Beacon Hill

1

Massachusetts State House

Government BuildingsMust-see

The gold dome is Boston’s compass point, and the free tour inside is one of the best 45 minutes on the Freedom Trail. Charles Bulfinch designed the State House, finished in 1798 on land once owned by John Hancock. Paul Revere’s company sheathed the wooden dome in copper in 1802; it was first gilded in 1874, and painted gray in World War II so it wouldn’t shine during blackouts.

Inside, find the Sacred Cod, a carved wooden fish that has hung over the House of Representatives since 1784 (Harvard Lampoon pranksters stole it in 1933), and the Hall of Flags. In Doric Hall, note the main doors: they open only for a visiting president or head of state, a departing governor, or a regimental flag returning from battle. Tours run weekdays and must be booked by phone.

Tip Enter at the General Hooker Entrance on Beacon Street, at the top of Park Street. For the classic dome photograph, cross to Boston Common.

2

Boston Athenaeum

Libraries & ArchivesWorth a visit

Founded in 1807, the Athenaeum is a members’ library, but for $11 anyone can step onto its first floor. It moved in 1849 into Edward Clarke Cabot’s building at 10½ Beacon Street, which gained two set-back upper floors in 1913–14, and its tall rear windows look down into the Granary Burying Ground.

Its treasure is George Washington’s own library. When a dealer bought hundreds of his books in the 1840s, Bostonians raised a fund to keep them in America, and in 1849 the Athenaeum bought them; it still holds the largest collection of books Washington owned. To see the upper floors, take the 1-hour Art & Architecture Tour, capped at seven people, or buy a $40 one-day membership that includes the fifth-floor terrace.

Tip Tour tickets often sell out several days ahead, so book as soon as your dates are firm.

3

Nichols House

Historic HousesWorth a visit

The Nichols House gets you inside a Beacon Hill townhouse and introduces the remarkable woman who lived there. Built in 1804 and attributed to Charles Bulfinch, No. 55 was one of a row that Jonathan Mason put up for his daughters. The Nichols family bought it in 1885, and Rose Standish Nichols lived here until 1960, then left it to become a museum.

She is the reason to come. Nichols was a landscape architect with some 70 clients, the author of English Pleasure Gardens (1902), a niece of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an officer of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association and a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Her furniture, tapestries and art fill the rooms. Plan around the clock: weekday tours start only at 10 a.m., 11 a.m. and noon, with more on Saturday.

Tip The museum also leads occasional Beacon Hill walking tours; registration is required.

4

Mt. Vernon Street

Streets & SquaresWorth a visit

Mt. Vernon Street is Beacon Hill dressed for company, and Henry James called it “the only respectable street in America.” It climbs from the flat land near the river to the State House, lined with Federal and Greek Revival townhouses, a few of them set back behind front gardens, which on this crowded hill counts as extravagance.

The showpiece is No. 85, Harrison Gray Otis’s second house, designed by Charles Bulfinch and finished in 1802; one block downhill, Chestnut Street has Bulfinch’s three houses of 1805–07 at Nos. 13, 15 and 17, built for the daughters of Hepzibah Swan, the only woman among the hill’s developers. Up the hill, the Nichols House at No. 55 is a house museum you can tour, and Louisburg Square opens off the north side. Walk it downhill from Joy Street, detour through the square, and finish on Charles Street for a coffee.

This Federal townhouse facing Boston Common holds three families’ worth of Boston history and a wardrobe of its clothes. Asher Benjamin designed it in 1808 for the merchant James Smith Colburn, as the western half of a matched pair at 54–55 Beacon Street.

The historian William Hickling Prescott, nearly blind, bought it in 1845 and built a rear addition, with a library on the second floor and above it the study where he wrote History of the Conquest of Peru and Philip II. The Dexters, who came next, swapped the original spiral staircase for the present colonial revival one. Since 1944 the house has been the Massachusetts headquarters of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, whose costume collection of dresses, fans, shoes and parasols from the 18th to the 20th century is always partly on show.

Tip Tours run on scheduled dates rather than daily, so buy a ticket for a set date before you go.

6

Acorn Street

Streets & SquaresMust-see

Acorn Street is often called the most photographed street in Boston, which is a nice joke on its first residents. Cornelius Coolidge built most of its small brick rowhouses in the late 1820s for the coachmen who served the families in the mansions on Chestnut and Mt. Vernon Streets, so the hill’s postcard began as its service lane.

Look at the granite foundations and lintels, which mark the turn from Federal to Greek Revival, and at the cobbles underfoot. Residents guard them fiercely: when utility work forced the stones up, they were stored and carefully relaid. Come before 9 a.m. or on an overcast day for soft light and an empty lane, shoot downhill from the Willow Street end, wear flat shoes, and keep off the doorsteps.

Tip Louisburg Square is a 2-minute walk north, just across Mt. Vernon Street.

7

Louisburg Square

Streets & SquaresWorth a visit

Louisburg Square is Beacon Hill at its most composed: two facing rows of Greek Revival brick houses, built 1834–47, around a fenced oval of grass that belongs to the neighbors. The Louisburg Square Proprietors own and maintain the green, an early American example of a privately held residential park, and its gates stay shut to the public. The name recalls the 1745 Battle of Louisbourg, in which Massachusetts militiamen fought, and the land was once owned by the painter John Singleton Copley.

Christopher Columbus stands at the north end of the green and Aristides the Just at the south. William Dean Howells and Louisa May Alcott both lived on the square, and the soprano Jenny Lind was married in one of its houses. Walk the full loop on the cobbles, then look back up the oval from Mt. Vernon Street.

Charles Street is Beacon Hill’s working main street, the place for coffee, lunch and an antiques browse between the Public Garden and the river. It sits on made land, one of the roads laid out when this shore was filled between 1807 and 1832. That is why the Charles Street Meeting House at No. 70, built by Asher Benjamin in 1807 for a Baptist congregation that held baptisms in the river, now stands well inland.

Before the Civil War its pulpit was an antislavery stronghold, hosting Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; since the 1980s it has held offices above shops. Walk the street from Beacon Street north to Charles Circle, then climb Chestnut or Mt. Vernon Street into the quiet residential hill.

The Vilna Shul is the last immigrant-era synagogue building standing in downtown Boston, a survivor from the decades when Boston proper had more than 50 synagogues. Jews from Vilna, now Vilnius in Lithuania, built it in 1919 to a design by Max Kalman. The congregation thinned as families moved away, and by the 1980s the building had closed and faced demolition.

A restoration of about $3 million uncovered hand-painted murals in the sanctuary, and the building reopened as Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture. It posts no regular drop-in hours. In spring and summer the way in is Boston By Foot’s 2-hour walk, on set dates from April to August, which starts in the sanctuary and then tours Jewish Beacon Hill; the rest of the year, groups can book a private tour. Pair it with the Museum of African American History, whose African Meeting House was itself a synagogue until 1972.

10

Museum of African American History

MuseumsWorth a visit

The Revolution gets the crowds; this museum tells the story of the free Black community that made Beacon Hill’s north slope a center of abolition, inside two of that community’s own buildings. The African Meeting House of 1806 is the oldest Black church building standing in the country. William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society there on January 6, 1832, and Frederick Douglass later recruited soldiers in it for the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments.

Next door, the Abiel Smith School of 1835, the oldest US public school built solely to educate Black children, holds the galleries and the ticket desk. Buy the ticket with the Meeting House talk; the $10 ticket leaves it out. Then walk the 1.5-mile Black Heritage Trail: rangers lead free walks from late May through September; otherwise use the NPS App.