The Boston Athenaeum and Old North Church Make the Hub’s Past Come Alive

Revere’s ride, gorgeous Sargents, lively architecture, and a library that’s a museum and cultural center, all profiled as we head toward America’s 250th anniversary

A mong my favorite sentimental art spots is the Boston Athenaeum, a combination library, museum, exhibition space, and cultural center at a corner of Boston Common and steps across Beacon Street from the State House. I write “sentimental” since I don’t get there often. But one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen was there in 2011: Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, a retrospective of the Brahmin of the bizarre and weirdly comic. It was peak concentration and perfectly balanced between his alphabet drawings — “Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin” — and his outlandish, macabre take on “little Zooks of whom no one was fond,” so little that he’s loaded into a cannon and fired into a lily pond.

Gorey wasn’t actually from Boston but from Chicago. Still, he went to Harvard, lived on Cape Cod most of his life, and had a distinctly Brahmin sense of humor. When I was the newly appointed director of Phillips Academy’s Addison Gallery, I visited the Athenaeum and saw that it allows dogs, or at least dogs brought by members. What a revelation! From that time forward, no dog went unadmitted at the Addison, and none ever behaved as badly as some children and adults. Unlike Zooks, none tempted us to bring out the artillery.

What’s the Athenaeum? It was founded in 1807 as a member-based library and center for the pursuit of knowledge for the benefit of all — an Athenaeum, named after Athena. Today, it houses 500,000 volumes; plus 100,000 rare books, maps, and manuscripts; and 100,000 works of art, among them paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs. It’s in a distinguished building from 1847 that’s been renovated and expanded, most recently in 2022. According to its 2024 annual report, it has 4,300 members but added 1,365 members that year alone. Possibly a few eternally lapsed members are in the Granary Burial Ground, the expansive, leafy, historic cemetery behind the Athenaeum.

I was very curious to see what’s happening at the Athenaeum. I hadn’t been there for ten years and knew — high-end Boston culture is a small world — that from the 1990s into the 2010s it was in a state of upheaval, as much as a Boston Brahmin could upheave.

Its roster of marquee-name members includes John Adams and his son John Quincy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Francis Parkman, Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes — Sr. and Jr. — Margaret Fuller, and Amy Lowell. All mark the Athenaeum as the haunt of Boston’s ruling WASP class, by the 1990s a much depleted and disbursed corps but one with a tight grasp on the Athenaeum’s governance and programs. With more than 200 book funds and an endowment, which exceeds $100 million today, it has kept developing its superb library and has never been broke. Still, its base was disappearing. The need and desire to do more for a larger community in Boston and its suburbs gnawed on the collective conscience of younger members, and not exclusively the left-of-center members. My regular readers will know how skeptical I am of how that crowd thinks.

Change was needed. And change happened. The place felt inert and looked fuddy-duddy. Lots of different psychological types hate change, but people careening toward class extinction probably hate it more than most. After tussles and directors and trustees coming and going, the place is reborn and refreshed — I heard that it was blow-by-blow as old Yankee barnacles were scraped off the hull, but such is life. The place was more of a ghost ship than a vibrant center for learning.

The collection is heavy on Boston portraiture. Many examples cover walls in a new, comfortable lounge area with cushy but not clubby seating. This space can be rearranged for a lecture with chairs to accommodate more than a hundred people. Boston of the Brahmin class was the land of blue-eyed blonds with angular faces. It’s an ethereal look that could pass as underfed — possibly more than their fair share had eating disorders — but, even if subconsciously, they seem to yearn for Heaven. There’s a group of portraits of the Perkins family, Brahmin royalty, deep in the slave trade and the opium business, for both of which they’re decried. The Athenaeum owns two expressive, lovely portraits by John Singer Sargent: George McCulloch’s from 1901, and Annie Adams Fields’s, from 1890. McCulloch was a ship builder and mining magnate and a patron and buddy of Sargent’s. Fields was very Boston. She and her husband, a publisher, had a salon for Athenaeum biggies. Henry James knew her and said she inspired his novel The Bostonians.

A venerable place like the Athenaeum, in a cultured city, even in one where the rich tend to be cheap, picks things up along the way. The library owns a considerable collection of Civil War letters, manuscripts, and ephemera; a chunk of George Washington’s library; Audubon’s Birds of America; early American maps and broadsides; early photograph portraits of Bostonians, especially by Southworth and Hawes, the great daguerreotype artists from Boston; and not one, not two, but seven paintings by Washington Allston, who, in his heyday in the 1820s and ’30s, was America’s most revered artist, from Cambridge, and the subject of my dissertation. For that reason alone, how could I not love the Athenaeum?

The Athenaeum’s renovation and expansion reconfigured existing space and added new space by absorbing the building next door. There’s a spacious, new children’s library, new study spaces for members, new gallery space, and a very good restaurant called the Folio Bistro. It’s close to the State House. If the pols manage to find it, well, it’ll be an elevating experience for them.

When I visited this summer, I saw a lovely temporary exhibition of photographs of New England wildflowers by Edwin Hale Lincoln (1848–1938), studies of fleeting beauty and rare individuality. Very Boston, though Lincoln lived in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts. Lincoln studied wildflowers for years, making many discoveries through doggedness, a natural gift for botany, and, as a smart and discerning amateur, an eye for what inbred specialists sometimes missed. It’s a loan show with vintage photographs, most black-and-white but some delicately colored, and lots of Lincoln’s research, so it’s a horticulture show as well as an art show.

I like the Athenaeum’s membership page, a recruitment device. It starts with a “why join” prompt followed by answers such as “you’re intellectually curious” and “you enjoy discovering something new,” “community matters,” “you like peace and quiet” — to which I say, “Hear, hear,” or think it — and “you appreciate special perks,” which means a lecture program, guest privileges, parking discounts, and a discount at the restaurant. A family membership is $590 a year. Not bad. It’s Boston. Among its hurdles in attracting new members is the Athenaeum’s reputation as a stuffy place that, unless we’re from the Brahmin class, isn’t for you or me.

Nothing can be further from the truth. Nobody knew I was coming on either visit — my usual ambush strategy — but I was warmly welcomed. It’s a Boston treasure and part of Boston’s history.

From burning the midnight oil over a good book to lanterns — “one if by land and two if by sea” — and midnight rides, Old North Church might not be the mother-lode site since Boston is so rich in colonial and Federal history, but it’s a key one. Built in 1723, it’s Boston’s oldest church building but not its oldest congregation. That’s King’s Chapel, near the top of Beacon Hill. King’s Chapel was a much-coveted place of worship and a hub for the city’s social, political, and financial big-kahuna Anglican class. Old North Church was conceived as the church for a rising class of ship captains, privateers, and younger elites who couldn’t afford pews at King’s Chapel.

King’s Chapel, built in stone in the 1750s, is Palladian Revival, with patterns of considerable flourish. Old North Church is inspired by Christopher Wren’s post-fire London churches, but it’s brick, with an interior that’s mostly a white box. It was an Anglican church when built, and it’s Episcopal today. John Gibbs, a parishioner and local painter, painted a series of angels and festoons between the arches in the 1730s. By around 1912, all had been covered with white paint, but we knew they were there. A restoration project first uncovered one and then 19 more, finishing this year. They’re small and very pretty.

While King’s Chapel has double colonnades with Corinthian capitals and a massive, elevated pulpit and canopy, Old North Church is more subdued and has moments rather than luxe statements. Its pulpit and canopy are smaller and more attenuated. Four carved wood angels, each 2 feet tall and made in Belgium around 1620, aren’t staples of New England churches, but here they are, set on pillars by an enormous organ whose casing, from around 1760, has as much English rococo glee as Boston could tolerate. William Maxwell, among the first congregants and an antiques dealer and decorator, gave two giant English brass chandeliers in 1724 to illuminate the church. Was he the Dorothy Draper of his day? For Boston, yes.

And there isn’t a “New North Church.” Old North Church is merely the oldest church in Boston’s North End.

I’ve heard the Old North Church bells two or three times over the years. They’re the oldest ringing church bells in America, cast in Gloucester, England, in 1744. They cast peals rolling across the landscape. They don’t play songs, so don’t expect “Edelweiss.” The MIT Guild of Bellringers does the honors. It’s a corps of bell ringers, ages young to not-so-young. Before there was an MIT, Paul Revere was among the church bell ringers.

Oh, and what about that steeple and those lanterns? By spring 1775, Boston’s salty air was thick with the abdabs. Tea had been tossed in the harbor, the first Continental Congress had come and gone, and Britain’s Parliament zigzagged from conciliation to restraint. Boston had a military government. British troops massed to clear weapons silos there and in the countryside. Action was imminent. On April 18, 1775, Robert Newman, the church’s sexton, the man who cares for the building, and John Pulling, the vestryman, the head of the church board, defied the British nighttime curfew to place two lanterns in the steeple window of the Old North Church. They were as much to be considered traitors as Paul Revere, the silversmith and factory owner who organized the warning system. The church was then Boston’s tallest building and, set on a hill, looked like a tower. “One if by land, two if by sea” signaled which course British troops would take to start its raids. “By sea” was the signal that the Brits were crossing the Charles River and heading to Lexington and Concord. Paul Revere took his famous ride, and battles followed the next day, as did the American Revolution. Others were involved, but Revere never spilled the Boston baked beans.

Old North Church is very tourist-savvy and presents its place in history with as much of the energy of Longfellow’s “Midnight Ride” poem as it can summon. Good interpretation, moment by moment and also of the “what did all of this mean variety,” puts us there and makes us think. I took the audio tour and thought it was fair and balanced. The entire interpretation program was rethought for the 250th anniversary of Revere’s ride and is heavy on Revere. They’d be smart to keep it this way. The church’s early membership was heavy on slave owners, human traffickers, and smugglers. The building’s fancy wood was likely harvested by Caribbean slaves. It’s a bottomless pit of mea culpas and pious finger-wagging and not useful to anyone. Best to say it once, keep the archives open to researchers, and move on.

I love the “People in the Pews” feature — short, discreetly placed profiles of parishioners of yore and, here and there, a famous visitor such as Theodore Roosevelt, the old Rough Rider who came to the 1912 opening of the renovated church made famous by the old Midnight Rider. There’s Timothy Cutler, Old North Church’s first rector, who, as one of the Yale Apostates, bolted from the Congregational ministry and became an Anglican priest. There’s Robert Newman, the sexton, expert in back-alley window-jumping, specifically from the house where he lived with his mother, to light two lanterns and, afterward, out of a church window from which he ran home and back to bed. There’s Matilda Bibbey, for 50 years a parishioner and of Irish stock, as were many North Enders. The Loyalist Owen Richards was tarred and feathered by the Sons of Liberty. It’s all good reading and atmospheric.

Old North Church is still an active Episcopal church closely associated with Old North Illuminated, a nonprofit that raises money, operates the church as a historic site, and deals with interpretation, education, and preservation. By the 1830s, the North End had a heavy immigrant population, mostly Roman Catholic, but it stayed lively, functional, and relevant. President Ford presided over a ceremonial lantern-hanging on April 18, 1976. Queen Elizabeth visited during her tour of sites linked to the Revolution in July 1976.

I don’t know what the Athenaeum and Old North Church are planning for 2026, but, in any season, they’re wonderful access points for past, present, and future. The courage of Revere and his gang and the knowledge of generations of Athenaeum members will always be a hard combination to beat. The Athenaeum isn’t part of Boston’s famous Freedom Trail — sites related to the Revolution — but Old North Church is. Both are icons of history.