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Hidden in Plain Sight
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Neighborhoods

Documenting the locations, historical background, and architectural context of neighborhoods across our curated destinations.

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Hero photo: Shawn M. Kent, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Acorn Street, the 1820s river-cobble lane of coachmen's houses on Beacon Hill's south slope.
Neighborhoods

Beacon Hill: Boston's Gas-Lit Time Capsule of Brick, Cobbles, and Two Histories

Beacon Hill is Boston's gas-lit time capsule: a half-square-mile of brick rowhouses, cobbled lanes, and gas flames burning in broad daylight, crowned by the gold dome of the Massachusetts State House. The hill holds two Bostons at once — the Brahmin south slope of money and letters, and the north slope that built one of America's first free Black communities. Walk both and you have read the city's whole 19th century in about an hour.

Beacon Hill10 min read
The Washington Square Arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue, seen from inside Washington Square Park
NeighborhoodsManhattan

Greenwich Village: The Neighborhood That Refused the Grid

Greenwich Village kept its colonial street pattern when the rest of Manhattan took the 1811 grid — and became the bohemian capital of America. From Washington Square and its 1892 arch to the folk clubs of the 1960s, the Stonewall uprising of 1969, and Jane Jacobs's preservation fight against Robert Moses, the Village shaped modern American culture within a few crooked blocks.

Greenwich Village11 min read
Domino Park at the corner of Calle Ocho and 15th Avenue, Little Havana, Miami
Neighborhoods

Little Havana: The Neighborhood That Rebuilt Havana on Calle Ocho

Little Havana is the neighborhood Cuban exiles built west of downtown Miami after 1959 — a living stretch of Calle Ocho with Domino Park's daily games, cafecito ventanitas, cigar rollers, the Tower Theater, and Viernes Culturales. Walk the most famous Cuban neighborhood in the world.

Little Havana10 min read