THE ART OF NOTICING: BOSTON.

So we picked a week to visit Boston that happened to be exceptionally hot, heat wave level. Like most days were over 100 degrees. Not something you plan for exactly, just something you find yourself in, iced coffee in hand, squinting at a city that is genuinely beautiful and also genuinely trying to cook you alive. We adapted, we picked our moments, much inside. We absolutely earned the things we went to see.

Boston is one of those beautiful, clean New England cities that holds a lot of contradictions in a small amount of space. The juxtaposition between the old and new right up against each other, sometimes literally. There's a moment walking through the financial district where you turn a corner and there's this tiny colonial brick building, the Old State House, just sitting there completely surrounded by glass towers like it refused to leave and everyone eventually built around it. Grounding the surroundings in history. I love that about a city. The things that just refuse to go, adding to the character.

Boston City Hall is the opposite energy, but equally interesting to me. Pure brutalism, all raw concrete and relentless repetition. I slowly walked back and forth and around the building, assessing the materials, the detail, the patina. I stood in front of it for longer than made sense in 100 degree heat. My family not so patiently waited, walking ahead at a slower than preferred pace. It's the kind of building that makes you feel something though even if you can't decide exactly what that is. I have this thing for modern architecture, especially historically rooted.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was the thing I was most looking forward to and it did not disappoint. If you don't know the story, Isabella was a woman in the late 1800s who built a Venetian palazzo in the middle of Boston, filled it with the art she loved on her own terms, and left instructions that after she died nothing could ever be moved or changed. Not a single thing. Holy time capsule, like really. Which means you walk through a space that is entirely one person's vision, frozen exactly the way she wanted it. I find that kind of singular obsession really moving. There's also an unsolved art heist mixed in there, with blank spaces where art once hung, which adds to the interest and mystique of the museum.

The central courtyard can't help but grab your attention with its Venetian Renaissance and Italian Gothic architecture. It opens to the sky through this enormous glass ceiling, lush with plants and patinaed sculptures. It's something pretty special. You walk in from the street and the city just disappears and you're transported to a different place in time. I kept stopping to look up and then down because the floors, the tiles, the details are everywhere you turn. A building that rewards the slowing down and noticing at every level.

There's a Sargent painting in there that has its own room basically. El Jaleo. I stood in front of it for a long time without moving, completely taken by this beautiful masterpiece in situ.

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston is a whole other animal. More encyclopedic, more sprawling. It's the type of museum where you could spend three days and still feel like you missed something. There was an illuminated cloud sculpture hanging in the atrium that captured my eye. I keep thinking about the way it just floated there against the industrial concrete, massive and impossibly light looking at the same time. Both ethereal and sculptural.

And then there was the Van Gogh exhibit. His portrait of Joseph Roulin, the postman, against that deep purple wall. I've had the good fortune to have seen a lot of Van Gogh over the years, the museum in Amsterdam, Starry Night, so much of it in person, and it still captivates my attention every single time. The scale of it, the brushwork up close, the fact that a person made this with their hands. I'm always inspired by the works of the masters.

The Museum of Science rounding out three museums in a week, which felt very different from the other two. Very interactive, experiential, hands on, art and science living together in the same space, with good air conditioning to boot. I walked into a room and my shadow became something else entirely.

Between multiple museum visits, we also ate our way through the North End. Because you have to eat, right? The best authentic Italian, pastries from Modern Pastry because you simply cannot go to Boston and skip the cannoli and baked goods, a lobster roll from James Hook & Co. by the water that's still stored in my taste bud memories.

We wandered into St. Leonard's late afternoon. The beauty was one reason, and to be honest, the air conditioning was another (there’s a theme here for sure.). I'm just not going to pretend otherwise. But those old North End churches have a certain presence to them that you feel regardless of why you walked in.

One afternoon we took ourselves to Harvard Square and sat in Tatte for a while, which if you haven't been is a cafe that makes you want to move somewhere just to have a regular table there. The floors alone, paired with the open industrial feel, long community farm table and bistro chairs. My kind of place.

Boston is a city that gives you a lot to look at. You just have to wander around to find it, even when it's trying to melt you.

xx,

Michel