Copley Square

How to Get There

From Back Bay and Downtown Boston hotels: Walk or drive via Boylston Street or Dartmouth Street to Copley Square, located directly across from the Boston Public Library and adjacent to Trinity Church, with access via the Copley MBTA Green Line station.

Overview

Copley Square, named for painter John Singleton Copley, is a public square in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, bounded by Boylston Street, Clarendon Street, St. James Avenue, and Dartmouth Street. Prior to 1883 it was known as Art Square due to its many cultural institutions, some of which remain today.

Architecture

Within the Square are several architectural landmarks:

• Old South Church (1873), by Charles Amos Cummings and Willard T. Sears in the Venetian Gothic Revival style
• Trinity Church (1877, Romanesque Revival), considered H. H. Richardson's tour de force
• Boston Public Library (1895), by Charles Follen McKim in a revival of Italian Renaissance style, incorporates artworks by John Singer Sargent, Edwin Austin Abbey, Daniel Chester French, and others
• The Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel (1912) by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in the Beaux-Arts style (on the site of the original Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
• The John Hancock Tower (1976, late Modernist) by Henry N. Cobb, at 790 feet (240 m) (241 m) New England's tallest building
• The Bostix Kiosk (1992, Postmodernist), at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston streets, by Graham Gund with inspiration from Parisian park pavilions

The Boston Marathon foot race has finished at Copley Square since 1986. A memorial celebrating the race's 100th running (in 1996) is located in the park, near the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth streets.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Copley Square", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0