Fun Facts About Boston

Fenway Park is a baseball field where the Boston Red Sox play. Built in 1912, it is the oldest professional baseball field in use in the country. Here are other interesting facts about the Boston, Massachusetts area:

-- Boston Common was America's first public park.

--Boston built the first subway in the USA.

-- Alexander Graham Bell placed the first phone call in his Boston machine shop.

--In the 1600s the Pilgrims outlawed the celebration of Christmas in Boston for more than 20 years.

--Harvard was the first college established in America in 1636. William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia was second.

--Boston's airport, Logan International, is built on land that was filled in. At one time it was part of Boston Harbor. 

Boston Terrier

--According to several sources, the Boston Terrier was the first purebred dog developed in the United States.

--There is one place in our country where this can happen, and it is in Boston at the site of the Boston University Bridge. A boat can sail under a train going under a car that is driving under an airplane. 

--More than one-fourth the population of Boston are college students. There are about 176 colleges and universities in the Boston area.

--Boston's Elias Howe invented the sewing machine.

--The Mather School, established in 1639, was the first public elementary school in the United States.

--Boston's best known dishes are baked beans, clam chowder, clams, and lobster.

Hancock Tower

--The John Hancock Tower is the tallest building in all of New England. Designed by the famed architect, I. M. Pei, the building has 10,334 windows and is 60 stories tall. There are about 13 acres of glass on the surface of the structure.

This map shows Boston's Big Dig. At a cost of more than 14 billion dollars, it was the most expensive highway project in the United States. 


--The project excavated more than 16,000,000 cubic yards of dirt, enough to fill a stadium 16 times. More than half a million truckloads of dirt were removed. It would take 4,612 miles to line up all those trucks.
--The project used enough concrete to build a 3-foot wide sidewalk from Boston to San Francisco.
--So much reinforced steel was used that it could make a steel bar long enough to circle the earth at the equator.
--The Ted Williams Tunnel is 90 feet below the Boston Harbor, the deepest tunnel in America.
--The project created more than 300 acres of parks and open space for citizens to use.
--Because traffic can now move faster, exhaust from vehicles has been reduced by 12% making the air cleaner to breathe.
--The Big Dig was planned in the 1970s and was complete in 2007.

This shows the Big Dig in progress.

 Boston is a wonderful place to visit. There is so much to see and do there, it would takes months or longer to do it all.