Jamaica Pond, a glacial kettle pond sixty feet deep, is the largest natural body of fresh water in Boston, and colonial residents came here to cut ice blocks for summer cooling. Jamaica Pond is one of the links in Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, its 68 acres of open water and surrounding park providing a landscape of reeds, willows, and water that feels remarkably wild for a neighborhood that is surrounded by dense residential development on all sides. Jamaica Plain, the neighborhood that surrounds the pond, developed in the nineteenth century as a summer retreat for wealthy Boston families who built estates along the pond shore and the hilltops, then as a streetcar suburb of the working and middle class, then as a mixed neighborhood that weathered disinvestment in the 1970s and 80s and emerged as one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, with large Latino, Caribbean, and LGBTQ communities alongside long-term residents of every background.
The Brewery Complex on Washington Street, where the Samuel Adams brewery is now located, was one of the largest brewery operations in New England in the nineteenth century. Walk the 1.5-mile path around the pond; the boathouse rents sailboats and rowboats in summer.