Salem Is the Coolest Destination in Coastal Massachusetts—and It Has Nothing to Do with Witches
A few years ago, my husband took a new job in Eastern Massachusetts. Moving there, he assured me, as we picked our way over rocky shorelines and through heritage gardens blooming with delicate spring flowers, would be an excellent new adventure. There were dozens of historic landmarks to check out, more parks and conservation areas than we could count, and hundreds of restaurants. Besides, wasn’t it more than a little like the sandy, boulder-strewn coast of Rhode Island, where I grew up?
It was—and it wasn’t. Somehow coastal Massachusetts felt more old-fashioned, more upscale, even snobbier than the coast of my home state, let alone the Land of Crocs and Fleece, aka the upper Hudson Valley, where I currently live. I admit now that this was largely in my own mind. But at the time, I’d pretty much written off the entire region as staid and patrician. Until one weekend when, on a whim, we drove into Salem.
I’d visited Salem on a middle-school field trip to learn about the Witch Trials history, and again in college, when a cousin who attended nearby Merrimack College suggested we go there for Halloween, because, you know, witches. I had a vague recollection of lots of gray and brown architecture, maple trees heavy with orange leaves, and . . . witches. And little else. I held these images in my mind as we crossed the bridge over the North River, fully expecting more of the same.
While Salem does have its fair share of gray and brown architecture—we can thank its Colonial founders and their somber sense of style for that—there’s a lot more to this city than structures like the House of the Seven Gables, which brood over landscape. A walk down Chestnut Street, in the McIntire District, especially at twilight, yields a number of lighter yet still historically significant homes and other buildings, many with placards that identify the year it was built and the original owner. (It’s mostly men’s names here; this was a time when women, even if they ran their households, were rarely landowners themselves.) And the brick-bedecked downtown, where most of the action happens, has a vastly different feel, even if a bit of New England crustiness still clings around its edges.
With about 42,000 residents in its 8 square miles, Salem is hardly a sprawling metropolis. Still, it manages to balance a small-town feel with worldliness, thanks to an eclectic, sometimes oddball, mix of people, businesses, and cultural institution. It also has zero-tolerance policy for intolerance, learned the hard way, through those infamous Witch Trials.
Though the witch hysteria—which grew out of a cauldron of social unrest that included xenophobia, misogyny, and greed—lasted just fifteen months, it accounts for the vast majority of the city’s tourism appeal. But falling into the trap of thinking that the Witch Trials are the most interesting part about Salem is the traveler’s most egregious mistake. Tumble down that rabbit hole and you’ll miss all the beauty, modernity, breath-of-fresh-air fun, and wonderfully weird experiences Salem offers.
Salem would really, really like you to stay home this Halloween
This year, to control the numbers of spook-seekers who still, despite a global pandemic, tried to throng Salem’s graveyards and historic streets around Halloween, the city essentially shut down to tourists. The MBTA commuter train bypassed Salem Station, parking lots were closed to incoming traffic, and all of the city’s Haunted Happenings were canceled. Businesses and restaurants closed early, and fines were implemented for violating parking restrictions, noise ordnances, and holding gatherings of more than 25 people. No, it shouldn’t have come to that. But we should also be able to count on our fellow humans to be levelheaded in the face of a public health crisis. Some weren’t, and I get why the city said “See ya next year.”
Surprise #1: Salem has a bunch of great ways to get outdoors
While several of the more spread-out towns around Boston’s North Shore get all the glory for outdoor activities, Salem has a bunch of intriguing options for fresh-air fun. Take in the Colonial and Federal architecture on Chestnut Street, a mix of modest homes and elaborate mansions. About a block away on Essex Street is Ropes Mansion. While not the largest of Salem’s estates, it’s free to visit and worth the side trip especially for its handsome Colonial Revival garden. Other important structures are accessible via the Salem Heritage Trail, a bright red line that loops over sidewalks, guiding you through a variety of historical places.
Some of New England’s oldest cemeteries are in Salem, including Howard Street Cemetery, Broad Street Cemetery, and Old Burying Point, the final, not-so-restful resting place of John Hathorne. The chief examiner during the Witch Trials, Hathorne was known for his browbeating court style, quick convictions, and refusal to reconsider verdicts, even after witness recanting. While a number of officials involved in the trials later expressed remorse for their involvement, Hathorne went to his grave with never so much as a “my bad.” His behavior so disturbed his descendants that some distanced themselves from him; author Nathaniel Hawthorne, his great-grandson, is said to have changed the spelling of his surname because of it.
Beside Old Burying Point lies the Witch Trials Memorial. With twenty carved benches bearing the names and means of death for the victims of the proceedings, it’s tasteful and surprisingly touching in its straightforwardness. On my most recent visits to Salem, I’ve found myself lingering here, thinking about how far we have—and haven’t—come since then.
For a more active outdoor experience, Salem has several parks. Salem Willows, about ten minutes outside the downtown, is a favorite among residents for its beaches, walking trails, and vintage-Americana strip of restaurants and arcades. In the summer the park also hosts outdoor concerts and a carnival with game booths and rides that light up the nighttime sky in streaks of neon pink, purple, yellow, and blue. Rent a paddleboard or kayak, or just sit on the docks and watch the sun set over Beverly Harbor.
You’ll find a lot of articles online touting Salem Lowe’s famous $2 chop suey sandwich, which is exactly the acquired taste it sounds like. Get something else to tide you over and save your cash for dinner in town, which we’ll get to shortly.
More hiking trails and bike paths wind their way through Forest River Park, on the opposite side of Salem Harbor. Also located here: Pioneer Village, a quirkier offering. One of the country’s oldest living history museums, this replica of a seventeenth-century fishing village was created in 1930 and has been used as a filming location in a handful of documentaries and Witch Trial reenactment movies. The way it sort of appears in the middle of the woods makes it a bit unsettling, like you’ve stumbled into the 2015 creeper The Witch (in which there were no Salem-style witches, but there was a goat demon, an unexpected appearance by Kate Dickie, aka Game of Thrones’ Lysa Arryn).
Winter Island Park is known for its tent and RV camping, with a long season that extends from late May to early November. On Salem Neck, the park boasts 27 acres, most with scenic views of Beverly and Salem Harbors, and Marblehead in the distance. It’s a prime spot for fishing, boating, and swimming, especially at the cheekily named Waikiki Beach. At its tip is Fort Pickering Lighthouse (also called Winter Island Light), originally built in 1871. Though it was decommissioned decades ago, the modest iron, brick-lined structure we see today is a refurbished version that’s still used as a private navigational aid.
In a normal year (read: not 2020), you can take a boat tour to Baker’s Island Light Station and Misery Islands, both located in Salem Sound. Baker’s is a small, privately owned island with a significant summer residential contingent and a 10-acre light station. Though you can’t freely tour the rest of the island, the area around the light station is plenty scenic, with rocky cliffs that step down into the water. In the summer, limited overnight rentals are available.
Great Misery and Little Misery make up the Misery Islands, so named by a seventeenth-century shipbuilder who was marooned here during a winter storm. Though beautiful, with acres of open meadow, aspen groves, and gorgeous views of the water, they haven’t fared much better since then. A casino and private club were built on Great Misery in the early twentieth century, only to go up in flames in 1926. Remnants of some of the structures, plus a 1940s airplane hangar, still dot the islands, which are operated as a nature reserve by the Trustees of Reservations and accessible by boat tour.
Along the beach of Little Misery lie the algae-covered ribs of the steamship The City of Rockland. An exceptionally unlucky tourist vessel, Rockland struck land and other boats no fewer than five times before it was finally scuttled here in 1923.
For diehard water nerds like me, touring the harbor on a schooner is one of the best parts of being in Salem. My pick: the Fame, a replica of the first American privateer schooner to enter the War of 1812. An aggressive ship, the original Fame and its crew were responsible for forcibly boarding and seizing the cargo of nearly two dozen ships. Victory was short for the Fame, which sank somewhere in the Bay of Fundy, between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in 1914. Of course, the replica is a bit more sedate, but that didn’t stop me from both buying the T-shirt (no kidding) and Instagramming the crap out of my trip.
Surprise #2: You’ll have too many arts & culture ops to choose from
Salem’s downtown isn’t just compact and walkable; it’s also full of opportunities for arts and culture, from the expected (Salem Witch Trials Museum, ghost tours) to the stately and historic (Pickering House) and the vaguely ridiculous (New England Pirate Museum). If you’re traveling with a group, there’s a good chance you’ll find something to appeal to all taste levels.
Start with the Tall Ship Friendship at the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, right on the wharf. Both are free, and pay homage to the city’s fascinating maritime roots, including a spice trade that made the country’s first millionaires, and a heavy dose of privateering.
The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), right in the center of the downtown, is a world-class museum with a range of exhibits that trace the lines from then to now. Their Yin Yu Tang exhibit—a sixteen-bedroom Qing Dynasty home reconstructed on the premises—has been one of the museum’s top draws for years. But it’s not the only exhibit worth exploring. From painting to photography, fashion design, pop art, and multimedia, this modestly sized museum offers some head-turning exhibits. Through early April 2021, the PEM is showing The Salem Witch Trials 1692, a deep dive into a dark chapter in Salem’s history, told through art and rarely exhibited trial documents.
I enjoyed the PEM and the Friendship, but my favorite art space in Salem is an open one: the Punto Urban Art Museum. Just a few minutes’ walk from the downtown, east of Lafayette Street in the diverse Point neighborhood (hence the museum’s Spanish translation of the name), the Punto combines art with social justice to encourage neighborhood pride and open up economic opportunities for local businesses. To date, it has 85 murals by 40 local and world-renowned artists, all painted on or adjacent to rent-restricted buildings. The subjects of some are as outsize as their dimensions; others feel more intimate and even pointed.
Surprise #3: The food scene in Salem is good—really good
While many coastal New England cities are reliable sources for lobster rolls, baked and fried fish, and little else, Salem is an exception. As the city’s population has diversified, so have its food options.
Adriatic is casual white-tablecloth, serving upscale Mediterranean, while Ledger and Opus top many hipster magazine lists, and are great spots for appetizers and craft cocktails. At Finz, on the wharf, the sushi game is strong. And Turner’s Seafood, only seven years old in its Salem location, is practically an institution. (Good luck getting a table; on three different weekend visits, it had a nearly two-hour wait.) At industrial-chic Kokeshi, feast on fresh, flavorful dishes like an ahi tuna poke bowl while watching Godzilla movies projected onto the wall across from the bar. Or hit Bambolina for wood-fired pizzas with fresh farmers’ market toppings.
Get your fill of flavorful, wood-fired pizza at Bambolina. 
The bar at Finz is an excellent choice for sushi and cocktails. 
Old school in the best way, upscale Adriatic serves foods from the surf and the turf. 
Ye Olde Pepper Companie: your hookup for real-deal saltwater taffy and Gibraltars. 
The Lobster Shanty is a local favorite for lobster rolls and fried fish, plus . . . a side of sarcasm.
Sample a bunch of cuisines with Salem Food Tours. Whereas the AM Coffee Walk focuses on the sweeter side, the Afternoon Stroll leans toward the savory. Both provide a wealth of historical trivia about the city, its architecture, and the spice trade, and include a tasting at Salem Spice, a small shop stocked to the gills with the likes of Saigon cinnamon, berbere, and kala namak.
A few tips for dining in Salem: No matter which restaurant you choose, make reservations, or you’ll be stuck with an early bird seating or Euro-style 9:00 p.m. dinner. And bring a fully loaded wallet; meals in Salem generally don’t come cheap, but the quality is on par with big-city restaurants.
Finally, save your dessert calories. When I visited, Goodnight Fatty was a late-night cookie “speakeasy” open only on the weekends, in an unmarked storefront down a creepy-looking alley. They’ve since moved to a storefront near the Salem Witch Museum, and are open in the morning for breakfast “chubbies” and afternoon and evening for small-batch treats, including vegan flavors, and cooies with soft-serve ice cream. Speaking of cold treats, Melt serves a dozen-plus homemade ice cream flavors (including vegan), and usually has a line snaking around the block. Just around the corner from the PEM, Jodi Bee Bakes is a vegetarian bakery with a slew of vegan and gluten-free options so good you won’t believe you’ve lived this long without them.
So if you’ve been thinking about a trip to Salem, repeat after me: the witch stuff isn’t the only, or even the best, reason to visit. A quirky, memorable experience is yours for the taking, if you’re willing to explore beyond the obvious.
The Real Low-Down on Salem’s “Witches”
Salem’s history will be forever intertwined with its infamous witch trials, which resulted from a complicated set of social circumstances, including fear of foreigners and women, and bald-faced greed.
The seeds of the witch hysteria were planted in the late 1600s, when several early landowners and politicians were attempting to buy—or else usurp—the property of other settlers. In 1692, a house slave named Tituba, who was mostly likely of South American heritage, was minding a group of young girls. To keep her charges entertained, she told them tall tales and performed sleight-of-hand tricks. Magic, even of the let’s-make-a-coin-disappear variety, was considered witchcraft by the stiff-lipped Puritans. The girls, afraid their parents would find out they’d taken part, pretended to have been compelled by the devil. Falling into fits of screaming, weeping, barking like dogs, and feigning illness, they earned the nickname the Afflicted Girls.
One of the first people arrested for practicing witchcraft was Bridget Bishop. Bishop, who married three times and never had children, owned not just a home, but also an apple orchard and two popular taverns. Well-off and outspoken, Bishop smoked, drank, flirted with men, argued openly with her husbands, and, most egregious of all to repressive Puritan society, dressed flamboyantly in “a black cap, and a black hat, and a red paragon bodice bordered and looped with different colors.” She was arrested, based purely on scuttlebutt, for practicing witchcraft.
The law in Salem at the time dictated that if property owners were executed for a crime, their holdings went not to their descendants, but to the city. And so the land-rich Bishop was swiftly moved to the front of the line. Although she maintained her innocence until the very end, she was tried and hanged within eight days of her arrest.
Old Salem Jail, where the accused—many of whom were frank opponents of the witch trials—were held, served a dual purpose. The conditions of its dungeons were so deplorable that four of the accused died while imprisoned, and many more succumbed to psychological torture and confessed to crimes they didn’t commit. The jail was also a cash cow for the city government: prisoners were charged daily room and board while incarcerated—another way for avaricious politicians to amass wealth.
During the fifteen-month period of witch hysteria, about one-sixth of Salem’s population of 2,600 was accused of witchcraft; even a few household pets were seized and executed. The youngest victim was four-year-old Dorothy Good, who was accused alongside her mother, Sarah Good. Sarah ultimately became one of 20 people, 15 women and 5 men, put to death—all but one of them hanged, not burned at the stake, as often depicted in movies or novels. Dorothy was jailed for nearly nine months before being released. Forever traumatized, she experienced mental health issues throughout her young life, and died a “madwoman” at the ripe age of sixteen.
The witch trials quickly became a permanent stain on Salem’s history. Despite a day of public apology and remembrance in 1697, atonement continued—except in the minds of a few powerful figures, like lead magistrate John Hathorne, who never repented for his role in the slaughter.
If you’re starting to sense some parallels between the Salem witch hysteria and the political climate of today, Arthur Miller, who wrote The Crucible in 1953, at the height of McCarthyism, would probably agree with you.
