Empty Spaces, Empty Promises Lie Beneath Downtown Boston’s Crummiest Sidewalks – StreetsblogMASS

Empty Spaces, Empty Promises Lie Beneath Downtown Boston’s Crummiest Sidewalks

A man and an woman step off the curb on a sidewalk in downtown Boston. A row of red bricks running down the middle indicate the path of the Freedom Trail. In the center of the sidewalk is a large rectangular hatch that leads to the basement underlying the sidewalk.

Downtown Boston’s “areaways,” or vaulted sidewalks, are places where the privately-owned basements of historic buildings jut out into the public right-of-way of city streets.