Boston
How Boston Was Built and Evolved Over Time
Boston outgrew its own geography and then manufactured more of it. The city was founded in on the Shawmut Peninsula, a three-hilled piece of land nearly surrounded by water and joined to the mainland by a narrow neck. That is a good site for a defensible Puritan town and a poor one for a port city of half a million people.
More than two-thirds of inner Boston did not exist when Boston was founded. The modern land area was created by filling in the surrounding tidal areas over centuries — and the fill had to come from somewhere. It came from the city itself: earth from the levelling or lowering of the three original hills, the Trimountain, after which Tremont Street is named. Boston cut down its own hills to make its own ground.
Then it imported the rest by rail. Back Bay was filled with gravel brought by train from Needham, and in the mid-to-late nineteenth century workers filled almost 600 acres of brackish Charles River marshland west of Boston Common with gravel railed in from the hills of Needham Heights. Mid-century reclamation projects also created significant parts of the South End, the West End, the Financial District and Chinatown.
A fire supplied one campaign's material. After the Great Boston Fire of , workers used the building rubble as landfill along the downtown waterfront. The burnt city became the ground the rebuilt city stands on.
You can read the join without being told where it is. Downtown's streets grew organically and form no grid; Back Bay, the South End, East Boston and South Boston were laid out later, on one. The change is abrupt, and it marks exactly where the natural land stopped and the made land began.
The subway went under because the streets could not be widened. In the Tremont Street subway opened — the first in the United States, running beneath the street named for the hills that had been levelled to build the city.
The twentieth century demolished rather than filled, and it went badly. Facing economic decline, the city set up the Boston Redevelopment Authority in . In the BRA began work on the historic West End: the demolition was extensive, it met strong public opposition, and thousands of families were displaced. The BRA went on to clear Scollay Square by eminent domain to build the modernist Government Center. These are the campaigns Boston argues about rather than celebrates.
The last great campaign put a highway underground. The Central Artery/Tunnel Project — the Big Dig — was completed in , after many delays and cost overruns. It buried the elevated expressway that had cut the downtown off from its own waterfront, which is why the harbour and the North End are walkable from the centre today.