Boston Layover Near North Station
Part of the full Boston Layover Guide: Freedom Trail From BOS
Boston’s North Station has TD Garden built directly over it, and inside a fifteen-minute walk there is a 1933 lightning machine at the Museum of Science, the inverted-Y towers of the Zakim bridge across the Charles, and a tour that takes you up to the championship banners hanging in the arena roof.
Indoor lightning at the Museum of Science
The Museum of Science stands on the Charles River Dam, the causeway that carries the road across the river between Boston and Cambridge, about ten minutes’ walk upstream from North Station. Its Theater of Electricity holds a pair of polished aluminium spheres fifteen feet across, each on a hollow insulating column 25 feet high, and the show fires lightning between them several times a day in a room dark enough to see it properly.
Robert Van de Graaff’s MIT team built the machine in 1932 and 1933 to accelerate particles, and assembled it inside a former Goodyear airship hangar on an estate at Round Hill in South Dartmouth, where it reached about five million volts before the research moved on. It came to the museum in 1955 and has been the centrepiece ever since. General admission is $29 for an adult and the building runs 9am to 5pm daily.
The plaza outside the doors is also a boarding point for the amphibious trucks that run sightseeing loops through the city and then drive straight into the Charles, so a ninety-minute seat booked ahead can start and finish at the same spot rather than sending you back across town.
The Zakim bridge’s inverted-Y towers over the Charles
The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge carries Interstate 93 across the mouth of the Charles just north of the station, and the shape worth walking out for is the pair of towers: each one an inverted Y, cut that way to echo the obelisk of the Bunker Hill Monument on the hill behind it. It opened in 2003 carrying ten lanes, which was billed at the time as the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world.
Paul Revere Park, on the Charlestown side of the locks, is the free ground with the clearest line to it, about ten minutes from the station across the North Washington Street bridge. The towers and cables are floodlit blue after dark.
The banner tour through TD Garden’s rafters
TD Garden opened in 1995 on top of North Station’s platforms and holds the Bruins and the Celtics, whose championship banners hang from the roof over the ice. The Sports Museum’s tour is the only way to see them from the height they hang at: an hour long, starting at a desk outside the pro shop in the station concourse, up to Level 9 for the banners and then back down through half a mile of Boston sports exhibits on Levels 5 and 6. Tours leave every half hour between 11am and 4:30pm at $30 for an adult, and the schedule bends around whatever the arena has booked that day.
North Station stacks its commuter rail concourse at street level above the subway platforms, so a suitcase costs you that flight of stairs down and back up on every change you make.
No one-seat ride to Logan from North Station
Getting out to Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) from here takes three vehicles. The Orange Line runs from the platforms under the concourse to State, the Blue Line takes over from there as far as Airport station, and a free Massport shuttle bus covers the last stretch to each terminal, leaving every five or six minutes. One $2.40 fare covers the subway half, and 30 to 45 minutes end to end is the honest range, depending on how the two changes fall.
Nothing above is more than fifteen minutes on foot, which is the argument for staying at this end of downtown instead of heading south for the Freedom Trail stops around Faneuil Hall and the Common, where the ride out is simpler but the walk to it is longer.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do during a layover near North Station and TD Garden in Boston?
The Museum of Science is ten minutes upriver on the Charles River Dam, and the thing to see there is the Theater of Electricity, where a pair of fifteen-foot aluminium spheres built in 1933 throw lightning across a darkened room several times a day. Admission is $29 for an adult. The Sports Museum runs hour-long tours from a desk inside North Station itself, up to the level the Celtics and Bruins banners hang at, though whether it runs at all on a given day depends on what the arena has booked. Ten minutes north, the Zakim bridge's two inverted-Y towers stand over the Charles and cost nothing to look at. Four hours covers all three; on two, pick the museum or the bridge.
Can I get inside TD Garden if there is no game on?
Yes, and a quiet day is the better day for it. The Sports Museum occupies Levels 5 and 6 of the arena and its tour goes up to Level 9, where you stand level with the championship banners rather than looking up at them from a seat. Tours leave every half hour between 11am and 4:30pm, $30 for an adult, and check-in is at the desk outside the pro shop down in the station concourse. The catch runs the other way from what you would expect: the schedule bends around whatever the arena has booked, so a concert load-in can shorten the day or cancel it.
Where can you see the Zakim bridge from for free?
Paul Revere Park, on the Charlestown side of the locks, is the closest open ground with a clear line to the towers, and it is a ten-minute walk from the station over the North Washington Street bridge. North Point Park continues along the same bank on the Cambridge side and gets you the full span from further back. Neither charges anything or closes, and the bridge is lit blue after dark, which is the version most people photograph.
Is anything near North Station worth doing after dark?
The Museum of Science shuts at 5pm and the Sports Museum's last tour leaves at 4:30, so the indoor half of this closes early. What is left is the water: the Zakim towers and their cables are floodlit blue at night and the walk out to Paul Revere Park works at any hour. The arena itself is the evening's real option, since a Bruins or Celtics night or a concert is the one thing here that only happens after dark, and North Station's concourse sits directly under it.