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The Omni Parker House is renowned as the longest continuously operating hotel in America founded in 1855 by Harvey D. Parker. The hotel and its restaurants are credited with a slew of famous firsts, including the Parker House Roll, Boston Cream Pie, and the term "scrod." Though the elegant old inn has hosted numerous celebrities over the decades, its most famous group of patrons was certainly the members of the nineteenth century Saturday Club.

Beginning in the mid 1850s, a select group of multitalented males assembled in the old Parker House on the last Saturday afternoon of each month. Their notoriously festive roundtables featured readings, intellectual exchanges, and endlessly flowing chatter, mirth, food and spirits. The Club's members included philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet and Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes. Many famous visitors dropped by while in town including Charles Dickens, who debuted his famous "A Christmas Carol" to an appreciative group at Parker House before publicly presenting it at the nearby Tremont Theater. Visitors to the Omni Parker can still see the fireplace mantle from Dickens' old room, and the mirror he used for practicing his performance gestures. You can also enjoy Parker's Bar, where the Saturday Club met, as well as the Press Room, where John F. Kennedy announced his bid for the U.S. Congress in 1946.

Omni Parker House
60 School Street
Boston, MA 02108
617-227-8600
Website: www.omnihotels.com
How to get here: Directions

The Literary Trail guided tour begins at the Omni Parker House.


The Literary Trail of Greater Boston
650 Beacon Street, Suite 403, Boston, MA 02215
Phone: (617) 350-0358 · Fax: (617) 350-0357
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