Charles Street Meeting House

The Charles Street Meeting House at 70 Charles Street, Beacon Hill, was built in 1807 to a Federal-style design by Asher Benjamin. Through the nineteenth century it was a Third Baptist Church active in abolitionist organising (Frederick Douglass spoke here in 1860). Between roughly 1900 and 1979 it operated as a Unitarian meeting house; from 1963 the congregation opened the building to civil rights and later LGBTQ+ organising. The building hosted the founding meetings of the Homophile Union of Boston in June 1969, three days before the Stonewall Uprising in New York. HUB became one of the first ten US gay rights organisations and remained active in Boston through the 1970s. The building also hosted the planning meetings and departure point for Boston's first Gay Pride march on 26 June 1971 — the second Pride march ever held in New England after Cambridge's the previous year. The building was converted to residential and commercial use in 1982 after the Unitarian congregation dissolved. The ground-floor sanctuary now houses a small commercial gallery; the upper floors are private apartments. The building carries a Boston Landmark plaque referencing its 1807 architecture; a second plaque added in 2019 by the Boston Landmarks Commission notes the 1969-71 LGBTQ+ organising history. Exterior visible 24/7 from Charles Street; ground-floor gallery open Wednesday-Saturday. Free. Beacon Hill's Charles Street is a working commercial-and-residential neighbourhood; combine with a walk uphill to Boston Common (five minutes) or a Beacon Hill townhouse walk for the "Boston Marriages" residential context of the 1880s-1910s (see separate entry).