Boston Layover Near South Station
Part of the full Boston Layover Guide: Freedom Trail From BOS
Boston’s South Station stands on Dewey Square under a hand-wound clock and an eight-ton stone eagle, with the red-brick warehouses of Fort Point five minutes east across the channel and the New England Aquarium’s harbour seal plaza a quarter of an hour north along the water.
The Giant Ocean Tank at the New England Aquarium
Central Wharf, where State Street reaches the harbour, holds a four-storey concrete drum with a 200,000-gallon reef tank standing inside it. A spiral walkway wraps that tank from the top down, so you circle the same water four times over on the way to the floor, past sharks, rays, a green sea turtle and a Caribbean reef built up around the middle of it. It is about fifteen minutes’ walk from South Station, north up Atlantic Avenue along the edge of the Greenway.
The tank opened in 1970 and the building runs 9am to 6pm, so a ticket bought before you walk up is what keeps the visit to the hour the exhibits actually take. The seals are the part with no ticket attached: five Atlantic harbour seals live in an open tank on the plaza in front of the doors, in full view of the pavement, and you can stand and watch them at any hour.
Artist studios in Fort Point’s Boston Wharf Company warehouses
Congress, Summer and A streets east of the channel are lined with red-brick warehouses the Boston Wharf Company put up between the 1880s and the 1920s to hold wool and dry goods. The wharves emptied out after the Second World War and the buildings went cheap, which is how artists ended up with the upper floors through the 1970s and 80s; the Fort Point Arts Community has organised them since 1980 and opens the studios to the public for one weekend each October.
The district went on the National Register in 2004 and covers about 55 acres, which is the reason the blocks still read as warehouses from the street even where the floors behind the windows are offices and flats now.
A 40-foot wooden milk bottle outside the children’s museum
Children’s Wharf, on the Fort Point Channel side of Congress Street, has a white wooden milk bottle forty feet tall standing on the plaza with a red cap on it. Arthur Gagner built it in 1933 as an ice cream stand in Taunton, forty miles south; H.P. Hood and Sons bought the derelict thing in 1977, floated it up the coast on a barge under the name the Great Bottle Sail, and handed it to the museum. It is eighteen feet across and weighs about seven and a half tons.
Boston Children’s Museum behind it, at 308 Congress Street, runs 9am to 4pm Wednesday through Monday and closes on Tuesdays, at $24 a head for adults and for children over a year old. The plaza and the bottle cost nothing, which is the version of this stop that fits a short gap.
The hand-wound clock on South Station’s roof
The head house on Dewey Square is the 1899 original: a curved granite front by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, a colonnade across the bend, and a clock set into the raised attic above it. The 12-foot face is driven by an E. Howard movement built in Roxbury on the same double three-legged gravity escapement as the clock in London’s Elizabeth Tower, and it is still wound by hand. A granite eagle eight feet across sits on the ridge over the dial.
Most people standing under it got off an intercity or commuter train carrying everything for a whole trip rather than a day bag, and there are no public lockers here: the railroad’s parcel room will hold a bag for 24 hours, $10 with a ticket for one of its own trains and $20 without.
Every Logan terminal is one bus from beneath South Station
South Station is the downtown end of the Silver Line SL1, which leaves from a platform in the busway under the concourse and runs through the harbour tunnel to all four terminals at Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) with no change on the way. The ride is about twenty minutes when the tunnel is clear and costs $2.40, the standard subway fare. That tunnel carries most of what else is leaving the city at the same time, so give it two hours against the ride, check-in and security together.
The replica tea ships moored off the Congress Street bridge are five minutes from the platforms, close enough to be tempting, but they sit on the Freedom Trail walk through downtown rather than on this side of the channel.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do during a layover near South Station in Boston?
Three or four hours covers all of it on foot. The New England Aquarium is about fifteen minutes north up Atlantic Avenue, and the thing to see there is the Giant Ocean Tank, a 200,000-gallon reef cylinder with a spiral walkway wound around it; that one is worth a ticket bought ahead, because it is the only stop here where the queue can cost you more than the exhibit. East across the channel, the red-brick warehouses of Fort Point are free to walk through, and the 40-foot wooden Hood milk bottle stands on the plaza outside the children's museum on Congress Street. Back at the station, the 1899 head house on Dewey Square carries a hand-wound clock and a granite eagle worth two minutes of looking up.
What is there to do near South Station in the rain?
The aquarium is the obvious one: the whole route through it is indoors, and the spiral walkway around the ocean tank means you can spend an hour there without going back outside. Boston Children's Museum on Congress Street is the other indoor option, and South Station's own concourse has seating and a food hall that nobody minds you sitting in. The part of this that gets wet is Fort Point, where the appeal is the streets themselves, and the Harborwalk path between the station and Central Wharf is open to the wind off the water the whole way.
What is closed near South Station on a Tuesday?
Boston Children's Museum, which runs 9am to 4pm Wednesday through Monday and shuts on Tuesdays. The milk bottle on the plaza outside it is a piece of the street and stands there regardless. The aquarium is open daily, 9am to 6pm, and the harbour seals on its front plaza can be watched from outside at any hour without a ticket. Fort Point's warehouse streets have no opening hours at all.
Is three hours enough to leave South Station for any of this?
Yes, if you pick one direction. Fort Point and the milk bottle are a half-hour round trip on foot with time left to stand around, so that works on almost any gap. The aquarium is closer to two hours door to door once you allow for the walk each way and the exhibits, which makes it a three-hour-minimum stop rather than a filler. Under two hours, stay in the concourse: the head house clock is the only thing here you can see properly in ten minutes.