Unspecified/General

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 cattle-grazing pasture for the colony's residents. For more than two centuries the Common served the practical purposes that gave it its name: communal grazing for livestock, public meetings, militia musters, public hangings on the elm-tree gallows at the central Frog Pond hill, and the unloading of British troops during the long pre-revolutionary occupation that culminated in the events leading up to the American Revolution. The British army camped on the Common throughout the 1768 to 1776 occupation of Boston, with the celebrated 1768 troop landings at the foot of the Common precipitating much of the revolutionary tension that produced the Boston Tea Party and ultimately the war itself. The Common has hosted some of the most consequential public gatherings in American history. The pre-revolutionary protest meetings that produced the Sons of Liberty were held there. The 1851 visit of the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth drew enormous abolition-minded crowds. The 1965 March on Boston, a 25,000-person civil rights demonstration led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., concluded on the Common's central lawn. The park today preserves several historically significant landmarks. The 1736 Central Burying Ground in the south-western corner contains the graves of more than 5,000 colonial-era Bostonians including the celebrated portrait painter Gilbert Stuart. The 1888 Brewer Fountain (a cast bronze fountain by Lienard) and the 1897 Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Memorial by the celebrated American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens commemorate the famous Civil War regiment of African-American soldiers. The Frog Pond in the central park serves as a shallow wading pool in summer and a public ice-skating rink each winter.

Type: Outdoors

Address: 139 Tremont Street, Boston, MA, United States

Telephone: 617-635-4505

Website: boston.gov/parks/boston-common

Opening Date: 01/01/1634