BOSTON TRAVEL GUIDE       

DOWNTOWN
Downtown is the historic and financial heart of Boston.  Containing half of the sights on the Freedom Trail, Downtown is filled daily with both tourists following the red brick road and city natives walking briskly to their offices.

PARK ST. CHURCH, 1 Park Street.
Built in 1809 on the site of the 18th-century town granary, the elegant Park St. Church  (now a Congregational church)  was once known as  "Brimstone Corner"  because gunpowder for the War 1812 was stored here.

Today Boston's skyscrapers overshadow the church, but for many years the church was the first sight travellers saw when approaching Boston. 

Throughout the 19th-century, the church was the site of some of the country's most impassioned anti-slavery speeches, including a famous 1829 speech delivered by prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
Open:  June - August, Tuesday - Saturday 9am - 3:30pm for tours, both self-guided and administered.

GRANARY BURYING GROUND, Next to Park Street Church.
Established in 1660, this cemetery takes its name from the grain warehouse that once occupied the site of the adjacent Park St. Church.

It is the final resting place of the five victims of the Boston Massacre  (which took place just outside the nearby Old State House), as well as such colonial notables as:  Elizabeth  "Mother"  Goose  (of nursery rhyme fame);  Samuel Adams;  florid  "Declaration of Independence"  signer John Hancock, whose suggestive tombstone is a favourite photo op;  and silversmith-cum-midnight rider Paul Revere.  (Revere's riding partner, William Dawes, lies down the street at King's Chapel.
Open:  daily 9am - 5pm.

KING'S CHAPEL & BURYING GROUND, 58 Tremont Street.
Built in 1688 by order of King James II  (hence the church's name), King's Chapel is the oldest Anglican parish in America.

None of the Puritan colonists who lived in Boston at the time of its construction would sell the Royal Governor land to build a non-Puritan church - and especially not a church of the very denomination they had come to America to escape - so the chapel was built on a town burial yard.

When the congregation of British soldiers who worshiped here became too large, America's first architect, Peter Harrison, was hired to design a grand new church.  The result is the building you see today, considered the finest example of Georgian church architecture in North America.

If the building seems to be lacking something, it's because it is.  The governor ran out of money before construction was completed, so a spire was never added atop the bell tower, which houses the largest piece ever crafted by Paul Revere  (who worked as a silversmith when not plotting revolution).

In 1785, soon after the remodelling, King's Chapel became the first Unitarian Church in the Americas.  Unitarian services are still held at the church today.

The small burying ground adjacent to the chapel was Boston's first.  Fewer than 1% of bodies buried here are marked with headstones, and many graves are stacked four or more bodies deep.

At the center of the plot is a cluster of graves including those of William Dawes, who rode with Paul Revere on his midnight ride, and Mary Chilton, the first Puritan to touch Plymouth Rock  (in present-day Plymouth, MA).
Chapel open:  summer daily 9am -4pm;  winter Saturday 9am - 4pm.
Burying ground open:  summer daily9am - 5pm;  winter 9am - 3pm.
Tel:  617 - 227 - 2155.

OLD CITY HALL, 45 School Street.
A smirking statue of Benjamin Franklin - the first portrait statue ever erected in the US - presides over the courtyard in front of the Old City Hall building. 

It was built on the former site of the Boston Latin School, which gives the street its name.  A plaque in the ground commemorates the school, which is still in operation but has since relocated to the Fenway. 

Established in 1635, Boston Latin was the country's first public school and its first educational institution;  famous alumni of the school include Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams.  (The latter two didn't venture far and are buried up the street at the Ganary Burying Ground).

Brahmin-era architect Charles Bulfinch built a county courthouse on the site in 1810, but the government outgrew the building by 1865, when it was demolished to make way for a new City Hall - the quite attractive French Second Empire building that stands today on Bulfinch's original foundation.

The building served as Boston's City Hall until 1969, when the government moved to the breath-takingly bizarre inverted brick ziggurat in Government Center.;  the Freedom Trail passes by that City Hall between the Old State House and Faneuil Hall.

Today, Old City Hall is filled with businesses, but even with all the businesses, it is worth walking through the building to see the architecture;  pamphlets and guides are available on the ground level.
Courtyard open:  24 hours.
Interior open:  Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm.
Tel:  617 - 523 - 8678.

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