cambridge historical tours boston

Meet The Team

Daniel berger-jones, stewart evan smith, julia clark, noah putterman, hanna burnett, reservations.

Tours Of The Greater Boston Area

The museum of fine arts, tour of the freedom trail, tour of harvard natural history museum.

Boston’s most visited tourist attraction is the Freedom Trail. Explore the origins of the American Revolution, while getting a fantastic overview of downtown Boston’s other offerings. Public Tours run daily starting at $35.

Boston Magazine named our Tour of the Innovation Trail 2023’s Best New Tour. Discover how historic innovation like the telephone and microwave oven have given way to Biotech, AI, and robotics in Cambridge’s famous Kendall Square.

An Immersive, project-based camp that gets kids walking through the history, hearing hilarious stories, and building their own videos for their YouTube channels and college applications.

Boston History Company Provides Your Guide to Greater Boston

Your tax-deductible donations make it possible for us to sponsor discounted educational tours and programs..

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Public tours, partners orgs, testimonials, "what a delightful way to spend an hour and a half strolling around harvard and the cambridge common areas.", "my boyfriend and i recently took a ghost tour with "jane smithonian" and it was awesome.", the robertsons, "our man was richard henry dana jr (daniel berger-jones: "you can call me 'junior'"), raconteur extraordinaire", jody and tom larson.

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Boston History

Review Highlights

“ What a delightful way to spend an hour and a half strolling around Harvard and the Cambridge Common areas. ” in 16 reviews

“ Our man was Richard Henry Dana Jr (Daniel Berger-Jones: "you can call me 'Junior'"), raconteur extraordinaire ” in 3 reviews

“ We opted for the private tour of the Freedom Trail , and it was worth every penny. ” in 4 reviews

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About the Business

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We like to tell mind-blowing stories. That's why we offer a little of everything and anything you might want. Our tours focus on the history of Harvard, MIT, and Old Cambridge, as well as Boston's Freedom Trail, North End, or Beacon Hill. We deliver history with a wink. Lots of humor, excellent stories, and all from well researched history. History should not be boring. If you think history is boring, you had a boring history teacher. Let us change your mind, or add to your love of it. …

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Rob was a great guide. He's funny and very informative; he will definitely keep everyone engaged. Highly recommend.

We did the 2.5 hour tour of Boston with Rob and this was the best tour experience I've had. Rob taught us a lot of fun facts and historical information that you wouldn't get just walking around yourself and had some great jokes to go along with the tour. It was definitely worth it and I would highly recommend this tour to everyone.

My friend booked our tour through Get Your Guide. Sewart led us on our 2.5+ hour Freedom Trail your. He did a fantastic job. He was witty and knowledgeable. Very engaging. I appreciated that he kept his eyes on the group to be sure everyone was moving along. I would def recommend this tour and guide. You can do the Freedom Tour on your own but this was well worth the money to have someone guide you and give you the history at the same time.

Stewart and Ben Franklin

We would definitely recommend this tour for anyone wanting to explore the rich history of Boston! It's a 2.5hr walking tour but it went by so fast. Rob was our tour guide and he was awesome - very knowledgeable and informative but also hilarious!

Informative, inspiring, and interesting! I am grateful to have had Rick be our tour guide! He cared about what he was talking about! After you take the tour, you'll definitely see Cambridge from a new perspective!

Excellent tour of Boston colonial history led by MarK! We learned and laughed. A pleasure.

Tally Ho! We enjoyed a great tour of the Freedom Trail! Our guide was very knowledgeable of the history of Boston and the American Revolution.

Amazing tour! Tour guide was full of energy and explained the history very well and made it so interesting. I strongly recommend it.

Nate was awesome!!! 5 stars!!! Very knowledgeable, animated and entertaining!! Highly recommended.

Fascinating information about the innovations coming out of this area. Very entertaining and inspiring!

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CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL TOURS (Boston) - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go

Boston History Company

Cambridge Historical Tours was founded in 2011 by two former guides for the Freedom Trail Foundation who recognized the untold treasures of Cambridge’s rich history. Cambridge Historical Tours extols Cambridge for setting the standard in American higher education and how it ultimately became a town of extreme ingenuity and innovation. Their four major tours give a comprehensive scope of Cambridge culture. They offer The Historical Hysterical Tour of Harvard , The Cantabrigia Tour of Old Cambridge , The Harvard Square Pub Crawl , and The Harvard Square Ghost Tour .

Beginning the season on April 13th, Public Tours will leave from the Harvard Square T Stop at 11:00am, 12:00pm, and 1:00pm daily. Beginning June 1st, Tours run hourly from 10am-4pm, and on the half hour at 12:30pm, 1:30pm, and 2:30pm. Ghost Tours begin operation on June 15th. Tickets and a full calendar of the year’s Public Tours can be found on the website.

All tours can be booked Privately Year-Round for a minimum charge of $120 for up to 10 people. The Historical Tours are great for schools and families alike.

For evening entertainment, enjoy the Pub Crawl or Ghost Tour, perfect for parties and corporate events. Historical tours are also available in Spanish and will soon be offered in other languages. Check the company website at www.cambridgehistoricaltours.org for updates. The company offers limited Public tours starting April 13th. The Pub Crawl runs year-round and is offered 2 nights a week at $55, including 5 appetizers and 5 drinks at 5 bars. Our regular tours are offered at $15 for Adults, $12 for students/seniors, $7 for Youth (9-13 years old), and free for Kids. For the best deal, enjoy the Combo of two Historical Tours offered at $20 ($12 for Youth 9-13).

In honor of the Bookish Ball and Shakespeare’s birthday, a free literary tour will be offered, starting at the Harvard Book Store at 4:30pm on April 20th.

March of 1964: Coming out of the Prep Shop on Church Street, you get a big whiff of Chinese food from Young Lees that makes your stomach gurgle. No time for food, though, as you’re on a mission to get a new tweed jacket. The one you’re wearing has chocolate ice cream stains from the stoned out Timothy-Leary wannabe who was too busy giggling to himself to watch where he was going, and got you pretty good with a cone-full as you entered Brighams ten minutes ago.

Down Church you head, past the Oxford Grill, fashion store, and Swiss Watch makers across the street, past Connie Dee Donuts, and the Ivy Barbershop. Across the street you see your pedantic friend in front of Berneimer’s Antiques, clearly trying to pick up a girl with his impressive knowledge of Byzantine art. Where the heck does that place even get that stuff? No time for him, either, and you cross to Sage’s market.

Passing the Brattle Theatre complex across the way, a mob of smokers crowds the benches out front, happily chatting away on breaks from studying in the cozy corners of the Blue Parrott coffee house, or between movies, or drinks at the Casablanca. A guy in front of the Brattle Pharmacy hands you an invite to join the communist party and three steps later a lady in front of Paperback Booksmith hands you a flyer that reminds you the Red Menace is still out there, and McCarthy was right. Harvard Square is, as ever, chock full of weirdos. Get over it, lady.

You pop into the Oxford Shop, since The prep had nothing in your size. Not much help here, either, so on you carry past Brattle Florist, Brine’s Sporting Goods, Schraft’s, and Woolworth’s. The crazy stoner who soiled your jacket is now slumped against the wall at Fanny Farmer’s, covered in his own ice cream and giggling to himself.

You cross the street to the tasty, pass Varsity liquors, and your stomach gurgles again at the Waldorf when you see the sign “Sandwiches, Sandwiches sandwiches sandwiches, All Kinds!”, but you plow ahead, as the Waldorf is more your 4am restaurant, when you need to pull an all-night to cram.

You pass the war-zone-like hole in the ground where Harvard has been destroying an entire city block to construct some monstrosity they’re calling the Holyoke Center, and make the quick decision to try the Andover Shop rather than J August, so you swing down Holyoke street, passing Thomas More and The Hasty Pudding.

The smell of roast beef coming from Elsie’s is too much, and your stomach takes control of your brain as you finally satisfy your hunger with a French Dip, ignoring the Andover as you pass it. Sated and happy, back out you go, and finally find a tweed in your size next door at the Andover, happily holding your filthy jacket in the bag for the new one as you round the corner onto Mount Auburn Street.

You go past Sak’s Fifth Avenue, cross over to the Lampoon castle, and try desperately to avoid that crazy lady with the bird in front of Starr’s Books. The thing craps everywhere, and you hear that in spite of being the daughter of a famous harvard professor, Widener library kicked her out for not controlling the things’ droppings. Passing Tommy’s Lunch, you finally head into Club 47 to set up for the evening show. As with every Tuesday, Joan Baez is playing again. She’s been selling out, so you’re confused as to why she’s sharing her billing tonight with some guy named Bob Dylan, but you’ve never been disappointed in her yet, so you’re keeping the faith. More than one person can be good at folk music, after all.

September 1971: You’re walking down Mass Ave from Remington Street, since there was no parking anywhere closer to the Square. You pass the classiest looking Gulf Gas station you’ve ever seen, thing looks like a bank, and once you pass the Baptist Church, you can feel the energy from the square already. You wave to your friend who’s out in front of the Bow and Arrow, taking a break from darts and day drinking with a quick smoke. You cross the street at the Hong Kong and pass Mr Bartleys. Out front of Crackerjacks a guy with no shirt and a headband is shoving flyers into people’s hands that say Stop The War. You cross over to the record and music store, Briggs and Briggs where a guy playing a kazoo stops to lower his purple shades and asks “LSD? Mushrooms? Reefer?”. You’ve already passed three book stores and a couple of insurance agencies, but you aren’t quite to the heart of the Square yet.

The foot traffic really picks up as you start to pass the countless diners, always full of businessmen or professors between meetings or class, retail workers on coffee breaks, random Russian grandmas, and the usual Harvard students and hippies who populate the Square.

You drop a few quarters in the cup of a panhandler by the south entrance to the T in front of J August, where Harvard men are browsing for Oxford shirts. You go around the stream of folks pouring out of the train and get whisked close enough to the door of the Hayes Bickford to get tempted by the smell of fresh coffee pouring from its open doors, the very thing you’re after today, but on you go into the Holyoke Center. A group of about 150 people have formed a circle around three men with guitars, and one with an accordion. Two have bell bottoms on. Two have mustaches and long hair. The other two have bushy beards. And long hair. None of them have shoes on. The pot smoke is thick as pea soup, and you need to be sober today, so you move towards the heart of the Square to grab a paper at the Out of Town News stand from Sheldon Cohen, who’s has been selling papers since he was a kid. The main T entrance is like a flame for moths, and the swarm of people all seem to flow in and out from under the sign that reads Park St 8 Minutes. Yeah right.

You wait for the light, watching the cars to the right of you fly past Brighams, and the Harvard Trust, and the Harvard Coop and Nini’s Corner. Taxis fly past with no apparent regard for anyone’s life. Honking fills the air. But the pedestrians are surprisingly well behaved, perhaps remembering a time not so long ago when a policeman, watching from a booth in the middle of the action, might publicly humiliate you via loudspeaker for infractions to pedestrian rules. In the distance, you hear the faint thumping of the djembe drums in Cambridge Common. It is Sunday, after all, and there’s sure to be a giant lovefest/drum circle out there, as there has been every Sunday for the last few years.

You cross over to the Tasty, tipping two fingers from your forehead towards the guy behind the counter whose name you don’t know despite seeing him every day. He tips a couple fingers back with one hand and slings a hot dog to a Harvard kid in a turtleneck with the other. Passing the Wursthauss, you look across the street to the giant hole where Leo’s and Whitney’s had been before they took the building down. Luckily, something’s going back up. Hopefully they’ll be back.

As you pass the Mandrake bookstore, you remember you were supposed to get a book of poetry for your girlfriend, but maybe Grolier’s would be better later. Or maybe Schoenhoff’s, and you can get her some Proust in French. She’ll love that.

And when was the last time you took her for candlepin bowling? You think to yourself as you pass the old sign.

You cross into the park, towards the old Pi Eta club. Taking the U shaped curve around the little Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park, you turn right on Winthrop Street. Just before you get to Club Henri IV, which everyone calls the Hungry Cat, you go down a little set of stairs into the basement under the Troll House dress shop where you find the new cafe you heard was a groovy little joint called Grendel’s Den. With wood panels, a classic bar, cheap wooden chairs, and the smell of pastries, coffee, and broiling beef permeating the place, it feels like a cozy den, indeed. A guy named Herbie with a slight German accent is shaving meat in the kitchen. His wife, Sue, greets you and leads you to your table. It smells good. It’s cozy and modest, with exposed brick on all sides, bar stools at the bar, weird-shaped tables in weird-shaped corners, and a fireplace. You kinda dig this vibe.

April 13th, 1984: You’re on your way to The Harvard Square movie theatre, which is debuting a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture show, and you’re gonna be there to see the madness. You figure you’ll get a good taste of the weirdos in the Square at this thing, especially considering this Friday is the 13th. Good marketing.

You come down Mass Ave and as you pass Harvard’s Widener Library on your right, you note the massive 5-story building going up where one Potato Two Potato had been just a few months before. Hopefully they’ll be back. Bob Slate’s Stationary and Schoenhoff’s Foreign Books, too. Would be a shame if they didn’t survive.

You cross Linden, and a guy on the corner tells you to repent, you sinner. Another guy hands you a “Let’s make the Soviet Union the 51st State” sticker. You walk past Emack and Bolio’s, where a group of teenagers with the spikiest dyed-green, egg-white-hardened 3-foot mohawks, stand chain smoking cigarettes. They’re all in thick leather jackets with spikes coming off of them, and cut-off jean shorts, despite the chilly weather.

You pass by the old T entrance, now sealed off with metal grates in front of the Porcellian Club. On the corner there now is a Chinese restaurant called Yenching. No Hayes Bickford, but Still smells pretty good. And notably, there’s no more stench of the subway coming up, as the last 6 years of utter destruction to make the new T station are finally coming to an end. The huge gaping pit that was Harvard Square is mostly sewn back together, though a few concrete barriers and other construction equipment show that it’s not all the way over yet.

As you come to the Au Bon Pain in the Holyoke Center, a guy with two amps and a ton of gain on his electric guitar is cranking out some crazy Van Halen riff from his latest album, aptly called 1984. You wonder what George Orwell would think if he could see what 1984 really looked like. Behind the mob is a small army of chess fans watching Murray Turnbull eviscerate yet another Harvard dweeb for a dollar wager. No one seems to care about public gambling on that scale.

You pass the Mug n Muffin, where the skater punks are really making a cloud of smoke, both from tobacco and other smells, and peek through the chain-link fencing into the Pit-like area that they’re STILL rebuilding as the Harvard Square plaza, already crawling with Punks, and covered in trash. It looks like a Pit, in every way. And where the hell do they think traffic is going to go now that they’ve screwed up the pattern? You shake your head and cross the street from the Tasty towards Nini’s Corner to grab a pack of smokes. A guy on roller skates nearly runs you over as he dances through traffic. A large sign on his back advertises Grendel’s Den, and you immediately recognize the large mustache of the bar’s owner, and your boss, Herbie, as he flies past.

As you pass the Greenhouse, you look in and see your girlfriend and her friends crowded around a table drinking tea and eating massive pieces of cake. She’s facing the wrong way, but you make faces in the window, and she finally sees you in the mirrors on the wall, and blows you a kiss. Tonight is for friends, though, and you keep walking to yours.

You go past Cardullo’s and the Coop’s other store, now selling huge amounts of clothing, and check out the place for Preppies to buy clothes, some new joint called “The Gap.” That’ll never survive in Harvard Square. Man, Harvard Square USED to be cool. Whatever happened to this place. Back in the day, it was all music, weirdos, mob bosses hanging out at Charlie’s Kitchen. Streakers, and violent protests. That’s when the Square had character. Now, it’s turning into something else.

The Tannery is under The Gap in a humongous space for a shoe store. You know at least three people who work there. There must be hundreds who do because the place is massive. It’s where you bought the platform heels you’re currently wearing as you head to Rocky Horror. Fishnets in a Boston April, though, may not have been the best choice, you think as you shiver.

There’s a guy juggling flaming torches for a delighted crowd of 150 or two hundred in front of Paperback Booksmith, but you go around him. On the other side of the plaza, out front of Calliope, is that cool guitarist you like with the crazy deep voice for a woman. She’s just finished a song. “What’s your name?” you ask, as you pop a dollar into her guitar case. “Tracy Chapman,” she says. “OK, Tracy. I’ll remember you when you’re famous,” you say with sincerity. She laughs.

You cross Brattle and head over to the Brattle Theatre, and go downstairs to Algiers, where your friend said he’d meet you, but he’s not there, so you assume he’s down getting a real drink, and head around the other side of the building to Casablanca. The air is thick as hell with smoke and people funk, but you find him and remind him you don’t want to miss the opening, as you love the song Science Fiction Double Feature.

You both knock back a quick shot of vodka, and head out across the street, banging a right on Church at Charlie Sage’s Market. You glance at your watch and realize you might actually have time for either another quick drink at the Oxford Ale House, or a quick scoop of chocolate ice cream at Steve’s across the road. But as you approach Palmer street, and hear the dulcet tones of folk music floating out of the stairway that you know leads to Passim, you see an unruly mob of folks in all kinds of fishnets and garter belts, and other things that remind you that you’re also dressed like a vaudevillian hooker, and it’s probably best to wait in line. You get the feeling you’ll probably be late for work tomorrow, since you have the lunch shift. But, hey, what the hell, this is gonna be totally rad.

June of 1993: Your walk down Mem drive was lovely, but it’s time to head to dinner. You take a right onto JFK Street, and chuckle as you pass the massive park where the JFK Library probably should have gone, but instead the people of Cambridge rebelled, and JFK had to settle for the renaming of Boylston street after him. The old MBTA yards that once were here are a distant memory as you pass the JFK School of Government, and the Galleria Mall where a gas station had once been. At least the Janus Theatre gives that building some character, you think to yourself, though the last movie you saw there was Bonfire of the Vanities, like 4 years ago.

The patio at Shay’s is already full of spectacled grad students in turtle necks, scribbling poetry furiously onto yellow legal pads, drinking coffee or chardonnay, or both. The smell of garlic coming down the alley from Iruña is quickly absorbed by the smell of French pastries from the Patisserie Francaise, and a couple of cigarette smoking skaters hanging out in front of Planet Records.

As you pass Winthrop Square, with its new look, new crisscrossing sidewalks, replacing the old horse-shoe path, and a new Newtowne Market sculpture (more of a rock), you sigh over the fact that you won’t be headed to Grendel’s Happy Hour this evening, where you could get dirt cheap food, since drinks can no longer be discounted in MA (thanks, Dukakis). For a second you think about changing your plans.

There’s a huge crowd waiting out in front of the House of Blues. You wonder who’s playing tonight, and think about taking a brief peek. Instead of House of Blues and Grendel’s, however, you’re headed to Upstairs at the Pudding, where you’ll spend a pretty penny, but you’re probably likelier to get your date’s attention.

As a silent protest to the Radio Shack, you take a right down Mount Auburn Street. Or is it because your ex is working at Uno’s Pizzeria, you hear, and you just want to avoid any possibility of seeing her tonight to throw you off your game?

As you pass Tweeter, across the street, and Tower Record, and Gnomon Copy, you wonder when it suddenly became cool for chains to open up shops in Harvard Square. Although the Dunkin Donuts wasn’t so bad. You look down into the depths of the one-room comic book store, Million Year Picnic, in a basement that looks up out its window all day at the big cross on the top of the Holy Cross Armenian Church. The church is closing, or moving soon, it’s rumored. Low attendance. The Armenian community in Cambridge is not what it once was.

You cross the street to the plaza in front of the express. That awesome Russian puppeteer is out, doing shows with his crazy little puppet he calls Doo Doo. You watch with 15 or so others, as this guy brings this little wooden doll with a trumpet for a nose to life. But just for a second. Don’t want to be late.

You cross to the other plaza where Brother Blue is out telling stories to another little crowd. Can’t stop, though, and you keep walking past the Au Bon Pain, the Booksmith, the Bertucci’s, and the two new little jewelry stores. You pass the Gap, and Origins. Cardullo’s is bustling with activity, as is the Greenhouse, and a steady flow of traffic streams in and out of Nini’s. The Square is just as busy as ever. And everyone’s oblivious that the Square USED to be so much more fly. Back in the 80s, there were independent businesses, and more locals than tourists, and far more bookstores and intellectuals, and culture, and music in the streets. Those were the good old days when the Square had character.

You wait for the light next to Frank Cardullo, who you recognize as the old man who ran Cardullo’s and the Wursthaus across the street. He retired a year ago, but you can’t imagine he just walked away. He’s probably just checking on stuff in his absence. You look up at the hilarious sign those car talk guys put up, pretending to be the law firm Dewey, Cheetham and Howe that’s just above the bank across the intersection. On the other side, above the Photo Hour, is a cowboy on a giant billboard smoking a Marlboro Red holding a lasso in the middle of cows.

As you cross through the Pit, a guy hands you a flyer for Frozen Yogurt from the TCBY on Mount Auburn. Out of Town News, recently purchased by Hudson News, glows like a Beacon in the middle of the Square. Musicians and homeless dot the bricks benches and very sidewalks themselves, napping, laughing, littering. You admire a girl with her lip pierced with seven rings, and more than twice that many in each ear. Best she avoids magnets, you think.

You walk past the Holyoke Center, and all the chess masters playing in the plaza in front of the Au Bon Pain. The break dancers are drawing a nice crowd next to the chess crowd, which isn’t tiny. It’s packed, in short. But you slither past to Yenching, the chinese joint on the corner. You bang a right, and are clear of the crowds. You pass The Hasty Pudding, and head past the Crocodile mounted on the wall, that apparently Teddy Roosevelt shot for some reason, and up to the roof deck in the restaurant upstairs where your evening awaits you.

Episode 4: Early 2000s, Gay Rights, Grendel’s Transitions (Potential Title: Things Change ) Cold Open:

Coming out of the weirdest, darkest productions of Uncle Vanya you’ve ever seen, courtesy of Robert Woodruff at the ART, you turn down Brattle Street. As you pass the old building that inspired Longfellow to write The Village Blacksmith, you sniff the passing aromas of High Rise Bakery, which used to be the Window Shop.

Or maybe that sweet scent is coming from the LA Burdicks, which is packed with folks coming out of the theatre. You go around them and past the Indian restaurant and cross Story street, past Crate and Barrel, peeping down the alley that leads to Harvest. You’ve got one thing on your mind, and that’s food. Time to get something cheap to eat. And maybe a beer.

It’s still early for Casablanca, and you don’t know anyone upon first glance outside of Algiers, so you decide to try one more spot for some company this evening, so you cross Brattle in front of Express, and then again towards WordsWorth, passing Million Year Picnic, which you prefer to Newbury Comics, as Newbury has gotten so mainstream, like the rest of Harvard Square.

You cross into Winthrop Park, and hop the fence by Peet’s Coffee to enter Grendel’s patio, wriggle through the chairs, down the stairs, and fling back the double hinged doors to see who’s there. The answer is no one you know. But you sit down on the classic wooden barstools and order a Smuttynose anyway. Suddenly, your trusty Blackberry starts ringing. You pick it up and your buddy greets you : “Wassaaaaaaaaaaap.” “Whazaaaaaaaaaaaaap,” you reply. Humiliatingly, in retrospect.

He’s at Pinocchio’s munching on pizza, and wants to see some comedy show, or something, so you toss back the rest of the bottle, tip the bartender well, and wander upstairs, where you wink at a couple of tourists on their way into Tommy Doyle’s to experience a “Hahvahd Bah”. Ohm, across the street, is already bumping with club music. You head across the road and around the backside of Berk’s shoe store, and into Pinocchios, where your hunger is finally satisfied by a thick Sicilian slice of mushroom and a slice of Buffalo Chicken. It’s so light and crispy. It’s gone in an instant.

And off you both go, heading past Harvard’s Fox Club, waiting for the light, and crossing Mount Auburn to the Garage. You peek down the stairs at the Skate shop on the other side of the 7-11, and almost get whacked by the street kids from Youth on Fire who are heading somewhere in a hurry. Uno’s Pizzeria is, as usual, pretty full of tourists, and Finagle a Bagel is the only dark storefront on the block at this hour.

As you turn the corner, you cringe wistfully at the Abercrombie and Fitch where the Tasty used to be. At least the Greenhouse is still open, you think, turning into the Pit, and crossing Dunster.

It’s a hive of activity in the plaza front of Au Bon Pain, as usual. Chess matches are flying, coffee and sandwich wrappers everywhere, a Beatles cover band blaring their fare with a crowd of tourists gathered around them. On the corner you spot Gregory and Butch smoking a hard earned cigertte after a day of selling more Spare Change newspapers than imaginable. You pass expecting Gregory’s familiar “Well, Hello Young Man,” but he’s clearly done for the day.

You pass J Auguste, now entirely full of Harvard paraphernalia for tourists, and then the store that you know will never close because it hasn’t, not since 1883, and the familiar delicious tobacco smell wafts out of the open door. Although there’s talk of a smoking ban indoors sometime in the near future. Seems unlikely, but you never know. This is the People’s Republic of Cambridge.

Passing Zinnia’s and Bob Slate’s Stationary and the hip new spot Grafton Street, you cross Plympton and admire the Harvard Book Store in all its splendor. It seems like this block is immortal, with its giant independent book store, Mr. Bartley’s burgers, and finally, your destination for eggrolls, scorpion bowls, and comedy on the third floor, The Iconic Hong Kong. The rumor you’d always heard that there was a brothel on the third floor in the 50s and 60s turned out not to be true, but Paul Lee, whose family owns the joint told you not to tell, as they kind of liked the publicity from the rumor. Tonight’s show will be funny, but after the second scorpion bowl, you won’t actually remember.

As you come out of the disco-themed Donkey Show at Club Oberon, the ART’s new-ish bar/dance/theatre venue, you look down and see a text from your lady that says “Went to Starbucks. Meet you there.” You scratch your head, and sit on the steps of Follow the Honey to gather your thoughts. There are three starbucks in Harvard Square, so you finally just pocket your phone, and head down Arrow Street, past Berryline, past the offices full of yoga instructors, psychologists, and architects, and swing a left just before Cafe Pamplona, passing the amazing facade of St Paul’s Church. For a minute you think of heading into Oona’s to get a tight pair of vintage pants so you can tell your girlfriend that they liked your dancing enough to cast you in the Donkey Show, but you’re covered in glitter already, and that’s enough.

Waiting for the light at the end of Bow Street, you turn right onto Mount Auburn Street. You pass Deadalus, the Boat House, and the empty gallery on the corner before approaching the little plaza in front of the Harvard Lampoon building, where 12 Poonsters stand in a 6×6 PVCpipe-and-tarpaulin swimming pool holding cans of Narragansett. You go past the student-run Harvard Store, you pass Insomnia cookies, Boloco burritos, and the hard-to-believe Tennis and Squash Shop that must be a mob front, right?:I mean, how much money can you possibly make selling squash balls these days? Best of luck to them.

Music is already blaring from the back of the Phoenix Club, or maybe the Spee, and In Your Ear music across the street has a small a cappella group in front of it, snapping in time, unsuccessfully competing with the bass from the amplified house music. They’d probably have more money in their hat if they were on the little platform leading into Schoenhoff’s Foreign bookstore, though no one seems to actually buy books in stores anymore, so maybe there’s just no foot traffic to justify it.

You pass the Holyoke center and cross Dunster across rom J Press. You enter the Garage, whiffing the basil and garlic from Le’s, and you poke your head into the Square’s sneakiest Starbucks, contained within the mini-mall, barely visible from the street. She’s not there, though, so on you go, past the chemical-bread smell of Subway, past Ben and Jerry’s, and underneath Crazy Dough, whose upstairs seating is always bustling with half-stoned teenagers, and this evening is no exception. Exiting the Garage on the other side of the building, you drop your spare change into the cup of some guy out in front of the old Life is Good store. You see a friend across the road, and he motions you over. In front of the Amex Travel, he invites you to Grendel’s for a drink, but you need to find your lady, so you say “Maybe in a bit,” and turn down JFK to Starbucks #2, smiling, as you always do, at the sign in front of the Travel agent that says “Please Go away . . .often.”

You can smell the Lush bath bombs from across the street, and as you pass Mudo shoe store, Vision Works, and the World’s Only Curious George store, you follow a whim, and pop around the corner into Tealuxe, just to make sure she didn’t confuse her coffee shops. Tealuxe and Crema Cafe are your spots but for some reason she’s fixated on the burnt coffee from Starbucks. But she’s not there, either, so you cross in a gap in traffic, scurrying past Cardullo’s, and Tory Row and the Coop, where the self-appointed mayor fo Harvard Square, Bob Marshall, and Dennis sit smoking cigars while Kelly does macrome, or whatever she’s up to, and cross over to the T stop, where Antonio is out late, entertaining tourists with his spraypaint art.

You enter the Square’s largest starbucks, next to PinkBerry, but she isn’t downstairs, or upstairs either, upon perusal, so there’s only one left. You cross Brattle street at Out of Town News, heading past Bank of America, CVS, T Mobile, and the Body Shoppe, turning left onto Church street, and passing Mint Julep, and the depressingly vacant Harvard Square Movie theatre. You wander across traffic, making sure to be on the other side of the road before you come to the mayhem of Margarita drunks in front of the Border Cafe, inhale the delicious scent of woodfired pizza from Cambridge One, and enter the tiny Starbucks next to Lizzy’s ice cream to find your lady reading her book of poems at the large window table, equipped with her typical grande chai latte with soy milk. “Want a coffee?” she smiles and asks, since she knows you aren’t drinking this month. “No, i want a mocktail. Let’s go to Grendel’s,” you reply.

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Cambridge Historical Tours

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Cambridge Historical Tours - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

Cambridge Historical Tours

Similar Experiences

Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as waiting time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

Cambridge Historical Tours - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

The Innovation Trail

The Innovation Trail is a way to experience, learn about, and be inspired by four centuries of world-changing breakthroughs from Boston. Join one of our scheduled walking tours, or use this website to guide you on your own stroll through the history of science, medicine, entrepreneurship, and technology. We want the Trail to inspire you to create the next great innovation!

Changing perceptions.

When most people think of Boston, they think about the American Revolution—or higher education. They might walk the Freedom Trail starting in Downtown Boston, and visit places linked to the start of the Revolution. Or they might be touring colleges, or attending events, at schools like MIT, Harvard, and Northeastern.

The Innovation Trail focuses primarily on what happened after America became an independent nation, and after some of Boston’s early schools like Boston Latin (founded in 1635) and Harvard (founded in 1636) were established. Independence and access to education began to build a foundation for innovation—as did societal changes like the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, waves of immigration, and marriage equality—allowing a diverse group of people to collaborate on research and company formation. Add in a desire to make the world better, and money from investors, universities, and government agencies to set up labs and run experiments—and voila, you get a thriving innovation ecosystem that has helped shape the modern world.

Who it’s for.

Visitors, residents, students, and teachers who want to understand more about Boston’s legacy of world-changing innovation.

What they’re saying.

Boston Magazine’s 2023 Best of Boston issue named The Innovation Trail the city’s “Best Walking Tour.” Yankee Magazine listed The Trail in its 2024 Best of Massachusetts feature. The Trail has also been covered by WBUR Radio Boston, GBH Boston Public Radio, NBC Boston, and the Boston Globe. The Trail is rated ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ on Google and TripAdvisor by those who have experienced it.

What’s next.

We’re working on a slate of events, tours, and education-related initiatives for 2024… raising money… and continuing to build awareness of the Trail. We’d love to get you onboard as a supporter of this important new experience in Boston! You can also follow us on social, or get in touch !

Tours & News

Guided tours open to the public are currently available every Saturday afternoon. Led by the award-winning guides of the Boston History Company.

Join us for our kick-off weekend as we celebrate our museum and science center partners! (Also: cool prizes!)

Special 2024 season kick-off walking tour and telephone museum visit

Arrange for a private guided tour of your own, led by the Boston History Company.

Special summer walking tour and museum visit in collaboration with History Camp.

Boston Magazine recognizes our walking tours, led by the Boston History Company, a Best of Boston winner for 2023.

Innovation Trail co-founder featured on the Explain Boston to Me podcast hosted by Lee Stabert

Innovation Trail featured in The Huntington News

The Innovation Trail is featured in November’s issue of Teach & Travel Magazine. Check out the article, “Massachusetts: A Small State with a Big Influence”

Co-hosts Jim Braude & Margery Eagan learn about The Innovation Trail

Tiziana Dearing interviews Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe correspondent and co-designer of the trail, and Namrata Sengupta of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Short video overview of the Trail featuring a walk of the Boston side.

Innovation Trail featured in Bostonia, Boston University’s Alumni Magazine

Reporter Molly Farrar goes on a tour.

Scott Kirsner describes the vision

Short audio segment

Creating a new way to tell the story of this region’s DNA of discovery, and our drive to solve tough problems.

Discover the Most Innovative City in America on Boston’s All-New Innovation Trail

Trail Sites

If you have an idea for something new, one of the ways to protect it from copycats—and eventually make money from it—is by filing a patent. In the 1860s, this building was the office of a patent law firm that employed Lewis Latimer. Latimer was the son of parents who escaped from slavery in Virgina and fled to Massachusetts. Audio Guide for This Stop:

(In a trial held after his father, George, was re-captured, George Latimer was represented by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, the famed abolitionists.) Lewis Latimer had little access to formal education, but after serving several years on a Union gunship during the Civil War—he joined at age 15—he got hired by the patent firm here at a salary of $3 per week, and taught himself how to draft intricate and detailed mechanical drawings. He rose to become head draftsman at the firm. Latimer helped the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, create the drawings used for the telephone’s first patent filing, and later, he worked with other inventors, including Hiram Maxim and Thomas Edison, to extend the useful life of the light bulb from minutes to hours and make it easier to manufacture, filing several patents of his own. By the end of Latimer’s career, he was a member of the Edison Pioneers, a small group of people who had worked closely with Edison in the early stages of his career. He was the only Black person in that group.

On your way to the next stop, see if you can spot a statue of Ben Franklin, the prolific inventor and signer of the Declaration of Independence. He attended Boston Latin School, originally located on this site, but ended his formal schooling at age 10 to work in his father’s soap and candle making shop not far from here. Boston Latin was America’s first public school, founded in 1635, offering free tuition to its students of all classes. It still exists, although in a different location.

The electric light bulb changed a lot of things about life in America. One industry that it gave birth to was the movies; without bright electric bulbs, you can’t have a movie projector. The three men who founded a company called Technicolor in 1914 had become intrigued by early movies—which were in black and white. They thought they could develop a new movie camera and projection system that could show movies in more realistic color. Audio Guide for This Stop:

Two of the founders had graduated from MIT—then called “The Tech”—so the name of their company is a reference to their alma mater. They set up a film processing lab in a railroad car, hitched it to a train, and sent it to Jacksonville, Florida, to shoot the first Technicolor film, “The Gulf Between.” It was shown for the first time here in 1917, and shortly after in New York—mainly to try to interest movie producers and theater owners in the idea of color movies. As the movie industry gravitated to Los Angeles, Technicolor followed it, leaving Boston behind. While you would have been among the first people to see a color movie if you were here in 1917, it wasn’t until 1939—the year that “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz” were made—that Technicolor convinced the movie industry that color was here to stay.

On the way to your next stop is the Omni Parker House Hotel, where both Boston Creme Pies and Parker House Rolls were invented.

One of the first millionaires in America was a man named Frederick Tudor, who was born in Boston. The business that made him rich? Shipping ice from frozen ponds in Massachusetts around the world, in the days before you could just plug in a freezer and start making your own cubes. Audio Guide for This Stop:

Part of Tudor’s genius was in selling a product that was free—frozen pond water—and using another free product—sawdust—to insulate it when he packed it into sailing ships and sent it around the world. (He tested various ways to keep the ice cold in transit and in storage at its ultimate destination.) Tudor’s ice made it to the Caribbean, India, Hong Kong, and England, and he built a network of ice houses around the world to store it. In warm weather countries like Cuba and Martinique, Tudor’s ice was used to make ice cream for the first time.

He would tell his salesmen to give bartenders a free one-year’s supply, after teaching them to make cocktails that benefitted from having ice in them. That created loyal customers. (Year-round access to ice was also helpful to doctors, who used it to treat patients who were suffering from severe fevers.) Along the way, Tudor went bankrupt and served time in debtor’s prison. But he eventually succeeded and became known as “The Ice King.” He died in 1864 in his home on Beacon Hill, and is buried in the back right corner of this cemetery. Look for a small, faded tombstone that says John Tudor, and an explanatory sign nearby.

One of the most important people in Boston’s early scientific history was an enslaved man named Onesimus, who was “given” to the preacher Cotton Mather by Mather’s congregation, and lived in Mather’s house in the North End. If you look for the white steeple of Old North Church, that neighborhood is the North End, where Onesimus lived. Audio Guide for This Stop:

There’s not much trace of him—or Cotton Mather’s house, which was located near Hanover Street, the neighborhood’s main street. Onesmus was born in the late 1600s, and lived in Mather’s household in the early 1700s. One of the most feared diseases of the time was smallpox, which killed about 30 percent of the people who got it, and left many of the survivors with severe scars—pockmarks—on their faces. Onesimus explained to Mather that in Africa, he had been inoculated against smallpox. His arm was cut open, a small amount of material from a person infected with smallpox was inserted into the wound.

Though Mather tried to promote the idea of inoculation as a smallpox epidemic gripped Boston in 1721, people at the time were skeptical of a medical procedure that seemed to be based on African customs. (At one point, someone hostile to the idea threw a small bomb through Mather’s window—which luckily failed to explode.) But Mather and a doctor who lived near present-day Government Center, Zabdiel Boylston, gathered data about the survival rates of those Bostonians who were inoculated. In the 1721 smallpox outbreak, only two percent of inoculated people died, compared to almost 15 percent of those who had not been inoculated. This was one of the earliest clinical trials on record in the US, using experimental and control groups to illustrate the effectiveness of inoculation. It would not have been possible without Onesimus.

(Look for a waist-high pedestal with a plaque on it.) Oops. Boston is usually great at preserving important historic buildings, but the one that used to stand right near here, Charles William, Jr.’s shop, was knocked down as part of the “urban renewal” program that got rid of tenement buildings and made space for Boston’s city hall (behind you) and the JFK Federal Building. Audio Guide for This Stop:

After the telegraph had been developed in the 1830s and begun to be used as the first real-time, long-distance communications technology, inventors began thinking about how to improve it. Maybe you could send multiple signals down the same wire, or perhaps even a human voice? The telegraph shop run by Charles Williams, Jr. was a magnet for telegraph tinkerers—including a young telegraph operator who worked for Western Union named Thomas Edison, who hung out after work in this shop.

Edison’s first patented invention, an automatic vote-recording machine for Congress and other legislative bodies to use when taking votes, was a flop, but it taught him an important lesson. Elected officials didn’t want to make vote counting faster, because then there was less time to convince their fellow legislators to change their votes. After that, Edison resolved that he would only invent things that people wanted.

But a Boston University professor named Alexander Graham Bell invented something pretty successful here: the telephone. Williams liked the invention, and had the first two telephones installed in his shop and his home in Somerville three miles away (which is still standing, at 1 Arlington Street, Somerville.) His phone numbers? 1 and 2. In the first few years after the telephone’s invention, every piece of telephone equipment was made in this building—until demand got too great.

Why did Bell, who was born in Scotland, went to college in London, and lived much of his life in Canada, invent the telephone here? He was able to establish a network of skilled technicians, and find an early investor who was the father of one of his students at the then-new Boston University. He had people like Lewis Latimer to help him file patents. Innovations don’t happen without money, networks of people to work with you, and a city that has early adopters like Charles Williams Jr.

You can stand on the lawn outside the Bulfinch Building at Massachusetts General Hospital—or, if the hospital is allowing visitors, you can go inside and seek out the Ether Dome. It’s worth seeing from the inside, and it is open to the public as long as there is not a lecture or meeting taking place. Audio Guide for This Stop:

The Dome is a top-floor operating theater that was designed to allow doctors and medical students observe surgeries as they happened, and in the years before Edison’s electric light bulb, it relied on the sun and skylights in the roof to provide enough illumination so the surgeons could see what they were doing. In 1845, the head surgeon at Mass General, John Collins Warren, performed a tooth extraction on a medical student using the gas nitrous oxide to knock out the patient. Unfortunately, the dose wasn’t right, and the patient experienced just as much pain as if the gas hadn’t been used.

Warren tried again in 1846, using a different gas, sulfuric ether, and a different person administering it, the Boston dentist William T.G. Morton. This time, after a patient had a tumor from his neck removed, he described the feeling as having his neck scratched a bit. The use of inhaled ether as an anesthetic spread around the world; it allowed surgeons to perform a much wider range of operations without causing pain. Warren was a big deal: he was a founder not only of Mass General Hospital, but also the New England Journal of Medicine, and he served as the first dean of Harvard Medical School. (Warren also is tied to the American Revolution: his father, also a doctor, treated wounded soldiers in the early battles, and his uncle, Joseph Warren, was a leading Patriot who fought and died at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775.)

Mass General has been the site of many other firsts, including the first surgery to reattach a limb, in 1962, and the first use of “telemedicine” in 1968 to enable doctors to evaluate and treat patients in another location.

Showcasing the evolution of medicine, including some of the instruments used in the first surgery with anesthesia, the Paul Russell Museum of Medical History and Innovation opened on the Mass General Hospital campus in 2012. (Free to the public. Currently open Tuesday through Friday, 10 AM to 2 PM, and Saturdays, 11 am to 4 pm from April through October.) Audio Guide for This Stop:

(optional detour) Visit the Museum of Science, founded in 1830 as the Boston Society of Natural History. One of the first museums to bring all of the sciences together in one place. Notable exhibit: Navigating a World with AI , featuring robots from iRobot and Boston Dynamics, and AI-powered artwork by Boston’s Masary Studios. Adds about 20-30 minutes of beautiful walking along the Charles River. Audio Guide for This Stop:

The dot-com era of the late 1990s inspired Tim Rowe, a graduate of MIT’s business school, to start Cambridge Incubator, a company that would start companies. That idea didn’t pan out, especially as the stock market crashed in 2000 and Internet startups with big ideas but very little revenue fell out of favor. But Rowe took the office space he’d rented and started carving it up into small blocks that he could rent to other startups—while also providing services like Internet access, space for events, and free coffee and snacks. Audio Guide for This Stop:

Entrepreneurs helping one another by offering feedback, or connections to potential customers or investors, was a key part of the formula. What started as Cambridge Incubator became Cambridge Innovation Center, and later CIC. Today, the CIC buildings in Kendall may be home to more startups and venture capital firms than any other buildings on the planet. The CIC served as the first Massachusetts address for tech giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon. It was the original address for successful companies like HubSpot, a marketing software company that is now publicly-traded and has an office of its own. CIC now has a global footprint, operating over 1 million square feet of office and lab space in cities like Philadelphia, Rotterdam, Warsaw, and Tokyo. CIC Health, launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, provided testing services to schools, and operated large-scale vaccination clinics at Fenway Park and Gillette Stadium.

Venture Café , another CIC founded entity, hosts public networking events, panel discussions, and pitch nights. Stop by almost any Thursday night of the year to see for yourself.

Just across Broadway from the tower at One Broadway, you'll see a plaza with a globe fountain in the center. Seek out the "Looking Glass" sculpture, designed by teen creatives from the nonprofit Innovators for Purpose. It's a wonderful photo spot that declares Kendall Square is the "most innovative square mile on the planet."

Created in 2011, the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame recognizes founders and inventors like Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs of Apple, and Mitch Kapor of Lotus Development Corp. Audio Guide for This Stop:

New location of the MIT Museum, reopened October 2022. Showcases ongoing research and ingenuity at the world-famous Institute, while also displaying past achievements through its vast collection— including archives from Polaroid Corp., the pioneering maker of instant cameras, founded a few blocks away. The museum offers a range of exhibitions and installations, a state-of-the-art maker space where visitors can tinker and discover, and ongoing programs. Audio Guide for This Stop:

If you own a phone that uses the Android operating system, that’s the primary reason that Google now has a sprawling office in Cambridge that employs about 2,000 people (as of 2021.) Way back in the days before the iPhone—2005—Google bought a startup whose two co-founders were based in Cambridge and Silicon Valley. That startup was called Android, and it was working on new operating system software for mobile phones. Its Cambridge-based co-founder, Rich Miner, began to hire engineers to work alongside him after the acquisition. Audio Guide for This Stop:

So Boston not only brought the world the telephone in the 19th century, but it also helped to create the world’s most popular smartphone operating system of the 21st century, with more than 2.5 billion Android users. As of 2021, Google’s Cambridge employees were working on projects for youtube, Google Travel, and Google News.

Secret spot: While you can’t go into Google to enjoy their free cafeteria food, snacks, and coffee, you can go up to the Kendall Rooftop Garden , which looks in on some of the Google space. It is being renovated but will open in Summer 2022. It’s a great place for a rest or a picnic lunch.

MIT’s motto is “mens et manus,” Latin for “mind and hand,” and that blend of intellectual exploration and practicality is part of what has made the school so successful at producing not just new breakthroughs, but also entrepreneurs, startups, and major, publicly-traded companies. Inside the Stata Center at MIT are labs focused on computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics (they gave birth to iRobot Corp., maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner), and a small, ground-floor exhibit about student “hacks,” or pranks, through the years. Audio Guide for This Stop:

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, works here—though the web was invented when Berners-Lee worked in Switzerland. The current building was designed by the California architect Frank Gehry, and named for Ray Stata, an MIT alumnus who co-founded the chip company Analog Devices. Bill Gates, the Harvard drop-out who co-founded Microsoft, was also a major donor.

This site was previously home to the Rad Lab, which was set up in the years leading up to World War II to develop key radar technologies. Many historians regard these technologies as crucial to the Allied victory over Hitler, helping the Allies to “see” enemy ships, planes, and other targets at long distances, and better direct their guns and bombs. It was also in this building that the term “hacker” was first used—in a positive context—and many of the origins of hacker culture had their roots, as part of the MIT Model Railroad Club. (Closed to the public during COVID pandemic.)

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard seeks to better understand the roots of disease and narrow the gap between new biological insights and creating impact for patients. (Pronounce “Broad” to rhyme with “road” and people will think you work there.) Beginning in the 2010s, the Broad has made key contributions to “genome editing” and a technique known as CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”), which is helping to improve our knowledge of how diseases work, and develop new types of therapies. Launched in October 2022, the new Broad Discovery Center is an active, public educational space that showcases how researchers in Kendall Square and around the world are seeking to understand and treat human disease. Audio Guide for This Stop:

The Broad Discovery Center has five galleries where visitors can immerse themselves in interactive and informative exhibits. Visitors learn how researchers at Broad and its partner institutions are teaming up with collaborators across the globe to chase down the roots of psychiatric conditions, cancer, infectious diseases, and more, develop new strategies for treatment, and build datasets and technologies to share with other scientists.

Optional stop: Directly across the street is the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research (500 Main Street), which has public galleries that are accessible on weekdays. These feature scientific photography and art, and provide an overview of current cancer research at MIT.

The Whitehead Institute was created in 1982 by philanthropist Jack Whitehead and David Baltimore, an MIT professor and Nobel Prize winner. A key part of the vision was assembling a supergroup of the world’s top biomedical researchers in one building, and eliminating “virtually any impediment to their pursuit of scientific discovery,” supplying ample funding and the most sophisticated lab equipment, but limited bureaucracy. (It’s an independent nonprofit affiliated with MIT.) Audio Guide for This Stop:

When the Human Genome Project was seeking to map the entire human genome—described as the world’s largest collaborative biological project—the Whitehead was the single largest contributor. The Whitehead’s Center for Genomic Research was spun out in the early 2000s to create the neighboring Broad Institute. Groups at the Whitehead are currently seeking to understand the biology of infectious diseases; why cancer cells behave differently from healthy cells, and what enables them to multiply so quickly; new ways to model and understand how the brain works; and many other biological domains.

To get over to Broadway, take the walkway next to the Broad Discovery Center and head toward Danny Lewin park, or take Ames Street. Biogen was one of the earliest biotech companies. Two of its founders, Walter Gilbert and Phillip Sharp, were professors at Harvard and MIT respectively; both were awarded Nobel Prizes. Audio Guide for This Stop:

Biogen’s mastery of recombinant DNA technology—using enzymes to “cut and paste” sequences of DNA to achieve therapeutic effects—enabled it to develop a vaccine for hepatitis B, as well as the drug Avonex, which is used to treat multiple sclerosis. (The name Biogen originally referred to “Biotechnology Geneva,” the city where the company was founded in 1978.) Biogen went public in 1983, and first set up a manufacturing plant in Cambridge in 1986. A Biogen drug approved in 2021, Aduhelm, targets Alzheimer’s disease.

Across the plaza is the campus of the headquarters of Akamai, a company that began life at MIT. Its original idea was to set up a network of servers around the world to cache, or store, content closer to where people wanted to access it—making everything show up faster on web browsers. Some of the company’s first successful large-scale demonstrations, in 1999, involved the delivery of a movie trailer for “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” and ESPN’s March Madness college basketball coverage. Audio Guide for This Stop:

(Danny Lewin, a co-founder of the company, was aboard a plane that left Boston on the morning of September 11th, 2001, and was killed trying to disrupt the hijacking.) Akamai today operates more than 300,000 servers around the world, and generates $3.5 billion in annual revenue—but when the founders were still at MIT, they were famously finalists in the school’s annual business competition, but not a winner.

Walk down Broadway and take a left at Technology Square. At 555 is Draper Labs, where you’ll see a giant moon hanging in the lobby. (There are sometimes displays open to the public as well.) Draper began life as a lab inside MIT; eventually it was spun out to be an independent research and development lab. Among its greatest achievements are the guidance computers that enabled Apollo spacecraft to successfully travel to and land on the moon. One of the software developers who wrote the code that ran these guidance computers was Margaret Hamilton, who later founded two companies and is credited as one of the people who defined the field of “software engineering.” Audio Guide for This Stop:

A few steps down from Draper Labs is the headquarters of Moderna Pharmaceuticals, which was founded in 2010 to explore the potential of modified RNA molecules (hence the name “mod-RNA”) to treat diseases or serve as a vaccine. The company’s founders were a team of university professors and venture capitalists who were born in Canada, Lebanon, and the United States, and the company’s first CEO was born in France. Audio Guide for This Stop:

In 2020, Moderna developed and received emergency use authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine based on its modified RNA technology. Moderna’s vaccine was among the fastest vaccines ever developed.

It’s hard to find a building with more ties to more different eras of innovation than this one. When first constructed, it was the Davenport Car Works, one of the country’s first manufacturers of passenger railroad cars. (Davenport pioneered the use of a center aisle for easy movement and greater passenger capacity, as well as the reversible seat, which could be switched to face forward if the train changed directions.) Audio Guide for This Stop:

Later, it was home to the Walworth Manufacturing Company, where a Walworth employee invented an adjustable wrench with incredible gripping power called the Stillson that is still in use today. In 1876, when Walworth was based here, this building was the site of the first “long distance” demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, from a Walworth office in Boston to this building, with Thomas Watson manning the equipment on this end. The goal was to prove the usefulness of the telephone in business.

In the late 1930s, an inventor named Edwin Land moved in. On a vacation in New Mexico, Land’s daughter wondered why the photos taken in traditional film cameras couldn’t be seen right away—they had to be developed in a lab. That innocent question led Land to invent the first instant camera, and start a company called Polaroid to market it. Even though Polaroid’s headquarters moved elsewhere in Cambridge, Land kept his private research lab here. One entrepreneur who was inspired by Land was Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer, who said that Land “saw the intersection of art and science and business, and built an organization to reflect that.”

Today, this brick building is occupied by LabCentral, a shared laboratory space used by dozens of fledgling biotech companies. When the building is open, you can go into the lobby and see small displays about the telephone and instant photography. If it's not open, see if you can find the accents above the building's windows that include fragments of railroad ties — a nod to the site's past.

This building from 1927 is a link to an era when Cambridge was one of the country’s manufacturing centers. Throughout much of the 1800s and well into the 1900s, the city was home to companies that made bicycle tires, fire hoses, telescope lenses, soap, pianos, ping-pong paddles, and ice cream. Audio Guide for This Stop:

There were also at one point 66 different candy companies in Cambridge, making everything from candy hearts for Valentine’s day to Squirrel Nut Zippers to lemon drops. (The Fig Newton cookie was also invented in Cambridge, in 1891—even though they were named for the nearby city of Newton.) This building is the last operating candy factory in Cambridge, owned by Tootsie Brands. The company unfortunately doesn’t offer tours, in part because candy companies are notoriously secretive about the equipment and processes they use to make candy—“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” wasn’t too far off base. Inside, they make 26 million pieces of candy a day. Why is that number so high? The factory is the only place in the world that Sugar Babies and Junior Mints are made—both of which are small little morsels.

If you look through the parking lot on the right side of this building (or walk over to 250 Massachusetts Avenue), you can see the top of another candy factory. That one, the former New England Confectionery Company, or NECCO, has a water tower on top that now sports a DNA helix. When the building made NECCO wafers and conversation hearts (“Be Mine”)—from the 1920s until 2003— the water tower was painted like a rainbow roll of that chalky candy. At one time, it was the world’s biggest candy factory under one roof. The building is now occupied by the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, the main research lab for the Swiss biopharma company. (Fun fact: like Willie Wonka’s factory, the building has glass elevators.) While Novartis and other biopharma companies design and test new drugs here in Cambridge, for the most part when they create something that is approved by the FDA and can be prescribed to patients, it’s made elsewhere. Cambridge’s real estate has become too valuable to do manufacturing these days—though the Cambridge Brands factory is hanging in there.

Across Main Street there is a mural that tells the story of candy manufacturing in Cambridge.

What next? There are other “off Trail” sites you can visit in Cambridge and beyond. (Scroll down to "Beyond the Trail.") If you’re hungry or thirsty, drop by Toscanini’s Ice Cream or Miracle of Science, two favorite hangouts of the Kendall Square and MIT communities a few steps away from the Cambridge Brands factory.

You can start the Innovation Trail in Downtown Crossing, near the Irish Famine Memorial and the Old South Meeting House, or in Cambridge near Central Square. To get to the Boston start, you want to get off on the MBTA’s Park Street, Downtown Crossing, Government Center, or State Street stops in Boston. All are less than a five minute walk to the Stop #1. To get to the Cambridge start, get off at the MBTA’s Red Line stop at Central Square in Cambridge. Walk down Massachusetts Avenue toward 810 Main Street.

If you scroll to the top of this site, you’ll see buttons that will rearrange the map depending on whether you want to start in Boston or Cambridge.

Another option is to start at the Museum of Science, and walk either toward the Boston or Cambridge side of the Trail. To do that, you can use the MBTA’s Science Park stop on the Green Line. The Kendall Square stop on the Red Line is helpful if you want to only walk the Cambridge side of the Trail.

Our audio guide covers all 21 stops of the Trail, and you can find it on iTunes , Spotify , or this site (click play on any of the audio segments at each stop). We worked with award-winning journalist and podcaster Wade Roush to create it, and the narrator is the Boston venture capitalist Carmichael Roberts.

The Boston Common Visitors Center, near the start of the Innovation Trail, has public restrooms. You may also be able to use restrooms inside the Omni Parker House Hotel or Boston’s Old City Hall (between Stops #1 and #2), Flour Bakery or Starbucks (on Cambridge Street between Stops #5 and #6), the Wyndham Boston Beacon Hill (between Stops #5 and #6), the Liberty Hotel (between Stops #7 and #8), One Broadway (Stop #9, in the restaurant Shy Bird or Brothers Marketplace), the Boston Marriott Cambridge (at Stop #10), A4 Café (between Stops #19 and 20), or Toscanini’s Ice Cream (after Stop #21.) All these stop numbers assume you are walking the Trail from Boston to Cambridge.

That depends on how many of the museums you go into, but if you’re using this site’s self-guided tour and you opt not to visit any of the museums, you can walk the full Trail in about three hours.

You could walk just the Boston half, or just walk the Cambridge half. (Click the button that says “Start from Cambridge” to see the stops listed starting from near Central Square.) You could also visit one of the great museums on the Trail, and perhaps add a nearby site before or after.

Our ticketed tours for the public currently run Friday, Saturday, and Sunday between May and October and are facilitated by the award-winning Boston History Company (formerly known as Cambridge Historical Tours.) They are 90-minute walking tours of the Cambridge portion of the Trail. They start and end in Kendall Square, starting at the Boston Marriott Cambridge hotel and ending outside of the MIT Stata Center (just a 5 minute walk back to the starting point). They do not include stairs, and so are very accessible to people using strollers or wheelchairs. These tours have ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings and glowing reviews on TripAdvisor and Google .

The ticketed walking tours, led by Cambridge Historical Tours, cover just the Cambridge side of the Trail. The ticket price does not include admission to the MIT Musuem or other museums, but they do go into galleries at the Broad Institute/Broad Discovery Center, and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab when the buildings are open. We encourage you to check out the museums on the Trail before or after your guided walking tour. The Broad Discovery Center and MGH Museum of Medical History & Innovation offer free admission; the MIT Museum and Musuem of Science have admission fees.

If you are walking the Innovation Trail as a self-guided our, we encourage you to check out the museums that are of greatest interest to you. All of them have restroom facilities; the MIT Museum and Museum of Science also have gift shops. Only the Museum of Science has a cafeteria and beverages available for sale.

The Pi Alley Parking Garage at 275 Franklin Street is closest to the start of the Trail in Boston. The Boston Common Garage and Center Plaza Garage are both a short walk from the start. If you park near the Boston start and walk all the way to Cambridge, it’s easy to take the MBTA back from the Central Square stop on the Red Line to the Park Street Stop on the Red Line. (This ride is three stops.)

If you’re starting on the Cambridge end, the 55 Franklin Street garage in Cambridge is well-located. If you walk all the way to Boston, you can take the MBTA’s Red Line from Park Street to Central Square to return to your car. (This ride is three stops.)

Absolutely. If you’re using Bluebikes , Boston’s bike-sharing program, there are stations at the Boston and Cambridge end of the Trail, and there are also places to drop bikes near all four of the museums on the Trail, if you’d like to go inside the Museum of Science, MIT Museum, Broad Discovery Center, or Museum of Medical History & Innovation at MassGeneral.

See the “Tours & Events” section of this site for upcoming tours and activities open to the public. If you’d like to arrange for a private group tour of the Trail, these can be arranged with our partner, The Boston History Company. Send us a note with your requested dates and we’ll respond ASAP.

We’d love to hear from you about what you think should be included. Either tag us on social media (@bostoninnotrail), or click the menu at the upper right corner of the page and choose “Connect with Us” to send us your thoughts.

Many innovative people and places aren’t included simply for reasons of geography; we wanted to create a walkable route in Boston and Cambridge, close to hotels, T stops, and other tourist destinations. Some aren’t included because there just isn’t a building/plaque/marker/historic home/museum or anything to see. In other cases, we had to be selective: how much (and what) do you highlight at a university like MIT or Harvard, for instance? But see the “Beyond the Trail” section of the site for interesting sites located around Greater Boston, some a short distance from the Trail itself. And we plan to continue evolving and adding to what’s here with input from you.

In creating the Trail, we wrestled with the city’s history, where many people involved in forming institutions, being educated by those institutions, and creating new inventions were white men. Boston, like many other cities across the country, has not exactly been a place of equal opportunity over the course of its history, and that reality is reflected in our legacy of innovation.

One of the Trail’s aims is to work with historians and others in the community to identify stories and contributions from BIPOC, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community whose work may have not yet been properly recognized and celebrated. We will endeavor to highlight the work being done by other organizations on this issue (See “Beyond the Trail,” under “Societal innovations and social change” for links.) We will also highlight work being done by existing sites on the Trail, like MassGeneral, to detail the diverse innovators who have contributed to their success and progress. If you’d like to participate or contribute, please click “Connect with Us” and send us an email. We plan to share additional stories on this website, on our social feeds, and in live tours.

Yes. We have had many dogs learn about innovation along with their human followers. One caveat: dogs are not permitted into any of the museums, offices, or MIT buildings on the Trail, unless they are service animals.

If you are walking the Trail with a dog, please tell them that the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was the first to sequence the complete dog genome (a boxer named Tasha.) More info here .

Beyond the Trail

Any time you try to curate a walkable set of sites, you’re forced to leave some things off—no matter how amazing—because they may require a few extra footsteps, a drive, or a trip on the T. But this group of museums, national park sites, monuments, and other university buildings are each well worth a visit. Many of them provide important context about the social, educational, and historical foundations that made possible the innovation ecosystem that exists in Boston today. We’ve listed them in order of their proximity to the Innovation Trail.

Many other sites and walking trails in Greater Boston highlight the role that social innovations played in creating a foundation for scientific and technical innovation, and in allowing a diverse group of people to access education, enjoy greater freedoms and equal rights, and contribute to academia and the business world.

These social change movements include advocating for the abolition of slavery (Massachusetts was the first state to do so in 1783), highlighted by the Museum of African American History and the Black Heritage Trail ; women’s suffrage and participation in labor unions, universities, and cultural institutions, highlighted by the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail ; marriage equality, with the first legal same-sex marriage in the United States, in 2004 (this took place at Cambridge’s City Hall , and the Boston Equality Trail highlights other important locations related to LGBTQ+ history leading up that moment); and the drafting of the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780, which served as a model for the United States Constitution (learn more about it at the John Quincy Adams birthplace or the Commonwealth Museum .) Several self-guided tours and trails organized by History Cambridge highlight that city’s heritage of political activism (as well as candy making .)

The Media Lab at MIT has spawned products like Lego’s Mindstorms robotics kit, the iWalk prosthetic foot, and the video game “Rock Band.” A first-floor exhibition space, showcasing the work of professors and students, is open to the public.

Henri Termeer, born in the Netherlands, was one of the pioneering executives of the early biotech industry, serving as CEO of Genzyme for nearly three decades. At the company, he helped shepherd science out of the lab and into the marketplace, delivering treatments for patients with rare (and often fatal) diseases like Gaucher and Fabry. Termeer helped elevate the profile of the biotech industry in Massachusetts and nationally. Genzyme was ultimately acquired for $20 billion by the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi. Termeer died in 2017. The square includes a statue of Termeer, quotes, and a reflecting pool inspired by the book “The Giving Tree.” The building at 500 Kendall Street, on the south side of the square, was originally built as Genzyme’s headquarters. It was the first LEED platinum-certified green building of its size in the US.

termeerfoundation.org/inspiredby/termeersquare

Look for the Ether Monument in the northwest corner of the Public Garden, near the intersection of Arlington and Marlborough Streets. It commemorates the first use of anesthesia; since several people claimed to have “discovered” ether for medical applications, the monument depicts a medieval doctor in Moorish robes, representing a generic Good Samaritan, anesthetizing a patient. An inscription says, “To commemorate that the inhaling of ether causes insensibility to pain.”

First subway system in Western Hemisphere (1897), built to relieve traffic congestion in downtown Boston. To power the subway, the Thompson-Houston Company had to build one of the most powerful electric plants in the world, in 1895. New York City and Boston were in a fierce competition to build the first subway over more than a decade; Boston was victorious. There are some historic displays at Park Street, and older trolleys at Boylston Street, the first two stations built.

The former home of Harvard Business School professor Georges Doriot. A French immigrant Doriot started what is regarded as the first venture capital firm (1946), Boston-based American Research and Development. Venture capital firms provide funding to entrepreneurs based on the merits of their idea; that money is a crucial driver of innovation in many fields. Among Doriot’s investments: Digital Equipment Corp., which turned the firm’s $70,000 investment into more than $350 million. At one point, Digital was the second largest technology firm in the world, after IBM. (Private home, not open to the public.)

Inside Harvard’s new Science and Engineering Complex, you can find a portion of the Harvard Mark 1 Computer, and a display featuring programming pioneer Grace Hopper and the very first computer bug (an actual moth trapped in the relays.) The computer was built during World War II, and some of the first programs run on it were simulations related to the design of the first atomic bomb.

“Massachusetts Innovations — Transforming the World.” Detailed display and video wall featuring fifty of the “greatest hits” of Massachusetts innovations. In Terminal C, near Gate C9. (This display is inside airport security, so you’ll need to be flying in or out of Logan Airport to see it.)

Students run these free tours of Harvard Yard, touching on the university’s history and the student experience. Many other operators run ticketed tours of Harvard.

harvard.edu/visit/tours

Home of the first woman to graduate from MIT, and the university’s first female instructor. Ellen Swallow Richards was the founder of the home economics movement, which sought to apply science in the home. She used this house as a laboratory, continually updating its ventilation, plumbing, and heating to create an optimal, safe, and efficient living environment. Swallow Richards also did pioneering work in water safety testing, and creating school lunch programs for low-income children. (Private home, not open to the public.)

Harvard University has been acquiring scientific instruments since 1672 — including magnificent orreries, compasses designed by Galileo, electrical apparatus donated by Benjamin Franklin, and cyclotron control panels. The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments is now among the largest university collections of its kind in the world. Admission is free. See website for current hours. The collection is located inside the Harvard Science Center, a short walk from Harvard Square.

chsi.harvard.edu

The Boston Manufacturing Company (1814), located here, was the first fully-integrated, water-powered cotton textile mill in the world—raw cotton entered at one end and came out as finished cloth at the other. It was also the first modern industrial corporation, pioneering the business model for organizing a manufacturing concern that remains the global standard today. The site now houses the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation, dedicated to telling the story of technology as a human endeavor that produces a variety of outcomes. Exhibits explore Waltham’s role in the rise of American industry, from textile manufacturing to machine tools, power systems, timekeeping (the Waltham Watch Company), and transportation (Metz motorcars and Orient bicycles).

charlesrivermuseum.org

In 1801 Paul Revere began rolling copper for the U.S. Government. The 9 acre Paul Revere & Son Heritage Site is a park and buildings that contain displays about the first copper rolling mill in America—as well as temporary exhibits focussing on innovation and history. (One focuses on Reebok, the sneaker company that was once headquartered in Canton.) A larger Paul Revere Museum of Discovery & Innovation is in the planning stages.

paulreveremuseum.org

Learn about the history of the Industrial Revolution by visiting mill buildings, seeing equipment operate, riding historic trolleys, and visiting the boardinghouses where mill workers lived.

nps.gov/lowe/index.htm

Opened in 2022. Features more than twenty immersive exhibits that make the history of the American Industrial Revolution come alive with projections and full-scale recreations. Raised in the UK, Samuel Slater was known as “Slater the Traitor” for bringing British textile-manufacturing technology to America. The museum features a recreation of Slater’s office, mill worker housing, a working water wheel, and an interactive textile design station.

samuelslaterexperience.org

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Communications Strategy Consultant; Author, “ The Front Steps Project ”

Downtown Boston Business Improvement District

Head of Next Practice & Inclusive Growth, MassChallenge

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Black Gems Unearthed

Initiative for a Competitive Inner City ; former Treasurer of Massachusetts

President Emeritus, MassTLC

Boston Marriott Cambridge

InnoLead / Boston Globe / Author, “ Innovation Economy ”

Massachusetts Historical Society

Author, “ Boston Made ”; Founder, Entrepreneur Innovation Center at Framingham State University

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Museum of Science

Landscape Architect and Public Historian

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Commonwealth Marketing Office

Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT

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Patent Attorney

History Cambridge

Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation

Author, “ Born in Cambridge ”; USA Today

Co-Founder, Greentown Labs & Founder, Nano-Ice

Thanks to Visual Dialogue for the Innovation Trail creative concept, design, and website Susan Battista Luke Hatfield Will Kastrinakis Fritz Klaetke Kristen McNally

Support the Trail

The Innovation Trail is a grassroots initiative—and we need your support. Our goal is to tell the stories of how innovations born in Boston shaped our world, and to inspire future generations of scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and educators. We’ve recently launched a schedule of regular public tours, but we have BIG plans to make this a must-do field trip, a more immersive and tech-forward experience, an essential part of any visit to Boston—and yes, eventually even posting signs or painting a line on the sidewalk. (If the Freedom Trail and an MIT fraternity can do it…. why not us?) We aren’t funded by any city agencies or universities. Our financial support comes entirely from people and organizations who believe in innovation as a force for good in the world. Is that you?

You can make a donation using the big red button at right, or by mailing a check to The Innovation Trail of Greater Boston , 217 Hanover Street, PO Box 130386, Boston MA 02113. The Innovation Trail is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and your donation is tax deductible as allowed by law.

Sharon Historical Society

Henry Ancona
Peter Bleyleben
Michael Dornbrook
Cary Goldberg
Marina Hatsopoulos
Maia Heymann
Tom Hopcroft
Geoff Hyatt
Scott Kirsner & Amy Traverso
Harry Kirsner
Bob Krim & Dr. Kathlyne Anderson
John Landry
George Mabry
Michael Mark
Robert Mason
Alex Rigopulos
Namrata Sengupta
Reed Sturtevant
Phil and Roseanne Swain
Chris Weaver

(The Innovation Trail is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and your donation is tax deductible as allowed by law.)

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Explore the rich history of Boston with our engaging and informative historical tours: Haunted Tales, the innovation trail, & tour of the freedom trail.Cruise with us as we elaborate on the eerie sightings, twisted deaths, and haunted landmarks along the banks of the Charles River. Hear stories of Harry Houdini, death by fire, and a horrific murder at Harvard University, all from the safety of ...
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For a tour of the entire Freedom Trail, we can take you through the path described to your left, the North End Tour path, and, additionally, all the way to Charlestown to see the USS Constitution and the Bunker Hill Monument. Tours of the Full Freedom Trail (all 16 sites) require 3-4 hours.***. Paul Revere's House and the Old North Church (30 ...
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We take pride in having a diverse staff of exceptional guides, many of whom have backgrounds in performance, history and the arts, and we take pride in curating tour experiences for all interests and backgrounds. We strive to provide a more approachable experience, limiting our public tour groups to 25 guests per guide.
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Cambridge Historical Tours provides Boutique Private and Public Tours of Boston, Tours of Harvard, Freedom Trail, Tours, Walking Tours, Boston Tours, & more. about us. ... Boston Magazine named our Tour of the Innovation Trail 2023's Best New Tour. Discover how historic innovation like the telephone and microwave oven have given way to ...
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About Us. Quality Matters. Our small staff of highly trained professional performers use charm, expert storytelling, and humor to give you the experience your group is looking for. We strive to maintain excellent customer service and vivid storytelling of accurate history. Once we meet you, the tour path could change slightly if we know you ...
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At night, we offer private and group Ghost Tours and Pub Crawls. As of 2024 we will be relaunching as The Boston History Company to reflect the way we've grown in these last 12 years. We've loved sharing our passion for history, science and Innovation as Cambridge Historical Tours, and we cannot wait to do the same as The Boston History Company ...
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