Ahead of you rises a pink granite facade meant to prove that ordinary Bostonians deserved a palace of their own, built for books rather than kings. The Boston Public Library was founded in 1848 as the first large free municipal public library in the United States, the first to allow books to be borrowed and taken home, and the first to establish a children's room. The current building, designed by McKim, Mead and White and opened in 1895, was called a palace for the people when it opened: its facade of pink Milford granite, its loggia of carved stone, and its bronze doors by Daniel Chester French were intended to give ordinary Bostonians a civic building as magnificent as any private palace or European public monument.
The entrance hall with its Siena marble staircase and the Bates Hall reading room with its barrel-vaulted ceiling 50 feet above the reading tables are among the great interior spaces in American architecture. The murals by John Singer Sargent in the third-floor gallery — a cycle on the history of religion, begun in 1890 and left incomplete at his death in 1925 — are among the most ambitious decorative works in American art. The courtyard, modeled on the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, is open to the public and is one of the quietest places in the city.