Beacon Hill

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.