Every page here covers one Boston landmark properly: what it is, what it actually costs, how long it takes and how to reach it on the T, from the Freedom Trail sites to the ballpark, the aquarium and the museums.
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The Freedom Trail is a 2.5-mile marked walking route through Boston and Charlestown that links 16 historic sites, most of them from the Revolutionary period, and a full end-to-end walk takes most of a day at a comfortable pace.
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Faneuil Hall is a colonial-era market hall and meeting house, gifted to Boston by merchant Peter Faneuil and later expanded by Charles Bulfinch, whose second-floor Great Hall hosted the town meetings where colonists first organized resistance to British rule.
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The Boston Harbor Islands are a group of islands in Boston Harbor, about a short ferry ride from the downtown waterfront, managed as a national and state park area.
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The Boston Childrens Museum is a hands-on, play-based museum on Fort Point Channel in Boston's Seaport area, founded in 1913 and designed almost entirely for children to touch, climb and experiment rather than look at glass cases.
parks
Boston Common is a broad, open public park at the foot of Beacon Hill, and the Public Garden is the ornamental Victorian garden immediately across Charles Street.
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Yes, the Boston Public Library is free to enter, and no ticket, reservation, or membership is required for the main building, the courtyard, Bates Hall, or the galleries.
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It is a floating museum on the Fort Point Channel that recreates the December 16, 1773 tea protest aboard full-scale replica ships, combining costumed interpreters, a participatory town-meeting reenactment, restored tea-chest artifacts, and a short film, all inside a visit of roughly one hour.
bunker-hill-monument
The Bunker Hill Monument is a granite obelisk commemorating the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major engagement of the Revolutionary War, fought on Breed's Hill in the war's first summer when colonial militia repelled two British assaults before withdrawing on the third.
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Castle Island is a fortified peninsula in South Boston at the entrance to the inner harbor, and Fort Independence is the granite fortification that has occupied it in successive forms since the colonial period, making it one of the longest continuously fortified sites in the United States.
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The Charles River Esplanade is a roughly three-mile linear park on the Boston side of the Charles River, built on reclaimed land between the water and Storrow Drive, stretching from near the Museum of Science upstream to the Boston University Bridge.
Back Bay
Copley Square is a public plaza in Back Bay, named for painter John Singleton Copley.
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Fenway Park is the Red Sox's home ballpark, and it doubles as a year-round tourist attraction because the club sells guided tours on days when no game is being played.
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Franklin Park Zoo is a 72-acre zoo inside Franklin Park, Boston's largest park, located on the border of Roxbury and Dorchester about four miles southwest of downtown.
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Georges Island is reached by ferry from Long Wharf North, with a crossing of roughly 45 minutes.
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The Granary holds the graves of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, James Otis, Robert Treat Paine, the five victims of the Boston Massacre, Benjamin Franklin's parents, and thousands of ordinary Bostonians from the 1600s and 1700s, all inside a single city block.
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The ICA's published admission is $20 for adults, $17 for visitors 65 and over, and $15 for students, with free entry for all visitors 18 and under and for Boston Public Schools students.
museums
Adult admission to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is $25, with seniors 65 and over paying $22, and the museum's admissions page grants free entry to every visitor aged 17 and under.
jfk library
The JFK Presidential Library and Museum sits on Columbia Point in Dorchester, roughly at the end of the peninsula that also holds the University of Massachusetts Boston campus.
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The Mapparium is a three-story, walk-through globe made of stained-glass panels, built into the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, and its maps have never been updated, so the political world inside it is the world of the 1930s.
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The Massachusetts State House is the seat of Massachusetts state government, a Bulfinch-designed landmark with a gilded dome at the top of Beacon Hill, overlooking Boston Common.
museums
Adult admission is $30, youths 7 to 17 pay $14, and children 6 and under enter free, per the museum's own visit page.
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The published reference prices are $39.95 adult and $30.95 child ages 3–11, with ages two and under free.
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The Old State House is a 1713 brick building at the intersection of Washington and State Streets that served as the seat of Massachusetts colonial government, and it is the oldest surviving public building in Boston.
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View Boston is the observation deck attraction occupying the 50th, 51st and 52nd floors of the Prudential Center tower on Boylston Street in Back Bay, the second tallest building in New England.
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The Skywalk Observatory sits at the top of the Prudential Center on Boylston Street in Boston's Back Bay, and the observation experience there is now operated and ticketed as View Boston.
harbor islands
Spectacle Island is a park island in the middle of Boston Harbor, about 30 minutes from downtown Boston by public ferry, administered as part of the Boston Harbor Islands national park unit and reachable only by boat, with no bridge, no causeway and no road connection of any kind to the mainland.
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Boston Symphony Hall is the concert hall on Massachusetts Avenue that was the first major auditorium in the world designed using the science of acoustics, and it remains the Boston home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the venue where the Boston Pops performs its celebrated holiday and late-spring seasons.
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Encore Boston Harbor is a luxury resort and casino in Everett, Massachusetts, on 33 acres of reclaimed industrial waterfront where the Mystic River meets Boston Harbor.
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The Harvard Museum of Natural History is the public exhibition museum for several of Harvard University's research collections, located at 26 Oxford Street in Cambridge, and its centerpiece is the Ware Collection of Glass Models of Plants, the Glass Flowers, created by the Blaschka family of glass artists in Dresden, Germany.
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Harvard Yard is the oldest, most photographed part of Harvard's campus: a walled cluster of red brick buildings, gates, lawns and trees that most visitors reach through the Johnston Gate on Massachusetts Avenue, and it functions as the public face of the oldest university in the United States.
back-bay
Newbury Street is the main shopping and strolling street of Boston's Back Bay, eight blocks of 19th-century brick brownstones running west from the Public Garden toward Massachusetts Avenue, with the lower-numbered blocks closest to the garden holding the densest cluster of flagship stores, galleries, and sidewalk restaurants.
old north church
The Old North Church is Christ Church in the City of Boston, an Episcopal church in the North End and the oldest surviving church building in Boston.
Freedom Trail
Admission is $6.00 per adult, $5.50 for seniors aged 62 and over and college students, and $1.00 for ages 5 to 17, with children under 5 free.
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Exhibit Halls admission at the Museum of Science Boston is $33.00 for adults, $28.00 for children aged 3 to 11, and $29.00 for seniors 60 and up, with children under 3 admitted free.
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The USS Constitution is a three-masted wooden-hulled heavy frigate launched in Boston at the end of the eighteenth century, the oldest commissioned warship still afloat anywhere, and undefeated in battle.
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The Boston Athenaeum is a private membership library, one of the oldest in the United States, housed in a landmark building at 10½ Beacon Street on Beacon Hill.
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The Rose Kennedy Greenway is a free public park in downtown Boston, built on the corridor where the elevated Central Artery stood before the Big Dig moved that interstate underground.
harvard-art-museums
The Harvard Art Museums are a single building at 32 Quincy Street in Cambridge that combines three formerly separate museums, the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Sackler Museum, into one complex of galleries, study rooms and conservation labs attached to Harvard University.
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The Swan Boats are a fleet of pedal-powered paddle boats shaped like swans, carrying passengers on six benches on a roughly 15-minute circuit of the Public Garden lagoon, operated by the same family since the nineteenth century.
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The Arnold Arboretum is a research collection of trees and shrubs run by Harvard University, occupying a designed landscape in Boston's Jamaica Plain that is free to enter, open every day of the year, and managed as a public park under a long lease with the City of Boston.
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Kings Chapel is Boston's first Anglican church, and the stone building standing today is a Georgian design widely counted among the finest church exteriors of its era in the United States.
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TD Garden is Boston's largest indoor arena, perched directly above North Station on Causeway Street in the West End, roughly a 10–15-minute walk from Faneuil Hall, with Boston Common’s trail start farther away.
museums
The MIT Museum is a science, technology, and design museum in Kendall Square, Cambridge, operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to showcase its own research and collections.
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The Samuel Adams Brewery is the original brewing site of the Boston Beer Company, the producer of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, located in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston rather than a downtown tourist district.
