1775 - Boston Fortifications (3)

When first looking at a map of Boston from colonial times, someone not familiar with the city’s growth would be quite confused. Looking for the Back Bay area, one would find, oddly enough, a bay. A real bay filled with water, not land. Boston, as it was in George Washington’s times, looked nothing like it does today. The city was built on the Shawmut Peninsula; an outcropping of land that, on old maps, looked almost as if a shifting of the tides or a large storm might just pinch it off from the rest of the mainland. In fact, it is said that in cases of abnormally high tides, Boston actually was cut off from the rest of the land. As the town grew after the Revolutionary War, it became clear that the Shawmut Peninsula by itself was not sufficient to hold the burgeoning city. Soon, city planners thought up ideas to fill in parts of the bay to produce new land; an idea which was fairly revolutionary in and of itself. Thus began the birth of the Back Bay and the Fens.

Looking at the Back Bay Fens as it is today, and then looking back at historical maps, it is hard to conceive of how it was formed. If one is only looking at the immediate present and the far past, its history will never be understood. The Back Bay was an amazing project that sprang up over the course of 40 years and managed to become almost indistinguishable from the rest of Boston. The area shows an amazing case of urban planning and tells many incredible stories. The entire story of these few blocks could (and have) filled volumes.

The story of the Back Bay begins with Boston in the early 1800’s. Around the turn of the century, people began considering the idea of using tidal power from the bay to power mills. These mills would grind corn or other grain by using the power of water that was captured behind dams during high tide. Before long, a few entrepreneurs began building dams in the area, planning to make money off of the industries that would spring up and use them. The Boston and Roxbury Dam, completed in 1821, was the largest of these. It covered a large portion of what is now the Back Bay. The designer of the dam, Uriah Cotting, thought a large profit would be made from it. But there was a problem. It seems that all of the dams that sprang up in the Back Bay area worked quite well; too well. The dams did more than capture the tides, they effectively stopped the tides. After a few years, the tides had been tamed so dramatically that they could not be used for industry.

One of the contributors to the problem was the railroad. The dams for industry were not the only things blocking the tides; new railroad trestles were crisscrossing the area. With each new trestle built, more of the water was filled in, and more of the tide was diminished. (4) A lesson learned from all of this was the increasing need for more concentrated planning. The railroad planned things, industrial entrepreneurs planned things, and developers planned even more different things, but none of them coordinated. So the water level that each planner counted on and planned to change by a certain amount, was unaccounted for by each other planner.
Soon, the Back Bay began to stagnate. Before the dams, water was able to flow freely to the Charles and out, keeping the area fairly fresh and clean. The people that lived in the area had grown accustomed to dumping trash into the Back Bay and the sewage from the area also flowed into it. With the natural flow stopped up, the area began to fester. As Charles J. Swift, a current superintendent, wrote, “By the 1840s, most people agreed a mistake had been made, especially during the summer, when the Back Bay became fragrant to the dismay of Beacon Hill residents,” (1) Something had to be done.

In 1849, the health department declared the area to be a “nuisance, offensive and injurious to the large and increasing population residing upon it.” (4) The solution to the new waste problem that the health department demanded was to fill in the area. (5) It had been filling with garbage for many years, but now the city decided that it would officially fill it to create new land and solve the tremendous problem. Work began in 1858.
Of course, not everyone liked the idea of filling in the Back Bay. As there are with any urban development project, there were objections. In 1859, E.Y. Robbins objected by saying, “It is a great ventiduct, conveying pure air into the city as your aqueduct brings water. In short, it is a great windpipe, through which the city breathes; and the opening out into Back Bay, as it were, the mouth of the city; and to obstruct it by buildings at the outlet would be a kind of public strangulation, and should never be permitted.” (4) Luckily, most people saw that this “ventiduct” was sending in some truly nasty air, and the construction continued.

Notice that the map of the Back Bay in 1855 shown here. It shows a plan of streets laid out for the Back Bay area. Looking at the date though, the map was finished in 1851; 7 years before the filling of the Back Bay even began. (3) This shows an interesting bit of evidence pointing to the fact that planners were already working out the details of the actual implementation of the city structure in the area years in advance. It is interesting to note that much of the street structure shown on this proposed map actually ended up becoming the real structure of the site years later when it was finally completed.

The filling idea was not completely new anymore by the time that work began on the Back Bay. Mill Pond had been filled in, (it was one of the first of these filling projects proposed), and South Cove and Great Cove had been finished in 1845. But the Back Bay posed some interesting problems that the planners had not encountered on the other sites. Once again, the Back Bay initially had quite an ebb and flow to it. The nearby areas of Muddy River and Stony Brook both drained right into the area that had now become land. If land was just carelessly filled in (as they were initially trying), it would create an area that would be very prone to flooding. Enter Frederick Law Olmstead; the great mind behind Central Park in New York City. Many ideas had been submitted to solve the problem of flooding, but most had been large, ugly, concrete basins to control flood water.

Olmstead’s idea was different. He proposed that the Back Bay have its own park, (somewhat similar, yet smaller than, his recently completed Central Park). The Fens would have a marsh in it that would drain to the Charles. In this way, the park itself would work as a major part of the infrastructure of the city. As Kathy Poole, a professional in urban planning, points out; “His regard for the land as infrastructure was a radical departure from the idea of infrastructures within a park.” In 1895, his vision was completed. The new park let water drain neatly into the Charles without interfering with the Back Bay residences. The Fens not only took in the water drained from Muddy River and Stony Brook, it also accepted the overflow from the sewer and storm drain system below it. In this way, the single project served many roles at once. Another interesting side affect of the Fens was that it helped to treat the sewage from the nearby areas. The “bioremediation” principle that present day sewage treatment ponds are based on is used in the same way in the Fens. Some sources praise Olmstead for his tremendous forward thinking on this, other sources claim it was just an effect that he stumbled upon. Either way, it worked wonders for the area. With the completion of the Fens, and the Commissioner Channel that had been built 7 years before, the Back Bay now had a completely functional sewage and drainage system.

One might stop and wonder how an area that was originally purely meant for industrial use, filled with mills and later things like iron foundries and factories, would grow to become a mainly residential and fairly classy neighborhood. The answer is actually quite simple; brute force. The change to residential living in the area did not happen by chance. Planners who designed the area felt that it needed to be a much more intimate part of the city. Developers also wanted to make a large profit. The state owned most of the land of the Back Bay area, and they wanted to start it off right. So, in a series of very shady moves (by today’s standards), the city developers tried to sell as much of the land to the upper-class as they could. They made sure that the land was mostly too expensive for lower-class people to buy and even gave discounts to upper-class buyers just to get them in the neighborhood. (1) Then they implemented a series of fairly strict building codes in the area to ensure a certain level of homogeneity in the housing that would be built there. By the early 1900’s, most of the beautiful architecture in the area was built.

In the twentieth century though, there were many changes that shaped the area. MIT moved from its spot in the Back Bay to its new location in Cambridge in 1910. What it left behind was a number of buildings that were used as residences by its fraternities. When the great depression hit, many of the large houses that had been owned by one family (or even one wealthy person) were sold off as apartments or condominiums. Some of the residences were even turned into shops or businesses. A little while later, Boston University purchased a number of buildings in the area as residences for its students. Kenneth Jackson provides a bit of insight into the evolution of this area in his book, The Crabgrass Frontier. After World War II, the great boom of suburbia drew out many of the middle-class people of the neighborhood. By the end of the twentieth century, all of these changes had created an interesting (and somewhat eclectic) mix of people living in the area. The area now holds shops and pubs, juxtaposed with the residences of both the rich upper-class condominium dwellers and the lower income college students from Boston University and MIT. Some of the buildings now look very well kept and practically new, while right next door a building might sit that looks like it has not been touched since it was built in almost a century before. A good example of this is the Charlesgate Condominium. The building itself, along with the buildings around it, was built in 1910. In 1999, it was completely renovated though, and today looks like a sparkling new building. The residents of it back in 1910 were diverse in background and probably not that well off. The records show that it used to be owned by many different people (probably part of the depression fallout). Each has names of Chinese, Italian, and Irish descent. Now, the residents of the building are mostly upper-class. This can be seen in the alley, with spots filled with Mercedes and other expensive cars behind the Charlesgate. Right next to them are the beat-up cars of the college students from Boston University that are housed just next door in a fairly dilapidated building.

In an area that was created to be homogenous, it is now ripe with change due to the forces of the last century. It continues to be a wealth of information and lessons about the proper execution and planning of urban development.

1838 - Boston - Showing dams and trestles running across the Back Bay area. (2)

1855 - Boston and Back Bay

Shows plans for street layout already proposed for Back Bay area in 1855. (2)

1879 - Print showing Back Bay area. (6)

1890 - Bromley Atlas showing site in Back Bay. (2)

Sources:

(1) Boston Business Journal - "For a Seaport vision, look to city's Back Bay"

(2) Mapping Boston

(3) The Boston Atlas

(4) "Boston's Back Bay Fens: A Sectional Story"

(5) NABB: "History of the Back Bay"

(6) The Library of Congress Map Collection

2003 - Grant Jordan - 11.016