Boston, believe it or not is a walkable city. You can walk from North Station all the way to Copley Square and beyond if you have the gumption to do so and the walk isn't that bad except for in the winter. I used to do that daily when I worked there back in the early to mid 1990s. The walk was actually faster sometimes than waiting for the subway. For me the walk was straight out of North Station then up Causeway Street to Congress and right up Congress all the way to where I worked on High Street. During my evening commute, if I was taking a later train, I would stop at the Fanuel Hall and Quincy Market marketplace and pick up a bite to eat. Quincy Market is similar to the area around Covent Gardens in London and looks much the same with the same kind of shops and food.
But anyway, that library and Trinity Church are beautiful. My dad used to bring me there when I was a kid. He worked right down the street in the Prudential tower back then. That alone was an experience because I would get a school vacation day with dad in the office. I think this was for mom to have a break. I used to spend a good part of my day with binoculars looking out the window from the 23rd floor. I could see as far out as the hills in Andover, up here in the Merrimack Valley, and all the way up north toward Gloucester. Looking south was difficult because I had to lean against the glass. Sometimes we would go up to the Skywalk and I could look out around the city. Seeing the old New Haven and Penn Central trains pulling in and out of South Station was a treat.
The library was designed by the famous design firm McKean, Meed, and White. The same firm that designed lots of buildings in Chicago and other cities. The Trinity Church was designed by Henry Richardson who did many other buildings in the area including many stations for the Boston and Albany (NYC), and Boston and Maine as well as the Trinity Church in Andover, MA. The church in Andover has the same dark and light sandstone design as does the church in Boston.
Forester,
Winthrop, named after John Winthrop, one of the Bay Colony founders is an interesting city. Its street layout was determined by the "Narrow Gauge" The 3-foot Boston and Revere Beach and Lynn. Pleasant Street was laid out as part of their branch line in and around Winthrop in the 1880s.
The Blue line, which currently runs as far as Suffolk Downs on the north, follows the former ROW of the Narrow Gauge and was opened in the early 1950s as far as Logan Airport. There's been talk off and on to extend the service back up to Lynn by swinging over to the nearby MBTA commuter line that runs parallel to the blue line. They could have used the old ROW, but some condos were built right on the ROW about 30 years go removing that option then and there.