The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings in North America
6 places in 2 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful 19th-century buildings in North America are Metropolitan Museum of Art (United States), Library of Parliament (Ottawa) (Canada) and Thomas Jefferson Building (United States). The list covers 6 19th-century buildings in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 5. Last updated 14 October 2026.
In the decades after the Civil War and Confederation, North American cities set out to prove they could match the cultural institutions of Europe. Fortunes made in railways and industry, and a growing belief in free public education, poured into libraries, and architects trained in the Gothic Revival and the Beaux-Arts tradition gave them reading rooms as splendid as any palace. That is why a list of the continent's finest nineteenth-century buildings reads largely as a list of libraries.
Ottawa's Library of Parliament, completed in 1876, is a circular Gothic Revival hall with a carved white pine interior; it survived the 1916 fire that destroyed the rest of the original Centre Block because its iron doors were closed. In Washington the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, opened in 1897, crowns its marble Great Hall and domed Main Reading Room with murals and sculpture.
Baltimore's George Peabody Library stacks five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies around a skylit atrium. Chicago's first central public library, now the Chicago Cultural Center, glows under a dome of Tiffany glass, and Boston's McKim Building, opened in 1895 under the inscription "Free to All", gave the city the barrel-vaulted Bates Hall. New York's Beaux-Arts Public Library, begun at the turn of the century and guarded by its marble lions, closes the group.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Museum | United States | |
| 2 | Library of Parliament (Ottawa) | Library building | Canada | |
| 3 | Thomas Jefferson Building | Library building | United States | |
| 4 | Chicago Cultural Center | Library building | United States | |
| 5 | George Peabody Library | Library building | United States | |
| 6 | Boston Public Library, McKim Building | Library building | United States |
01 Metropolitan Museum of Art
United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W
Image by marekr from Pixabay The building is itself a history of American taste. The first structure, a red-brick Gothic Revival hall of 1880 by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, is now swallowed inside more than twenty later additions. The Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue façade, the Great Hall and the Grand Stairway were designed by Richard Morris Hunt and his son Richard Howland Hunt around 1900, McKim, Mead and White added the side wings in 1910, and the glass-walled galleries at the back are by Roche-Dinkeloo. The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden sits on the roof near the south-west corner.
02 Library of Parliament (Ottawa)
Library of Parliament
Canada · 0.8 km from Ottawa45.426° N 75.700° W
Image by Pet_orient from Pixabay It was designed by Thomas Fuller and Chilion Jones, and it borrows its idea from the circular Reading Room of the British Museum while wrapping it in the form of a Gothic chapter house. Construction started in 1859, stalled in 1861, and was only finished in 1876, when some 47,000 volumes were moved in. From the outside it reads as a lantern of stone ringed by sixteen flying buttresses, with carved friezes and floral ornament in the Victorian High Gothic manner and a copper-covered roof rising to a cupola.
Did you know? The library is pictured on the face of the Canadian ten-dollar bill.
03 Thomas Jefferson Building
United States · 1.5 km from Washington38.889° N 77.006° W
NPS/Tom Engberg · Public domain More than fifty American painters and sculptors worked on the decoration, and the result is overwhelming in the best sense. The Great Hall is a space of marble, gilding and painted vaults; a brass compass is set into its floor, ringed by the signs of the zodiac. At the head of the stairs outside the reading room, Elihu Vedder's mosaic shows Minerva laying aside her helmet and shield, a goddess of war turned patron of learning. Nearby, in a case of its own, lies one of the Library's greatest treasures, a Gutenberg Bible, flanked by murals tracing the history of writing from the cairn to the printing press.
Did you know? The dome was meant to stay under about 21 metres tall to avoid rivalling the Capitol, but Casey and Green raised it to roughly 59 metres.
04 Chicago Cultural Center
United States · 4.1 km from Chicago41.884° N 87.625° W
Image by hnguyenvu from Pixabay Inside, the building turns into a jewel box. The grand staircase is of white Carrara marble set with medallions of green Connemara marble from Ireland, and walls and arches glitter with mosaics of iridescent Favrile glass, stone and mother-of-pearl. The climax is Preston Bradley Hall, a great, richly ornamented hall, crowned by a stained-glass dome some 38 feet (about 12 metres) across made by the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company to a design by J. A. Holzer. Its panes, cut in the shape of fish scales and set with glass jewels, glow with daylight, and the signs of the zodiac circle its crown; it is regarded as the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world.
Did you know? The building's second dome, by Healy and Millet over the Civil War memorial rotunda, is even larger: about 40 feet across with some 50,000 pieces of glass.
05 George Peabody Library
United States · 1.8 km from Baltimore39.297° N 76.615° W
Matthew Petroff · CC BY-SA 3.0 The money came from George Peabody, a merchant and banker who became one of the great American philanthropists of his century. In February 1857 he gave $300,000 as the founding sum for an arts and culture institute for the people of Baltimore, one that joined a music conservatory — the first in the country — to a free reference library. The library wing was designed by the architect Edmund G. Lind, working closely with the institute's provost Nathaniel H. Morison, and was completed in 1878.
Did you know? The five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies were produced by the Baltimore ironworks Bartlett-Hayward Company.
06 Boston Public Library, McKim Building
United States · 2 km from Boston42.349° N 71.079° W
Image by MonicaVolpin from Pixabay The Boston Public Library itself was founded in 1848 and opened its first reading rooms in 1854; it is now the third-largest public library in the United States. By the 1880s its collection had outgrown its building on Boylston Street, and after a failed design competition the trustees turned in 1887 to Charles Follen McKim of the New York firm McKim, Mead & White. McKim took the Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris as his starting point and produced a nearly square, three-storey block of pink Milford granite, its long Dartmouth Street front lined with arched windows, carved medallions of early printers and monumental inscriptions.
Did you know? To keep the state's land grant, workers started on the foundations at 4:18 p.m. on 21 April 1886, the last day allowed, for an earlier design that was later scrapped.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful 19th-century buildings in North America?
- On our list, Metropolitan Museum of Art (United States) ranks first, followed by Library of Parliament (Ottawa) (Canada) and Thomas Jefferson Building (United States).
- Which country has the most 19th-century buildings in North America?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (5) and Canada (1).
- What are the names of the New York Public Library lions?
- The two marble lions in front of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building are named Patience and Fortitude, names given by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s.
- Why is the George Peabody Library called a cathedral of books?
- Its reading room in Baltimore, completed in 1878, rises through five tiers of cast-iron balconies to a skylight, giving the interior the height and light of a church nave.
- How many 19th-century buildings are on this list in North America?
- The list covers 6 19th-century buildings in 2 countries. The United States has the most, with 5.