Special Little Places: Closes, Corridors and Courts

Still basking in my Edinburgh afterglow as we finish the last week of classes of the Fall 2023 semester: at home, as a deficient boiler has rendered Salem State’s North Campus an uninhabitable place. Shades of 2020-2021 for sure! I’m actually teaching two online classes by choice next semester, but I was not expecting to be back on Zoom so soon. I had a bit of time to think about some themes I wanted to emphasize about my Scotland trip, and one is “special little places”: I find that in most (not all) European cities that I have visited there are urban spaces which preserve a bit of the past, off the beaten path. Little courtyards and lanes and ways. Off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh there are so many “closes”! It’s quite extraordinary really–some access other ways, some are closed-off, all seem to transport you off a busy street into somwhere else. Here are just a few: Riddell’ss Close AND Court, Advocate’s Close, Tweeddale Court and Bakehouse Close: the latter two arre Outlander locations, and I encountered an Outlander tour just after I took these pictures!

There are some special places in Edinburgh’s 18th century “New Town” as well, but not as many: it was laid out for breadth, perspective, and movement, just like an American city (well, at least the latter). There are places and lanes that give you a bit of that enclosure within the larger city feeling, like Circus Lane below, and the spectacularly picturesque Dean Village. You can still get away, or get back, in the New Town.

There are a few places in America where you can get this out-of-time experience. Beacon Hill in Boston is like that for me. Neighborhoods in Charleston, Alexandria, Annapolis, Newport and Nantucket. Salem used to have lots of little ways and squares, but it has always evolved, and most have disappeared. Everybody’s favorite little street is actually a court, Bott’s Court between Chestnut and Essex, and I can spot a really special little way on a 1916 map of Salem: (the) North Pole! I’m not sure where that place went, but it’s definitely no longer here.