BOSTON — Tents are popping up across one of Boston's flagship tourist neighborhoods — just in time for the FIFA World Cup, America's 250th, and the busiest tourist summer Boston has scheduled in a generation.
In a four-slide Instagram post Thursday that tagged Mayor Michelle Wu, Governor Maura Healey, and the state environmental agency DCR, the neighborhood watchdog account @backbaysos documented at least four tents pitched across Boston Common and the Charles River Esplanade. Both are flagship destinations in the city's tourism brochures.
"You can set up a tent anywhere you like in @mayorwu's Boston," the group wrote.
A gray dome tent on the Charles River Esplanade, with the Back Bay skyline behind it. Via @backbaysos.
The locations span the heart of District 8, the Back Bay-anchored City Council seat represented by Wu loyalist Sharon Durkan. Boston Common — founded in 1634, the country's oldest public park — sits at one end. The willow-shaded Esplanade riverbank, a mile-long ribbon of public greenspace along the Charles, sits at the other.
A second tent, this one along a Common path, captured by the @backbaysos account.
The summer Boston was supposed to sell
Boston is hosting seven FIFA World Cup matches at Gillette Stadium starting in mid-June. International visitors are already arriving for warm-up programming around the Foxborough fixtures.
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That's the FIFA traffic. The America's 250th traffic is already underway: the city's anchor sites — Bunker Hill Monument, Old North Church, the Boston Tea Party Ships, the Lexington-Concord battle road — are running expanded programming in advance of the July 4 semiquincentennial.
And the Boston Pride for the People Parade kicks off the weekend right here in District 8 — stepping off from Copley Square on Saturday and marching through the South End before ending at the festival on Boston Common. That is tomorrow.
The same Boston Common where, per @backbaysos, a small orange tent is currently pitched against the side of a stone kiosk.
An orange tent pitched against the side of a kiosk on Boston Common, where the Pride parade ends on Saturday. Via @backbaysos.
Durkan's district
The City Councilor for the affected territory is Sharon Durkan, a Wu loyalist last seen pushing parking-restriction expansions downtown that mostly hit the small businesses in her own district. The hashtags accompanying the @backbaysos post — #dirtydurkan and #mayorwuwhereareyou — make clear who the residents blame for the encampments.
Boston City Councilor Sharon Durkan, who represents the Back Bay-anchored District 8.
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Durkan was elected in a 2023 special election to fill Kenzie Bok's seat after Bok left to lead the Boston Housing Authority. She has been one of Mayor Wu's most reliable votes on the City Council since.
The state Department of Conservation and Recreation, also tagged in the @backbaysos post, manages the Esplanade — and is the agency that would have to authorize any enforcement against tents on the riverbank. The state has, for years, leaned on outreach over enforcement.
What the city says
Wu's office has long held that street-level homelessness in Boston cannot be addressed by clearing encampments alone, and that expanded shelter and substance-use treatment capacity is the only durable answer.
That position is harder to sell when it is broadcast across an Instagram carousel of tents pitched in the city's own tourist-brochure cover shot — two days before a Pride parade marches through the same parks, two weeks before FIFA arrives, and four weeks before the country's 250th birthday.
Back Bay residents are watching. The tourists are about to.
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