Boston Public Library, McKim Building

Above the main doors of the Boston Public Library's original building on Copley Square, three words are cut into the granite: "Free to All". The McKim Building, opened in 1895, was conceived as a palace for the public, and it remains one of the finest Renaissance Revival interiors in the United States.

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. Inside, the building wraps around an arcaded courtyard modelled on the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, with a fountain, a reflecting pool and Doric columns of Tuckahoe marble. The structure also contains one of the first major uses of Rafael Guastavino's thin tile vaults.

McKim brought in the leading artists of the day, and the decoration took more than two decades to finish. A grand staircase of yellow Siena marble, guarded by a pair of Saint-Gaudens lions, rises past murals by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes to Bates Hall, the reading room — about 218 feet long and 50 feet high under a coffered barrel vault, lit by dozens of lamps on its long tables. Edwin Austin Abbey's Quest of the Holy Grail runs around the old book-delivery room, and on the top floor John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion cycle fills the hall named after him. Daniel Chester French designed the bronze entrance doors. The building became a National Historic Landmark in 1986; a Brutalist addition by Philip Johnson, opened in 1972, adjoins it to the west.

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.

Getting there

The library stands on Copley Square in Boston's Back Bay neighbourhood, on Dartmouth Street between Boylston and Blagden streets. Copley station on the MBTA Green Line has an entrance in front of the library's Boylston Street side. The nearest airport is Boston Logan International Airport (BOS), about 6 km away.