Boston: An Engineering Success Story
Among the earliest engineering projects to come to Boston was undoubtedly the civil engineering that transformed the landscape of the city itself. Boston began as an irregular, spidery-shaped peninsula (practically an island) consisting of three peaks that rose out of the harbor. These peaks were Fort Hill, Copps Hill and Trimount (consisting of three hills itself - Pemberton, Beacon and Mt. Vernon. The North End (which would become known as the Italian section of Boston) was itself a peninsula (Shawmut) distinct from the rest of Boston.
The extent of the future landfill can be seen in the superimposed modern map of Boston over the outline of the original peninsula. This massive project started around the time that the American Revolution began. By 1775, the only significant change to the landscape had been the construction of the long wharf (nearly ½ mile long) and a dam across the arms of the North Cove (defined by the coast of the North End and Mt Vernon) to utilize the tides in order to power grist mills and sawmills. This dammed cove formed a man-made pond named Mill Pond., after the Mills powered by waterwheels that spun with the in and out bound tides.
By the beginning of the 19th century, Boston was quickly outgrowing its relatively small landmass (approximately 780 acres). The town fathers decided to expand outward into the sea, specifically by filling in marshes, mud flats, and gaps between wharves along the waterfront, a process Walter Muir Whitehill called "cutting down the hills to fill the coves." Cutting down hills was apparently a common practice in colonial Boston as Mount Vernon was cut down early in the 1800s, and the soil was used to fill along Charles Street.
Boston selectman, Charles Bulfinch had been the visionary for how Mill Pond could be transformed into usable city space. In 1808 he designed the Bulfinch Triangle plan for the filled in land. By this time, the 50-acre Mill Pond had become dirty and stagnant, posing a health risk. City planners decided to fill in the old pond to build housing for working class citizens. To do so, gravel from the central peak of Beacon Hill was excavated and moved to fill in the pond. The effort took 21 years from 1807 to 1828. The primitive tools used to cut down the first hills of Boston help explain the length of time required to cut down the hills, and the initial slow pace of landfill projects. Cutting the steep hills was critical to adding more land along the edges of the coves, and also made the hills themselves more habitable.
Three major streets made up the sides of the triangle: present-day North Washington, Merrimack, and Causeway. Bulfinch's plan included building a canal through the center of the Triangle. Boston’s latest big land works project (known as the Big Dig) has restored the Bullfinch Triangle by burying the former Central Artery underground (Route 93). Today, the three sides of the triangle are again complete and visible for visitors to IMS 2009.
In 1814, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation was chartered to construct a mill dam, which extended from Brookline to the edge of the Boston Common. This long dam, intended to harness the power of the tides, would also serve as a toll road connecting Boston to Watertown, bypassing Boston Neck. By the mid 1830s, the area behind the dam was further subdivided by newly constructed railroad beds which crisscrossed the bay.
The Mill Dam was a popular promenade, and ultimately became the foundation of Beacon Street. The blocking of the bay by these constructions created vast reservoirs of stagnant water, made less appealing by the addition of raw sewage. The environmental impact of these projects was not well understood. The condition of the bay was a serious problem, and added incentive to the move to fill in this area as well. Land fills from West Cove, South Cove and Great Cove had added about 500 acres of living and working space to Boston, yet at mid century the city was a thriving metropolis and the hunger for new land was more intense than ever.
During the mid-to-late 19th century, workers filled more than 700 acres of brackish Charles River marshlands west of the Boston Common, creating the Back Bay neighborhood. This massive project was begun in 1857. New technologies were required for the filling of the Back Bay. It was a larger area to be filled and the easy sources of fill had already been cut down. The invention of the railroad and steam shovel made it possible to bring in gravel from as far away as Needham to the West. For nearly fifty years, day and night, 24 hours a day, gravel was brought in by railroad from Needham and westward areas, up to 3,500 railroad cars of it a day. It was a tremendous undertaking, and carefully organized by an entrepreneur named John Souther.
The Great Boston Fire of 1872 was Boston's largest urban fire and still one of the most costly fire-related property losses in American history. The conflagration began at 7:20 p.m. on November 9, 1872, in the basement of a commercial warehouse at 83—87 Summer Street in Boston, Massachusetts. When flames reached the wooden elevator shaft, they quickly rushed up through floors crammed with flammable rolls of cloth, hosiery, gloves, laces, and hoop skirts and set the building's wooden roof ablaze.
Curious spectators assumed that someone else had alerted the fire department; they watched the blaze for 20 crucial minutes before an alarm was sounded. Two engines responded and immediately gave a second and third alarm. By 7:45, every fire company in the city had been called; they all arrived pulling their engines by hand. But it was too late.The blaze burned for 15 hours with a heat so intense that it created its own roaring wind. Flames spread relentlessly from one wooden roof to the next, melting whole blocks of granite stores and warehouses into superheated rubble. Nearly 1,700 firemen from 27 different towns — some as far away as New Haven and Providence — pumped weak streams of water on the blaze. They had some victories; they saved the Old South Church and kept the blaze away from the Common. But mostly they battled in vain as flames raced down to the waterfront and consumed boats in the harbor. Finally, town officials persuaded an exhausted Damrell to use his weapon of last resort: explosives. Under pressure from the mayor and the city's postmaster general, a reluctant Damrell agreed to blow up blocks of buildings to rob the fire of fuel. While the tactic was effective, it was the source of controversy later The blaze consumed about 65 acres (263,000 m²) of Boston's downtown, 776 buildings, and much of the financial district and caused $73.5 million in damage. At least twenty people are known to have died in the fire. After the Great Boston Fire of 1872, workers used building rubble as landfill along the downtown waterfront. Within two years, a new city arose from the ashes.
The filling of present-day Back Bay was completed by 1882; filling reached Kenmore Square in 1890, and finished in the Fens in 1900. The project was the largest of a number of land reclamation projects since 1820, which over the course of time, more than doubled the size of the original Boston peninsula.
Boston’s Fall and Rise in the 20th Century
The late nineteenth century became a time of economic expansion and seaport retrenchment. The port was prosperous, but the local control of shipping lines and the great trading houses which supported them, began to be wrested by New York's new breed of millionaire barons. So too, international trade began to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the Port of New York. In addition, Boston's shipbuilding industry virtually collapsed as the craft-oriented wooden shipyards failed to adapt to the assembly-line techniques of iron and steam-powered ship construction.
As the downtown waterfront began to deteriorate, railroad companies built new port facilities on the rapidly expanding filled waterfront of South Bay and East Boston. There they operated giant grain and export coal terminals, backed by enormous rail yards. These features continued to dominate Boston Harbor well into the 1940's.
The military also increased its presence in Boston Harbor. The Charlestown Navy Yard, homeport of the USS Constitution, had been emplaced in Charlestown since the Revolution, but by the end of World War Two the Navy had three annexes and a Naval air station on Boston Harbor. During the war, the nearby Fore River Shipyard turned out more ships than any other shipyard in the country.
Boston Today
Today's Port of Boston has been virtually transformed since the stagnation of the immediate postwar years. The port's rebirth began in 1956, when an ineffective, locally-controlled port commission was replaced by the autonomous, self-supported, Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport). Massport immediately began the difficult job of buying up and rehabilitating abandoned or deteriorated property, updating rail and road links and, in general, preparing the port for changes in the world shipping industry. For more than 350 years, Boston has proved its willingness to embrace or develop the technology necessary to meet the needs of a changing world.
With the recent opening of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center – site of the MTT-s IMS 2009 symposium and exhibition, the redevelopment of the South Boston waterfront is still very much a work in progress. This relatively new convention and exhibition center serves as the anchor and economic engine for mixed-use development in the South Boston Waterfront. The $850 million Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC), is New England’s largest building. Its dramatic 516,000-square-foot exhibition hall, considered one of the most powerful spaces of its kind in North America. Like the landfills of yesterday, the BCEC is a part of Boston’s greater long-term vision to expand the city as a whole, to create a waterfront district the entire community can enjoy. As IMS 2009 attendees visit the BCEC, they won’t just see a convention center, they’ll see an extension of this ever-changing city on the hill.
