Symphony Hall

This guide to Symphony Hall in Boston opens on its chaotic first night in October 1900, when season tickets were auctioned off and Isabella Stewart Gardner paid nearly four times face value for a good seat. It traces how founder Henry Lee Higginson raised the building's cost by selling shares, then spent what mattered to him on a young Harvard physicist, Wallace Sabine, brought in to calculate how sound would move through the room. Look up at the empty niches on the facade, meant for statues Higginson never paid for.