6 places to spend an afternoon.
Saturday starts on Peters Hill in the Arnold Arboretum, entered by the Blackwell Footpath from Forest Hills for the morning light. Then a lap of Jamaica Pond, a browse at Papercuts Bookshop on South Street, and a show on the second-floor stage at the Footlight Club. Leave the car at home.
3 things to do, 3 shops, all in Jamaica Plain.
The Arnold Arboretum is 281 acres Harvard rents from Boston for a dollar a year on a 1,000-year lease, with 16,000 plants along Olmsted's paths. Jamaica Pond is a glacial kettle lake with a 1.5-mile loop and a 1912 boathouse that rents rowboats. The Footlight Club has staged shows on its second floor since 1877.
Harvard rents these 281 acres from Boston for a dollar a year on a 1,000-year lease, and Olmsted laid out the paths. Some 16,000 plants grow here, including a katsura raised from Sapporo seed in the 1870s. Picnicking is banned except on Lilac Sunday each Mother's Day, when 400 lilacs on Bussey Hill Road hit peak bloom.
A glacial kettle lake Olmsted folded into the Emerald Necklace, ringed by a 1.5-mile path where joggers lap it before work. The 1912 boathouse rents rowboats, kayaks, and sailboats in season; no private hulls allowed. In the 1800s Frederic Tudor cut ice here and shipped it to India, starting the global ice trade.
Green clapboard with red trim on a residential street, and a second-floor stage that's been running shows since 1877 - the oldest continuously operating community theater in the US. Members bought Eliot Hall in 1889 to keep it from the wrecking ball. Small house, steep history, mostly volunteer casts.
South Street does the shopping. Kate Layte moved Papercuts Bookshop to the corner of South and Carolina in 2020, tripling her shelf space. Hilken Mancini of Fuzzy took over the men's vintage room Gumshoe ran for 25 years, now 40 South Street Vintage, and City Feed and Supply works its Stony Brook corner like the feed stores it was named for.
Kate Layte opened this place in 2014 as 400 square feet on Green Street, then moved it to the corner of South and Carolina in 2020, tripling the room for shelves. It also publishes under its own imprint, Cutlass Press - four books so far, starting with a 2015 anthology.
Gumshoe sold men's vintage on South Street for over 25 years before Hilken Mancini, who fronted Fuzzy on Atlantic in the '90s and co-founded Punk Rock Aerobics, took it over and added women's racks. The stock skews '60s to '80s, every piece hand-picked. Girls Rock Camp Boston runs out of the back.
Two farm kids who'd never run a grocery named it after the feed stores where their neighbors drank coffee, and the Stony Brook corner it occupies still works that way. Order the #9 Farmer's Lunch on Iggy's bread: house-pickled green tomatoes, sharp Vermont cheddar, Granny Smith apple. Fair trade coffee, no fuss.
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