Union Oyster House

Boston, MA

Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel Project — the "Big Dig" — buried the city's elevated highway underground and reconnected neighborhoods that concrete had severed. Begun in 1987 and running for well over a decade, it was one of the largest and most complex public-works projects in American history. This plaque honors the more than 15,000 people who designed, managed, and built it, and especially those who died in its construction.

Boston, MA

Here, beginning in 1719, James Franklin ran the printing office of the New England Courant, one of colonial America's boldest and most independent newspapers. His younger brother Benjamin Franklin served here as an apprentice, learning the printing trade that would help make him famous. Later, from 1769 to 1776, Edes and Gill published the Boston Gazette on this spot — a fiercely patriotic paper that helped fan the flames of revolution.

Boston, MA

In the heart of Boston's financial district stands a stately 1909 building raised for the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company, an era when grand banking houses announced the permanence and prosperity of American finance. The building earned a second distinction as the final home of the Boston Stock Exchange, an institution that had traded since 1834 and helped fund New England's mills, railroads, and mines through the industrial age. When the exchange closed its doors in 2007, more than 170 years of regional capital markets came to a quiet end on Franklin Street.

Boston, MA

This spot marks the birthplace of Jordan Marsh, the great New England department store founded when nineteen-year-old Eben Dyer Jordan partnered with Benjamin L. Marsh in mid-19th-century Boston. In the same bustling commercial city, Nantucket's Rowland Hussey Macy gained the early retail experience that would lead to his own famous name. The plaque records how, in 1996, the two lineages of American retailing joined when Jordan Marsh became Macy's.