I grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and my elementary and high-school education was infused with the history that was all around us, so I was very curious to know just how the shutdown of the nation's parks had affected my most favorite part of Minute Man National Park -- the Old North Bridge.
Had the Park Service wrapped the iconic Minute Man sculpture by Daniel Chester French in burlap, so the tourists couldn't see it? I took a few minutes on a perfectly gorgeous Columbus Day to find out.
As I expected, the parking lots had been chained off, the bathrooms were locked, and the park headquarters (the old Stedman Buttrick Georgian-style mansion) was closed up. Monument Street (foreground in the picture) is actually a long residential street with parking allowed along most of it, and with parking prohibited only in the immediate vicinity of the Bridge. So some tourists had parked by the side of the road and walked a few hundred feet to the Bridge.
