Explore Boston

The Old State House is a brick building of 1713 on State Street, the oldest surviving public building in Boston and the seat of the colonial government. The Boston Massacre of 1770 took place in front of it, and the Declaration of Independence was read from its balcony in 1776. Today it is a history museum run by Revolutionary Spaces, on the Freedom Trail.

The Old South Meeting House is a brick Puritan meeting house of 1729 on Washington Street. On 16 December 1773 some 5,000 people met here before the Boston Tea Party. Saved from demolition in the 1870s in one of the first preservation campaigns in the United States, it is now a museum and meeting space run by Revolutionary Spaces, on the Freedom Trail.

The Paul Revere House is a timber house built around 1680 on North Square in Boston's North End, home of the silversmith and patriot Paul Revere from 1770 to 1800. Later used as a tenement with shops, it was restored and opened as a museum in 1908, and shows furnished period rooms that include pieces owned by the Revere family.

The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum is a museum on the Congress Street Bridge over Fort Point Channel about the protest of 16 December 1773, when colonists threw East India Company tea into Boston Harbor. Guided visits lead through a meeting house and aboard the replica ships Beaver and Eleanor, and the museum shows the Robinson Tea Chest from that night.

USS Constitution is a three-masted wooden frigate of the US Navy, launched in Boston in 1797 and still in commission, crewed by Navy sailors. It earned the name Old Ironsides in the War of 1812. The ship is berthed at the Charlestown Navy Yard, where visitors can go aboard, and the USS Constitution Museum beside it covers its history.

The Museum of Science is a science museum built on the Charles River Dam between Boston and Cambridge, at Science Park since 1951. It grew out of the Boston Society of Natural History, founded in 1830. Its halls hold hundreds of hands-on exhibits, and it houses the Charles Hayden Planetarium, the Mugar Omni Theater and a theater with a large Van de Graaff generator.

The Institute of Contemporary Art is a museum of contemporary art on the Boston Harbor waterfront in the Seaport District. Founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art, it moved in 2006 into a building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro whose upper galleries cantilever over the Harborwalk. It shows changing exhibitions, its own collection and performances.

The Museum of Fine Arts Boston is an art museum in the Fenway area, founded in 1870 in Copley Square and housed since 1909 in a granite building by Guy Lowell on Huntington Avenue. Its collection of more than 450,000 works ranges from ancient Egyptian and Japanese art to European paintings and American art in the Art of the Americas wing.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Fenway is an art museum opened in 1903 by the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner in a building modelled on a Venetian palazzo. Galleries around a planted courtyard hold European, Asian and American art, including works by Titian, Rembrandt and Sargent. Empty frames recall the theft of 13 works in 1990.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston, in Harvard's University Museum building on Oxford Street. Opened in 1998 as the public face of three Harvard research museums, it shows the Glass Flowers, some 4,300 glass models of plants by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, along with fossils, animals, minerals and meteorites.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum stands on Columbia Point in Dorchester, beside Boston Harbor. Designed by I. M. Pei and dedicated in 1979, it is the presidential library of the 35th president, run by the National Archives. Its exhibitions cover Kennedy's campaign, presidency and family, and a glass pavilion looks out over the harbor.