Boston Audio Walking Tour

Highlights

• 
  USS Constitution

  Your tour brings you to the world's oldest commissioned warship still afloat. USS Constitution was launched in Boston in 1797, one of the original six frigates authorized by Congress to form the nucleus of the United States Navy.

• 
  Fenway Park

  Ahead of you sits the oldest Major League Baseball park still in use, home to a team whose bond with its city has no real match in American sports. Fenway Park opened on April 20, 1912 — the same week the Titanic sank — and has been in continuous use ever since.

• 
  Walden Pond

  Between July 1845 and September 1847, Henry David Thoreau kept a cabin on this glacial kettle pond, writing the book that reshaped how Americans understood wilderness and simplicity. Thoreau built his cabin on land owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson on the north shore of this glacial kettle pond, lived there for two years and two months, and wrote Walden, or Life in the Woods from the journals he kept during and after his stay.

• 
  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

  Your visit begins at one of the world's great comprehensive art museums. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was founded in 1870 and moved to its current neoclassical building in the Fenway in 1909.

• 
  Dorchester & John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

  Ahead lies a peninsula pushing into Dorchester Bay, home to the oldest surviving building in Boston and, at its tip, the library honoring the only Boston-born president of the United States. Dorchester was incorporated as a separate town in 1630, settled by Puritan colonists from Dorset, England, and its Blake House, built in 1648, is the oldest surviving frame building in the city.

All 39 stops

• Boston Common (Downtown / Beacon Hill)

  Your walk has brought you to the oldest public park in the country.

• Massachusetts State House (Beacon Hill)

  That gleaming dome catching the light above Beacon Hill is Charles Bulfinch's declaration of American ambition in brick and marble.

• Park Street Church & the Granary Burying Ground (Downtown / Beacon Hill)

  Notice how a 217-foot steeple and a crowded old graveyard share this single Boston corner.

• Old South Meeting House (Downtown)

  This unassuming brick meeting house is where the Boston Tea Party was planned and launched.

• Old State House (Downtown / Financial District)

  Brick walls and a gilded lion and unicorn rise above you here, marking the oldest surviving public building in Boston, built in 1713.

• Faneuil Hall & Quincy Market (Downtown / Waterfront)

  Above the entrance a golden grasshopper catches the light, marking the hall where the arguments for American independence were first spoken aloud.

• Paul Revere House (North End)

  This low, weather-beaten timber house is the oldest surviving structure in downtown Boston, home to the man behind the most famous ride in American history.

• Old North Church (North End)

  Old North Church, built in 1723, is the oldest church building in Boston and the site of one of the most famous signals in American…

• Copp's Hill Burying Ground (North End)

  From this high ground in the North End, the second-oldest burying ground in Boston, your eyes take in a harbor view that once made it…

• USS Constitution (Charlestown Navy Yard)

  Your tour brings you to the world's oldest commissioned warship still afloat.

• Bunker Hill Monument (Charlestown)

  This hill saw the first major battle of the American Revolution, where colonial militia dug overnight earthworks and dared to face the finest soldiers in…

• Harvard Yard (Cambridge / Harvard Square)

  Around you spreads the oldest university campus in the United States, founded in 1636.

• MIT & the Charles River (Cambridge / Kendall Square)

  Across the river, a neoclassical dome and columned facade face Boston, marking one of history's most productive engines of science and technology.

• Beacon Hill (Beacon Hill)

  Picture Boston's Brahmin aristocracy climbing this hilltop in the decades after the Revolution, raising brick Federal-period townhouses that their descendants have never quite abandoned.

• Back Bay & Newbury Street (Back Bay)

  Beneath your feet lies gravel hauled by train from the hills of Needham, starting in 1857.

• Trinity Church & Copley Square (Back Bay)

  Look up at the massive Romanesque towers of Dedham granite dominating Copley Square.

• Boston Public Library (Back Bay / Copley Square)

  Ahead of you rises a pink granite facade meant to prove that ordinary Bostonians deserved a palace of their own, built for books rather than…

• Fenway Park (Fenway)

  Ahead of you sits the oldest Major League Baseball park still in use, home to a team whose bond with its city has no real…

• Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Fenway)

  In front of you rises a Venetian palazzo built around a hidden courtyard, the private obsession of a woman Boston society never quite knew what…

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Fenway)

  Your visit begins at one of the world's great comprehensive art museums.

• The Emerald Necklace & Arnold Arboretum (Jamaica Plain / Olmsted's Parks)

  Nine miles of linked parks and parkways run from Boston Common to Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain, and you are walking into Frederick Law Olmsted's…

• Boston Public Garden (Back Bay / Public Garden)

  Your walk enters twenty-four acres of formal garden, the first public botanical garden in the United States, laid out here in 1837 on what had…

• South End & Victorian Row Houses (South End)

  Bow-front row houses fill the South End, the largest intact Victorian residential neighborhood in the United States.

• Roxbury & Dudley Square (Roxbury)

  Roxbury has been the center of Boston's African American community for more than a century, and Dudley Square, now Nubian Square, is its commercial heart.

• Dorchester & John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Dorchester)

  Ahead lies a peninsula pushing into Dorchester Bay, home to the oldest surviving building in Boston and, at its tip, the library honoring the only…

• Boylston Street Finish Line (Back Bay / Copley Square)

  Every Patriots' Day since 1897, the Boston Marathon has ended on Boylston Street, right where you are.

• Charles Street & the Flat of the Hill (Beacon Hill / Charles Street)

  Charles Street, brick-paved and narrow, is the commercial spine at the base of Beacon Hill and one of the most charming main streets in urban…

• Harvard Square (Cambridge)

  Harvard Square, where Massachusetts Avenue, Brattle Street and JFK Street meet, is the commercial center of one of the most intellectually dense square miles in…

• Walden Pond (Concord / Lincoln)

  Between July 1845 and September 1847, Henry David Thoreau kept a cabin on this glacial kettle pond, writing the book that reshaped how Americans understood…

• Lexington Green (Lexington)

  This triangular patch of grass marks where the American Revolution's first shots rang out on April 19, 1775.

• North Bridge, Concord (Concord)

  Below you the Concord River slides beneath a small wooden bridge, quiet now but forever marked as the place where, on April 19, 1775, the…

• African Meeting House & Black Heritage Trail (Beacon Hill)

  In front of you rises a plain brick building raised in 1806 by Beacon Hill's free Black community, the oldest surviving African American church in…

• Charlestown & the Navy Yard (Charlestown)

  Charlestown, settled in 1629, sits on a peninsula across the inner harbor from the North End and is the oldest neighborhood in Boston.

• The North End & Hanover Street (North End)

  Here in Boston's oldest residential neighborhood, layers of immigrant history have settled into brick and dialect alike.

• South Boston & Castle Island (South Boston)

  Two- and three-story wood-frame houses line the streets around you, the same neighborhood the world later came to know through the films Good Will Hunting…

• Longfellow Bridge (Beacon Hill / Cambridge)

  Granite towers rise ahead as you cross the span linking Boston and Cambridge over the Charles River basin.

• Fort Point Channel & the Innovation District (South Boston / Seaport)

  Twenty years have transformed Fort Point Channel more completely than any other neighborhood in Boston, from brick warehouses to the glass towers you see along…

• Rowes Wharf & Boston Harbor (Waterfront)

  Boston Harbor made the city, chosen by John Winthrop in 1630.

• Jamaica Pond & Jamaica Plain (Jamaica Plain)

  Jamaica Pond, a glacial kettle pond sixty feet deep, is the largest natural body of fresh water in Boston, and colonial residents came here to…

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