The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings in the United States
5 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful 19th-century buildings in the United States are Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Jefferson Building and Chicago Cultural Center. The list covers 5 19th-century buildings. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The great American buildings of the late nineteenth century were built for readers. After the Civil War, industrial fortunes and a strong belief in free public education combined to produce public libraries of extraordinary ambition, and architects trained in the Beaux-Arts and Renaissance Revival traditions gave them marble halls, murals and mosaic that earlier ages reserved for palaces and churches. The movement made the library the civic showpiece of many American cities.
The Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, opened in 1897 as the home of the Library of Congress, is the most lavish: its Great Hall is lined with marble, sculpture and painted vaults, and its octagonal Main Reading Room rises to a domed ceiling. In Boston, Charles Follen McKim's library, opened in 1895 with "Free to All" carved above its entrance, houses the long barrel-vaulted Bates Hall and murals by John Singer Sargent.
Baltimore's George Peabody Library, completed in 1878, surrounds its atrium with five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies under a skylight. The Chicago Cultural Center, built as the city's first central public library, shelters a dome of Tiffany glass among its mosaics, and the New York Public Library's Beaux-Arts main building, begun at the turn of the century, ends the list with the Rose Main Reading Room and its two marble lions on Fifth Avenue.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Museum | |
| 2 | Thomas Jefferson Building | Library building | |
| 3 | Chicago Cultural Center | Library building | |
| 4 | George Peabody Library | Library building | |
| 5 | Boston Public Library, McKim Building | Library building |
01 Metropolitan Museum of Art
United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W
Image by marekr from Pixabay The Met also runs The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, a museum of medieval European art opened in 1938 that incorporates parts of five French cloisters.
02 Thomas Jefferson Building
United States · 1.5 km from Washington38.889° N 77.006° W
NPS/Tom Engberg · Public domain The heart of the building is the circular Main Reading Room under its great dome, whose exterior was originally gilded with 23-carat gold leaf. Eight marble columns carry statues personifying branches of knowledge, and sixteen bronze portrait figures stand along the raised balustrades. High in the dome, Edwin Blashfield's 1896 mural The Evolution of Civilization sets out twelve figures for the cultures he believed had contributed most to human knowledge. Visitors see the room from an enclosed gallery; outside, Roland Hinton Perry's Court of Neptune fountain animates the west front with bronze sea gods, turtles and nymphs. The building has been a National Historic Landmark since 1965.
Did you know? The building was needed largely because of the Copyright Law of 1870, which obliged every applicant to send the library two copies of their work.
03 Chicago Cultural Center
United States · 4.1 km from Chicago41.884° N 87.625° W
Image by hnguyenvu from Pixabay In the 1960s the old library came close to being demolished; preservationists fought for it, and in the late 1970s it was reborn as a cultural centre, the whole building being given over to the arts after the new Harold Washington Library opened in 1991. Today it hosts free exhibitions, concerts and talks, and serves as the city's official reception venue, so a visitor can simply walk in off the street and stand under the Tiffany dome. The Tiffany dome was restored in 2008 and again in the early 2020s, when its glass was cleaned and repaired piece by piece.
Did you know? The land for the library was donated by the Grand Army of the Republic, which is why Union veterans received their own memorial hall inside.
04 George Peabody Library
United States · 1.8 km from Baltimore39.297° N 76.615° W
Matthew Petroff · CC BY-SA 3.0 Since 1982 the building has belonged to Johns Hopkins University and is run as part of its special collections, open for reading and study; the room also doubles as an event venue, and those fees help to support the books. The setting adds to the pleasure: Mount Vernon Place is the grand nineteenth-century square around the city's Washington Monument, and the Peabody's conservatory, still one of the world's notable music schools, carries on next door.
Did you know? The institute was meant to open in 1860, but the turmoil of the Civil War in the border state of Maryland delayed it until 1866.
05 Boston Public Library, McKim Building
United States · 2 km from Boston42.349° N 71.079° W
Image by MonicaVolpin from Pixabay Boston, the capital of Massachusetts and one of the oldest cities in the United States, built its Back Bay district by filling in a tidal bay over the second half of the 19th century, and Copley Square — with H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church directly opposite the library — became its cultural heart.
Did you know? When it opened in 1895 the building was described as the most expensive library in the world, having cost more than two million dollars.
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 the United States?
- On our list, Metropolitan Museum of Art ranks first, followed by Thomas Jefferson Building and Chicago Cultural Center.
- Who painted the murals in the Boston Public Library?
- The McKim Building contains murals by John Singer Sargent on the theme of the triumph of religion, as well as works by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Edwin Austin Abbey.
- Is the Chicago Cultural Center dome made of Tiffany glass?
- Yes. The building, opened in 1897 as Chicago's central public library, has a stained-glass dome by Tiffany in its former delivery room, often described as the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world.
- What is the Thomas Jefferson Building?
- It is the oldest of the Library of Congress buildings in Washington, opened in 1897 and named after Thomas Jefferson, whose personal library helped rebuild the collection after 1814.
- How many 19th-century buildings are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 5 19th-century buildings.