Hood Milk Bottle

The Hood Milk Bottle is a 40-foot-tall wooden milk bottle on the Fort Point Channel that now works as an ice cream stand and snack bar. It serves soft-serve ice cream and snacks from a roadside novelty structure that its listing calls a time capsule of milk conveyance. It is one of the country’s earliest examples of whimsical “Coney Island” architecture, an oversized version of a milk bottle.

Arthur Gagner built the bottle in 1933 in Taunton, Massachusetts, to sell homemade ice cream. By the 1960s it had been abandoned, until H.P. Hood rescued it and, in 1977, moved it by barge to the Boston waterfront in an event remembered as the “Great Bottle Sail.” Restored and still in use, the bottle remains a symbol of Boston’s quirky architectural history and waterfront culture.

What to Know

• The stand operates seasonally rather than year-round.
• It is listed in the Boston Seaport directory under ice cream.
• The bottle stands next to Boston Children’s Museum.