The story
As you stand here on Tremont Street, look up at the massive, circular brick facade of the Boston Center for the Arts. This is the Cyclorama, and its strange, rotunda-like shape isn’t just an architectural whim. It was built with one very specific, very massive purpose in mind.
In 1884, when this building first opened its doors, it didn’t house art galleries or theaters. It was designed to hold a single, colossal painting: Paul Philippoteaux’s The Battle of Gettysburg. Imagine a canvas four hundred feet long and fifty feet high, wrapping around the interior walls in a seamless circle.
In an era before cinema, this was the ultimate immersive experience—the 19th-century version of virtual reality. Visitors would walk through a dark tunnel and emerge onto a central platform, surrounded by the smoke, the chaos, and the heartbreak of the Civil War’s turning point. The scale was so vast and the detail so precise that veterans of the battle were known to weep, claiming they could finally show their families exactly what it felt like to stand in the middle of the carnage.
But public tastes are fickle. By the 1890s, the novelty of the cyclorama began to fade. The massive painting was eventually sold and moved—it now lives in the Gettysburg National Military Park—and this grand brick drum was forced to reinvent itself.
It became a roller-skating rink, a bicycle academy, and even a venue for professional wrestling. However, its most surprising chapter began when the roar of the battlefield was replaced by the roar of internal combustion. In the early 1900s, the building was converted into a garage and workshop.
A French bicycle racer named Albert Champion moved in. Champion was a daredevil who had come to America to race motorcycles, but he was also a brilliant tinkerer. Right here, within these circular walls, he began manufacturing high-quality porcelain spark plugs.
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because his initials gave birth to the AC Spark Plug Company, a titan of the American automotive industry. So, as you look at those intricate brick arches and the great skylighted dome above, remember that this floor has felt the weight of both thousands of gallons of paint and the very first sparks of the motor age. Today, as the heart of the Boston Center for the Arts, the Cyclorama has come full circle, returning to its roots as a place of creativity and public gathering.
It remains one of the South End’s most enduring landmarks—a Victorian spectacle that helped jumpstart the modern world.