North Bennet Street School:

Virtual Tour of Tour America's First Trade School!

May 6 @ 4:00pm

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FREE

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Online Recording Available Here

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Join us for an extensive, behind-the-scenes, virtual tour of NBSS, America's first trade school. Using our new 360-degree model, we will guide you through the entire facility, covering its architectural features, work spaces, machine rooms, and all of the workbenches in between. We train students in nine full-time programs including carpentry, preservation, bookbinding, locksmithing, furniture making, jewelry making, piano technology, and violin making.

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Since its founding in 1881, NBSS has been a fixture of its North End neighborhood. Originally nestled in several small buildings within the interior of the community, the School moved to its expansive new home—the most prominent surviving example of Georgian Revival civic architecture in Boston—near the Rose Kennedy Greenway in 2013. Designed by noted architect John M. Gray, the Depression-era masonry structures were envisioned as a single civic complex with three distinct facades as part of the East Boston Tunnel project in 1934. The buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.

 

The award-winning renovation project by Kennedy & Violich Architecture linked two of these abandoned municipal buildings, unifying the School’s extensive workshops and administration under one roof, while also creating a vibrant center for traditional trades in an urban environment.