Ahead lies a peninsula pushing into Dorchester Bay, home to the oldest surviving building in Boston and, at its tip, the library honoring the only Boston-born president of the United States. Dorchester was incorporated as a separate town in 1630, settled by Puritan colonists from Dorset, England, and its Blake House, built in 1648, is the oldest surviving frame building in the city. Dorchester was annexed by Boston in 1870 and developed through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a streetcar suburb of triple-decker houses — the three-story wooden apartment buildings, one flat per floor, that are Boston's most distinctive residential building type and the housing of the city's working class.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, designed by I.M. Pei and opened in 1979 on Columbia Point overlooking the harbor, commemorates the 35th President, who was born in nearby Brookline in 1917 and made his political career in Massachusetts. The museum holds Kennedy's papers and the artifacts of his presidency, including the documents of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy-Nixon television debates. The glass pavilion's views of the harbor and the Boston skyline provide a setting that Kennedy, who loved the sea, would have appreciated.