On a budget, Old State House still earns its price.
~$15 adults
The strangest collision of old and new in the city — a 1713 brick colonial building, balcony and lion-and-unicorn and all, hemmed in on every side by Financial District glass towers, with the T rumbling underneath. The real charge is outside and free: the ring of cobblestones in the traffic island below the balcony marks where five colonists fell in the 1770 Boston Massacre, and standing on it while office workers stream past and buses idle a few feet away makes the history feel oddly close and oddly ignored at once. The small museum upstairs (Revolution-era exhibits, the actual balcony where the Declaration was first read to Bostonians) is a tidy under-an-hour stop. The catch: if you don't stop to find the Massacre marker, it's just a pretty building you photograph and walk past.