Boston: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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The Freedom Trail exists because of one newspaper column. In 1951 a Boston journalist named William Schofield wrote that visitors could not find the historic sites because nobody had ever connected them, and proposed a marked walking route; the mayor took it up within weeks. The line is four kilometres of red brick and paint through sixteen sites, and you do not need a guide or a ticket to follow it. Start at the Common at nine. Two of the sites charge a small admission and the rest are free, and the whole thing is downhill after Beacon Hill.

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A short history of Boston

In 1630 Puritan settlers from England, led by John Winthrop, founded Boston on a peninsula in Massachusetts Bay. In 1636 Harvard University was founded in nearby Cambridge, the first in America. The struggle against the British began in Boston: in 1770 British soldiers fired on a crowd, and in 1773 the residents threw the East India Company's tea into the sea. In the 19th century tens of thousands of immigrants from Ireland arrived. In 1897 the first section of underground railway in the United States opened here.

The ten best sights in Boston

1
Massachusetts State House
1798, on Beacon Hill; the dome was wood, then copper laid by Paul Revere, and is now gold leaf
2
Granary Burying Ground
Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock and the Boston Massacre victims; about 2,300 markers
3
King’s Chapel
1754, and it was built around the old wooden church so the congregation could keep using it
4
Old South Meeting House
Five thousand people met here on 16 December 1773 and then went to throw the tea in the harbour
5
Old State House
1713 and the oldest surviving public building in Boston; the Declaration was read from its balcony
6
Faneuil Hall
Given to the town in 1742 by a merchant who traded in enslaved people; the hall says so now
7
Paul Revere House
Built about 1680 and the oldest house still standing in downtown Boston; he owned it for thirty years
8
Old North Church
1723, the oldest church in Boston, and the two lanterns were hung in its steeple on 18 April 1775
9
Copp’s Hill Burying Ground
1659, the second oldest here, and British soldiers used the headstones for target practice
10
USS Constitution
Launched 1797 and the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world; the crew is active-duty navy

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Free walking tours in Boston

The red line on the pavement

Boston Common · Set aside in 1634 — four years after the town was founded — as common pasture that every household had the right to graze on, and it is the oldest public park in the United States. Cows were legally grazed here until 1830. The British army camped on it for eight years of occupation, and the public hangings were held at a great elm until 1817.
Granary Burying Ground · There are about two thousand three hundred markers and an estimated five thousand people — the stones were rearranged into tidy rows in the nineteenth century for easier mowing, so almost none of them stands over the right grave. Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, the five killed in the Boston Massacre and Benjamin Franklin’s parents are all in here somewhere.
Old State House and the Massacre site · On the fifth of March 1770 British soldiers fired into a crowd outside this building and five men died. The first killed was Crispus Attucks, of African and Wampanoag descent. The lawyer who defended the soldiers at their trial — successfully, getting six of eight acquitted — was John Adams, who later became the second president, and he said afterwards that it was the best thing he ever did for his country.
Faneuil Hall · Peter Faneuil gave the hall to the town in 1742, and the money came from a merchant business that included trading in enslaved people — a fact the city argued about publicly for years and that the hall’s own interpretation now states. The grasshopper weathervane on the roof is the original from 1742 and has a hollow compartment with records inside it.
Old North Church · On the eighteenth of April 1775 two lanterns were hung in this steeple for about a minute, as a signal that the British were crossing by water. The detail that is almost never told is that this was an Anglican church — the church of the Crown — and most of its congregation were Loyalists. The sexton who hung the lanterns, Robert Newman, was acting against his own parish.
USS Constitution · Launched in 1797 and still a commissioned United States Navy ship with an active-duty crew — the oldest commissioned warship afloat anywhere in the world. She got the name Old Ironsides in 1812 when British shot was seen bouncing off her hull; the hull is live oak, which is unusually dense, and it was up to fifty-five centimetres thick. She is taken out into the harbour and turned around once a year so that she weathers evenly.

The bay they filled in

Back Bay is called that because it was one — a tidal bay that had become an open sewer. Between 1857 and about 1890 the city filled it in with gravel brought by train from Needham, fifteen kilometres away: a train of thirty-five cars arrived every forty-five minutes, day and night, for decades. More than half of modern Boston is land that did not exist in 1800. This walk is on that fill, and the thing to understand is that the buildings do not sit on it — they sit on wooden piles driven through it, and the water table has to be kept high or the piles rot and the buildings sink.

Acorn Street, Beacon Hill · Beacon Hill used to be about twenty metres taller than it is. Between 1799 and 1824 the top was dug off and carted down to fill the mill pond and the harbour flats, which is where the West End and part of the North Station area now sit. The cobbles on this lane are the original ones and the houses were built for the coachmen of the families on the main streets.
Commonwealth Avenue Mall · The only planned grid in Boston, and it was laid out as a Parisian boulevard — a central mall with trees, flanked carriageways — because the fill gave the city a blank sixty hectares and the designers had just been to Paris. The cross streets run in strict alphabetical order from Arlington to Hereford, which is the only place in this city where you can navigate by name.
Trinity Church · H. H. Richardson finished it in 1877 and it weighs about ninety million kilograms on ground that is gravel and mud, so it stands on four thousand five hundred wooden piles. Wood under water lasts indefinitely; wood exposed to air rots within years. The city therefore monitors the Back Bay groundwater level and has a legal obligation to recharge it, because if it drops, the church and thousands of brownstones around it start to settle.
Boston Public Library · Opened in 1895 and it was the first large free municipal library in the United States — free to any resident, with the right to borrow books and take them home, which in 1854 when the library was founded was a genuinely new idea. Bates Hall, the reading room, is seventy metres long with a barrel-vaulted ceiling fifteen metres up, and anyone may walk in and sit down.
Christian Science Plaza and the Mapparium · The Mapparium is a stained glass globe three storeys high that you walk through on a bridge, built in 1935, and the thing that makes it remarkable is a decision: the borders have never been updated. So you stand inside a world with a British Empire, a Soviet Union and no Israel, India or Pakistan. The acoustics are also a hard sphere, so a whisper carries perfectly across thirty feet.
Back Bay Fens · Olmsted’s first piece of the Emerald Necklace, and it was not designed as a park but as engineering — a salt marsh built to absorb the tidal flooding and sewage that the filling of Back Bay had made worse. The victory gardens inside it were planted in 1942 for wartime food and have been continuously cultivated ever since, which makes them the oldest surviving victory gardens in the United States.

Beacon Hill’s other side

The south slope of Beacon Hill, the one with the gas lamps on the postcards, was where the merchants lived. The north slope, fifty metres away, was the largest free Black community in the northern United States before the Civil War, and it is where the fight against slavery in this country was organised — the Underground Railroad, the first Black church building in America, and the regiment the city raised in 1863. This route is that half of the hill, and then it goes down into the North End, where a wave of molasses killed twenty-one people in 1919. Go in the morning; it is all free.

The Shaw Memorial · Augustus Saint-Gaudens spent fourteen years on this relief, and it was the first American public monument to show Black soldiers as individuals rather than as a type — he used real models and every face is different. It commemorates the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first Black regiment raised in the north from free men, which lost about half its number assaulting Fort Wagner in 1863. The regiment refused all pay for eighteen months because the army offered them less than white soldiers.
The African Meeting House · Built in 1806 by Black labourers for a Black congregation, and it is the oldest Black church building still standing anywhere in the United States. In January 1832 William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in this room, and Frederick Douglass recruited for the 54th Regiment from this pulpit. It was known at the time as the Black Faneuil Hall.
Museum of African American History · Next door, in the 1835 Abiel Smith School, which was the first public school in America built specifically for Black children — and which the community then campaigned to close, because a separate school was the point of the grievance. In 1855 Massachusetts became the first state to ban segregated public schools, after a Boston father named Benjamin Roberts sued and lost, and the legislature acted anyway.
Louisburg Square · The oldest private square in the United States: the twenty-two households round it jointly own the green in the middle and have done since 1844, which is why it has no public path through it and why residents pay to maintain it themselves. Louisa May Alcott died in the house at number ten.
The Great Molasses Flood site · On the fifteenth of January 1919 a steel tank on the waterfront here burst and released about two point three million gallons of molasses. The wave was roughly four and a half metres high and moved at about fifty-five kilometres an hour; it killed twenty-one people and injured a hundred and fifty, crushed an elevated railway support and knocked buildings off their foundations. The lawsuit that followed ran for six years and established that the company was liable, and it is one of the reasons American engineering requires certified plans.
Hanover Street · The North End has been the immigrant quarter for the whole of the city’s history and it changed hands three times: Irish from the 1840s, then eastern European Jews, then Italians from the 1880s, who are still here. It is the densest neighbourhood in Boston, the streets follow the seventeenth-century cowpaths, and the two famous cannoli shops are thirty metres apart on this street and the argument between them is genuinely taken seriously.

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Getting to Boston and getting around

Logan International Airport · Five kilometres from downtown and across the harbour; the Blue Line and a free shuttle reach it
South Station · The intercity hub; New York in three and a half hours, and the bus terminal is attached
North Station · Trains north to Salem and Maine; the two main stations are not connected to each other by rail
Park Street · Opened 1897 and part of the oldest subway tunnel in North America, still carrying trains
Back Bay · Orange Line and commuter rail under Copley; the station sits on filled land like everything here
Harvard · The Red Line to Cambridge; fifteen minutes from downtown and the station is entirely underground
Long Wharf · Ferries to the harbour islands and to Charlestown; the 1710 wharf is under the modern one

Cheap eats in Boston

Boston food is cold water and immigration. The cold water part is not sentiment: the Gulf of Maine is one of the richest fishing grounds on earth and the city was built on cod — there is a gilded cod hanging in the State House chamber, placed there in 1784 as a reminder of what paid for the building. The immigration part gave the city its Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Cape Verdean, Haitian and Vietnamese counters. Twelve to thirty dollars, cards everywhere, and tipping is twenty per cent. One rule about chowder: it has no tomatoes in it here, and saying otherwise will not go well.

Clam chowder · Cream, potato, salt pork and quahogs; ten dollars a cup and never, under any circumstances, tomatoes
The lobster roll · Two kinds and they are different dishes: cold with mayonnaise, or warm with butter; twenty-eight dollars
Cannoli on Hanover Street · Two shops thirty metres apart; one fills to order and one fills in advance, and that is the whole argument
Boston cream pie · It is a cake, not a pie, and it is the official dessert of the state of Massachusetts
Haymarket produce · Fridays and Saturdays since the 1830s; cash only, the vendor picks for you and you do not touch
Chinatown late food · The third largest Chinatown in the country and the only part of Boston still open at two in the morning
Roast beef, north of the city · A regional sandwich that exists only in the towns north of Boston: rare beef, sauce, mayo, a seeded roll
Santarpio’s, East Boston · Open since 1903; thin bar pizza and grilled lamb skewers from the same kitchen, and cash is easier
Marshmallow fluff · Invented in Somerville in 1917, and the town still holds a festival for it every autumn
Baked beans and the triangle trade · The nickname Beantown comes from molasses, and the molasses came from the slave trade route

Museums in Boston

Boston has sixty universities in the metro area and the museums reflect that: several of the best are teaching collections owned by Harvard or MIT, which means they are organised by what a student needs to see rather than by what draws a crowd. The two big independents are at opposite extremes — one of the largest encyclopaedic museums in the Americas, and a Venetian palace whose owner’s will forbids moving a single object. Many are free or discounted to Massachusetts residents and several have a free evening each week.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum · Her will forbids moving, adding or removing anything, and the empty frames from the 1990 theft still hang
Museum of Fine Arts · Nearly half a million works; the Egyptian and Nubian holdings came from its own digs from 1905
Harvard Art Museums · Three collections under one Piano roof since 2014; the conservation lab is visible through glass
Harvard Museum of Natural History · The glass flowers: 4,300 models made in Dresden by one father and son between 1887 and 1936
Peabody Museum · One of the oldest anthropology museums in the world; it is also actively repatriating its holdings
Museum of Science · The Theater of Electricity runs the world’s largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator, from the 1930s
MIT Museum · Moved to Kendall Square in 2022; robotics, holography and the institute’s own failed experiments
JFK Presidential Library · I. M. Pei’s first major commission, and he was chosen by the widow over far more established names
Museum of African American History · The 1806 meeting house and the 1835 school, both on Beacon Hill’s north slope, in one ticket

Holy places in Boston

Boston was founded in 1630 as an explicitly religious project — a Puritan colony meant to be a model to the world — and the consequences ran both ways: the colony hanged Quakers in the 1660s, banished Anne Hutchinson for preaching, and executed people for witchcraft at Salem in 1692, and it also produced the first church in America built by and for Black worshippers, the first ordained Black minister in the country, and the Unitarian split. The buildings are nearly all free and nearly all still in use.

King’s Chapel · Founded 1686 as the first Anglican church here, on land seized from a burying ground because nobody would sell
Old North Church · 1723, Anglican, and most of its congregation in 1775 were Loyalists; the lanterns were hung against them
African Meeting House · 1806, built by Black labour for a Black congregation; the oldest such building standing in America
Trinity Church · 1877, and the whole weight of it rests on 4,500 piles of wood in the mud of a filled bay
Christian Science Plaza · The world headquarters of a church founded in Boston in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, a woman
Granary Burying Ground · The winged skulls on the oldest stones are Puritan; the willow and urn ones are later and Unitarian
Copp’s Hill Burying Ground · 1659; over a thousand free and enslaved Black Bostonians are buried in the north-east corner
Mount Auburn Cemetery · 1831, and the first garden cemetery in America; it was designed to be visited rather than mourned in

Nature and day trips near Boston

Boston’s green space is one connected object and that was deliberate. Between 1878 and 1896 Frederick Law Olmsted designed the Emerald Necklace — about eleven kilometres and four hundred and forty hectares of linked parks running from the Common out to Franklin Park — and it is the only linear park system he designed and saw completed. Half of it was engineering disguised as landscape: the Fens and the Riverway were built to fix flooding and sewage. All of it is free and all of it is walkable in a day if you are determined.

The Emerald Necklace · Eleven kilometres of connected parks from the Common to Franklin Park; Olmsted, 1878 to 1896
Arnold Arboretum · Free and open every day of the year; a Harvard research collection of about fifteen thousand plants
Jamaica Pond · A glacial kettle hole twenty-seven metres deep; it supplied the city’s drinking water until 1848
Charles River Esplanade · The river was an open sewer into the 1990s and parts of it are now certified for swimming
Castle Island and the Harborwalk · A fortified site since 1634 — the oldest continuously fortified place in English North America
Spectacle Island · The city tip until 1959; it was capped with earth from the Big Dig and is now a park with beaches
Blue Hills Reservation · Fifteen kilometres south; 2,800 hectares, 200 kilometres of trail and timber rattlesnakes
Walden Pond · Thoreau lived beside it for two years from 1845; the pond is open for swimming and parking is limited

Things to do in Boston with kids

Boston is one of the easiest American cities with children: it is small enough to walk, the subway is cheap and has lifts at the main stations, and the swan boats, the duckling statues and the frog pond are all inside one ten-minute radius. The thing that matters most is the season. January and February here are genuinely cold — minus ten with wind off the harbour — and the indoor options then are the aquarium, the science museum and the children’s museum, all of which are busy and worth booking.

Swan Boats, Public Garden · Running since 1877 and still owned by the same family; they are pedalled by a person at the back
Make Way for Ducklings · Eight bronze ducklings from the 1941 book, installed in 1987; children are meant to sit on them
New England Aquarium · A four-storey cylindrical reef tank with a spiral ramp around it; book a timed entry
Museum of Science · The lightning show is the thing; the generator throws a four-metre arc and it is extremely loud
USS Constitution · Free to board, and the sailors who show you round are serving navy crew in 1813 uniform
Boston Common Frog Pond · A spray pool in summer and a skating rink in winter; the skating is cheap and the hire is on site
Franklin Park Zoo · Inside the largest park in the Emerald Necklace; the gorilla house and a walk-through aviary
Georges Island ferry · A boat from Long Wharf to a Civil War fort children can climb around in; free entry on the island

Nightlife in Boston

Boston closes early and the reason is historical: the licensing laws here descend from Puritan statute and the city still has a two o’clock last call with most bars shutting at one, and the subway stops around half past midnight. Plan around that rather than against it. What the city does have is sixty universities, which means more live music per head than almost anywhere, and a drinking culture based on neighbourhood bars rather than clubs. Cambridge and Somerville are cheaper and better than downtown.

Central Square, Cambridge · The densest cluster of live music rooms in the metro; cover charges are ten to twenty dollars
Davis and Union Squares, Somerville · Two stops on the Red and Green lines; breweries, small venues and the cheapest pints around
Symphony Hall · Opened 1900 and the first concert hall in the world designed using acoustic science
Berklee and the student rooms · The largest contemporary music college in the world; student performances most nights and often free
Fenway after a game · Lansdowne Street behind the wall fills within minutes of the final out; eighty-one home games a year
Seaport · Built since 2000 and it shows; roof bars with a harbour view and prices to match

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Frequently asked questions about Boston

What is there to see in Boston?

The top sights in Boston are Massachusetts State House, Granary Burying Ground and King’s Chapel. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Boston?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Boston without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Boston?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Boston, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The red line on the pavement.

How do you get to Boston and get around?

The main ways are Logan International Airport, South Station and North Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Boston, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Boston that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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