Some New Englanders believe wealth is a burden to be borne with a minimum of display. Happily, the early residents of Beacon Street were not among them. They erected many fine architectural statements, from the magnificent State House to grand patrician mansions. Here are some of the most important buildings of Charles Bulfinch, the ultimate designer of the Federal style in America: dozens of bowfront row houses, the Somerset Club, and the glorious Harrison Gray Otis House.

After the Boston Athenaeum, Beacon Street highlights begin at No. 34, originally the Cabot family residence and until 1996 the headquarters of Little, Brown and Company, once a mainstay of Boston's publishing trade. At 33 Beacon Street is the George Parkman House, its gracious facade hiding more than a few secrets. One of the first sensational "trials of the century" involved the murder of Dr. George Parkman, a wealthy landlord and Harvard benefactor. He was bludgeoned to death in 1849 by Dr. John Webster, a Harvard medical professor and neighborhood acquaintance who allegedly became enraged by Parkman's demands that he repay a personal loan. At the conclusion of the trial, the professor was hanged; he's buried in an unmarked grave on Copp's Hill in the North End. Parkman's son lived in seclusion in this house overlooking the Common until he died in 1908. The building is now used for civic functions.

Notice the windows of the twin Appleton-Parker Houses, built by the pioneering textile merchant Nathan Appleton and a partner at Nos. 39 and 40. These are the celebrated purple panes of Beacon Hill; only a few buildings have them, and they are incredibly valuable. Their amethystine mauve color was the result of the action of the sun's ultraviolet light on the imperfections in a shipment of glass sent to Boston around 1820. The mansions aren't open to the public.

The quintessential snob has always been a Bostonian -- and the Somerset Club, at 42 Beacon Street, has always been the inner sanctum of blue-nose Cabots, Lowells, and Lodges. The mansion is a rare intrusion of the granite Greek Revival style into Beacon Hill. The older of its two buildings was erected in 1819 by David Sears and designed by Alexander Parris, the architect of Quincy Market. A few doors down is the grandest of the three houses Harrison Gray Otis built for himself during Boston's golden age.