Notwithstanding the influential career of Henry Hobson Richardson, the 19th century ended in Boston with the construction of one of the most important buildings in the history of American architecture: McKim, Mead and White’s Boston Public Library (1895). This “People’s Palace,” designed in the form of an Italian Renaissance palace, monumentalizes the importance of education in a city self-consciously marking its preeminence in the various fields of learning. Using Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste.- Geneviève (1850) in Paris as his model, Charles McKim created an American paragon of Beaux-Arts design, integrating architecture, sculpture, murals, mosaics, and stained glass into an aesthetic whole. The neoclassical architecture displayed at the Boston Public Library and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago led to a renaissance of this style across the country. Boston embraced the planning principles of the “White City” with its “Boston- 1915” movement, a Progressive Era ...