Swan Boats Signal Spring in Boston
Public Garden is Home to Graceful Riverboats Beloved by Tourists
For more than a century, the Public Garden near Boston Common has offered tours of the garden lagoon on distinctive riverboats, thanks to a Lohengrin-loving opera buff.
If it’s spring, the swallows must be out in Capistrano – and the swans must be out in the Boston Public Garden. Not the deceptively beautiful avian avengers waiting for an opportune moment to lunge at Fido, but the gracefully drifting riverboats that have appeared in the garden lagoon every April for more than a century.
Long before the Red Sox, these foot-propelled catamarans were announcing the advent of spring, and today they’re still unique to Boston. The Public Garden, 24 acres of flora next to the Boston Common and bordered by Arlington, Boylston, Charles and Beacon Streets, was a swamp known as the Back Bay before it was spruced up into the country’s first public botanical garden in 1837.
Forty years later, opera-loving businessman Robert Paget developed the first Swan Boat – like Wagner’s Lohengrin, he wanted to cross the river in a swan-drawn boat.
Paget’s original design called for single seats, eight to a boat; when Paget’s son John took over the business, he enlarged the boats to include benches that seat 20. One of the boats John built in 1918 is still making the rounds today, and his son Paul now presides over the six-boat operation along with his wife, Marilyn.
The 15-minute drifting tour around part of the three-acre lagoon might not lead you to Lohengrin’s Holy Grail, but it does make a romantic vantage point from which to enjoy the flowering landscape and open-air sculptures of the botanical garden.
Swan Boat season begins in mid-April and ends in mid-September. The boats are wheelchair-accessible and operate seven days between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Like their feathered counterparts, however, they stay out of the rain, wind and heat.
Fares are $2.75 for adults, $2 for senior citizens and $1.50 for children and teens age 2 to 15.
For more information, call 617-522-1966 or visit Swan Boats.
