How did they fill in Back Bay?
With most of the city's hills already leveled and made into new land, some parts of Back Bay were filled with trash, mud from the flats of the South Bay on the other side of Boston Neck, and sand and gravel brought in by railroad from Needham, Massachusetts, west of the city.
Why did they fill in Boston Harbor?
In the 1830, owners of the wharves along the South Cove, including Griffin's wharf where the Boston tea party took place, decided filling the cove and wharves to build railroads would be more profitable than keeping the cove open for shipping.
When was the Mill Pond in Boston filled in?
The demolition of Beacon Hill and filling of Mill Pond was completed around 1828. In the end, the filling of Mill Pond added 50 acres of land to the city of Boston.
How did Boston add land?
That's an astonishing amount, and that history of landmaking is part of what makes Boston so vulnerable to sea level rise today. People built new land by filling in the spaces between wharves, or building out into marshes and tidal flats, and usually constructed their new land right above the high tide line.
How long did it take to fill in the Back Bay?
After nearly 25 years of construction, the entire Back Bay was filled in, from the Public Garden to Kenmore Square. Original Boston Museum of Fine Arts Building on the corner of Dartmouth Street and St James Avenue. The new Back Bay neighborhood quickly developed into Boston's premier arts and culture center.
Is there still tea in the Boston Harbor?
No. That's why the tea was tossed into the saltwater of the Boston Harbor so it couldn't be sold and a sales tax collected on it to pay for the Seven Years War.
Is Logan airport built on a landfill?
Apple Island was an island in Boston Harbor in Massachusetts, one of five islands that were integrated with landfill over the years to form East Boston and Logan International Airport.
What is the deepest pond in Massachusetts?
Walden PondAt 103 feet deep, Walden Pond, officially known as Walden Pond State Reservation, is a glacial kettle-hole pond and the deepest natural body of fresh water in Massachusetts—consequently, the water stays (relatively) cool.
Was Boston built on a landfill?
” A large portion of the city sits on man-made land. Structures built on the landfill are supported by dozens of 30- to 40-foot-long wood pilings, similar to telephone poles, that reach down through the landfill to a harder layer of clay.
Is Boston built on bedrock?
The Roxbury Conglomerate, also informally known as Roxbury puddingstone, is a name for a rock formation that forms the bedrock underlying most of Roxbury, Massachusetts, now part of the city of Boston.
Is Boston built on marsh?
Several hundred years ago, when colonists ventured into the Boston area, they came across land sprawling with wetlands, mudflats, and salt marshes. Since then, much of the area has been filled in with landfill to build the city we know today.
What was the original name of Boston?
TremontaineOriginally called Tremontaine for the three hills in the area, the Puritans later changed the settlement's name to Boston, after the town in Lincolnshire, England, from which many Puritans originated.
Why did Boston fill in the Back Bay?
Boston had been using the area as a trash dump, and citizens were complaining about the stench (and pests). Boston's solution was to completely fill its portion of the Back Bay mud flats. The fill for this came from the west peak of Beacon Hill (known as Mount Vernon).
Why are they dredging Boston Harbor?
The yellow tubing, called shock tubing, was used by a USACE contractor while they blasted rocks for a $300 million Boston Harbor dredging project to allow new classes of large cargo ships to deliver goods to the New England region with access to Boston ports. The tubing contains no explosive materials.
Why did the Boston Port Act happen?
On March 25, 1774, the British Parliament passed the Boston Port Act, closing Boston Harbor to commerce. The act was meant to force Boston into paying for tea dumped into the harbor four months earlier during the Boston Tea Party.
What was the purpose of the Boston Port Act?
The only Coercive Act intended solely as a punitive measure, the Boston Port Act, passed on March 31, 1774, was designed to close Boston Harbor to "the landing and discharging, lading or shipping, of goods, wares, and merchandise," effective June 1, 1774. It also removed all customs officials from Boston to Salem.
How deep was the Back Bay in September?
September–Filling of the Back Bay began -average depth of fill 20 feet; more than 450 acres filled; fill brought from Needham; streets were filled to grade 17 (17 ft above mean low tide), lots filled to grade 12, so basements would be below street level.
What is the Back Bay Houses website?
Launched in 2014, the website is the culmination of ten years of research to identify who lived in (and, if possible, who owned) each Back Bay property.
What is the name of the church in the back bay?
The Unitarians’ new church, now known as Arlington Street Church, is completed. It is the first public building in the Back Bay.
When was Back Bay filled?
Present-day Back Bay itself was filled by 1882; the project reached existing land at what is now Kenmore Square in 1890, and finished in the Fens in 1900. Much of the old mill dam remains buried under present-day Beacon Street. The project was the largest of a number of land reclamation projects which, beginning in 1820, more than doubled the size of the original Shawmut Peninsula.
What is the back bay?
Back Bay is an officially-recognized neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, built on reclaimed land in the Charles River basin. Construction began in 1859, as the demand for luxury housing exceeded the availability in the city at the time, and the area was fully built by around 1900. It is most famous for its rows of Victorian brownstone homes—considered one of the best preserved examples of 19th-century urban design in the United States—as well as numerous architecturally significant individual buildings, and cultural institutions such as the Boston Public Library, and Boston Architectural College. Initially conceived as a residential-only area, commercial buildings were permitted from around 1890, and Back Bay now features many office buildings, including the John Hancock Tower, Boston's tallest skyscraper. It is also considered a fashionable shopping destination (especially Newbury and Boylston Streets, and the adjacent Prudential Center and Copley Place malls) and home to several major hotels.
What hotel was built in 1971?
The Colonnade Hotel (1971), with its row of columns, delineates the "back side" of the Prudential Center complex.
What was the first Hancock building?
The Stephen L. Brown Building ( Parker, Thomas & Rice, 1922) was the first of the three Hancock buildings: The Old John Hancock Building ( Cram and Ferguson, 1947) was the tallest building in Back Bay until construction of the Prudential Tower.
What was the High Spine plan?
In the 1960s, the " High Spine " design plan, in conjunction with development plans, gave way to the construction of high-rise buildings along the Massachusetts Turnpike, which in turn allowed the development of major projects in the area.
What are the major cultural institutions in the back bay?
Cultural and educational institutions. Prominent cultural and educational institutions in the Back Bay include: Alliance française, on Marlborough Street. Berklee College of Music, which occupies a number of older and newly built Back Bay buildings.
What was the purpose of the Back Bay Architectural District?
In 1966, the Massachusetts Legislature, "to safeguard the heritage of the city of Boston by preventing the despoliation" of the Back Bay, created the Back Bay Architectural District to regulate exterior changes to Back Bay buildings.
What was the back bay?
The development of the Back Bay began as a water power project. In 1814, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation was authorized by the Massachusetts legislature to build a dam from the corner of Charles and Beacon Streets in the east to Sewall’s Point in the west (at that time in Brookline; what is today Kenmore Square in Boston), separating about 430 acres of tidal lands from the Charles River. A Cross Dam was built connecting with the Mill Dam at a point about 210 feet west of what is today Hereford and running southwest at approximately a 45 degree angle to Gravelly Point (at about what is today the intersection of Commonwealth and Massachusetts Avenues). The Cross Dam divided the tidal lands into two basins. A western basin (about where the Fenway neighborhood is today), called the Full Basin, and an eastern basin (about where the Back Bay neighborhood is today), called the Receiving Basin. Water was allowed to flow into the Full Basin from the river at high tide, then into the Receiving Basin and then back into the river at low tide. The tidal flows were used to power mills located along the Cross Dam. A toll road was built on top of the dam and is today’s Beacon Street. The project was completed in 1821 and was not highly successful.
When was the Back Bay area?
The map at the right, detail from an 1853 map by George W. Boynton, shows the Back Bay as it existed in 1853, with the extension of Beacon Street along the mill dam referred to as Western Avenue. The photograph below shows this area in a panoramic view taken from the Massachusetts State House ca. 1858.
How many buildings were built in the Back Bay?
A total of 1,156 buildings were constructed on the originally vacant lots in the residential portion of the Back Bay as defined for purposes of this website. Of these, as of 2015, 99 have been demolished and replaced with 61 newer buildings or, in two cases, with a playground and a parking lot.
What is the name of the two basins of the Fenway neighborhood?
The Cross Dam divided the tidal lands into two basins. A western basin (about where the Fenway neighborhood is today), called the Full Basin, and an eastern basin (about where the Back Bay neighborhood is today), called the Receiving Basin.
What books have been written about the back bay?
A number of excellent books and articles have been written on the filling of the Back Bay. Walter Muir Whitehill’s Boston, A Topographical History and Bainbridge Bunting’s Houses of Boston’s Back Bay provide overviews. More comprehensive information is included in Nancy S. Seasholes’s Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston, which discusses the Back Bay project in the context of Boston’s overall land fill development, in Boston’s Back Bay by William A. Newman and Wilfred E. Holton, which is devoted exclusively to the filling of the Back Bay, and in Karl Haglund’s Inventing the Charles River, which examines the evolution of the Charles River, including the Esplanade. These books contain excellent maps showing the progress of the filling operations, many based on the early blueprint maps prepared in 1881 by Fuller and Whitney, civil engineers associated with the project, in their A Set of Plans Showing the Back Bay 1814-1881.
Why was the Back Bay important to Boston?
Seasholes’s Gaining Ground discusses in detail, the city had historically grown by filling land, and the Back Bay presented an opportunity to eliminate a health hazard while meeting an economic need.
When were sewers built in Boston?
Construction of Sewers. On December 11, 1856 , the Commonwealth executed a tripartite agreement with City of Boston and the Boston Water Power Company to resolve issues regarding the construction and operation of the sewers to serve the new area, issues which the Joint Committee called “by far the most perplexing and most important operations to be settled.” The agreement set forth a series of rights and obligations to provide for the coordinated construction of sewers in the filled land, including ensuring that the City, which previously had discharged its sewers into the Back Bay, could have access to the sewers in the newly-filled land and drain them into the Charles River.
Overview
History
Before its transformation into buildable land by a 19th-century filling project, the Back Bay was a bay, west of the Shawmut Peninsula (on the far side from Boston Harbor) between Boston and Cambridge, the Charles River entering from the west. This bay was tidal: the water rose and fell several feet over the course of each day, and at low tide much of the bay's bed was exposed as a marshy flat. …
Roads
The Back Bay is traversed by five east–west corridors: Beacon Street, Marlborough Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury Street and Boylston Street. These are interrupted at regular intervals by north–south streets named alphabetically: Arlington (along the western border of the Boston Public Garden), Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester and Hereford Stre…
Architecture
The plan of Back Bay, by Arthur Gilman of the firm Gridley James Fox Bryant, was greatly influenced by Haussmann's renovation of Paris. It featured wide, parallel, tree-lined avenues unlike anything seen in other Boston neighborhoods. Five east–west corridors—Beacon Street (closest to the Charles), Marlborough Street, Commonwealth Avenue (actually two one-way thoroughfares flanking t…
Cultural and educational institutions
Prominent cultural and educational institutions in the Back Bay include:
• Alliance française, on Marlborough Street
• Berklee College of Music, which occupies a number of older and newly built Back Bay buildings
• Boston Architectural College, the oldest independent architecture school in the US
Parkland
• The Back Bay Fens is a large picturesque park on Back Bay's south edge that forms part of Boston's Emerald Necklace.
• The Charles River Reservation runs between Storrow Drive and the Charles River at Back Bay's northern border.
• Commonwealth Avenue, which runs through the center of Back Bay, has a large center mall.
Transportation
Back Bay is served by the Green Line's Arlington, Copley, Hynes Convention Center, and Prudential stations, and the Orange Line's Back Bay station (which is also an MBTA Commuter Rail and Amtrak station).
See also
• Copley Square
• High Spine
• National Register of Historic Places listings in northern Boston, Massachusetts