In the heart of downtown Boston bounded by Beacon, Park, Tremont, Boylston and Charles Streets, the Boston Common is the oldest public park in the United States and one of the most historically significant public spaces in the nation. The 50-acre rectangular park was established in 1634, just four years after the founding of Boston itself, when the Puritan colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony purchased the land from the original settler William Blaxton and dedicated it to common use as a ca.....

On the western edge of downtown Boston immediately west of Boston Common at the corner of Beacon, Charles, Boylston and Arlington Streets, the Boston Public Garden is the first public botanical garden in the United States and one of the most beloved small urban parks in New England. The 24-acre formal garden was established in 1837 by an Act of the Massachusetts General Court on a piece of made land created through the gradual filling-in of the marshy bay just west of the Common. The garden was.....

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 .....

At the bustling Assembly Row shopping and entertainment district in the Boston suburb of Somerville just north of Cambridge, LEGOLAND Discovery Center Boston is one of more than two dozen LEGOLAND Discovery Centers operating worldwide as the indoor family-entertainment counterpart to the larger outdoor LEGOLAND theme parks. The 44,000-square-foot facility opened in May 2014, occupying the upper two levels of a substantial mixed-use commercial building at the heart of the Assembly Row complex. T.....

On the crest of Beacon Hill overlooking the historic Boston Common from the north, the Massachusetts State House is the seat of government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and one of the most architecturally distinguished state capitol buildings in the United States. The original red-brick three-storey building was designed by the celebrated American architect Charles Bulfinch (often considered the first professionally trained architect born in America) and substantially completed in 1798, w.....

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.....

On the Charles River Dam immediately north of the Beacon Hill neighbourhood of Boston, the Museum of Science Boston is one of the largest and most heavily visited science museums in the United States and one of the most architecturally distinguished. The museum spans the Charles River Dam itself, with the main museum building straddling the river between the Cambridge and Boston shores on a unique cantilever foundation built atop the early-twentieth-century dam structure. The museum opened in Fe.....

Stretching some eight blocks from the Boston Public Garden in the east to Massachusetts Avenue in the west, Newbury Street is the principal upmarket shopping district of central Boston and one of the most heavily visited commercial streets in New England. The mile-long thoroughfare cuts through the heart of the Back Bay neighbourhood, with the leafy tree-lined street bordered on both sides by an almost unbroken parade of restored late-nineteenth-century brownstone townhouses, each with its groun.....