Picture Boston's Brahmin aristocracy climbing this hilltop in the decades after the Revolution, raising brick Federal-period townhouses that their descendants have never quite abandoned. Beacon Hill was developed as a residential neighborhood from the 1790s onward, with Charles Bulfinch designing many of the brick Federal and Greek Revival row houses that line the narrow streets. The neighborhood's gaslit brick sidewalks, purple windowpane glass (produced by a chemical reaction in early nineteenth-century glass), and window boxes of geraniums create an urban streetscape that has changed remarkably little since the 1830s.
Mount Vernon Street has been called the most civilized street in America. Acorn Street, with its original cobblestones and brick sidewalks, is one of the most photographed streets in the city. The north slope of Beacon Hill was a predominantly African American neighborhood in the nineteenth century, home to abolitionists and fugitive slaves; Lewis Hayden, a formerly enslaved man who became a leading abolitionist, lived on Phillips Street and kept his house as a station on the Underground Railroad, reportedly with kegs of gunpowder in the basement, warning that he would blow it up rather than allow it to be searched for fugitives.