Museums worth the parking hassle

Russell Forziati

@rforz_jp

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I don't do museums for fun, I do them because my sister-in-law visits every August and somebody's gotta pick the itinerary. Twelve places I'll actually stand in line for, ranked by whether it's worth circling the block three times to park. The MFA's always the safe bet when company's in town, but half these I go back to alone, no complaints, no crockpot waiting.

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Museums worth the parking hassle — 10 items
Name	Address	City	My take
1Museum of Fine Arts	465 Huntington Avenue	Boston	Half a million pieces of art and I've seen maybe forty. Still the one you take out-of-towners to, no arguments.
2Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum	25 Evans Way	Boston	That courtyard stops you cold every time. Empty frames still hanging where the stolen paintings used to be, which tells you something about this town.
3Museum of Science	1 Science Park	Boston	Take the nieces and nephews here and you won't hear a peep out of them for two hours. Worth it on that alone.
4Boston Children's Museum	308 Congress Street	Boston	That giant milk bottle out front has been there since I was a kid. Good for a rainy Sunday when the Sox get rained out too.
5Institute of Contemporary Art	25 Harbor Shore Drive	Boston	Sits right over the harbor in the Seaport. Some of the stuff in there I don't get, but the view alone covers admission.
6John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum	Columbia Point	Boston	Out past UMass on the water. My father took me here as a kid and I still think about that sailboat out front.
7USS Constitution Museum	Charlestown Navy Yard, Building 22	Charlestown	Free admission, which around here is basically a miracle. Walk over and see the actual ship after, it's right there.
8Harvard Museum of Natural History	26 Oxford Street	Cambridge	Technically Cambridge, I know, but it's a quick hop over the river. The glass flowers room is genuinely bizarre in the best way.
9MIT Museum	314 Main Street	Cambridge	Robots and kinetic sculptures, more fun than it has any right to be for a school's museum. My nephew wants to move in.
10Otis House Museum	141 Cambridge Street	Boston	Old Bulfinch house in the West End, restored down to the wallpaper. Gives you a real sense of what a triple-decker owner's life wasn't like back then.