Larz Anderson Auto Museum, Automobile museum in Brookline, United States
The Larz Anderson Auto Museum is a car museum in the Brookline neighborhood of Boston, housed in a historic carriage house designed by architect Edmund Wheelwright. The building sits inside a park and holds a collection of early automobiles that span the first decades of motorized travel.
Larz and Isabel Anderson started gathering automobiles in 1899, at a time when the car industry was still in its earliest years. After Larz Anderson died in 1937, the estate passed to the town of Brookline, which eventually turned the carriage house into a public museum.
The carriage house was built for a wealthy family at a time when owning a car was rare, and that sense of privilege still shapes the feel of the place today. Visitors walk through a space that once served the social rituals of the American upper class at the turn of the 20th century.
The museum is open most days of the week, and the surrounding park makes a visit easy to combine with a walk outdoors. Parking is available on site, which makes it convenient to reach by car, though the area is also accessible by public transit from central Boston.
The museum holds a library dedicated to automobile racing and transportation history, with documents covering carriages, motorcycles, and bicycles alongside early cars. This side of the collection shows how many different ways of moving existed at the same moment in time, before one of them came to dominate.
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