The Boston Athenaeum is a library, museum and club that has been welcoming intellectuals since 1805. Its founders included the drafter of Massachusetts’ constitution and President John Adams secretary. Other members include Nathaniel Hawthorne. Harriet Beecher Stowe. and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Today, its landmarked 1849 neoclassical headquarters in Beacon Hill—which unveiled a $17 million, historically sensitive restoration, renovation, and expansion in fall 2022—brims with more than 500,000 circulating volumes plus a 100,000-piece strong special collection of maps, manuscripts, and ephemera, and another 100,000 works of art, including paintings by John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart, and Allan Rohan Crite, a 20th-century chronicler of the Black experience in Boston. Only Athenaeum Members can borrow books, but anyone can come and visit. You can buy a ticket for the main-level reading rooms, galleries and Children’s Library, or book a guided tour for the entire five-plus floor building, including the stacks and the old-fashioned catalog. Folio is a new cafe that will open in 2024.
