Last Chance to Visit Getting Around Town

After eight months on display, Getting Around Town will be closing on April 27 to prepare for our next exhibit. For locals and out-of-town visitors, we invite you to visit one more time to see the extraordinary collection of transit maps dating from the seventeenth century to the present and for those unable to visit in person, the digital exhibition will remain on our website.

Visit Getting Around Town → 

Our Last Public Event for Getting Around Town · Tuesday, April 16 6pm ET

In our Spring 2024 conversation series Routes Ahead of Us, we take the themes of our current exhibition Getting Around Town and connect the history of Boston’s transit system with questions about how to build a better, more equitable urban mobility system in the future.

These informal presentations feature discussions with transit and mobility experts, free drinks and refreshments at the Boston Public Library’s Newsfeed Café, and tours of Getting Around Town following the conclusion of the program.

In the final event of this series, we’ll be speaking to Dan Rosengard, the Executive Director of Transportation for Boston Public Schools. In this role, he is focused on ensuring the delivery of safe, reliable, on-time, and cost-effective yellow bus transportation to and from school for over 22,000 Boston students on a daily basis.

Register for free → 

Highlights From the Vault: Bus Networks of Boston with TransitMatters

On March 29, we collaborated with TransitMatters to guest curate our biweekly From the Vault series.

In addition to selecting maps from our collection, TransitMatters staff also wrote captions detailing the importance of each piece to the past and future of Boston’s bus networks. This event was our most successful From the Vault event so far of 2024 and brought in over 70 visitors to chat with Leventhal and TransitMatters staff about the city’s evolution over time, modern public transit, and the woes of “bus bunching."

Read the highlights article → 

Officially Introducing Heaven & Earth

As the opening date of Heaven & Earth: The Blue Maps of China approaches, we invite you to delve further into the history and beauty of two Prussian blue maps that inspired guest curator Richard Pegg, and have never been exhibited together—before now.

Heaven & Earth puts these two maps into the context of China during the Qing Dynasty, and reveals them as unique in the global history of mapmaking. The exhibition will debut on May 11, 2024 at the Leventhal Map & Education Center.

Read the press release → 

Featured Visitor Maps from Getting Around Town

If you’ve made an in-person visit to Getting Around Town, you may have seen our invitation to make your own maps of Boston or other parts of the world. We’ve gotten to see how creative and detailed our patrons have been and we’d like to show off some of our staff favorite maps from the exhibition! These featured maps were chosen by Satoh Feng, our Visitor Services & Exhibition Assistant:

Here to Home by Mallory Smith

PANAMA: “centro del mundo, corazon del universo” by Augusto

Visit Getting Around Town →