Beacon Inn | Boston Bed and Breakfast | Brookline, MA

Here at the Beacon Inn we’d like to wish all the dads out there a very happy Father’s Day! If you’re staying with us in Boston this weekend, we have a few suggestions for things to do:

Visit the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum:Just a short drive from Boston, the deCordova Sculpture Park offers a great outdoor art experience. If you’re looking to get a little fresh air and see some great modern sculpture, this is a unique museum that we highly recommend. Dads get free admission from 10am to 5pm!

Grab a Father’s Day Brunch: Zaftigs Delicatessen is one of our favorite brunch destinations in Boston for both savory and sweet options, but you can definitely expect a wait, especially for a Sunday brunch on Father’s Day. If you don’t mind standing in line for a little while, the food is well worth the wait! (We recommend the potato pancakes and the banana-stuffed French toast.) It’s a pleasant walk from either of our Beacon Street locations. If you’re looking for something a little different and don’t mind a little more of a walk, we recommend Deep Ellum for a slightly more upscale brunch (duck confit hash!) or the Allston Diner for a hipster take on Southern comfort food (chicken and waffles!), both in the neighboring community of Allston.

Take a Tour of Fenway Park: Between 11am and 2pm, stop by Fenway Park for their annual Father’s Day “Walk in the Park.” This free event gives families a close-up look at one of America’s most historic ballparks. Take a walk around the warning track, sit inside the visitor and home dugouts, and get autographs from Red Sox alumni!

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, located at 280 The Fenway in Boston, is not only home to paintings and sculptures, but also a breathtaking outdoor courtyard and garden. As you explore the collections of rare books and manuscripts and decadent furniture, you will begin to get a sense of Isabella’s vision ­­­– an installation that inspires an emotional, intimate response from every viewer.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, a philanthropist and art collector, established the museum in 1903 in the style of a 15th-century Venetian palace. The lighting and display of the work gives the museum the atmosphere of a private home, giving visitors the full experience of Gardner’s curatorial vision.

On March 18, 1990, art thieves stole $500 million worth of artwork from the collection in an infamous heist. Over two decades later, the crime remains unsolved, but the museum still boasts an impressive range of works encompassing a diverse array of European, Asian, and American art. We love the museum so much we even named one of our guest rooms at our Boston bed and breakfast after Mrs. Gardner!

Admission is $15 for adults, $12 for senior citizens, $5 for college students with a valid ID, and free for visitors the age of 18. And if your name happens to be “Isabella,” that guarantees you free admission for life!

The greater Boston area is home to many fantastic public parks and green spaces and the town of Brookline is no exception. If you’re looking for a brief respite from the city, the Hall’s Pond Sanctuary (located practically across the street from the Beacon Inn at 1087 Beacon Street) is worth a visit.

Hall’s Pond is one of two natural ponds remaining in Brookline and the grounds include a boardwalk wetland trail and a small formal garden. Although located just steps from a busy section of Beacon Street, you might spot a variety of birds including great blue herons, black-crowned night herons, kingfishers, and red-winged blackbirds during your visit.

While the Hall’s Pond Sanctuary might be a tiny park compared to the sprawling Boston Common and Public Gardens, this natural preserve in the heart of Brookline offers a welcome change of pace to local residents and tourists alike. If you’re staying at our 1087 bed and breakfast location, we recommend taking a stroll across the street to see what Hall’s Pond has to offer.

Before 20-theater cineplex pilgrimages, motorboat outings, and gas grill BBQs, one of the most popular summer pastimes was… wait for it… walking in the park! As incredible as it may seem in the distraction-abundant, air-conditioned urban playground of Boston, not even 100 years ago, a favorite pastime entailed only fresh air, good conversation, natural views, and walking. Lots of walking.

Taking a walk is a favorite activity of our front desk staff, and it can be sweet relief for long-distance travelers. As it happens, nearly the whole town of Brookline is a walkers’ paradise, full of gorgeous old homes along winding streets. Boston is much the same, and since between the two there are so many places to enjoy a long and scenic walk, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite parks easily accessible from our two Boston bed and breakfast locations—one obvious and the others less so:

Jamaica Way: According to Wikipedia, Jamaica Way “is a four-lane, undivided parkway in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston near the border of Brookline. The Jamaicaway was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as part of Emerald Necklace. Many of the houses which line the Jamaicaway are large and of architectural interest. The oldest houses were created by elite Bostonians for year-round or seasonal use.”

Emerson Park: Emerson Park is a small, leafy, and secluded park amid a wealthy Brookline neighborhood. It’s a great spot to sit on a bench and read a book while getting some sun. Not to mention the best egg salad sandwich in Boston can be found up the street at Cutty’s. On summer evenings, the park hosts a concert series including pop, folk, oldies, bluegrass, country and rock.  It’s a great place to chill out after a day touring downtown and you can bring your kids.

Corey Hill Outlook Park: Once a park frequented by patients recovering from stays at the hospital atop the hill (now condos), the Corey Hill outlook is a quiet spot to have a picnic while enjoying views of Cambridge and Harvard’s church steeples. Or, if you’re feeling restless, there’s a kids’ playground across the street and hundreds of steps leading up the hill, to the park, that are great for jogging.

The Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline claims to house America’s oldest car collection and if you’re an auto enthusiast this is one of the Boston area’s best attractions! It may fly beneath the rader of most casual tourists, but if you’re looking to take a break from all the baseball and Revolutionary War history for a totally different experience, then you shouldn’t miss this museum.

Located on the former 64-acre estate (now a public park) of the wealthy Anderson family, the museum is housed in the former carriage house, constructed in 1888 and opened as a museum in 1949. The building was inspired by the architecture of the Chateau de Chaumont-Sur-Loire in France and has a well-deserved designation on the National Register of Historical Places.

The collection itself boasts several automotive treasures, including the unusual 1905 Electromobile, the flamboyant 1912 Renault Victoria Phaeton, and the luxurious 1926 Lincoln Seven. While the museum is not easily accessible via public transportation, it’s a short drive from either of our Boston bed and breakfast locations and our front desk staff would be more than happy to provide you with directions.

John F. Kennedy is one of the greatest and most tragic figures in American political history but did you know this former president was born on this day in history right here in Brookline? JFK was born around three o’clock in the afternoon in his family’s modest home at 83 Beals Street in Brookline on May 29, 1917. This house still stands today as a National Historic Site offering guided tours and public events.

Located on a leafy side street near Brookline’s beautiful Coolidge Corner (and just a short walk from either of our two conveniently located hotels), the John F. Kennedy house was restored by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1967 based upon her recollections of its original appearance. The modest exterior of the home belies the striking restoration work within that gives us a clear picture of the former president’s childhood in the early 20th century.

This site is one of Brookline’s great historic treasures and it’s certainly worth stopping in to see while visiting the local restaurants and shops in Coolidge Corner. Come and see what Brookline (and Boston) has to offer!

It’s (almost) Memorial Day weekend here in Boston and while the weather forecast doesn’t look too promising, we certainly aren’t letting that keep us down. For starters, we’ve got the first ever Boston Calling Music Festival on May 25 and 26 featuring fun., The National, The Shins, Marina and the Diamonds, and more. We may be looking at a few showers this weekend but the event promises to go on rain or shine, so grab your tickets and head on down to City Hall Plaza!

On a somewhat more somber note, visitors to our city may notice that the Boston Common has been partially transformed from today through Sunday with the Military Heroes Garden of Flags, an annual tradition in which more than 20,000 flags are planted in the Common to honor all our fallen heroes since World War I. It’s a poignant way to start your journey on the Freedom Trail, which is one of the best ways to see the sights of Boston.

Baseball fans, take note, the Red Sox are home today through Tuesday, playing a four-game series against the Indians and two games against the Phillies. There’s nothing that says springtime in Boston more than a day at Fenway Park.

And finally the Museum of Fine Arts is holding their free Memorial Day Community Weekend, promising three days of special exhibitions, art making, gallery tours, family activities, and a community art project. Admission to the museum will be completely free of charge for all visitors from May 25 to 27.

Whatever your reason for visiting our city this weekend, make our Boston bed and breakfast your home away from home.

Now, if you’re a Red Sox fanatic—and after trucking around town to see a statue and plaque, you should be by now (see our previous post about the Huntington Avenue Grounds)—you can continue your tour of the Olde Towne Teams’ former haunts on another college campus: Boston University.

Until 1953, Boston enjoyed two baseball clubs: the National League Braves (formerly the Boston Red Stockings, the oldest continually-playing team in American sports), before the team moved to Atlanta via Milwaukee, and the American League Red Sox (formerly the Boston Americans; confused yet?)

On the site of what is now BU’s Nickerson playing field stood the Braves Field, a stone’s throw from Fenway. Built in 1915, it held its ground for 37 years—hosting three World Series and an All Star Game—before being demolished to make way for university dorms and Astroturf.  But it wasn’t entirely demolished, and that’s where things get interesting.

Baseball fans should see what’s left of Braves Field because, well, the jewel-box-park style of concourse under the right-field pavilion’s bleachers looks just as it did back in the day (unlike Fenway’s concourse, which has been more recently updated), and because Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Leon Cadore and Braves pitcher Joe Oeschger battled it out for a pair of complete-game performances… that lasted for a still-record 26 innings! In other words: you’re in the presence of past greatness.

Everyone else—looking at you, moms and dads taking your kids on college visits—should see it because you’re going to want to tell your friends that you saw something other than the back of a student tour guide’s head. Regular tourists and rabid baseball fans alike, take note; for a quintessentially Boston experience, the Beacon Inn can help.

On rare occasion, The Beacon Inn bed and breakfast hosts the most American type of guest: those road-tripping across country to visit every National and American league baseball park. In that spirit—and the spirit of this, the first month of the baseball season—we’re duty-bound to remind our other, more relaxed guests that Fenway Park is open for business. You are welcome to worship there during your stay, and we have it on good information that Boston’s holy leaders give dispensation for mistaking this green jewel for a Temple.

Yawkey Way, the street on which Fenway is parked, is tree-lined and especially pretty at sunset, on game day, when it’s closed to automotive traffic and opens up to allow fans to stroll among souvenir hawkers, baseball cap vendors, and street food purveyors. If marinating in the history of the area brings about a Red Sox conversion experience to a stark-raving Sox fan, the baseball-deranged staff at the front desk can help!

The bed and breakfast staff can recommend a number of other Boston baseball sites that recall the sport’s early glory days. Head over to Huntington Avenue, home of Northeastern’s campus, to see the site of the Huntington Avenue American Base Ball Grounds.

While the site itself is unimpressive today (it’s Northeastern’s indoor athletic arena), there is a plaque and statue on an adjacent street named World Series Way. Both the plaque and statue were erected in 1993, the former to memorialize the park’s hosting the first World Series in 1903 and the latter to commemorate Cy Young pitching the first perfect game of the modern era one year later in 1904.

That should be plenty of baseball touring for one afternoon, and imagining Cy Young pitching a no-hitter will work up an appetite. If that’s the case, Chicken Lou’s is a short walk from World Series Way, and despite it’s small size (it’s a 10’ by 20’ shack), it serves up delicious sandwiches with names like the Cholesterol (bacon, egg & cheese), TKO (chicken, swiss, bacon & honey mustard), and Naughty Nuggets (fried chicken nuggets). Just like The Babe used to eat.

In the food truck business, Boston restaurateurs would have to put hundreds of trucks into operation to rival the number of trucks operated by chefs in Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon—both food truck meccas boasting 600 trucks (or “carts”) apiece. If new food trucks continue to rumble into business at the current rate of 28 per year, it won’t be long before Boston, like Portland, can support a food truck tourism industry. This month marks the beginning of food-truck-hunting open season; it’s time to wash off your handkerchief for 7 months of glorious mouth-wiping, and mouth-watering, gastronomic goodness.

It’s possible to sample all of Boston’s 78 truck-rateaurs—and make no mistake, some of this street food puts sit-down gourmet dining to shame in quality and price—in as little as two weeks. Here at the Beacon Inn, we realize (some of us, reluctantly) that most of our bed and breakfast guests want to do more than nosh-nom-nom their way around Brookline and Boston, so we’ve developed a list of our favorite trucks and keep a schedule of their destinations at our front desk. This list is updated from time-to-time, and we’ll occasionally post these updates, as reviews, on our blog.

In no particular order, the Beacon Inn’s top-three food truck favorites:

The Chicken and Rice Guys: lamb gyro plate
Roxy’s Gourmet Grilled Cheese: Mighty Rib Melt
The Dining Car: Honey Truffle Goat Cheese Sandwich