Boston Public Library
National Historic Landmark · Boston, Massachusetts
The first large free municipal library in America, founded in 1848, and the first anywhere to let ordinary people borrow a book and take it home. Its Copley Square building, opened in 1895 by McKim, Mead and White, was built deliberately as a palace for the people — a Renaissance courtyard, a barrel-vaulted reading room two hundred and eighteen feet long, and murals commissioned from John Singer Sargent, Edwin Austin Abbey and Puvis de Chavannes. All of it is free to walk into.
700 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116, United States
FREE, with no ticket and no booking. The McKim building keeps shorter hours than the modern Johnson wing and is more restricted on Sundays — check before a late-afternoon visit. Free art and architecture tours run daily on a published schedule, first-come. Green Line to Copley; Back Bay on the Orange Line is the accessible station.
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