Boston University built its arena loud on purpose. Agganis Arena at 925 Commonwealth Avenue, the centrepiece of BU's John Hancock Student Village on the site of the old Commonwealth Armory, opened on 3 January 2005 with the Terriers' men's hockey team beating Minnesota - and legendary coach Jack Parker had consulted the architects to make sure the new room kept the deafening home-ice advantage of tiny Walter Brown Arena. The rink bears Parker's name; the building honours Harry Agganis, the Golde.....

The first concert hall ever built on scientific principles is still ranked among the world's three best. Symphony Hall at 301 Massachusetts Avenue opened on 15 October 1900 as the permanent home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned by BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson from the architects McKim, Mead and White - with one decisive addition. Higginson hired Wallace Clement Sabine, a young Harvard physics professor, as acoustical consultant, and Sabine's new mathematical formula for reverber.....

Allston Rock City lost its cornerstone and got a new one at the same address. Brighton Music Hall at 158 Brighton Avenue occupies the room that was Harpers Ferry for four decades - the bar Edward Connelly opened in 1970 and named for the Civil War battle, which grew into "Boston's Best Live Music" and the primary stage of the student-dense Allston scene. Harpers hosted everyone from Bo Diddley and blues festivals to the hardcore bands orphaned by the Rathskeller's closing, Maroon 5, Fall Out Boy.....

The most storied address in Boston rock and roll sits directly across Lansdowne Street from Fenway Park's Green Monster. The Citizens House of Blues Boston at 15 Lansdowne Street opened on 19 February 2009 with a one-night reunion of the J. Geils Band, becoming the thirteenth House of Blues in America and, at roughly 2,500 capacity, the largest room in the chain. The 53,000-square-foot complex rose on ground that had already spent four decades as the city's nightlife engine: the Ark, the legenda.....

The oldest continuously operating theatre in Boston, the Emerson Colonial Theatre on Boylston Street has been a centrepiece of the city's Theater District since it opened in 1900. Renowned for its sumptuous Gilded Age interior of gold leaf, marble and ornate plasterwork, the theatre has hosted countless landmark productions over more than a century and holds a storied place in American theatrical history as a celebrated pre-Broadway tryout house. The auditorium seats around seventeen hundred pe.....

In the dense urban Fenway-Kenmore neighbourhood about two miles west of downtown Boston, Fenway Park is the oldest active baseball stadium in Major League Baseball, the home of the Boston Red Sox and one of the most beloved sporting venues in the United States. The 37,755-seat ballpark opened on 20 April 1912 (just five days after the sinking of the Titanic, an event that overshadowed all news coverage of the opening). Continuously occupied by the Red Sox since the opening day, the park has serv.....

On the central Cambridge campus of Harvard University just north of Harvard Yard, the Harvard Museum of Natural History (often referred to as the Harvard Natural History Museum) is the public-facing museum of Harvard University's three principal natural-history research collections. The museum occupies the third and fourth floors of the dramatic 1902 Romanesque Revival Museum Building at 26 Oxford Street, with the museum's permanent galleries drawing on the combined collections of the Museum of .....

In the Fenway-Kenmore neighbourhood of Boston about three miles west of downtown, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is one of the largest encyclopaedic art museums in the United States and one of the oldest. The museum opened its permanent home on the Fourth of July 1876, on the occasion of the celebrated United States Centennial Exhibition, in a small Gothic Revival building at Copley Square in central Boston. The museum relocated to its current dramatic Beaux-Arts building on Huntington Avenue in.....