Joseph and Clementine Langone Park sits directly on the edge of the Boston Harbor, marked by a wide, elevated boardwalk that offers views across the water toward Charlestown. This four-and-a-half-acre space provides a public expanse of…
Strange Boston Landmarks
Take a walk through Boston's history to find the unusual, overlooked physical landmarks that hold some of the city's strangest stories. From a giant steaming kettle to empty museum frames, this route highlights unique local trivia.
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1. Langone Park
2. The Boston Stone
Embedded in the foundation of a building on Marshall Street is a flattened, spherical stone, roughly two feet in diameter. Below it sits a smaller plinth carved with the words, "Boston Stone 1737." The object was originally a millstone…
3. Steaming Kettle
A giant gilded copper tea kettle hangs from the Sears Block near Government Center. Manufactured in eighteen seventy-three by the Boston coppersmiths Hicks and Badger, the three hundred pound vessel served as a trade sign for the Oriental…
4. Ether Dome
The Ether Dome is defined by its semicircular, steep-tiered rows of wooden seats that sweep down toward a central operating floor, all bathed in natural light from a large overhead skylight. This space, located atop the Bulfinch Building…
5. Cocoanut Grove Memorial Plaque
The Cocoanut Grove memorial plaque sits flush in the sidewalk, a modest bronze marker in the Bay Village neighborhood. It serves as the only ground-level testament to the disaster that occurred here on November twenty-eighth, nineteen…
6. Mapparium
The Mapparium is a three-story-tall globe constructed from six hundred and eight stained-glass panels. It sits inside the Christian Science Publishing Society building, where visitors walk across a thirty-foot-long glass bridge that spans…
7. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is defined by its building, a four-story structure designed to resemble a fifteenth-century Venetian palace. While the exterior appears unpretentious, the interior centers on a glass-roofed courtyard…