Highland Park is a historic hilltop green space in Roxbury crowned by the Fort Hill Tower, a striking Gothic Revival stone standpipe. Designed by architect Nathaniel J. Bradlee and completed in 1869 as the Cochituate Standpipe, the tower once helped supply water drawn from Lake Cochituate in Natick to local residents. It stands on Fort…
Brook Farm Historic Site preserves the grounds of one of America’s most famous utopian experiments. In the 1840s, a community of Transcendentalists, inspired by figures associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle, lived and farmed here, attempting a cooperative life that blended manual labor with intellectual pursuit. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne was briefly a member, and the…
Castle Island is a beloved South Boston peninsula crowned by Fort Independence, a granite, five-bastioned fort completed in the mid-19th century on a site fortified since the 1630s. Now connected to the mainland, the island offers a flat, scenic loop walk with panoramic views of Boston Harbor, passing planes on approach to Logan Airport, and…
Boston College is a private Jesuit, Catholic research university whose main Chestnut Hill campus straddles the Boston (Brighton) and Newton line, about six miles west of downtown Boston. Set on roughly 175 hilltop acres overlooking the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, the campus is celebrated for its Collegiate Gothic architecture, with landmark towers like Gasson Hall and…
Launched in 1797, USS Constitution is the world’s oldest commissioned warship still afloat. She earned her nickname “Old Ironsides” during the War of 1812, when British cannonballs were seen bouncing off her thick oak hull. Berthed at the Charlestown Navy Yard, the ship is still an active U.S. Navy vessel, crewed by active-duty sailors who…
The Charlestown Navy Yard is one of the oldest shipbuilding facilities in the United States, established in 1800 on Boston Harbor in Charlestown. For more than 170 years it built and serviced warships for the U.S. Navy before closing in 1974; much of the historic yard is now part of Boston National Historical Park, managed…
The New England Holocaust Memorial honors the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and stands as a place of remembrance and education in downtown Boston. Set in a narrow park between Congress and Union Streets near Faneuil Hall, the memorial consists of six luminous glass towers, each representing a major Nazi death camp. Visitors…
The Ether Dome is a domed surgical amphitheater on the top floor of the Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital, designed by architect Charles Bulfinch and completed in the early 1820s. On October 16, 1846, it became the site of the first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia using ether, a watershed moment in medicine that…
Rising 221 feet above Charlestown, the Bunker Hill Monument is a granite obelisk commemorating the Battle of Bunker Hill, fought on June 17, 1775, one of the earliest and bloodiest engagements of the American Revolution. Although the colonial militia ultimately withdrew, their stiff resistance against a much larger British force became a rallying symbol for…
Copp’s Hill Burying Ground crowns a rise in Boston’s North End, overlooking the harbor and the Charlestown shore. Founded in 1659, it is the second-oldest cemetery in the city after King’s Chapel Burying Ground and holds more than 1,200 marked graves. Among those buried here are colonial ministers of the Mather family, artisans, merchants, and…
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