Plans detail Holocaust museum to be built along Freedom Trail

Museum to be built on Tremont Street, across from Boston Common

Museum to be built on Tremont Street, across from Boston Common

The latest breaking updates, delivered straight to your email inbox.

Museum to be built on Tremont Street, across from Boston Common

Renderings and floor plans delivered to Boston city officials this week provide new insight into the plans for a new museum dedicated to preserving the memory and lessons of the Holocaust, which is proposed for construction near Boston Common and along the Freedom Trail.

The Holocaust Legacy Foundation and architecture firm Schwartz/Silver Architects Inc., submitted the new details about the proposed six-floor, 33,000-square-foot building in a presentation to the Boston Civic Design Commission. It explained that visitors will enter the museum from Tremont Street at the corner with Hamilton Place and that queues, when necessary, will line up on Hamilton Place. Visitors coming by car and bus would be dropped off at Park Street.

Additional details included in the latest document include proposals to widen sidewalks on Hamilton Place, reducing the radius of the sidewalk at the corner and adding granite pavers inset with stainless steel bars to the sidewalks, a design element that will blend with the building facade.

On the exterior, the design features an undulating stainless-steel woven metal fabric meant to evoke the curtains drawn in Jewish households as the Nazis rose to power and the fences that surrounded the death camps. Jutting out on one side will be a bay window surrounding a railcar that was used for deporting Jews to the camps. Designers plan to use "subtle lighting" to emphasize the facade in the evening and at night.

"From The Freedom Trail, people may see museum visitors filing into the railcar but not exiting, illustrating the reality of millions of people who were transported to their deaths in such cars," the foundation said in a previous summary of the plans.

The latest update also proposes adding seating or walls on the exterior along Hamilton Place alongside interchangeable banners. Sixty-five percent of the ground-level wall along Tremont Street will be transparent but part of it will be made up of granite panels engraved with quotes.

On the top floor, the plans call for offices and an event space.

Finally, the presentation included renderings of how the building will look and the shadows it will cast across various times of day.

The museum is planned to open in early 2026.

Video below: Survivor tells her story