Downtown

1

Old State House

Historic SitesMust-see

Start the Revolution here. Built in 1713 as the Town House, the seat of colonial government, the Old State House is Boston’s oldest surviving public building, now dwarfed by office towers and sitting on top of a subway station. In its Council Chamber in 1761, James Otis spoke for four hours against the writs of assistance, and on March 5, 1770, the Boston Massacre broke out in the street outside, where a circle set into the pavement marks the spot.

On July 18, 1776, Colonel Thomas Crafts read the Declaration of Independence from the balcony, and Bostonians tore the lion and unicorn, emblems of the Crown, off the building; today’s pair are copper replacements. Inside, Revolutionary Spaces runs a museum of colonial and revolutionary Boston. Climb the spiral staircase to the Council Chamber, and find the 1831 Simon Willard clock, still wound by hand every week.

Tip One ticket covers this and the Old South Meeting House, a short walk south on Washington Street, including the Ruckus! show there.

The ground floor is a Chipotle, and the building has survived worse. Thomas Crease, an apothecary, built the brick corner house in 1718 on the lot where Anne Hutchinson’s family had lived before the colony banished her, and from 1832 to 1865 it was the shop of William Ticknor’s publishing firms, Ticknor and Fields among them: Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne and the visiting Dickens met here, and The Atlantic Monthly, founded in 1857, went to press from a back room. In 1960 a motel was planned for the site; the Old Corner Committee raised $275,000 and bought the building on December 30, and Historic Boston Incorporated still owns it, the only Freedom Trail stop that is entirely commercial.

It became a Boston Landmark in May 2025. Read the plaques, buy nothing, and walk a block south to the Old South Meeting House.

Tip Up School Street, Old City Hall’s courtyard holds the city’s statue of Benjamin Franklin, and a sidewalk mosaic marks the first site of Boston Latin School.

3

Old South Meeting House

Historic SitesWorth a visit

This is the room where the Boston Tea Party began. Built in 1729 for a Puritan congregation, Old South was one of the largest buildings in colonial Boston, and on December 16, 1773, thousands packed in for a final meeting over the East India Company’s tea. When it broke up, the crowd headed for Griffin’s Wharf. Phillis Wheatley worshiped here, and Benjamin Franklin’s family belonged to the congregation.

British troops gutted the hall during the occupation and used it to practice riding, and in 1876 it was auctioned for its building materials. Bostonians saved it, and it opened as a museum in 1877. Plan your visit around Ruckus!, a 25-minute sound, light and projection show inside the meeting house that starts at quarter past each hour and comes with admission. Arrive 15 minutes early; latecomers are turned away 5 minutes in.

Tip Ruckus! uses loud sound effects, gunfire included, and dynamic lighting; parental discretion is advised for younger children.

4

King’s Chapel and King’s Chapel Burying Ground

Religious SitesWorth a visit

Two of Boston’s oldest stories share the corner of Tremont and School streets. The burying ground came first: in use since 1630, it was the town’s first, and it holds Governor John Winthrop and Mary Chilton, believed to be the first woman to step off the Mayflower. Find Joseph Tapping’s stone, where a skeleton and Father Time face off. Nathaniel Hawthorne dug his fictional Hester Prynne’s grave here on the last page of The Scarlet Letter.

The chapel was founded in 1686 as Boston’s first Anglican church, and Peter Harrison’s granite building of 1754 went up around the wooden church so worship could continue. After the Revolution it became America’s first Unitarian church. Inside, sit in the original box pews below the oldest American pulpit still in continuous use, then take the Bells & Bones tour into the crypt and to the 1816 Revere bell.

Tip No reservations needed: Bells & Bones tours usually leave on the hour, and shorter crypt or gallery tours on the half hour.

5

Granary Burying Ground

Historic SitesWorth a visit

Walk through Isaiah Rogers’s Egyptian Revival gate of 1840 and you are among the Revolution’s headliners. Laid out in 1660 and named in 1737 for the town granary next door, the Granary holds three signers of the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine, along with Paul Revere, Peter Faneuil and the five victims of the Boston Massacre. Christopher Seider, the 11-year-old shot by a customs officer 11 days before the Massacre, shares their grave.

About 2,345 stones and tombs mark an estimated 5,000 or more burials, so many graves go unmarked. The 25-foot obelisk at the center, raised in 1827, honors Benjamin Franklin’s parents. Come at opening, before the tour groups, and read the carved slates as closely as the famous names.

The steeple is the reason to stop. Peter Banner’s church went up in 1809 on the site of the old town granary, and its 217-foot spire was the first landmark travelers saw as they approached Boston. The corner is still called Brimstone Corner, for the fire-and-brimstone preaching or for the gunpowder kept in the basement during the War of 1812.

What happened inside matters more than the room itself. On July 4, 1829, William Lloyd Garrison made his first major public statement against slavery here, and on July 4, 1831, “America,” better known as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” was first sung here. With the church’s Freedom Trail exhibit closed until June 2027, admire the steeple from the Common and come inside for Sunday worship. The Granary Burying Ground is next door.

Look up before you go in. St. Paul’s went up in 1819 as a Greek temple on Tremont Street, Boston’s first example of Greek Revival architecture and a sharp break from the colonial meeting-house look of Park Street Church up the street. Alexander Parris and Solomon Willard gave it a sandstone temple front, and the pediment above was meant to hold a carving of St. Paul preaching before King Agrippa. It was never made. Nearly two centuries later, in 2012, the cathedral commissioned Donald Lipski to fill the space; his A Ship of Pearl is the shell the congregation calls the Nautilus.

Inside, a 2014–2015 renovation took out the pews and added skylights, leaving an open, bright room centered on the altar.

Tip A Wednesday service at 12:15 p.m. makes an easy lunchtime visit.

8

Boston Common

Parks & GardensMust-see

Start here, because Boston did. Set aside in 1634, the Common is the oldest public park in the United States, about 50 acres of lawns, paths and monuments below the State House dome. Cows grazed it until 1830, British regulars camped on it during the 1775 occupation, and later crowds gathered here for Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope John Paul II.

Pick up the Freedom Trail’s red line at the visitor center on Tremont Street, but save time for the Beacon Street edge. Facing the State House, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze relief of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment, unveiled in 1897 after nearly 14 years’ work, rewards a close look. Frog Pond is a skating rink in winter and a spray pool in summer, and the Public Garden waits across Charles Street.

The Common’s quiet corner holds the people colonial Boston kept at the edges. Opened in 1756 to relieve the crowded older grounds, it took strangers who died in town, the almshouse dead from 1771, and free and enslaved Black Bostonians; some British officers from Bunker Hill are believed to lie here too. Gilbert Stuart, the portraitist best known for George Washington, is buried here, as are 14 participants in the Boston Tea Party.

The city kept cutting into it. Widening Boylston Street in 1836 cost a double row of tombs, and subway diggers in 1895 found more remains, now gathered in a large grave in the northwest corner. Give the slates 15 minutes: death’s heads, cherubs, urns and willows, plus Catholic symbols that appeared once Catholicism was legalized in 1780.

The Theater District is an evening place: by day it is mostly facades, but around curtain time the marquees light up along Tremont and Washington streets and the sidewalks fill. Architect Clarence Blackall built two of its anchors. The Emerson Colonial opened with Ben-Hur on December 20, 1900, and is the city’s oldest continually operating theater, and his 1925 Metropolitan, a movie palace, lives on as the Boch Center’s Wang Theatre, beside the 1910 Shubert. Thomas W. Lamb’s 1928 B.F. Keith Memorial Theatre is now the Citizens Bank Opera House.

Plan the night around a ticket. Eat early in the district or a block over in Chinatown, then stroll back across the Common afterward. The T runs late enough for most curtain calls: last trains leave about 12:30–1 a.m., and about an hour later on Friday and Saturday nights.

The best thing in the Financial District is a 1.7-acre lawn on top of a garage. Post Office Square was an above-ground parking garage until 1988, when it was torn down; the replacement went entirely underground, 80 feet down, opened in 1990 at a cost of $18 million, and paid for the park laid over it in 1992, named for Norman Leventhal, the developer who led the project. The Halvorson Company and Ellenzweig Architects gave it a pergola around a central lawn, a fountain, a café and a great many chairs, and at lunchtime the towers empty onto it.

Come at noon on a weekday for the show, or at 8 a.m. for the lawn to yourself, on the way from the Old State House to the waterfront.

12

Quincy Market

Markets & Food HallsWorth a visit

Quincy Market is a tourist food hall inside a superb building, and it pays to notice both. Mayor Josiah Quincy pushed it through in 1824–1826, and Alexander Parris designed a columned, two-story granite hall about 535 feet long, with a copper-clad dome over its central rotunda. After a long run as a working wholesale market, it reopened in 1976 as one of America’s earliest and most influential festival marketplaces.

Eat here for convenience and atmosphere rather than for the best chowder in town. Carry your cup from the counters along the central aisle to the seats under the dome; come before noon or after 2 p.m. to find one. At the lunch peak, take your food out to the cobblestones and watch the street performers working between the market and Faneuil Hall.

13

Faneuil Hall

Historic SitesMust-see

Every Boston visit passes through here, and it should. Peter Faneuil, a merchant whose Atlantic empire ran on goods, wealth and enslaved people, gave the town this market hall in 1742. Colonists protested the Sugar and Stamp Acts in its meeting hall upstairs, earning the building its name as the Cradle of Liberty, and abolitionists, suffragists and labor organizers later claimed the same floor.

Walk past the ground-floor shops and climb to the Great Hall. National Park Service rangers give free 15-minute talks there Wednesday to Sunday on the half hour, 10:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m., unless a city event has closed it. On weekdays, keep going to the fourth floor, where the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company keeps a museum, usually open 9 a.m.–3 p.m. Outside, look up for Shem Drowne’s gilded grasshopper weathervane, then walk through to Quincy Market behind.

Tip The National Park Service visitor center on the ground floor hands out free Freedom Trail maps.

14

Blackstone Block

NeighborhoodsWorth a visit

Step behind Faneuil Hall and Boston shrinks back to its colonial scale. The Blackstone Block, named for William Blaxton, one of Boston’s earliest European settlers, keeps a knot of narrow lanes and alleys that escaped three centuries of street widening; the city made the street network itself, laid out by about 1676, a Boston Landmark in 1983.

Walk Marshall Street. The Union Oyster House fills a building from around 1716 and has served customers since 1826. Nearby stands the Ebenezer Hancock House, which John Hancock handed to his brother, the Continental Army’s deputy paymaster general; French silver sent in 1778 to pay Washington’s troops was stored inside. Look for the Boston Stone in a building wall, said to mark where the town’s early surveys began. On Fridays and Saturdays the Haymarket stalls press right up against the block.

Six glass towers, each 54 feet high, rise in a narrow park beside the Freedom Trail, and the walk through them takes a few minutes and stays with you far longer. Stanley Saitowitz won an international design competition for the memorial, dedicated in 1995. The towers stand for the six main death camps, Chelmno, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Belzec, and recall a row of memorial candles. Millions of numbers etched in the glass evoke the tattoos forced on prisoners, and in sunlight their shadows fall across you as you pass.

Read as you go: survivors’ memories are etched on the tower walls, and REMEMBER is cut into the black granite ramps. Come back after dark if you can, when the towers are lit from within and a glow rises from the pits beneath them.

16

Haymarket

Markets & Food HallsWorth a visit

Haymarket is Boston at its loudest and cheapest. Every Friday and Saturday, more than 40 independent vendors stack fruit, vegetables and seafood on carts along Blackstone Street and call their prices to the crowd, keeping up a trade in cheap fresh food that dates back to 1820.

Come to cook, not to browse. Bring small bills, since vendors deal in cash, and buy what you will eat in a day or two. Bargaining is part of the ritual, and the deals improve as Saturday afternoon wears on and vendors clear their carts. For local farms under a roof, the Boston Public Market is steps away, and the 17th-century lanes of the Blackstone Block open right behind the stalls.

Boston has never made up its mind about City Hall. Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles won it in a 1962 design competition that drew 256 entries, and their Brutalist concrete inverted pyramid, stepping out over a broad brick plaza in the Government Center district that replaced Scollay Square, was dedicated in 1969. Architects were won over early: it took the American Institute of Architects’ Honor Award that same year.

Judge it from the plaza first, then walk in on a weekday. The plaza-level lobby is public, with an information booth and a café that opened in 2025, and the plaza itself was rebuilt in a renovation finished in 2022. Faneuil Hall is just across Congress Street.