This 161-year-old, 551-room hotel in downtown Boston is the longest continuously operating hotel in the country -- the first in Boston to offer elevator service and running water.
The hotel has played host to every American president since Ulysses S. Grant. However, none has had stronger ties to the upscale hotel than John F. Kennedy. He made his first public speech at the age of seven in the Press Room while attending his grandfather's birthday party. The Press Room later became the place where he announced his candidacy for U.S. Congress and where he held his bachelor party. Moreover, Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier at the Parker’s Restaurant, Table 40.
The Saturday Club, a group of the brightest luminaries in American’s Golden Age of Literature, called the Omni Parker House home. It was here that Charles Dickens gave his first American reading of "A Christmas Carol," Longfellow drafted “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and the idea for the Atlantic Monthly was born. Other members of the Saturday Club included novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier.
Parker’s Restaurant is renowned as the birthplace of the Boston Cream Pie, now the official Massachusetts state dessert. It is also where Parker House Rolls, whose recipe was kept secret until 1933 when President Franklin Roosevelt requested it for a state dinner at the White House, were born.
And while the hotel has retained its historic charm, a multi-million-dollar renovation in 2008 also brought welcome modern conveniences like flat-screen TVs in the spacious rooms.
If you plan on visiting Boston in the near future, consider staying at this historic property. If anything, it's still worth a visit -- if only to snap a couple of pictures of the nation's longest continuously operating hotel.
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