[2] The museum is a non-profit educational institution with community events, lectures, children's programs, walking tours of the park, and an ever-changing series of exhibits on motor vehicles and the automobile's impact on society and culture.

Gigantic in scale, the building stored carriages, housed horses, and served as home to stable staff who lived on the upper floor.

The museum also attracts visitors with lectures on various subjects relating to transportation or local history, as well as musical entertainment in "The Carriage House Concert Series".

The Library and Archives at Larz Anderson Auto Museum are devoted to materials relating automobile, racing and motor transportation history.

In 1971, in cooperation with the Veteran Motor Car Club of America, the Andersons' carriage house became known as the Museum of Transportation, under the direction of Duncan Smith.

The museum's collection of antique-auto newsreel footage broadened into a library of vintage movie comedies, displaying vehicles of the 1920s in motion.

Museum visitors had the opportunity to see high-wheeled-bicycle demonstrations, and ride in a vintage-1937 fire engine named for Boston Pops conductor and firefighting-memorabilia enthusiast Arthur Fiedler.