Government Center is an area in downtown Boston, centered on City Hall Plaza. Formerly the site of Scollay Square, it is now the location of Boston City Hall, courthouses, state and federal office buildings, and a major MBTA subway station, also called Government Center. Its development was controversial, as the project displaced thousands of residents and razed several hundred homes and businesses.
Faneuil Hall is a marketplace and meeting hall located near the waterfront and today's Government Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. Opened in 1742, it was the site of several speeches by Samuel Adams, James Otis, and others encouraging independence from Great Britain. It is now part of Boston National Historical Park and a well-known stop on the Freedom Trail. It is sometimes referred to as "the Cradle of Liberty," though the building and location have ties to slavery.
The committees of correspondence were a collection of American political organizations that sought to coordinate opposition to British Parliament and, later, support for American independence during the American Revolution. The brainchild of Samuel Adams, a Patriot from Boston, the committees sought to establish, through the writing of letters, an underground network of communication among Patriot leaders in the Thirteen Colonies. The committees were instrumental in setting up the First Continental Congress, which convened in Philadelphia in September and October 1774.
Henry Tuke co-founded with his father, William Tuke, the Retreat asylum in York, England, a humane alternative to the nineteenth-century network of asyla, based on Quaker principles.
Quincy Market is a historic building near Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was constructed between 1824 and 1826 and named in honor of mayor Josiah Quincy, who organized its construction without any tax or debt. The market is a designated National Historic Landmark and a designated Boston Landmark in 1996, significant as one of the largest market complexes built in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. According to the National Park Service, some of Boston's early slave auctions took place near what is now Quincy Market.
William Adams Delano was an American architect and a partner with Chester Holmes Aldrich in the firm of Delano & Aldrich. The firm worked in the Beaux-Arts tradition for elite clients in New York City, Long Island and elsewhere, building townhouses, country houses, clubs, banks and buildings for colleges and private schools. Moving on from the classical and baroque Beaux-Arts repertory, they often designed in the neo-Georgian and neo-Federal styles, and many of their buildings were clad in brick with limestone or white marble trim, a combination which came to be their trademark.
Asher Benjamin was an American architect and author whose work transitioned between Federal architecture and the later Greek Revival architecture. His seven handbooks on design deeply influenced the look of cities and towns throughout New England until the Civil War. Builders also copied his plans in the Midwest and in the South.
Peter Faneuil was a wealthy American colonial merchant, slave trader and philanthropist who donated Faneuil Hall to Boston.
Dock Square in downtown Boston, Massachusetts, is a public square adjacent to Faneuil Hall, bounded by Congress Street, North Street, and the steps of the 60 State Street office tower. Its name derives from its original (17th-century) location at the waterfront. From the 1630s through the early 19th century, it served boats in the Boston Harbor as "the common landing place, at Bendell's Cove," later called Town Dock. "Around the dock was transacted the chief mercantile business of the town." After the waterfront was filled in during the early 19th century, Dock Square continued as a center of commerce for some years. The addition in the 1960s of Government Center changed the scale and character of the square from a hub of city life, to a place one merely passes through. As of the 1950s the square has become largely a tourist spot, with the Freedom Trail running through it. John Winthrop, coming from Salem where he landed as a Puritan from England, ended up "setting up a dock at the head of the cove, and here began the town of Boston, which soon was recognized as the political and economic center of the [Massachusetts Bay] colony.
Merchants Row in Boston, Massachusetts, is a short street extending from State Street to Faneuil Hall Square in the Financial District. Since the 17th century, it has been a place of commercial activity. It sits close to Long Wharf and Dock Square, hubs of shipping and trade through the 19th century. Portions of the street were formerly known as Swing-Bridge Lane, Fish Lane, and Roebuck Passage.
White Swallow was an extreme clipper built in Boston in 1853 for the California trade.
The Thatcher Magoun, an extreme clipper launched in 1855, was named after Medford's great shipbuilder, Thatcher Magoun, who died the year that she was launched.
James Otis Curtis was an American shipbuilder who built ships in Medford, Massachusetts. He built wooden ships that were either powered by sail or by screw and steam.
Paul Curtis was an American shipbuilder who built ships in Medford, Massachusetts.
Magoun Square station is a light rail station on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line located at Lowell Street south of Magoun Square in Somerville, Massachusetts. The accessible station has a single island platform serving the two tracks of the Medford Branch. It opened on December 12, 2022, as part of the Green Line Extension (GLX), which added two northern branches to the Green Line, and is served by the E branch.
Anne Whitney created two public statues of Samuel Adams. One, made in 1876, resides in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol, Washington, D.C. The other, made in 1880, is located in front of Faneuil Hall Plaza in Boston.
A Once and Future Shoreline is a permanent public artwork that graphically marks the edge of Boston Harbor, circa 1630, into the granite paving blocks of the plaza on the West side of the historic Faneuil Hall building. The 850-foot-long artwork depicts the location of a pre-colonial shoreline by graphically etching silhouettes of materials that are found typically along the high tide line. The artwork offers a way to engage the imagination in an exploration of the changes to this now urban site from a salty tidal marsh, to an active pedestrian plaza.
Thatcher Magoun was a shipbuilder who specialized in large ships and brigs, 250-tons and larger, built for the China trade. His reputation, according to the maritime historian Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, was "second to none among American shipbuilders." He was also called the "Father of Shipbuilding on the Mystic River."
The William Starkey was a 19th-century pilot boat built in 1854, by Benjamin F. Delano at the Thatcher Magoun shipyard for W. W. Goddard, of Boston. Starkey helped transport Boston maritime pilots between inbound or outbound ships coming into the Boston Harbor. She was named for Captain William Starkey, one of the founders of the Boston Marine Society. The Virginia Pilots' Association purchased the Boston schooner William Starkey in 1865, where she became a pioneer of the associations' fleet and the oldest pilot boat on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In the age steam, she was sold in 1899 to Thomas Darling of Hampton, Virginia.
