Faneuil Hall & Quincy Market

Faneuil Hall has been called the 'Cradle of Liberty' since Samuel Adams stood inside it in the 1760s and argued that taxation without representation was tyranny — a line of reasoning that would eventually get a lot of people killed and a country founded. The redbrick hall, built in 1742 as a gift to the city from merchant Peter Faneuil, has been a marketplace on the ground floor and a meeting hall above ever since, and the meetings held upstairs helped start the American Revolution.

The hall sits at the centre of Faneuil Hall Marketplace, a complex that includes Quincy Market — a granite-columned building from 1826 that functions as one of America's oldest food halls. The ground floor of Quincy Market is a corridor of food vendors serving clam chowder in bread bowls, lobster rolls, Italian sausages, and every other Boston food cliché you can think of. It's tourist-heavy and priced accordingly, but the clam chowder is genuinely good and the lobster rolls are made with actual lobster, which isn't always a given.

The real Faneuil Hall — the meeting room on the second floor — is free to enter and usually uncrowded, which is a minor miracle given its significance. The room where Adams, Otis, and other revolutionaries debated independence is preserved with its original layout, and the paintings and historical displays give context that the marketplace below can't provide. Visit the hall first for the history, then descend to the market for lunch.