The South End has become a bastion of creativity and artistic expression. Walking down Washington Street you’ll see where the inspiration comes from in the well-preserved architecture.
Home to an eclectic mix of design boutiques, Natalie van Dijk Carpenter’s Lekker, which opened here five years ago, stands out. Lekker the Dutch word for alluring, enticing, great, attractive and tempting is fitting for Carpenter’s European concept store.
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The famous Swan Boats in the Public Garden, www.swanboats.com ($2.50; age 2 to 15, $1), offer another peaceful interlude. While parents sit back for the 15-minute figure-eight cruise around the lagoon (including an island where the ducks lived in the book “Make Way for Ducklings”), children will be quietly intrigued by the driver pedaling away, bicyclelike, behind the swan in the back of the boat.
M.I.T. Museum Main Gallery
265 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, (617) 253-4444
web.mit.edu/museum
($5; age 5 to 18, $2; closed Monday), you’ll find robots, 3-D holograms, including one of the remains of a 2,000-year-old man discovered in a bog in England, and an exhibition of photographs that capture instants in time like when a bullet explodes through an apple.
The Museum of Fine Arts is Boston’s grand museum, but the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum around the corner, at 280 The Fenway, www.gardnermuseum.org, (617) 278-5156, is Boston’s jewel.
In the late 19th century Mrs. Gardner and her husband traveled the world collecting art. Their home, built in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palace, houses great works from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East along with Mrs. Gardiner’s eccentric personal touches like a moonstone covering a lock of Robert Browning’s hair.
The eccentric Venetian-style palazzo built about a century ago that is crammed with 2,500 of Mrs. Gardner’s acquisitions. Her will warns that if the permanent collection is disturbed, it will be given to Harvard; that partly explains the empty frames of two Rembrandts and a Vermeer taken along with other pieces in a 1990 robbery that is unsolved. Consider buying the $4 audio guide or $16 paperback guide because much of the collection is unlabeled.
Visitors with the name Isabella are admitted free; everyone else pays $10.
The South End Open Market
540 Harrison Avenue, 617-481-2257
www.southendopenmarket.com
The South End Open Market takes place every Sunday through October from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (except on holiday weekends, like this one).
This is Boston’s version of London’s Portobello market, with vintage clothes sellers and young fashion and jewelry designers rubbing elbows with artists and cheesemakers and antiques dealers.
What’s exciting about this market is that it changes each week. So, some Sundays you’ll discover a local artist who is there only that day. Everyone sells from tables beneath white tents.
28 Degrees
1 Appleton Street, 617-728-0728
www.28degrees-boston.com
28 Degrees is a bar that shimmers with flashy cocktails, a flashy circular bar and an even flashier party going on inside. There are Bellinis, pomegranate cosmos and Herradura tequila and Cointreau margaritas to be downed with a mixed crowd of Euro-students, chic-beyond-belief adults and neighborhood regulars. This bar alone fills Boston’s glamour quotient.
SoWa, a strip of blocks south of Washington Street, is where you’ll find Boston’s emerging artists. Try both the 450 Harrison Building and the artists’ studios at 500 Harrison Avenue, which is open to the public on the first Friday of each month all summer. (Check for times at www.sowaartwalk.com.)
The city’s art scene has shifted to Harrison from Newbury Street, says Bernard Toale, whose Toale Gallery has been at 450 Harrison since 1992 (617-482-2477; www.bernardtoalegallery.com).
“The art and the clientele in the South End is younger and funkier,” he says. “First Fridays are big happening scenes, with a younger, urban, new South End crowd. I’ve been around a long time, but I’d say the South End is made up of a lot of younger galleries showing newer artists, and not just local artists.”
Cyclorama @ Boston Center for the Arts
539 Tremont Street, 617-426-5000
www.bcaonline.org
Catch an avant-garde art exhibition or a contemporary play at the Cyclorama. This 23,000-square-foot rotunda is part of the Boston Center for the Arts, and also offers a range of community events and is home to the Community Music Center of Boston, the Boston Ballet Costume Shop, three small theaters and a rehearsal studio.
Flour Bakery + Café
12 Farnsworth Street, 617-338-4333
www.flourbakery.com
Flour Bakery & Cafe is a small sandwich and pastry shop that serves pain aux raisins ($2.50) for breakfast and made-to-order salads for lunch. It opened behind the just-expanded and just-reopened Boston Children’s Museum (300 Congress Street, 617-426-8855; www.bostonkids.org), known for its science playgrounds and hands-on activities.