onetenchelsea

As a part of our goal of visiting more of Boston's tourist sites that we'd never been to, Jessica and I went to the JFK Presidential Library a couple of days ago.

The library is in Dorchester, which is the neighborhood just south of Southie, on the campus of UMass Boston. It's got a great location overlooking the harbour. J and I have never lived anywhere with an ocean before, and we were kind of surprised how inaccessible the ocean actually is from Boston. I kind of expected it to be more like Lake Michigan is to Chicago, but Dorchester actually has some nice views. The library was designed by IM Pei, the architect who did the Hancock tower in Boston, One Bank Place in Minneapolis, the Holocaust Museum in DC, The Deutsches Historischen Museums in Berlin, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and the renovation of the Louve in Paris, to name a few of his more famous works. The library falls right in the middle of his career, and although I don't like it as much as some of the newer building, it's a testament to the forward thinking of his design how it looks as if it would have been built just last year.

More so then the facade, it's the interior and the display spaces that are really interesting. It's very much the twenty-first century museum. Instead of having lots of displays with stuff to read, each section of JFK's presidency has a few thinks to read and look at, but at the center there will be some monitors that are showing video from the time. For example, in the part about the election, you actually had video of Walter Cronkite reading off election results. It's the type of place that a teenager (in saying teenager, I actually mean adults who can't understand why I would go to a museum for fun. you know who you are.) wouldn't get bored or overwhelmed. My favorite area was probably the temporary display of gifts that had been given by foreign heads of state. There were some wonderful pieces of silver from the Shah and the King of Cambodia as well as several beautiful African tribal masks. Also, out of the twenty or so displays, there was one devoted to the Peace Corps, which I think is really one of JFK's best contributions, so I was glad to see it there. There were also films about JFK's life prior to the presidency and on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Overall, the museum is worth a stop if you are in New England. It's one of the better ones i've visited.

I also just finished uploading a bunch of photos from my last trip to canada to flickr. It's going to take me a few months to upload the entire trip. You can click the photo below to take a look. I should also mention that it was Mikee Caron who took most of these photos.