Boston Layover Near Back Bay Station

Boston’s Back Bay Station stands a block off Copley Square, within a few streets of Trinity Church’s arched stone front, a walk-through stained-glass globe fixed at the borders of 1935, a reflecting pool nearly 700 feet long, and an observation deck on top of the Prudential Tower.

The observation deck on top of the Prudential Tower

The Prudential Tower rises 749 feet over Boylston Street, and its top three floors have been open to the public since June 2023, one of them an open-air terrace with no glass in the way. What the height shows best is the Back Bay itself: a straight grid drawn on filled tidal flats in the 1850s, running up against the crooked lanes of the older city to the east.

It opens daily from 10am to 10pm with last entry at 9:15, which makes it the only stop around here that still works after dinner, and tickets start at around $35. An entry time bought in advance is the difference between walking in and standing at the ticket desk, which matters more here than at the other stops because the lift queue is on top of the ticket queue.

The Mapparium’s stained-glass globe on Massachusetts Avenue

The Mary Baker Eddy Library at 210 Massachusetts Avenue holds a hollow glass globe three storeys high with a bridge running through the middle of it, so you stand at the centre of the earth and look out at the map instead of down at it. It is built from 608 stained-glass panels painted with the political borders of 1935 and never revised since, which is why the Soviet Union and French Indochina are still up there.

The glass reflects sound rather than absorbing it, so a sentence spoken quietly at one end of the bridge arrives whole at the other, and everyone works this out within about ten seconds of stepping inside. The library runs 10am to 5pm Monday to Saturday and 11am to 5pm on Sunday, and the globe is entered on a timed ticket, so it is worth checking the next slot before walking over.

The reflecting pool on Christian Science Plaza

Christian Science Plaza runs between Massachusetts Avenue and Huntington Avenue with a pool close to 700 feet long and 100 feet wide down the middle of it, the water sitting flush with a polished red granite edge. I. M. Pei’s firm laid the plaza out from 1968 and finished it in the early 1970s, with the domed Mother Church at one end and a long low colonnade down one side.

There is no gate and no charge, and the thing worth timing is a still hour, when the dome comes back off the surface whole. It is also the largest piece of open ground in this part of the city, which is worth knowing if the alternative is another block of shopfronts.

Newbury Street’s eight blocks of brownstone shopfronts

Newbury Street runs eight blocks from the Public Garden west to Massachusetts Avenue, and the thing that makes it worth the walk is that almost none of it was built for shops. These are 1870s and 1880s Back Bay houses with the retail fitted into their basements and parlour floors, so the street keeps a residential shape, stoops, bay windows, iron railings, with the commerce slotted in underneath.

The blocks toward Massachusetts Avenue are the cheaper end and the blocks toward the Public Garden are where the rents show. Boylston Street runs parallel one block south, so the way back doesn’t have to repeat the way out.

Trinity Church on Copley Square

Trinity Church has stood on the south side of Copley Square since 1877, and it is the building that gave Richardsonian Romanesque its name: H. H. Richardson’s low, heavy mass of banded granite and brownstone, three deep arched portals across the front and a lantern tower over the crossing. The interior belongs to John La Farge, who painted the walls in dark red and gold and made much of the stained glass himself. Visits cost $10 for an adult, $8 concessions, free under 14, Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 4:30pm; it is a working parish, so a wedding or a funeral can close it at short notice.

Back Bay’s platforms sit in a narrow trench under Dartmouth Street, shared by the subway, the commuter rail and Amtrak, and the evening peak fills the stairs down to them end to end.

A $3 bus runs from across the street to every Logan terminal

The Back Bay Logan Express picks up at the Dartmouth Street entrance to Copley Place, directly across from the station, and drives to the curb at each terminal at Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) with nothing in between. It leaves every thirty minutes from 5am to 9pm, costs $3 outbound and nothing coming back into the city, and the driver hands out a pass that puts you at the front of the security line at the terminal.

Nothing on this walk is older than the 1870s, which is the real difference between this end of the city and the colonial ground around Faneuil Hall and the Granary Burying Ground: the Back Bay was open water until the 1850s, so all of it was drawn at once, on a grid, by people who knew exactly what they were building.