Few Boston sights make families smile faster than the giant Hood Milk Bottle standing outside Boston Children’s Museum at 308 Congress Street, on Children’s Wharf along the Fort Point Channel.
The bottle was built in 1934 by Arthur Gagner of Taunton to sell his homemade ice cream, and it is considered one of America’s earliest fast-food drive-in stands. Standing 40 feet tall and weighing 15,000 pounds, the wooden bottle in the playful ‘Coney Island’ style could hold 58,620 gallons of milk if it were real. After years of abandonment in Taunton, HP Hood bought and restored the structure and donated it to the museum; in 1977 it sailed by barge through Boston Harbor in the famous ‘Great Bottle Sail’ to its current home.
With support from Hood, the bottle received a major renovation of its facade and infrastructure in 2020, with new windows, awnings, exterior lighting, and HVAC. Each warm season its concession stand scoops ice cream for museum families, and in 2027 the bottle will celebrate 50 years at Children’s Wharf.
Pair a photo at the bottle with a day inside the museum, and you have one of Boston’s happiest family traditions.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)
