South End

This guide to Boston's South End centers on the castle-like rotunda on Tremont Street, where thousands paid fifty cents in 1884 to climb a dark staircase and view a painted panorama of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, the work of the Frenchman Paul Philippoteaux. It follows the reactions of the crowds who filed in, including Civil War veterans who wept in front of a battle they had actually survived, and traces the rotunda's fortunes as cyclorama painting fell out of fashion by 1890. The painting itself was abandoned for years afterward, left in a rotting wooden crate a few blocks from where you are standing.