Boston Athenaeum (fifth) opens.

Architect: Edward Cabot. Designed in the Renaissance Revival style and modeled after the Palazzo da Porta Festa in Vicenza, it opens in July at 10 ½ Beacon Street. The cornerstone was laid on April 27, 1847. The oldest private library in the U.S., David McCord calls it “A kind of Utopia for books [that] combines the best elements of the Bodleian, Monticello, the frigate Constitution, a greenhouse and an old New England sitting room. The reader, the scholar, the browser, the borrower is king.” According to Walter Muir Whitehill, only the address appears on the front door because of “The general Boston assumption that anyone with serious business knows where things are; those who do not should inform themselves by other means than gaping at signs.” Proprietors are limited to 1,049 in 1854. The building is renovated and two floors added by Bigelow & Wadsworth in 1915, and renovated and expanded by Schwartz/Silver Architects in 2002 and Annum Architects in 2022.