Back Bay

1

Boston Public Library (Central Library, Copley)

Libraries & ArchivesMust-see

The Boston Public Library is a palace that charges nothing, and says so: Free to All is carved over the Dartmouth Street entrance beneath a head of Minerva. Founded in 1848 as the first large free municipal library in the United States, it moved in 1895 into Charles Follen McKim’s Renaissance Revival building on Copley Square, now a National Historic Landmark.

Pass through Daniel Chester French’s bronze doors and climb the yellow Siena marble stair past Puvis de Chavannes’s murals, his only work outside France. Bates Hall runs the length of the building under a 50-foot barrel vault. Upstairs, John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion fills a skylit gallery; he worked on it for nearly 30 years and died with it unfinished. End in the arcaded courtyard, modeled on Rome’s Palazzo della Cancelleria.

Tip Free guided tours require registration, up to a month ahead; otherwise take the library’s 30-minute audio tour on the Bloomberg Connects app.

2

Copley Square

Streets & SquaresWorth a visit

Copley Square is Boston’s architectural face-off: Richardson’s Trinity Church on the east, McKim’s Boston Public Library on the west, the Hancock tower’s mirror behind, and Old South Church’s Venetian tower at the Dartmouth Street corner. The park between them reopened in stages after an $18.9 million rebuild, fully in May 2026, with the fountain restored and a raised grove of shaded seating facing the library.

On Boylston Street beside the library is the Boston Marathon finish line. A few steps and a block west of it, at the two blast sites of April 15, 2013, stand three stone pillars with bronze lighting columns, installed in 2019, one for each of the three people killed there, with cherry trees that bloom each April. The farmers market fills the McKim plaza Tuesdays and Fridays, 11 a.m.–6 p.m., mid-May to late November.

Tip The fourth landmark, Old South Church at the Dartmouth Street corner, is the one most visitors skip.

200 Clarendon, still the Hancock Tower to most Bostonians, is best seen as a mirror. Henry N. Cobb of I. M. Pei & Partners finished the 62-story tower in 1976 on a slim rhomboid plan, with notched end walls and a skin of reflective glass, so that New England’s tallest building seems to step back from Trinity Church, which floats in its facade.

The early years were rough, and the original glass panels had to be replaced, but the design won the American Institute of Architects’ Twenty-five Year Award in 2011. The building is private offices with no observation deck, so take it in from the west side of Copley Square, by the library, with Trinity in front and the glass rising behind. For a view from the top, ride up to View Boston at the Prudential Center.

4

Trinity Church

Religious SitesMust-see

Trinity Church is the building that gave America a style. H. H. Richardson completed it in 1877, and its massive stone, round arches and great central tower came to be called Richardsonian Romanesque. The American Institute of Architects has ranked it among the ten most important buildings in the country, and it is a National Historic Landmark.

Pay to go inside, because the interior is the masterpiece. Rector Phillips Brooks had John La Farge work with Richardson so that murals, color and architecture read as one, and La Farge’s murals wrap the walls in deep color. Windows from nine studios followed, among them works by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones and masterpieces by La Farge himself. From September to May, come on a Friday for the free 12:15 p.m. organ recital.

Tip When the church is closed, the free exterior audio tour covers the stonework.

5

Newbury Street

Shopping & DiningWorth a visit

Newbury Street is the Back Bay’s shop window: eight blocks of 19th-century houses turned boutiques, galleries, salons and cafés, running from the Public Garden to Massachusetts Avenue. The cross streets go alphabetically, Arlington to Hereford, so you always know where you are. Shops moved in during the early 20th century, often by remodeling the rowhouses, so look above the signs for bay windows, mansard roofs and carved stone.

The street changes as you walk west. The blocks near the Public Garden lean toward high fashion and flagship names; toward Massachusetts Avenue it grows more independent, with record stores and casual food. On selected Sundays in summer and early fall, Open Newbury closes the street to cars from Berkeley Street to Massachusetts Avenue.

If your family has New England roots, this is where to dig. Founded in 1845 and now operating as American Ancestors, the New England Historic Genealogical Society is the oldest and largest genealogical organization in the United States, and its Newbury Street headquarters holds millions of manuscripts, books and records on families across New England and beyond.

Casual visitors should start with the Family Heritage Experience, an interactive exhibition that introduces the pleasures of family-history research. Serious researchers head upstairs to the Brim-DeForest Library on the fifth and seventh floors. Come prepared: names, dates and places for your grandparents and great-grandparents turn a browse into a find, and the staff help beginners and seasoned researchers alike.

Time a visit for a Sunday morning between September and May, when Emmanuel Music performs a Bach cantata at the 10 a.m. Eucharist, in the liturgy it was written for, just before the closing hymn. Emmanuel Music says no other organization in the world does this regularly.

The building has its own pull. Alexander Rice Esty’s church of 1861 was the first building on Newbury Street, and its jewel is the Leslie Lindsey Memorial Chapel, consecrated in 1924. Leslie Lindsey married in April 1915 and was lost with her new husband on the Lusitania that May; her family built the chapel in her memory, chasing the finest materials and workmanship America and Europe could provide.

8

Arlington Street Church

Religious SitesWorth a visit

Come for the glass. Arlington Street Church holds Tiffany windows installed between 1898 and 1933, which the church counts as the world’s largest single-themed collection of Tiffany windows. Arthur Gilman modeled the exterior on St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, and the 190-foot spire, finished in 1861, rises over a building that rests on 999 wooden pilings in the new Back Bay fill.

The congregation, Unitarian Universalist today, has a long record of dissent. William Ellery Channing led it for four decades from 1803, in its Federal Street days. In 1967 some 340 young men turned in or burned their draft cards at an anti-draft rally here with Dr. Benjamin Spock and William Sloane Coffin, and in 2004 the church held what it calls the first legal same-sex wedding in a church in the United States.

Tip Tours are self-guided with an audio guide and need no booking; outside the June–October season, the 11 a.m. Sunday service is the way to see the windows.

9

Swan Boats (Boston Public Garden)

Kids & FamilyWorth a visit

The Swan Boats are a 15-minute ride at about 2 miles an hour, slow by design. Robert Paget, a shipbuilder and opera lover, launched them on the Public Garden lagoon in 1877, hiding a foot-powered paddle mechanism inside a giant swan inspired by the finale of Wagner’s Lohengrin. He died the next year, and his widow, Julia, ran the business for more than three decades.

The Paget family, now in its fourth generation, still runs the fleet of six boats, the oldest dating from 1910. The route loops around the rocky island from Make Way for Ducklings and glides under the footbridge. The season ends on Labor Day and the boats return in April.

Tip Go early on a weekday morning, before the lines build.

10

Boston Public Garden

Parks & GardensMust-see

The Public Garden is Boston at its most composed: 24 acres of reclaimed marsh, established in 1837 as the first public botanical garden in America and laid out to George Meacham’s competition-winning plan. Its centerpiece is the serpentine lagoon, crossed by William G. Preston’s little footbridge and circled from April into September by the Swan Boats.

Read it by its monuments. Thomas Ball’s mounted George Washington, unveiled in 1869, guards the Arlington Street gate and looks straight down Commonwealth Avenue. Near the northwest corner, the 1868 Ether Monument salutes the first use of ether in anesthesia. Nancy Schön’s bronze Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings arrived in 1987, and climbing is encouraged. The garden adjoins Boston Common but is not on the Freedom Trail, so give it an unhurried hour of its own.

Tip Enter from the Common at Charles Street and leave by the Arlington Street gate, where Washington lines you up for a walk down Commonwealth Avenue.

11

Esplanade (Charles River Esplanade)

Parks & GardensWorth a visit

The Esplanade is where Boston goes to breathe: a riverbank park of lawns, lagoons and footbridges facing Cambridge across the Charles. It exists because damming the river in 1910 turned tidal mudflats into a steady basin; in the mid-1930s Olmsted’s protégé Arthur Shurcliff nearly doubled the parkland, and Storrow Drive took its slice in the early 1950s.

The landmark is the Hatch Memorial Shell. Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops gave the first concert on this spot on July 4, 1929, from a temporary wooden shell; the permanent shell was dedicated in 1940, and the Pops still play it every Fourth of July. Cross Storrow Drive on a footbridge from Back Bay or Beacon Hill and walk upriver late in the day, toward MIT’s Great Dome across the water.

12

Gibson House

Historic HousesWorth a visit

The Gibson House is the Back Bay with the front door open. Catherine Hammond Gibson commissioned Edward Clarke Cabot to design this brownstone-and-brick rowhouse in 1860, when it was one of the first homes on the new land, and three generations of Gibsons and dozens of servants lived and worked here until 1954.

Its preserver was the last Gibson in residence, Charles Hammond Gibson Jr., a poet, horticulturist and notable Boston character, who began guarding the house against change in 1936; it opened as a museum in 1957. The wallpapers, imported carpets, furniture and family heirlooms stayed put, and so did the working rooms: kitchen, laundry and coal shed. The 45-minute guided tour climbs through four floors.

Tip Only one small group is in the house at a time, so buy ahead. Tours aren’t suited to children 5 and under.

Look up. The reason to stop at Commonwealth Avenue and Clarendon Street is the frieze crowning First Baptist’s square tower, by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, later the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty. It depicts four sacraments, with faces of famous Bostonians, Longfellow and Hawthorne among them, and the trumpeting angels at the corners earned the building its local nickname: the Church of the Holy Bean Blowers.

H. H. Richardson designed it in Roxbury puddingstone, his first church in Boston, and it was completed in 1872 for the Unitarian Brattle Square Church, whose congregation dissolved soon after moving in. First Baptist has worshiped here since 1882. Take in the whole tower from the median of the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, then walk a few blocks south to Trinity Church to see what Richardson did next.

14

Commonwealth Avenue Mall

Parks & GardensWorth a visit

This is the Back Bay’s front parlor: a 200-foot-wide boulevard Arthur Gilman designed in 1856 on Parisian lines, with a shaded promenade down the middle. Built from 1858 into the 1870s as the landfill advanced, it carries the green of the Public Garden west to the Fens, a link in the Emerald Necklace.

Walk it west from Arlington Street and statues mark the blocks: William Rimmer’s granite Alexander Hamilton of 1865, the Mall’s first; Olin Levi Warner’s seated William Lloyd Garrison; the 1997 Vendome memorial to the firefighters killed in the 1972 fire; and Meredith Bergmann’s Boston Women’s Memorial of 2003, where Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone and Phillis Wheatley use their pedestals instead of standing on them. Anne Whitney’s Leif Erikson is the only figure facing west.

Old South gives Copley Square a blaze of polychrome stone and a congregation with a past. Gathered in 1669, it spent two centuries downtown, where Benjamin Franklin was baptized in its meetinghouse the day he was born, Samuel Adams often led the singing and Phillis Wheatley was baptized; it moved here in 1875.

Cummings and Sears designed the church in the Northern Italian Gothic that John Ruskin championed, with a tall campanile that replaced, in the 1930s, a first tower that had begun to lean. The architects had their own faces carved on the portico columns, so look closely. The congregation still owns a 1640 first edition of the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in British North America, kept across the square at the Boston Public Library.

Come to the Prudential Center for the view, which has its own entry as View Boston, and treat the rest as shelter. At street level the Pru is more useful than thrilling: an enclosed mall of shops and restaurants at the foot of the 52-story tower, linked by an indoor bridge to Copley Place, so you can cross a good stretch of the Back Bay out of the rain.

The Christian Science Plaza is right behind it, and Newbury Street a block north; the Prudential stop on the Green Line E branch opens into the mall.

17

View Boston

AttractionsWorth a visit

View Boston is the city’s observation deck, three floors at the top of the 52-story Prudential Tower, and the open-air Cloud Terrace on the 51st is the reason to pay. It replaced the old Skywalk in June 2023: the elevators run to the 52nd floor, where the enclosed viewing floor and the exhibits are, and the terrace and its bar are a floor down. The harbor and the islands lie east, Fenway Park and the Charles to the west and north.

Buy ahead for a time slot, or buy a flex ticket, good on any day in a two-week window, and go on the first clear one; fog or rain cancels the point. The last hour of daylight is the time, and the lights come on while you are up there. The Prudential Center mall below is the way in.

Tip Allow 45 minutes to an hour; the $3 booking fee is charged on every ticket, including the flex ticket.

18

First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church)

Religious SitesWorth a visit

Whatever your beliefs, the Christian Science Plaza is one of Boston’s grand architectural set pieces: a Romanesque church of 1894, a domed Extension of 1906 and a broad plaza with a long reflecting pool, designed in part by the firm of I. M. Pei. This is The Mother Church, headquarters of the faith Mary Baker Eddy founded.

The free 40-minute tour is the way in. The original church keeps its Italian mosaic floors and hand-carved birch pews. The Extension’s great dome fills the auditorium with natural light, and its Aeolian-Skinner organ has more than 13,000 pipes, which the church counts among the largest in the world. Tours start at 210 Massachusetts Avenue, the same building as the Mapparium, so pair the two.

Tip Symphony station is closed for rebuilding until 2029; ride to Prudential (Green E) and cross the plaza, or walk up from Massachusetts Avenue (Orange).

19

Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity

MuseumsWorth a visit

Come for the Mapparium, a three-story stained-glass globe you cross on a 30-foot bridge through its middle. Opened on June 1, 1935, its 608 glass panels freeze the world of that year, Siam and the Soviet Union included, and with light shining through them you stand inside the planet.

The sphere is also a whispering gallery: two people at opposite ends of the bridge can talk softly and sound side by side, and a voice at the center comes back in surround sound. A short light-and-narration show traces how the world has changed since 1935. The library’s exhibits on Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science and The Christian Science Monitor, are for the curious; the globe is for everyone.

Tip Mapparium entry is by timed ticket, so book a slot.

The Massachusetts Historical Society is a research library first, but its free galleries put the nation’s founding paper on display. The Rev. Jeremy Belknap invited nine like-minded Bostonians to found it in 1791, making it the oldest historical society in the United States, and its collections hold the papers of John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson’s architectural drawings and Paul Revere’s own account of his ride.

Its galleries, in an 1899 Beaux-Arts building at the Fenway end of Boylston Street, show changing exhibitions drawn from the collection, often on the Revolution and the Adams family. Casual visitors can simply walk in; researchers should book an appointment for the reading room.

Tip On the second Tuesday of each month, the galleries and library don’t open until noon.