The Boston Public Library is a municipal public library system in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1848. The Boston Public Library is also Massachusetts' Library for the Commonwealth, meaning all adult residents of the state are entitled to borrowing and research privileges, and the library receives state funding. The Boston Public Library contains approximately 24 million items, making it the third-largest public library in the United States behind the federal Library of Congress and New York Public Library, which is also privately endowed. In 2014, the library held more than 10,000 programs, all free to the public, and lent 3.7 million materials.
111 Huntington Avenue is a Boston skyscraper. Located on Huntington Avenue, it is part of the Prudential Center complex that also houses the Prudential Tower. Completed in 2002, the tower is 554 feet tall and houses 36 floors. It is Boston's 12th-tallest building. It won the 2002 bronze Emporis Skyscraper Award. It is sometimes given the unofficial nickname The R2-D2 Building after the Star Wars droid's top, and the Juicer Building after its juicer-type top.
Chickering & Sons was an American piano manufacturer located in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was founded in 1823 by Jonas Chickering and James Stewart, but the partnership dissolved four years later. By 1830 Jonas Chickering became partners with John Mackay, manufacturing pianos as "Chickering & Company", and later "Chickering & Mackays" until the senior Mackay's death in 1841, and reorganized as "Chickering & Sons" in 1853. Chickering pianos continued to be made until 1983.
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, branded as MassArt, is a public college of visual and applied art in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1873, it is one of the nation's oldest art schools, the only publicly funded independent art school in the United States, and was the first art college in the United States to grant an artistic degree. It is a member of the Colleges of the Fenway, and the ProArts Consortium.
Mechanics Hall may refer to different current or former meeting halls:
Prudential station is an underground light rail station on the MBTA Green Line E branch, located below Huntington Avenue next to the Prudential Tower complex near Belvidere Street in Boston, Massachusetts. Prudential station is accessible, featuring low raised platforms and elevator service to the Huntington Arcade of the Prudential Center shopping mall at the base of the Prudential Tower.
Huntington Avenue is a thoroughfare in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, beginning at Copley Square and continuing west through the Back Bay, Fenway, Longwood, and Mission Hill neighborhoods. It is signed as Massachusetts Route 9. A section of Huntington Avenue has been officially designated the Avenue of the Arts by the city of Boston.
Timothy Gilbert was an American piano manufacturer, abolitionist and religious organizer in Boston, Massachusetts. His brother Lemuel Gilbert was also a piano manufacturer.
Symphony and Horticultural Halls are historic buildings at the corner of Massachusetts and Huntington Avenues in the Fenway–Kenmore neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The halls were listed as a pair on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Symphony Hall was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1999.
Henry Van Brunt FAIA was an American architect and architectural writer.
The Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association (est.1795) of Boston, Massachusetts, was "formed for the sole purposes of promoting the mechanic arts and extending the practice of benevolence." Founders included Paul Revere, Jonathan Hunnewell, and Benjamin Russell. Through much of the 19th century, the association organized conferences and exhibitions devoted to innovation in the mechanical arts.
Ephraim W. Bouvé (1817-1897) was an engraver in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 19th century. Around 1848 he kept a studio on Washington Street. By 1863 he had moved his studio to Bromfield Street, and by 1883 moved again, to Milk Street. E.W. Bouvé served as a judge in the category for "paper, blank books, stationery, etc." in the 1887 exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association.
William Gibbons Preston was an American architect who practiced during the last third of the nineteenth century and in the first decade of the twentieth. Educated at Harvard University and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was active in Boston, New York, Rhode Island, Ohio, New Brunswick and Savannah, Georgia, where he was brought by George Johnson Baldwin to design the Chatham County courthouse. Preston stayed in Savannah for several years during which time designed the original Desoto Hotel, the Savannah Volunteer Guards Armory and 20 other distinguished public buildings and private homes. He began his professional career working for his father, the builder and architect Jonathan Preston (1801–1888), upon his return to the United States from the École in 1861, and was the sole practitioner in the office from the time his father retired c. 1875 until he took John Kahlmeyer as a partner in about 1885.
The New England Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute flourished in the 1880s in Boston, Massachusetts. It existed as a rival to the long-established Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. Individuals affiliated with the NEM and M Institute included businessman John F. Wood, James L. Little, John M. Little, Samuel R. Payson, William B. Merrill, and Frederick W. Griffin.
Augustine H. Folsom or A.H. Folsom was a photographer in the Boston, Massachusetts-area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Subjects included buildings in Massachusetts, Maine, and Georgia. Folsom showed photographic work in the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association exhibitions of 1874 and 1881. He lived in Roxbury, c. 1870–1926. Works by Folsom reside in the collections of the Boston Public Library; Historic New England; Metropolitan Museum, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Georgia State Archives; and the American Antiquarian Society.
The Mechanic Apprentices Library Association (1820-1892) of Boston, Massachusetts, functioned as "a club of young apprentices to mechanics and manufacturers ... whose object is moral, social, and literary improvement." Some historians describe it as "the first of the kind known to have been established in any country." Founded by William Wood in 1820, it also had an intermittent formal relationship with the larger, more established Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. In its heyday, roughly 1820s-1850s, the Apprentices Library "[met] quarterly ; ... [had] nearly 200 members, and a library of about 2000 volumes; connected with which [was] a reading room, gratuitously supplied with the best newspapers and magazines of the city, and a cabinet of natural history. In addition to these advantages, the association [had] lectures and debates in the winter, and a social class for the study of elocution in the summer."
Amory Nelson Hardy or A.N. Hardy (1835–1911) was a photographer in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 19th century. Portrait subjects included US president Chester A. Arthur, clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, politician James G. Blaine, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writer Julia Ward Howe, labor activist Florence Kelley, suffragist Mary Livermore, philanthropist Isabella Somerset, and suffragist Frances Willard. He also made "electric-light portraits" of roller skaters in 1883.
Ernest Ferdinand Ritz was a Swedish-American photographer in Boston, Massachusetts during the 19th century.
Chickering Hall (1901–1912) was an auditorium in Boston, Massachusetts, located on Huntington Avenue in the Back Bay. It stood adjacent to Horticultural Hall. Tenants included the Emerson College of Oratory and D.M. Shooshan's "Ladies' and Gents' Cafe." In 1912 it became the St. James Theatre, and later the Uptown Theatre. The building existed until 1963, when it was demolished.
The St. James Theatre (1912–1929) of Boston, Massachusetts, was a playhouse and cinema in the Back Bay in the 1910s and 1920s. It occupied the former Chickering Hall on Huntington Avenue near Massachusetts Avenue, adjacent to Horticultural Hall. For some years Loew's theatre chain oversaw the St. James. In 1929 the theatre "became part of the Publix (Paramount) chain, and was renamed the Uptown."
