Omni Parker House

Boston's oldest hotel and its oldest guests

★★★★★📍 Downtown Boston, Massachusetts$$$

The history is the amenity: the hotel grew through the nineteenth century as Boston's literary and political meeting place, and the current tower dates to a 1920s rebuild that kept the old spirit while adding rooms. Dickens rehearsed his readings in front of a mirror that the hotel has kept, and generations of politicians, writers and visiting celebrities have passed through the lobby, which is why the hotel's history displays reward a few minutes. The staff roster belongs to the lore as well: Malcolm X is said to have worked as a busboy and Ho Chi Minh in the bakery, and John F. Kennedy announced his first run for Congress at the hotel in 1946 and is said to have proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier at Parker's Restaurant. The most repeated room story concerns Room 303, the subject of so many complaints of laughter, running water and the smell of whiskey that the hotel is said to have converted it into a storage closet; it is often cited as an inspiration for haunted-hotel fiction.

Room craft: ask for a higher floor for quieter nights and better city views, request a room on the reportedly active floors if the ghost stories are the point, and book a table at Parker's Restaurant for the rolls and the cream pie where both were born. Downtown parking is expensive, so arrive by train or taxi and walk everywhere. For a drink, Parker's Bar off the lobby is the classic Boston room for a nightcap after a ghost tour. Compared with the Hawthorne in Salem, the Parker House is the bigger, more polished city hotel; choose it when Boston is the base and Salem the day trip.

Practicals: 60 School Street, on the Freedom Trail, one block from the State Street T station and about 10 minutes from Logan Airport. Fit: walk-everywhere history trips, Ghosts and Gravestones nights, Boston burying-ground mornings and the short train hop to Salem.