About Hood Milk Bottle
Boston has plenty of monumental architecture, but few landmarks are shaped like a container from the refrigerator. Beside Boston Children’s Museum stands a 40-foot-tall milk bottle, complete with a narrow neck, cap, and enough interior space to function as a small building.
The bottle began in Taunton in 1933, when Arthur Gagner created it as a roadside attraction where he could sell homemade ice cream. According to Boston Children’s Museum, the structure is about 18 feet wide, weighs roughly 15,000 pounds, and could theoretically hold 58,620 gallons of milk if it were an actual container.
After decades in Taunton, the bottle was moved to Boston in 1977. Getting it there required more than a truck and a wide-load sign. The structure traveled by barge to its new waterfront home, where it became part of the museum complex. H.P. Hood later supported renovations, giving the giant bottle the familiar branding seen today.
The Milk Bottle is easy to see from the museum plaza and surrounding Harborwalk area. Its appeal is wonderfully straightforward: somebody once decided that the best way to sell ice cream was to build a two-story bottle beside the road, and Boston eventually decided the thing was worth keeping.