Boston travel guide

Top 10 sights in Boston

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Martin~jawiki at Japanese Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Museum of Fine Arts Boston

   The twentieth largest art museum in the world by gallery space, holding about 500,000 works, with the strongest collection of Japanese art outside Japan. Its Art of the Americas wing of 2010 put Copley, Sargent and the Boston Impressionists in one sequence.

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2. 

   2© Sean Dungan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

   A museum in a Venetian-style palazzo Isabella Stewart Gardner built in 1903 for her own collection, whose display she fixed in her will so that nothing may be moved. Thieves took thirteen works worth about half a billion dollars in March 1990; the empty frames still hang.

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3. 

   3© Fcb981, this edit (cropped to pano, corrected distortion) by mixpix 18:33, 28 De · CC BY-SA 3.0

   John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

   A white concrete and glass library by I. M. Pei of 1979 on Columbia Point, holding Kennedy's papers and the Ernest Hemingway collection. The recreated Oval Office and the 1960 television debate are the parts people remember; the glass pavilion looks out over the harbour.

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   Museum of Bad Art

   A museum founded in 1993 to collect art too bad to be shown anywhere else, most of it rescued from thrift stores and kerbsides. Its six hundred works have included a portrait allegedly painted with a fork; the collection has moved between basements and cinema lobbies.

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5. 

   5© Alan Hunt · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Charlestown

   The oldest settled part of Boston, founded in 1629 a year before the city itself, across the Charles from downtown. The Bunker Hill Monument and USS Constitution are here, and the Irish community that filled it in the nineteenth century left the triple-decker houses.

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6. 

   6© Roman Eugeniusz · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Dorchester

   The largest neighbourhood in Boston at sixteen square kilometres, and the most ethnically varied, with the biggest Vietnamese and Cape Verdean communities in New England. The Dorchester Heights monument marks where Washington's cannon forced the British out in March 1776.

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7. 

   7© Phillip Capper from Wellington, New Zealand · CC BY 2.0

   Boston Common

   The oldest city park in the United States, set aside in 1634 as common grazing and used for public hangings, militia drills and, in 1969, a Martin Luther King memorial. Redcoats camped on it before Lexington; the Frog Pond is a skating rink in winter.

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8. 

   8© en:User:Daderot · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Faneuil Hall

   A market and meeting hall of 1742 given to the town by the merchant Peter Faneuil, where Samuel Adams argued against British taxation — which is why it is called the cradle of liberty. Faneuil's money came partly from the slave trade, a fact the site now acknowledges.

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9. 

   9© Brian Corr (Bcorr at French Wikipedia) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Roxbury

   A neighbourhood founded in 1630 and annexed in 1868, and since the mid-twentieth century the centre of Black Boston. Malcolm X lived on Dale Street as a teenager, and the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists is in the district.

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10. 

    10

    Harvard Art Museums

    Three museums under one roof at Harvard — the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger and the Sackler — holding about 250,000 objects, reunited in a Renzo Piano building of 2014. The Busch-Reisinger has the best Bauhaus collection outside Germany, including Klee and the Lyonel Feininger archive.

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1. 

   1© Luciof · CC BY-SA 3.0

   South Boston

   A dense neighbourhood on the peninsula southeast of Fort Point Channel, farmland when it was annexed in 1804 and Irish Catholic working class by the twentieth century. Its Saint Patrick's Day parade is the largest in New England, and Carson Beach is the city's swimming.

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2. 

   2© Ingfbruno · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Freedom Trail

   A four-kilometre route marked in red brick and paint past sixteen sites, laid out in 1951 by a journalist who thought visitors could not find anything. It runs from Boston Common to the Bunker Hill Monument and takes about three hours at a walk.

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3. 

   3© Swampyank at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Beacon Hill

   A neighbourhood of gaslit brick streets on the north slope of the hill behind the State House, built from 1795 on land levelled from the original beacon hill. Acorn Street is the most photographed street in America; the African Meeting House of 1806 is on Joy Street.

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4. 

   4© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Bunker Hill Monument

   A granite obelisk of sixty-seven metres on Breed's Hill, finished in 1843 to mark the battle of 17 June 1775 — fought mostly on this hill rather than the one it is named after. Two hundred and ninety-four steps climb it, and there is no lift.

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5. 

   5© Francisco Anzola · CC BY 2.0

   Old North Church

   Boston's oldest surviving church building, of 1723, from whose steeple two lanterns were hung on the night of 18 April 1775 to signal that the British were coming by sea. Paul Revere knew the signal was for others; he had already set out.

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   Chestnut Hill

   A village ten kilometres west of downtown, split between Boston, Brookline and Newton, and best known for Boston College. Heartbreak Hill, the last rise of the Boston Marathon at the twentieth mile, runs through it.

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7. 

   7© Rick Berk · CC BY 2.0

   Back Bay

   A district built between 1857 and 1900 on 240 hectares of filled tidal flat, laid out on a French axial plan and the largest intact Victorian streetscape in the United States. Trinity Church, the Boston Public Library and the brownstones of Commonwealth Avenue are all in it.

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8. 

   8© Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Old State House

   The oldest surviving public building in Boston, of 1713, from whose balcony the Declaration of Independence was read to the city in July 1776. The Boston Massacre happened in the street below in 1770; the lion and unicorn on the roof are replicas of ones burned that year.

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   East Boston

   A neighbourhood on the harbour islands annexed in 1836, and the arrival point for Irish and later Italian and Jewish immigrants — Donald McKay's clipper ships were built here. It is now largely Latin American, and Logan Airport occupies half of it.

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10. 

    10© DoorFrame at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Allston

    A neighbourhood in western Boston named after the painter Washington Allston, largely student housing for the universities around it. Cheap rents and basement venues made it the base of Boston's indie music scene from the 1980s on.

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