A lot of us would like to live in a fancy house on a big hill…until we start to think about having to go up and down that hill every day. If you drive a car, this is an excellent way to turn your brakes into nubbin. If you ride a bike, you’ll need a shower at each end of your commute. And if you’re a pedestrian, then you’d better hope your hill either has gentle slopes OR staircases with railings, which could save your bones during winter.
The hills of Brookline are not like the other hills in Boston. (Yes, technically Brookline is its own municipality, but let’s be real here: it’s part of Boston.) These hills are big and steep enough to turn a day of sledding into a trip to the ER, and during the late 19th Century, when rock star landscape architect and Brookline resident Frederick Law Olmsted was helping to develop Beacon Street into a commerce zone with its own street car line, it occurred to him that people living in the Brookline hills would need a quick, straightforward way to descend to Beacon Street from their homes.
And so, Olmsted started building staircases into those gilded hills….
Today, the staircases of Brookline are treated as something of an open secret. You might have taken one of them to a high point when visiting a friend or participating in a group hill running workout. The latter was my introduction to the long staircase which ascends from Beacon Street through wispy trees and tight spaces in between residential dwellings, eventually reaching the summit of Corey Hill, where you can gaze across the Charles River toward Cambridge and the Middlesex Fells forest.