Boston Discovery Guide

The draw

The Revolution happened here, and the evidence is walkable. The Massacre site, the Old State House, Paul Revere's house, the Old North Church and Bunker Hill are strung on a line marked through the pavement. Around them sit the country's oldest public park (1634), oldest public school (1635) and first subway (1897) — and 350,000 college students, so it is no museum town.

The problem when visiting

The hotel bill is the problem, not the sightseeing. Boston is expensive to sleep in, and prices spike for the April Marathon, May graduations and the autumn peak season. The weather is two different cities: July is humid heat at 74°F, January 30°F with heavy snow.

The tactic

Take the free bus in and then walk. Service from Logan on the Silver Line is always free, and the historic core is small enough that the subway is often slower than your feet. Come September to mid-October: students back, humidity gone.

Walk the Freedom Trail, but not all of it in one go. The marked route links the Revolutionary sites through the downtown and across the river to Charlestown. The downtown half — Common to the North End — is the dense part and takes a morning. The Charlestown half is a long walk over a bridge to two monuments; take the ferry or the Orange Line back rather than retracing it.

Eat in the North End, but walk past the first three restaurants. The streets nearest the trail price for people who have just finished it.

Spend an afternoon on the Charles. The Esplanade runs along the river with the Back Bay skyline behind it, and it is where the city goes when the weather allows. It is free and it is the best view of Boston there is.

Give the museums a full day each, not an hour. The Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum both reward the time; neither can be skimmed.

Get to a game if the season allows. Fenway Park is small, old and in the middle of a neighbourhood rather than a car park, and a Red Sox crowd tells you more about the city than any tour.

Then leave the peninsula. Cambridge is three stops on the Red Line, the Harbor Islands are a ferry ride, and both feel like different places.

The oldest continuous civic culture in the country, and it knows it. Boston has been called the "Athens of America" since the early nineteenth century, when William Tudor wrote that it was "perhaps the most perfect and certainly the best-regulated democracy that ever existed". The claim is immodest and the city has never entirely let go of it.

The literary inheritance is real and locatable. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, James Russell Lowell and Longfellow all wrote here. The Old Corner Bookstore, where they met and where The Atlantic Monthly was first published, is sometimes called the cradle of American literature. The Boston Public Library of 1852 was the first free library in the United States.

The accent and the vocabulary are their own. The non-rhotic Eastern New England accent, a body of local slang, and a dry, sardonic humour that outsiders regularly mistake for rudeness.

Where to find it rather than read about it: a weekday morning in the Boston Public Library's Bates Hall; the North End on a Sunday; a neighbourhood bar in Southie or Dorchester during a game; the Common at lunchtime. Not Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which is a shopping centre with a famous building attached.

Use the transit, and take the free bus from the airport. Nearly a third of Bostonians commute by public transport, the network is good, and service from Logan on the Silver Line is free. A taxi into a city with no grid and a buried highway through the middle of it is the worst of both.

Walk the historic core rather than riding through it. It is small enough, the streets were built for it, and the subway under the old downtown is slower than your feet for most of the Freedom Trail.

Spend outside the trail. The restaurants nearest Faneuil Hall and the top of Hanover Street are priced for people who will never come back. One street over is better and cheaper, and the money stays with a neighbourhood business.

Treat the Revolutionary sites as buildings, not backdrops. Several are small, structurally old and still in use — the Old North Church is an active congregation, and Faneuil Hall still holds public meetings.

Respect the parks as infrastructure. The Emerald Necklace is a designed nineteenth-century system that connects habitat through a dense city; it works because it is continuous.

And go in the shoulder season if you can. September to mid-October and late May to June spread the load off the peaks and are better visits anyway.

September to mid-October is the best time to be in Boston, and it is not close. The summer humidity has gone, the students are back so the city is fully alive, and the light is good. It is also when foliage season begins to fill rooms, so book.

Late May to June is the other window: warm without the July humidity, long evenings, everything open. Avoid graduation weekends in May, when hotels across Boston and Cambridge fill at once.

July and August are warm and humid — July averages 74.1°F (23.4°C) — with about 13 days a year above 90°F. The compensation is that the students are away, so the city is emptier than at any other warm time.

April is variable and dominated by Patriots' Day and the Marathon. The week before is a genuine value window; the weekend itself is not.

November to March is cold: January averages 29.9°F (−1.2°C), with about 25 days below freezing and occasional heavy snow. Late January and February are the cheapest and emptiest weeks of the year, and the museums, the library and the bars are all indoors.

Boston gets over 2,600 hours of sunshine a year, so "cold" rarely means "grey".

Boston is expensive, and accommodation is why. It is consistently among the costliest American cities for a hotel room, and the spikes are event-driven rather than seasonal — the Marathon in April, graduation weekends in May, and autumn foliage season.

What the fixed costs actually are

Where the money goes

Hotels first, food second, transit a distant third. Getting around Boston is cheap and can be nearly free; sleeping in it is not.

The free layer is unusually good. Boston Common and the Public Garden, the Esplanade, the Arnold Arboretum, the Freedom Trail itself as a walk, the harbourfront and the Boston Public Library all cost nothing. A visitor on a tight budget can have a full day in Boston for the price of lunch.

Students are the local economy's calibration. With 350,000 of them, there is a cheap-eating layer in Allston, Cambridge and near the universities that the downtown does not show you.