Walking west from Boston Common for 10 or 15 minutes on Boylston Street in Back Bay brings you to Copley Square (map), at the corner of Boylston St and Dartmouth St, bounded by those streets and St James Avenue.

The square is framed by the classic Boston Public Library, the elegant Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, and Henry Hobson Richardson's famous Trinity Church, built in the late 1800s.

Other hotels are concentrated in this prime office and shopping area as well. More...

Part of the square is a pretty, green, partly shady park with a pool, flowerbeds and benches.

Modern intruders on this gentility are the striking mirror-glass shaft of the John Hancock Tower and, a block west, the sprawling office-and-shopping complex called Copley Place.

On the west side of the Boston Public Library is the John B Hynes Veteran's Memorial Convention Center, the smaller of Boston's two official convention centers (the larger one being the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in the Seaport District of South Boston. More...)

North of Copley Square along Clarendon and Dartmouth streets is Newbury Street, with its boutiques and sidewalk restaurants, and beyond that Commonwealth Avenue.

All trains on the MBTA subway's Green Line, eastbound and westbound, stop at the Copley Square station. After Copley, westbound B, C, D and E trains follow different routes to their destinations.

—by Tom Brosnahan

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