VIDEO: One Week Later, Crowd Returns to Boylston Street to Honor Boston Bombing Victims
One week after thousands of people gathered on Boylston Street to cheer on runners as they crossed the finish line of the 117th annual Boston Marathon, several hundred people returned to the area to honor those who were killed and injured in the bombings that forever changed a Boston tradition.
At 2:50 p.m.—the time when, one week prior, the first explosion went off, followed 10 seconds later by a second—the city of Boston and communities throughout Massachusetts held a moment of silence.
With the Copley Square area still cordoned off as a crime scene, hundreds of visitors gathered behind fencing at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley streets where a makeshift memorial sprouted up in the week following the event.
The memorial, which features thousands of tributes such as flags, T-shirts, running shoes, posters, cards, teddy bears and flowers, has been moved off the street to the sidewalk outside the Bank of America building, presumably in anticipation of Boylston Street being reopened to the public—though a date for that opening has not yet been announced.
The crowd at Boylston and Berkeley offered more than a moment of silence on Monday, standing quietly for several minutes before and after the appropriated time.
At around 2:49 p.m., the crowd began softly singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”—just barely heard over the occasional honk and motorized splutter of the busy city. When the anthem concluded, the crowd went silent again for well over a minute.
Some people bowed their heads, some cried or wiped away tears, some took photographs and video of the scene and some stared quietly down the deserted part of Boylston Street, perhaps imagining what it looked like on Monday last.
As the crowd began to stir, with people beginning to head off to wherever they needed to be, a man waving a Boston hat with one hand and an American flag with the other began singing “God Bless America” and was soon joined by many others in the crowd.
As the singing concluded, a loud cheer went up through the crowd, as people turned and waved to police officers on the other side of the barricade.
The crowd began to disperse as, in the distance, church bells rang out and played “Amazing Grace.”