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    Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era
    Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era
    Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era
    Ebook232 pages56 minutes

    Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era

    By Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

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    The Back Bay was one of Boston's premier residential neighborhoods between 1837 and 1901. From its quagmire beginnings and with the creation of the Boston Public Garden in the 1830s, the Back Bay was envisioned as an urbane and sophisticated streetscape of stone and brick row houses. The major center of the neighborhood became Art Square, now known as Copley Square, which was surrounded by Trinity Church, New Old South Church, Second Church of Boston, the Boston Public Library, and S.S. Pierce and Company. With images of swan boats and architectural delights, Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era illuminates a particularly vibrant period in this intriguing and relatively new neighborhood's past.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateNov 19, 2003
    ISBN9781439611944
    Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era
    Author

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco is a noted historian and author of over sixty books on Boston, its neighborhoods and surrounding cities and towns. He lectures widely on the history and development of his native city.

    Read more from Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

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      Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era - Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

      .

      INTRODUCTION

      Wherever land can be made economically, on the circumference of the city, without destroying commercial advantage, there it is bound to appear.

      —Boston Almanac, 1855

      Settled in 1630 by a group of Puritans seeking religious freedom, Boston was an 800-acre peninsula projecting from the mainland at Roxbury. The Neck, or present-day Washington Street in the South End, connected the crab-shaped town, and it remained as such for nearly two centuries until the early 19th century, when topographical changes began to take place with the leveling of Beacon Hill with the fill being used to create the flat of the hill between Charles Street and the river. The infilling of Dock Square for the new Faneuil Hall Market, now called Quincy Market, from 1822 to 1826 created new buildable land. The new South End, a large development in the 1840s and 1850s, was a planned residential district of brick row houses with numerous squares such as Union and Chester Parks and Rutland and Concord Squares.

      In 1814, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation was chartered, which was to use the waterpower of the basin by dams built across it. The dams were to have roads above them linking Boston to Roxbury and Brookline. The Mill Dam was laid as an extension of Beacon Street to Brookline, and the Cross Dam led to Roxbury. These roads became Beacon Street and Parker (now Hemenway) Streets, respectively. Completed in 1821, the Mill Dam served its purposes admirably and acted as a toll road to Brookline. In 1831, with the opening of the Boston and Providence Railroad, a further crossway was laid through the Back Bay, with the railway heading south from the Park Square terminus. All of this development and the damming of the Back Bay from the tidal flow of the Charles River caused the area to stagnate. With a large part of the city’s sewerage draining into the basin, it became not only a sanitary but a noxious offense, as it was under water at high tide, and at low tide it was a mud flat, reeking with waste and sewage. This hastened city officials to seriously contemplate the immediate infilling of the basin. The area just west of the Boston Common had been infilled between Beacon and Boylston Streets and was to be laid out as the Boston Public Garden in 1837, but the Back Bay and its noxious odors had become offensive and demanded attention.

      By 1849, the Back Bay nuisance, as it had become known, was first addressed seriously when a land commission was appointed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to deal with the subject of creating new land from the marshland of the Back Bay. A comprehensive plan was drawn up by the firm of Garbett and Wood and presented in 1852. The land was to be divided with the mill corporation taking control of the territory north of the Mill Dam, and the Commonwealth taking the territory east and west of a line near the Boston and Providence Railroad. The Water Power Company took all territory south of that line. The plan, one of many presented, to design the Back Bay was undertaken by Arthur Gilman, a prominent architect in partnership with Gridley J. Fox Bryant. Earlier in the century, Abel Bowen, a nephew of the entrepreneur Daniel Bowen, showman and curator of the Columbian Museum, had sketched a plan of the Back Bay with row houses sharing a uniform setback from the street with shared rooflines and a center treelined park. Gilman’s plan called for cross streets beginning at the Boston Public Garden and continuing west to the Muddy River, between Boylston Street and the Mill Dam, or Beacon Street. However, the infilling of the marshland of the Back Bay was a monumental task that was to take close to three decades to complete and was done under the auspices of the Back Bay Park Improvement.

      In 1857, the infilling of the Back Bay marshland began through the ingenuity of John Souther, a resident of South Boston and an engineer. Souther owned the Globe Locomotive Works and had been successful in designing machinery used in the sugar plantations in Cuba; he was thought to be eminently suited to this task. In the 1850s, he was approached by the Commonwealth to oversee the filling of the marshland, which was undertaken by the contracting firm of Goss and Munson. The fill was brought by train from Needham, a town 12 miles west of Boston, to the Back Bay in 35 gondola cars that ran 24 hours a day, 6 days a week, and every 45 minutes. The fill was dredged from the hills in Needham (the area of Gould Street near Route 128) by steam shovels designed by Souther that filled the railcars. Upon arrival in the Back Bay, the cars were tipped on a spring action, spilling the contents into the area to be filled. The fill had an average depth of 20 feet, and the expanse of the Back Bay to be filled was roughly 460 acres. The lots were filled lower than the streets laid out by Gilman, as each townhouse had a basement that would be below street level. Though a monumental task, it is said that only 80 men worked on the project, which included the loading of the cars, transportation, and dumping. So successful was this venture that by 1885, only a small area was left unfilled, near the area of the Back Bay Fens along the Muddy River.

      The filled land, known initially as the New West End, but later be known as Boston’s Back Bay, was laid out according to Arthur Gilman’s plan. The east-west streets, such as Marlborough and Newbury Streets, were named for parts of 18th-century

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