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Faneuil Hall in Boston

Thursday, 1 July 2021 - 12:00 pm (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: North America / Nordamerika
Category/Kategorie: General, House of the Month, Shopping Reading Time:  2 minutes

🔊 Listen to this Post Faneuil Hall is a marketplace and meeting hall located near the waterfront and today’s Government Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. Opened in 1743, it was the site of several speeches by Samuel Adams, James Otis, and others encouraging independence from Great Britain. It is now part of Boston National Historical Park and a well-known stop on the Freedom Trail. It is sometimes referred to as “the Cradle of Liberty”. In 2008, Faneuil Hall was rated number 4 in “America’s 25 Most Visited Tourist Sites” by Forbes Traveler.

On October 9, 1960, the building was designated a National Historic Landmark and added to the National Register of Historic Places following the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which placed all National Historic Landmarks in the National Register. The ground floor and basement were altered in 1979. The Hall was restored again in 1992, and in 1994 the building was designated a local Boston Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission. The headquarters of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts is located on the fourth floor and includes an armory, library, offices, quartermaster department, commissary, and a military museum with free admission.

Faneuil Hall is one of four historic buildings in a festival marketplace, Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which includes three historic granite buildings called North Market, Quincy Market, and South Market adjacent to the east of Faneuil Hall, and which operates as an indoor/outdoor mall and food eatery. It was designed by Benjamin Thompson and Associates and managed by Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp.; its success in the late 1970s led to the emergence of similar marketplaces in other U.S. cities. According to Ashkenazy, Faneuil Hall Marketplace had 18 million visitors in 2016. The North and South Markets buildings are currently under study for landmark status by the Boston Landmarks Commission.

The bell was repaired in 2007 by spraying the frozen clapper with WD-40 over the course of a week and attaching a rope. Prior to this repair, the last known ringing of the bell with its clapper was at the end of World War II, in 1945, though it had since been rung several times by striking with a mallet.

The gilded grasshopper weather vane on top of the building was created by Deacon Shem Drowne in 1742. Gilded with gold leaf, the copper weather vane weighs 80 pounds (36 kg) and is 4 feet (1.2 m) long. The weather vane is believed to be modeled after the grasshopper weather vane on the London Royal Exchange, based upon the family crest of Thomas Gresham.

The area between the eastern end of Faneuil Hall and Congress Street is part of Boston National Historical Park. In this landscape is a 19th-century sculpture of Samuel Adams created by sculptor Anne Whitney. The granite plaza surface is marked for 850 feet (260 m) with the approximate location of the early Colonial shoreline c. 1630. The street layout and building plot plan designations from an 1820 map are shown by etched dashed lines and changes from pink granite to grey granite paving slabs. The shoreline marking artwork entitled, A Once and Future Shoreline, is made with etched silhouettes of seaweed, sea grass, fish, shells and other materials found along a high tide line. Art within Faneuil Hall includes many paintings and sculpture busts of Revolutionary War activists, pre Civil War abolitionists, and political leaders.

Read more on Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Quincy Market, NPS.gov – Faneuil Hall and Wikipedia Faneuil Hall. Learn more about the use of photos. To inform you about latest news most of the city, town or tourism websites offer a newsletter service and/or operate Facebook pages/Twitter accounts. In addition more and more destinations, tourist organizations and cultural institutions offer Apps for your Smart Phone or Tablet, to provide you with a mobile tourist guide (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Global Passport Power Rank - Travel Risk Map - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.

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