Proposal · Commonwealth Avenue Mall, Back Bay
Comm Ave Mall Proposal at the Elephants — John & Benna
“One hundred elephants on Comm Ave, in town for five weeks, and he got the timing exactly right.”
- Location
- Commonwealth Avenue Mall, Back Bay
- When
- Early evening · late summer, while the herd was in town
- Type
- Surprise proposal + portrait hour
- After
- Dinner on Comm Ave, drinks on Newbury
Benna loves elephants, and for five weeks this summer there were a hundred of them standing on Commonwealth Avenue Mall. The Great Elephant Migration is a travelling herd of life-size sculptures woven from an invasive plant by Indigenous artisans in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India, and it sat between Dartmouth and Fairfield from the 8th of August to the 13th of September. John spotted the window and built the whole evening around it, which is exactly the instinct I wish more people had — the best proposal spot is almost never the prettiest one, it's the one that means something to her.
The plan
He came to me early, which gave us room to get the timing right. His dinner reservation was at Deuxave, the place they'd had their first proper dinner as a couple, and it happens to sit on Commonwealth Ave a few blocks down from the herd. So the plan wrote itself: pull dinner earlier, have a drink on Newbury first, and walk to the restaurant down the mall, which is simply how you'd get there anyway. Nothing invented, nothing for Benna to wonder about. John did the legwork too — he moved both reservations, scouted the stretch, and told me which bar they'd be at so I could pick them up the moment they stepped out rather than guessing on a corner.
The moment
From there I followed at a distance the whole way down the mall and texted him once I had eyes on them; after that it was entirely his call. He stopped at the elephants. She never saw me.
Portraits after
Then we had the better part of an hour for portraits along the mall in good evening light, and the two of them walked into dinner engaged instead of sitting through a meal with a ring in a pocket. Everything he'd planned still happened — dinner, drinks after, all of it — just in the order that gave him the photographs.
If something with a date on it is passing through town
- The elephants have since moved on to the next city, which is the thing about a herd like that: it was in Boston for five weeks and John caught it. If something with a date on it is passing through town, that's your spot.
- Keep the evening you already had — drinks, dinner — and reorder it so the photos come first.
- Tell me the bar or the door you'll be coming out of; I'll pick you up from there.
- For the mall itself — which blocks, the light, the timing — read the Commonwealth Avenue Mall proposal guide. Proposal photography starts at $699.
