Off the Bricks

Pack 07

A Heist and Con Walking Tour of Boston

Boston likes to tell its history as a story about principle. This walk tells the other one: the money. Twelve stops from the old Charles Street Jail to the Province House site on Washington Street, plus a South End bonus stop and a detour to the Fens, covering three centuries of the city's biggest scores and best cons.

You'll start at the jail that held Boston's con artists, now a hotel called the Liberty. You'll stand outside the building where, on a January night in 1950, men in peacoats and Halloween masks took more than a million dollars in cash. You'll find the lot where Captain Kidd sat in irons in 1699, and the door he walked through when he was taken. You'll climb to the corner where Charles Ponzi's line formed in the summer of 1920, and walk a block to the street that took him down. You'll learn which famous Boston smuggler was never convicted of smuggling, which beloved mayor did time twice, which founding merchant was fined for gouging, and who ran Ponzi's scheme on Boston forty years before Ponzi.

Every stop is a riddle that walks you to the spot, and every answer is something you read on site - a date on a tablet, a number on a door - from the public sidewalk, day or night. Every story is sourced to court records, the FBI's own case files, governors' letters, a judge's diary and the papers of the day. Where a famous story doesn't hold up, we tell it and then show you the record.

About two and a half hours, about four kilometres, mostly flat. Short cuts for an hour in the North End or an hour downtown.

Play any two stops free.

Route

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Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

  • The whole walk

    160 MIN · 4.2 KM · 13 STOPS

  • The short cut: pirates, Kidd and Ponzi

    55 MIN · 1.4 KM · 6 STOPS

    A pirate's gibbet, a founding merchant fined for gouging, Captain Kidd's jail and the door he was arrested at, Ponzi's stairway and the newspaper that sank him, inside an hour.

  • The short cut: the North End and the wharves

    55 MIN · 1.8 KM · 5 STOPS

    A mayor who did time twice, the Brink's garage, the night a crowd robbed the lieutenant governor, Hancock's wharf and a pirate's gibbet, in an hour.

Stop 01 · West End

A federal judge ordered the Charles Street Jail closed in 1973. It reopened in 2007 as a hotel called the Liberty.

In 1973, the West End Museum says, a federal judge, W. Arthur Garrity, spent a night inside this building, then ruled the conditions unconstitutional and ordered it closed. This was the Charles Street Jail, Suffolk County's lockup since the Leverett Street Jail closed in 1851. It stayed open anyway, until 1990, when the new jail on Nashua Street was ready. In 2007 it reopened as a hotel, and whoever picked the name had a sense of humor. Two people you'll meet later on this walk slept here, not by choice. In October 1880 Sarah Howe, who ran a bank for single women at eight percent a month, was committed here when she couldn't make bail. In 1904 James Michael Curley did his time here for taking a civil service exam for someone else. The West End Museum adds Malcolm Little, years before he was Malcolm X, and Sacco and Vanzetti.

Look now

Look at the windows. They had bars once.

Read more
Crime Scene: The West End's Three Jails - The West End Museum

Stop 02 · Faneuil Hall

Somebody stole the grasshopper off Faneuil Hall in 1974, and the detective on the case was named Paul Revere Carroll.

The gilded grasshopper on Faneuil Hall's cupola is about four feet of copper, and in the winter of 1973 to 1974 somebody took it. The New York Times put the theft between Christmas and January 4. The City's archives say it was gone for more than six months. The detective in charge was Paul Revere Carroll, a descendant of the man himself. It came back after the Plymouth County district attorney called him to say he had part of it. By Boston.com's account, the man who owned up was a steeplejack, someone who climbs buildings for a living, and he admitted it while facing drug charges and hoping for a better deal. He isn't named, and no court record of the theft has been published. The vane has had a locking device ever since. Shem Drowne, a coppersmith, made it for Peter Faneuil, copying the grasshopper on Sir Thomas Gresham's crest at London's Royal Exchange. The 1755 earthquake knocked it down and Drowne put it back up. As for the story that a Gresham baby was found in a field by a chirping grasshopper, the London Bullion Market Association calls it probably apocryphal.

Look now

Look up at the vane, then at the cupola rail around it. Somebody got up there in the dead of a Boston winter.

Read more
Why is there a grasshopper atop Faneuil Hall? - Boston.com (2023)

Detours

  • Thirteen Works, Eighty-One Minutes
    Walk to Park Street station (about 6 minutes, up School Street and left on Tremont), take a Green Line E train outbound (toward Heath Street) to Museum of Fine Arts, about 18 minutes, then walk about 7 minutes up Museum Road to The Fenway. Come back the same way. Subway fare applies; museum admission is separate and not needed for the stop.

Pit stops

  • Restroom · NEAR STOP 02
    Faneuil Hall (National Park Service visitor center)
    Public restrooms in the basement, with an elevator; NPS visitor center on the first floor. Check posted hours.
    National Park Service

51 sources