A Walk Through the South End on a Crisp October Morning

Brownstones, Bow Windows, and the Smell of Something Baking

I entered the South End from the Back Bay side, crossing Columbus Avenue near Dartmouth Street, and the transition was immediate - the Back Bay's French-inspired boulevards gave way to the South End's Victorian bow-front rowhouses, five stories of red brick and brownstone with curved bay windows that bulge gently toward the street like the neighborhood is leaning in to tell you something. It was a Saturday morning in October, the air was sharp, and every other stoop had a pumpkin on it, some carved, some not, all of them expressing a position on autumn.

The South End is Boston's largest Victorian brick rowhouse district, and it is also one of the most diverse neighborhoods in a city not always celebrated for diversity. It has been, at various points, a wealthy residential enclave, a rooming house district, a center of the Black community, a cradle of the gay rights movement, and is now all of these things simultaneously, layered and complicated and better for it. You can read this history in the storefronts along Tremont Street, which shift from French bistros to Ethiopian restaurants to drag brunch spots within a few blocks.

I stopped at Flour Bakery and Cafe on Washington Street, where Joanne Chang's sticky buns have achieved a level of fame that is entirely proportional to their quality - caramelized, pecan-studded, warm from the oven, and sized for someone who believes that moderation is a philosophy best applied to other areas of life. I ate mine at a window seat, watching the foot traffic on Washington Street - the dog walkers, the joggers, the couples with strollers navigating the brick sidewalks with the grim determination of people who have accepted that brick sidewalks and stroller wheels are natural enemies.

I walked south to the SoWa Art and Design District on Harrison Avenue, where the old warehouse buildings have been converted into artist studios, galleries, and a weekend open market that spills onto the sidewalk. On Sundays, the SoWa Open Market fills a parking lot with vendors selling handmade jewelry, vintage clothing, and artisanal pickles of a specificity that could only exist in a city with this many graduate students. I bought a jar of habanero peach preserves from a woman who grew both the habaneros and the peaches, which felt like an appropriate level of commitment.

The South End's residential streets - Rutland Square, Union Park, Worcester Square - are where the neighborhood reaches its architectural crescendo. These small parks, ringed by identical rowhouses with iron railings and carved lintels, were designed in the 1850s as London-style squares, and they achieve a symmetry and warmth that makes you want to live here immediately, or at least sit on someone's stoop and pretend you do. The trees in Union Park were fully turned - red maple, golden elm - and the light came through them in a way that made the brick glow.

I ended at Wally's Cafe on Massachusetts Avenue, a jazz club the size of a living room that has been open since 1947 and is the oldest continuously operating jazz club in New England. It was too early for music, but the door was open, and I stood in the doorway and looked at the tiny stage and the cramped tables and thought about all the nights of music that room has absorbed, the way a sponge absorbs water - not by trying, just by being porous and present. The South End is like that. It does not perform. It absorbs, and it gives back, and it has been doing both for a very long time.