Boston Public Library
Beaux-Arts granite palace floating on thousands of buried wood pilings driven into filled harbor land.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Boston Public Library centers on the roughly 4,500 wooden pilings driven deep beneath the Dartmouth Street entrance, supporting a building raised on filled Back Bay harbor land after the site was open water until the 1860s. You'll hear about architect Charles McKim's runaway budget for the 1895 building, the granite quarried and fitted in Milford, and a 1929 sewer leak that let air reach wood that had stayed wet since 1888. Look at the arches and the words free to all carved above the keystone, and remember what is holding it all up.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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