landmark · official boundary
Boston Common
A property designated a landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission. At Bounded by: Park, Beacon, Charles, Boylston Tremont.
Place
official layer
An official boundary, promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it. It is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer.
- Filed by this archive as
- landmark
- Authority
- Boston Landmarks Commission
- Within
- Boston
- Area
- 19.05 hectares
- Boundary
- held as GeoJSON at
/asset/adc17c03d7e6e4c0398c76eceb910058/boston-common.geojson— 8832 bytes, exactly as accessioned
Map
image/svg+xml at /asset/bc26a01cea4effd1921b0390f44a6183/boston-common.svg — 1836 bytes, SHA-256 bc26a01cea4effd1… · Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0The exact coordinates are held separately as
/asset/adc17c03d7e6e4c0398c76eceb910058/boston-common.geojson (application/geo+json, 8832 bytes, SHA-256 adc17c03d7e6e4c0…). The map is simplified for drawing; the boundary is not.Questions this record answers
Each answer is composed only from fields this record carries, and names the attestation for what it says. A question the record cannot answer from its own attested content is not asked here. Where a boundary is described as official it was promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it and is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer; where it is described as vernacular it is held by attestation alone and amends no official boundary.
Where is Boston Common, and what kind of boundary does the archive hold?
Boston Common is recorded as a landmark, within Boston. The archive holds its boundary on the official layer: promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it.
Attested by: City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
What do people call Boston Common that no authority granted?
The archive records 1 attested vernacular name for Boston Common, on the vernacular layer and never on the official one: “the Common”, attested by Samuel Adams Drake, Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston since 1873. Where two attestations disagree, both stand.
Attested by: Samuel Adams Drake, Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston — Samuel Adams Drake, Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (1873)
Who drew the boundary of Boston Common?
Boston Landmarks Commission promulgated it. A boundary with no promulgating authority is an assertion rather than a fact, and this archive files those separately, as claims.
Attested by: City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
How large is Boston Common?
19.05 hectares, computed from the boundary the archive holds and not quoted from elsewhere.
Attested by: City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
What does the archive's map of Boston Common show?
A static map of the boundary, rendered by the archive on a server and never in a reader's browser, served as image/svg+xml at /asset/bc26a01cea4effd1921b0390f44a6183/boston-common.svg. The exact coordinates it was drawn from are served separately as application/geo+json at /asset/adc17c03d7e6e4c0398c76eceb910058/boston-common.geojson.
Attested by: Rendered by archive-ingest 0.1.0 from the boundary this archive holds; digest bc26a01cea4effd1921b0390f44a61834231c803cb7957af412a361702a1945a.
What does the wider world call Boston Common?
It asserts none, deliberately. 1 candidate was considered and not asserted: Q49132 (declined) — name agrees but type does not: this record is filed in this archive's `landmark` class, and Q49132 is classed on Wikidata as urban park. A wrong sameAs is worse than none: under OWL semantics it instructs a consumer to merge two things into one, so the archive asserts an identity only where it can defend it and publishes the refusal where it cannot. Every verdict is in the reconciliation ledger at /reconciliation.
Attested by: Q49132 — rdfs:label / skos:altLabel = Boston Common, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0
Candidates the archive declined
Identities that were considered and not asserted. They are published here rather than merely filed, because a decision nobody can see is indistinguishable from never having looked. A candidate is DECLINED where the archive weighed it and refused it, and HELD where the archive asserts it nowhere on this record — most often because it is asserted on the archive's principal record for the same place, and asserting it twice would instruct a consumer to merge two records the archive deliberately keeps apart. Each row states which, in its own words. A wrong sameAs is worse than none. Every verdict is in the reconciliation ledger.
- Wikidata —
Q49132· declinedMatched against: rdfs:label / skos:altLabel = Boston CommonWhy: name agrees but type does not: this record is filed in this archive's `landmark` class, and Q49132 is classed on Wikidata as urban parkMethod: label-type-geography within the P131=Q100 candidate pool · Decided 3 September 2026
Attested claims about this record
These are attestations, not adjudications. The archive records who says a thing and since when. Where two attestations disagree, both stand.
Boston Common is called the Common
Attested by Samuel Adams Drake, Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (scholar) since 1873 · attested
Related records
- located in — Boston
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:boston-common
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/place/boston-common
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/place/boston-common.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston) — source of record
- License
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- 97
- Attribution
- City of Boston
- Rights as stated
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the dataset's GeoJSON from the City of Boston open-data portal | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | normalize | the source's own name field became the record title; no name was supplied by the archive | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | reproject | the source is WGS 84 (EPSG:4326); geometry was set to that SRID without alteration of coordinates | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | externalize-boundary | The boundary left the inline page graph and became two preserved holdings: the exact coordinates at /asset/adc17c03d7e6e4c0398c76eceb910058/boston-common.geojson and a static map rendered server-side at /asset/bc26a01cea4effd1921b0390f44a6183/boston-common.svg. The stored geometry is unchanged; the record graph now addresses it instead of carrying it. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |