Look for the rectangular green lawn, pale stone walkways, and the long pergola that frames this compact park in the middle of the Financial District.
Post Office Square is one of those Boston places that quietly reinvented itself. Back in the eighteenth century, rope makers worked this area. Then homes moved in, then businesses, and after the Great Boston Fire of eighteen seventy-two tore through the neighborhood, rebuilding gave the square a new identity. People started calling it Post Office Square in eighteen seventy-four because the United States Post Office and Sub-Treasury faced it here. Today, that role belongs to the John W. McCormack Post Office and Courthouse nearby.
What you’re standing beside now is Norman B. Leventhal Park, a private park that welcomes the public like an open hand. It stretches across about one point seven acres, with fountains, a café, a pergola, and a central lawn softened by one hundred twenty-five species of plants. But here’s the sneaky part... beneath your feet sits a parking garage dropping about eighty feet underground, once one of the deepest excavations in Boston. Cars down below help pay for the calm up here; the garage revenue funds the park’s upkeep.
That idea took a while to arrive. In eighteen seventy-four, architect Nathaniel Bradlee designed the headquarters of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company on this site. That building came down in nineteen forty-five, and by nineteen fifty-four a hulking above-ground garage had swallowed the square. Then the city flipped the script: workers demolished that garage in nineteen eighty-eight, opened the underground garage in nineteen ninety for eighteen million dollars, and finished the park above in nineteen ninety-two. If you want to see just how dramatic that swap was, take a quick peek at the before-and-after image in the app.
The square has seen its share of history, too, from a Lyndon B. Johnson speech in nineteen sixty-four to the aftermath of a nineteen eighty-six transformer explosion and fire in One Post Office Square.
So this place is really a Boston magic trick: a hard-working garage below, a soft green pause above, and it stays open twenty-four hours a day.
Take a moment to soak it in... and when you’re ready, we can head on to Custom House Tower.
%20julesvernex2.jpg){kind=link}