Eden on the Charles: the making of Boston 9780674048416, 9780674058552, 9780674416833

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EDEN ON THE

CHARLES

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EDEN ON THE

CHARLES THE MAKING OF BOSTON

MICHAEL RAWSON

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts « London, England ¢ 2010

Copyright © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Rawson, Michael. Eden on the Charles: the making of Boston / Michael Rawson. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-04841-6 (alk. paper)

1. Boston (Mass.)—History—1oth century. 2. Boston (Mass.)—Social conditions—1oth

century. 3. Boston (Mass.)—Environmental conditions. 4. City planning—Massachusetts— Boston—History—1oth century. 5. Human ecology—Massachusetts—Boston—History—

19th century. I. Title. P73.44.R39 2010

974.4 6103—dc22 2010007038

CONTENTS

Prologue: To Builda City 1

1.Enclosing the Common 22 2. Constructing Water 75 3. Inventing the Suburbs 129

4. Making the Harbor 179 5. Recreating the Wilderness 233

Epilogue: The City Complete 277

Note on Boston Common Petitions 285 Notes 2091

Acknowledgments 347

Index 349

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PREFACE

hen I was growing up in the Boston area, one of my favorite

W views of the city was from a hilltop in a suburban forest preserve that lies north of the city. The hill places the observer at the boundary of two seemingly distinct environments. To the south, the view reveals five miles of increasingly dense development that culminates in the skyscrapers of Boston. To the north, the unbroken forest of the preserve stretches almost to the horizon. The sharp contrast between the urban and the wild, the “artificial” and the “natural,” makes for a powerful visual experience. The viewer is overcome by the impression that cities and nature are completely disconnected from each other. It almost seems as if one can see, in sharp relief, the very line that divides them. I still enjoy visiting that hill, but I realized in writing this book that the view is misleading. Like the residents of all cities, Bosto-

nians maintain many connections with the natural world. They breathe air, visit parks, drink water, eat food, and sail on the Charles River. They burn fossil fuels to produce energy, and they consume goods made from wood, cotton, metal, and other natural sources, some of which enter the city through the large natural system that is Boston Harbor. Urban scholars recognize today that Boston and other cities are not detached from the natural environment. Rather, they are inextricably connected to it.

But such connections are not as straightforward as they might seem. Even simple actions, like visiting a park or drinking a glass of water, are structured by complex relationships between humans and the natural world that are social, cultural, political, economic, and legal in character. The residents of Boston, for example, do not simply “visit” Boston Common but relate to it entirely through leisure. Cultural norms and city ordinances restrict their activities to recre-

viii Preface ational pursuits, in contrast with prior generations who related to the Common through activities such as digging gravel and pasturing a cow. Bostonians also maintain a particular relationship with their drinking water. Unlike urbanites in many other parts of the world, they consider access to an abundant supply of clean water to

be a moral and political right, rather than a privilege. As a result, they insist that it be dispensed to users—usually by a governmental agency—at a reasonable price. Relationships such as these are easy to overlook because they are so familiar, yet variations can be found in all American cities and play a central role in how urbanites organize their interactions with the natural environment. In a world in-

creasingly dominated by cities, they could not be of greater importance. There was a time, however, when many of America’s most com-

monly experienced ways of relating to nature did not exist. They were invented in the nineteenth century with the construction of the nation’s first cities, and many were invented in Boston. As resi-

dents of one of the earliest communities to urbanize in America, Bostonians helped to design some of the first canals, urban parks, waterworks, sewer systems, railroads, factories, residential suburbs,

rural cemeteries, harbor facilities, and suburban forest preserves. We often think of such places and systems as the “infrastructure” that underpins urban life, and so they are. But this book also treats them as key points of connection between the human and natural worlds that structure how the two interact. By helping to create these connections, Bostonians also helped to invent the new environmental relationships that came to define what it means to be “urban.” ‘That process is the subject of this book. The metropolitan world that emerged during the nineteenth cen-

tury was based on different ways of relating to the environment than Americans had previously known. Technology mediated interactions with nature that had once been more immediate, sometimes

to dramatic effect—the difference, for example, between fetching

Preface ix water from an outdoor well and getting it from an indoor tap was enormous. Scientific advances enabled urbanites to adopt more aggressive approaches to controlling the harbors, rivers, and other natural systems that support cities. Changing ideas about leisure led to the dedication of certain natural areas solely to recreational pursuits, and a new desire to moderate the disruptive effects of cease-

less urban change made it possible to permanently preserve such places. In the countryside immediately outside cities, a set of new relationships to nature based on a domestically oriented suburban ideal was replacing a traditional agrarian lifestyle. Linking these changes and countless others was the growing influence of government, which often encouraged, managed, and protected new ways of interacting with nature. By the end of the century, the transformation was complete. A new web of environmental relationships was in place, one that continues to characterize the American metropolis today.

Ideas about nature deeply informed the shape of these new interactions, and the work of cultural historian Raymond Williams helped me to appreciate how complicated such ideas could be. They

often reflected contemporary thought about society, economics, politics, medicine, and science, and they were incredibly divisive. Almost without exception, the ideas of nature discussed by Bostonians were freighted with the baggage of class strife or ethnic tension and

conveyed as much information about the human as they did about the natural. Williams recognized this when he famously wrote that “what is often being argued, it seems to me, in the idea of nature is the idea of man... indeed the ideas of kinds of society.” Williams applied this insight to the creation of literary representations of the city, but I am exploring its implications for the creation of the city itself.

Since Boston was America’s intellectual center for much of the nineteenth century, it provides especially fertile ground for exploring competing ideas of nature. In fact, one would be hard-pressed

xX Preface to find another place in nineteenth-century America where people were devoting more time to thinking and writing about the natural world. Much of this intellectual activity was responding to the process of urbanization, especially after 1822 when Lowell—the nation’s

first industrial “shock city’—was founded only twenty-five miles from Boston. The growth of Lowell and the early development of their own city prompted Bostonians to reexamine their relationships to nature earlier than most other Americans, and their reflections are recorded in everything from paintings and poems to government documents and engineering reports. If these sources reveal anything, it is the simple but powerful fact that controlling the environmental change produced by city building required controlling the meaning of nature as well. What we call “nature,” however, is neither wholly cultural nor wholly physical, but almost always both. That inherent complexity has made it difficult for scholars to write histories that give both aspects of nature their due. Urban and cultural historians, for their part, have tended to treat the role of nature in the city-building process as a largely intellectual one, with nature narrowly defined as

the set of romantic ideas that influenced the design of pastoral places like parks, suburbs, and rural cemeteries. Material conditions and asymmetries of power are usually left unexamined. Environmental historians have launched their own sustained study of urban

growth and its social and environmental consequences, but their work tends to emphasize material nature at the expense of cultural nature. This book brings both aspects of nature to the foreground with the conviction that engaging nature in all of its physical and cultural complexity produces a more nuanced understanding of its place in human history.

Since the new relationships between urbanites and the natural world emerged from specific social and environmental contexts, I have chosen to focus on several closely analyzed case studies. Early

chapters explore how Bostonians transformed Boston Common

Preface xi from a pasture into the first public park, created one of the earliest city-wide waterworks, and helped to invent that enduring residential ideal, the pastoral suburb. Later chapters trace how Bostonians used innovative means to control the city’s coastline, rivers, and harbor, and pioneered a new kind of suburban park system that preserved natural areas and provided a matrix for future development. Individually, each chapter details the creation of a familiar building block of the modern metropolis from a less familiar environmental perspective. Together, the chapters provide a topical and loosely chronological journey through the century-long process of city building, tracing through their stories the gradual accumulation of the relationships to nature that make up metropolitan life.

These chapters do not cover the full extent of this enormous transition. Only a volume of monumental size and scope could contain the entire story. But the relationships that I have chosen to highlight have either become central to urban life across a broad swath of American cities or are particularly revealing. Several also represent new stories about environmental change in Boston itself. ‘The

removal of the cows from Boston Common, the battles to annex the city’s suburbs, the transformation of the harbor—all represent underexplored pieces of Boston’s past that played major roles in its development. Of course, emphasizing some transitions necessarily means deemphasizing others. In making such choices, I was guided by the historical questions I was seeking to answer and by the history of Boston itself. The reason, for example, that I do not explore more fully the new ways of interacting with nature created by the rise of the factory system is that Boston industrialized a full generation after its neighbor, Lowell, and did not directly experience the earliest formation of those relationships. The chapters, then, strive to be true to Boston’s distinctive history, and they find unity in thematic connections rather than topical coverage. As the chapter topics suggest, I am treating Boston as both a dis-

crete political entity that is separate from its suburbs and a more

xii Preface nebulous cultural and environmental region that includes them. This seemingly paradoxical characterization simply reflects the fact that cities have many different kinds of boundaries, and their political boundaries are usually different from their environmental and cultural boundaries. Where Boston's political control stops at very clear municipal lines that are traceable on a map, its environmental connections and cultural influence extend over a much larger area. Excluding Boston’s suburbs from its environmental history just because they fall outside of its political boundaries would therefore be just as shortsighted as omitting Ralph Waldo Emerson from a cultural history of Boston because he lived in Concord. Although my primary goal is to shed light on the historical relationship between nature and cities, I also remain fascinated by the history of Boston itself. As a native of the Boston area, I know firsthand that the city’s past is always present, not just in countless monuments and historical markers but also in its sense of identity. In an age of cultural homogenization on a global scale, Boston has managed to retain an impressive measure of continuity with its past. The old adage that Boston is a “state of mind,” a particular way of thinking, still resonates today. But it was never more relevant than in the nineteenth century, when Bostonians applied their distinctive state of mind to the creation of a distinctive city.

If we consider how much we are nature’s, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1844)

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PROLOGUE

To Build a City he life of Edward Everett Hale spanned much of the nineteenth

T concur and the older the noted author and minister got, the more he marveled at the changes to the natural world produced by the growth of Boston. Born on the corner of Tremont and School streets in 1822, the elderly Hale remembered the Boston of his childhood as “a large, pretty country town.” His memory of free-standing homes with large gardens and orchards stood in sharp contrast to the brownstones and business blocks that he had watched replace them. Hale wondered whether people might now “buy their thread and needles, perhaps, where I have picked and eaten pears, or have aimed my arrow at a target a hundred yards away.” The younger Boston had also been a city of hills, almost all of which had since been leveled. “Fort Hill has been entirely removed,” Hale observed, “and a little circular bit of greensward marks the place where, in my boyhood, was a hill fifty feet high.” As Bostonians were taking down the hills, they were using the excavated material to make new land by filling tidal flats. The neighborhood that Hale and his parishioners called home stood on ground where the sea had ebbed and flowed only a few years before. “I have sailed my bark boat on the salt waters where I now can sit in the parlors of my parishioners, ” Hale recalled. “I have studied botany on the marshes where I now sit in my own study.”?

Rather than being unique to Boston, such wholesale rearrangements of the natural world lay at the heart of the nation’s first great period of city building. In the same century, Chicagoans reversed the flow of their city’s river so that it ran away from, rather than to-

2 Eden on the Charles ward, Lake Michigan; the residents of Pittsburgh raised parts of their city by as much as ten feet to improve drainage; and the citizens of New Orleans surrounded their city with miles of earthen levies to hold back the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Such changes might seem extraordinary when considered one city at a time, but taken as a whole they were routine. Across America, the building of cities promoted a complete restructuring of the natural world to accommodate larger populations and to fulfill new social and economic goals. Environmental change of this magnitude created the understandable impression among many Americans that a city is a place separate from nature, a place where

the built environment has replaced the natural one. The educator Henry Tappan made the point succinctly in 1852 when he wrote: “Life in a great city is, at best, a war with nature.”

The result of all this environmental change, however, was not the severing of human relationships with the natural world but the production of new ones. In 1800, when Boston had a population of just 25,000 people clustered on the northeast side of its peninsula, its residents interacted with the natural world in ways that were largely rural, or at least pre-urban. Bostonians combined labor and leisure on Boston Common, grazing cows and beating carpets in the same space where they took strolls and admired the view. They provided

their own water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning by pulling it from a well, if they had access to one, or buying it from a vendor. They made new land by filling tidal flats, with no fear of damaging the gigantic natural harbor and without any scientific understanding of how its hydraulics worked. They altered their physical environment constantly, with the expectation that what they had just created would itself someday be replaced. And the residents of the small towns surrounding Boston organized their lives around agriculture and husbandry and were not “suburban” in any modern sense of the word.’

By 1900, with the population at 560,000 and the city’s political

Prologue: To Build a City 3 boundaries greatly expanded, Bostonians had established a radically

different set of relationships to nature. They had banished labor from their Common and created a number of other green spaces devoted exclusively to leisure pursuits. They had exchanged well water for lake water piped directly into their homes, and they treated

it as a right to be provided by government, rather than a privilege. They had learned to see their harbor through the lens of science, which they used to make dramatic changes in Boston's estuary. They

had come to appreciate the value of environmental permanence and had preserved thousands of acres of open land from development. And many of them had moved out of Boston proper into nearby suburbs to live a romanticized and recreational version of country life. Through these and other transformations, Boston had become a modern metropolis, not just in its political and economic relationships but in its environmental ones as well.’

Since Boston urbanized very early by American standards, it helped to invent many of the places and systems that would structure these new relationships. After removal of the cows from Boston Common in 1830, the Common became the first public park in America devoted entirely to recreation. Mount Auburn Cemetery in nearby Cambridge was the first rural cemetery when it opened in 1832, and Boston’s water system and suburbs emerged early enough to provide models for many other urbanizing communities. Later in the century, the city established the first metropolitan sewage system and the first suburban forest preserves, and it dug deep beneath Boston Common to construct the nation’s first subway. The new

ways of relating to the natural environment expressed through these places and systems remind us that cities did not replace nature as they expanded. Rather, city building was a process that not only altered the natural environment but also revolutionized the relationships to it that supported communities and their inhabitants. People still interacted with nature, but in fundamentally different ways.’ The transformation of the relationship between Bostonians and

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