Boston only rises 330 feet above sea level. So you’d be forgiven for thinking there are no serious climbs to challenge a local walker. But almost every neighborhood in the city has a steep pathway to burn the quads and race the heart.
While many probably avoid the stairs if they can, for some they are a draw. Sean Duffy, a dog walker for The Fetching Hound dog-walking service, leads his furry friends up the 70 steps from Russell Street to Mead Street in Charlestown a couple times a day, five days a week.
“I have to avoid these stairs with some of the older dogs, but most of the dogs don’t care,” Duffy said. “At least they don’t complain to me.”
Speaking immediately after the climb, Duffy wasn’t winded at all.
“When I was in high school, I was the captain of my wrestling team, and when I had to lead warmups, I always made everyone do stairs,” he said. “Stairs are my go-to.”
Others were quick to join him in extolling the virtues of vertical.
In nearby Doherty Park, Dan Haseltine showed no visible effort as he sped up the 49 granite stairs lined with Roxbury puddingstone.
“I am doing it on purpose! As I push it close to 40 [years old] here, I get some exercise. Get the heart rate up every day is the goal, right?” Haseltine said. “You got a good view here, too, you know, and you get the Mystic River in the background.”
The dreams of snowboarder Jayden Brumm of Wellesley are tied to stairs.
“Stairs for me, they’re a unique thing. They provide nice rails like this one right here to film cool snowboard tricks and produce movies,” he said between takes as his friends filmed him balancing his board sliding down the handrail next to 20 concrete stairs in Mission Hill’s McLaughlin Playground.
“We’re trying to make a video this year or a movie, actually, and companies watch it,” Brumm added. “Hopefully they want to sponsor you. They’ll start paying us to fly around the world.”
Even if that doesn’t work out, Brumm appreciates stairs. “I think people need to be walking up and down stairs rather than taking escalators and elevators. I do this pretty much every day, like a thousand times a week. That’ll get you pretty fit.”
It might also get you hurt.
McLaughlin Playground has another set of 68 stairs down to Fisher Avenue, and Miguel Tabares knows every one of them well. He’s up and down them every day, six days a week as he commutes to his restaurant job. The stairs get slippery in the winter.
“You fall so easy because no one takes care of them. They just throw salt,” Tabares said. Asked how many times he’s fallen, he answers, “This year? Maybe ten times.”
In East Boston, the 58 steps of the Golden Stairs Terrace Park once represented the first steps new immigrants to America would take around the turn of the last century. After a Cunard Line ship would deposit them for document processing and medical checks on the docks that now comprise Piers Park, new arrivals would climb the stairs to enter their new country. After they had ascended from Marginal Street to the top at Ruth Street, from the Old World to a new life, they were rewarded by a panoramic view of Boston Harbor.
While not a new immigrant, Andrea MacMillan did just arrive from New Jersey a few months ago and loves the climb.
“I don’t need to be here. I choose to be here,” she said. “I prefer the active exercise of coming up the stairs.”
Frequent climber Isaiah Stapleton estimates he’s been up the East Boston stairs a couple hundred times.
“I live in the area, and this is the largest staircase in this area. I like walking up and down and back and forth, just because I like to get in my steps and work my legs a little bit and get the blood flowing,” he said.
The stairway that gets you closest to heaven within city limits rises only 18 steps. Peaking at just 330 feet above sea level, Bellevue Hill Park in West Roxbury doesn’t really even afford visitors a, well, belle view. But it is a lovely forest walk, and home to the Bellevue Standpipe, an imposing tank sheathed in rough granite that serves as part of the city’s municipal water supply. Built in 1914, it was joined by a more modern tank in the 1950s.
“it’s kind of the Third Place in the neighborhood. I think a lot of people come up here with kids and dogs,” said Mike Kowalick. The Seattle transplant guesses he’s made the climb with his pit mix Huck a hundred times.
Heading down the steps toward his nearby home, he said: “This is a nice magnet, so you see people you know. It’s just kind of a random gathering spot that is really pleasant.”
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that the McLaughlin Playground is in the Mission Hill neighborhood.
Lane Turner can be reached at lane.turner@globe.com.