Charles Street, brick-paved and narrow, is the commercial spine at the base of Beacon Hill and one of the most charming main streets in urban America. Charles Street was developed in the early nineteenth century as the service street for the Beacon Hill neighborhood above it, and its scale — narrow, brick-paved, lined with buildings of two and three stories whose ground floors have been shops continuously since the 1820s — has changed remarkably little in two hundred years. The antique shops that crowded the street through much of the twentieth century have been joined by restaurants, boutiques, and wine bars, but the basic fabric of the street — a pedestrian-scaled commercial corridor within a residential neighborhood — is a model of urban design that cities spend millions trying to recreate elsewhere.
Charles River Street, the pedestrian path along the river behind Charles Street, follows the route of the Mill Dam built in 1818 to harness tidal power from the Charles River basin. Walk the length of Charles Street from the Public Garden to the Longfellow Bridge and you are walking through a living museum of nineteenth-century Boston commercial architecture, most of it still in its original use as ground-floor retail with residences above.