Boston

city · earth

The capital of Massachusetts and the oldest major city in the north-eastern United States, founded in 1630 on a narrow peninsula in Massachusetts Bay and expanded repeatedly by filling tidal flats — the Back Bay district through which the marathon finishes is nineteenth-century made ground. In this Journey Boston appears as the city whose athletic club invented the annual civic marathon in 1897 and whose western commuter towns supply the course: the race is run inbound along a corridor through Hopkinton, Ashland, Framingham, Natick, Wellesley and Newton before entering the city itself. It is a canonical city object and is not defined by the marathon.