Boston's Map, Explained

if you look at this early map of Boston and compare it to Boston's map today it's almost entirely unrecognizable no other city in the United States has had as much land made as Boston has I was really curious why Boston's map looks like this so I took a trip I am so excited right now I have lived in New York I have lived in DC and I've never been to Boston [Music] pretty much every Western city has some sort of Rhythm or pattern to like why the streets are the way they are you look at New York and you can understand okay it looks like a grid you look at DC and it's like there's some sort of pattern here I can kind of figure out what's going on you look at Boston I don't even know where to start so I found two people who know a ton about the map of Boston and I can't wait for you to meet them H can you see me yes this is Nancy seashells you've cut your hair I have I look pretty different no I think it looks from my point of view better thank if you're going to talk to anyone about land making in Boston she's kind of the go-to she published this book called gaining ground this atlas of Boston's history she helped write this I'd always been interested in how Boston was filled in in addition to talking to Nancy I met up with a regular guy who decided to M the city's entire history Ed McCarthy hi Ed McCarthy nice to meet you I'm Daniel hi Daniel come on in okay I've produced about 20 and they detail the history of the development of Boston a lot of the streets follow Contours of the shoreline that has been filled in for centuries so they follow the Contour of the shoreline that simply isn't there anymore even though the Shor Line's long gone it still has a big impact on the city absolutely there's a fun little quip that the Boston Street pattern was designed by cows it's a drastic oversimplification they're not cow paaths everybody thinks they are everybody has heard that so with their help I want to take a closer look at this part of the city if you just learn a couple of the stories behind some of these neighborhoods it can give you a really solid foundation to understand this map Boston sits right here in the northeastern United States it's perched on the edge of the Atlantic and was among the first English settlements as they began to colonize America they came because they were separatists from the church of England and when you rewind to when they first got here it was just the shama Peninsula it's it's like barely not an island right this road that led to the mainland was a little more than an Indian Trail and at high tide it was a wash with water the original Shoreline is engraved in the granite right over here and I thought we'd go take a look at it let's do it let's do it this is the original Shoreline of the Boston sha peninsula where the Puritans arrived and none of these people knew anything about building houses or starting a community they were they were religious people so they were rather frightened about the uh foreign land that they suddenly found themselves in both downtown and in the North End are where some of the earliest settlements were but the whole area is very densely settled and it's evident in the street pattern in fact it's right here in the North End where Paul River's house still stands and it's the only surviving building from the 1600s in all of Boston Boston has had so many changes over the centuries it's tough to visualize what the old city really used to look like so this is probably as close as you're going to be able to get the buildings have been here since the earth was formed the cobblestone streets are still intact and a lot of these businesses have been in operation since the 1700s Ed surprised me and took me into one of these buildings which is the Union Oyster House oh wow it's in a building that was built probably in 1704 and has been been an operating oyster house for almost 200 years that means when you look at this old map from 1722 this building is in this map okay okay there we go not going to lie I am not a huge fan of oysters but when in Rome to Boston to Boston I followed Ed's lead and it was actually pretty good we also had some really good clam chowder and I found out that this is where the toothpick was invented but what does oysters and clams have to do with the map of Boston oysters thrive in tidle Flats where mud is exposed When the tide goes down and in the early days when Boston was settled it was surrounded by tidal Flats these mud flats were really good for the oysters and really bad for the shipping industry and it made it very difficult to load and unload ships in the Boston Harbor they'd have to get boats that could go in really shallow water and make a bunch of trips back and forth to unload these ships so they decided to solve this problem by building the creatively named Long Warf and Long Warf is still visible on today's map right here I have it depicted here sticking out into the harbor it's going way out there it was going way out there Long Warf reached past these tidle flats and allowed these big ships to unload straight onto the dock to me the Long Warf and the road that's there now feels like a symbolic anchor in the city because it runs from the old state house which was used as a customs house for a while and then eventually became the seat of the government in m Massachusetts it leads from there directly toward the ocean pointing back toward England where a lot of the problems and conflict came from that led to the eventual creation of the United States but obviously Long Warf wasn't the only WARF in the city there was tons of them and you can even still see them today when you look at these old maps of Boston you can see this Cove that Long Warf was reaching through and it was actually filled through a process called Waring out that is building Wares out from the shore and then filling in the slips between them they built a perimeter structure around the outer area of an area to be filled and it was usually a stone seaw wall just like the ones they were using for Wares then they dumped and filled behind it until the level of fill was above the level of high tide that was it it was that simple you know their solution was just to fill in these tidal Flats so it's interesting you can see even in today's streets where the these Bays were exactly all those old Fingerprints of the old Shoreline are still there but it's just been built out and built out and built out over time Long Warf however kept its shape but the land behind it kept encroaching making it shorter shorter so I want to let Nancy say something that she has been preaching for a long time I've been on a crusade about this for almost 20 years landfill to me means filling on top of existing land and that's not what happened in Boston and land reclamation means to me dying pumping and draining to reclaim Land from the sea and that is not what happened in Boston either I really am insistent on and calling it made land and not landfill so we will be calling it land making this leads us perfectly into Beacon Hill the neighborhood carries the name of a hill that used to be there that had three different Peaks on it but was ultimately almost entirely carved down to fill in different land making projects these old drawings show workers doing the hard labor of carving away these Hills and moving the soil to be used elsewhere and right now I'm standing in the spot pretty close to where the perspective of that drawing is and there's no longer any hill behind me it's just kind of a bump in the road a slight elevation change I got to wander around Beacon Hill for a little bit and it was super super Charming but I did find out while I was there that all of the gas lanterns that used to light the the streets were all replaced with LED lights a couple years ago which is sad Nancy brought up a really interesting theory about why she thinks the streets in the Beacon Hill area are much more rectilinear than downtown or the North End there were rope walks running down the hill the main industry in Boston for a long time was ship building and before talking to Nancy I didn't know what a rope walk was but they're used for weaving rope together rope walks were very long narrow structures because the length of the Rope walk walk determined the length of the rope that was made they often smelled really bad because of the chemicals being used in the Rope making process and they were super flammable so they were often put kind of on the outskirts of the settled part of town and there were a lot of them here in the Beacon Hill area although I've never read it almost every single rope walk in Boston was on a hill or an incline of some sort and I think that was to help the workers keeping tension on the rad as they walked backwards she was saying that the streets were almost always made parallel to them so even though there were three different peaks in this area we still ended up with a pretty rectilinear Street pattern which I thought was super interesting the elephant in the room that I haven't even mentioned when talking about Beacon Hill is Boston Common and Boston common is this park right here this is the oldest public park in the United States States it was set aside to never be developed and so far that's held true it has been used for a couple different things initially it was a cow grazing pasture and then over time it was used for housing soldiers and various things like that law was passed in the 1700s that forbade any more land takings that robbed the common of space and it's been preserved pretty much ever since then in later years there are nice quaint stories of gentlemen walking their their ladies in their in their long Flo he dresses arm and- arm in the sunsets along here it's still a very nice little reprieve from The Busy City around it and has some beautiful walking paths now this portion just west of Boston common is the Boston Garden and this is entirely on built land Boston Garden is just that it's a Botanical Garden that you can walk through and see a bunch of different species of trees and then you can get a little petal booat and go throughout the lake and it's a really idealic area to just sit and enjoy nature you can actually see the new Massachusetts state house that's still in use right on the border of Boston Common and the Beacon Hill neighborhood now let's talk about the West End you can see this old tidle Basin that was called mil Pond it was damned off so that title power could be used to run the Mills over time it got more and more polluted and didn't work like it was supposed to so they ended up hiring the first American Born architect to create a street layout for the area that would be filled in this triangle right here was laid out by Charles bullfinch the famous architect who at the age of 12 watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from his house in Boston this is a very distinctive Street pattern that you can see on the map almost instantly and on any aerial photo you see it so quickly it'll help you Orient yourself for the map and for where you're looking in the city the street running along the top here is called Causeway Street that was this Causeway that went across between the North End and the West End the West End 3,000 families compelled to make room for new high rent Department buildings this used to be a really tightly-knit Irish and immigrant community that fell victim to a Redevelopment project in the late ' 50s it is a classic example of what not to do in urban renewal in this Redevelopment project 46 Acres of an entire workingclass neighborhood was demolished [Music] before the Redevelopment project the West End looked and felt a lot like the North End the low rents and the proximity of both areas to manufacturing and business centers has attracted thousands of immigrants during the last half century but more than 12,000 people were essentially forced to leave their houses and their Community a lot of them were promised that they would be able to move back when the project was done which obviously didn't come true and very few of them if any were really helped with relocating Old West Church was one of the very few historic sites that were preserved and I didn't make it when I was there but there is a West End Museum that you can go to and learn a lot more about that development project if you're interested if you didn't catch my last video my friends at gravel which is a company that makes travel gear is just giving away $500 worth of gear and all you have to do is subscribe to my channel comment on that video like it and watch it and boom you could win 500 bucks worth of their stuff which is awesome so do that and while you're here like this one too so now we have Back Bay which is obviously very different from the rest of the Boston map that we see so behind the peninsula was another Bay the Charles River Estuary so that became known as The Back Bay and that name still hangs on today even though all of that land has been filled in and it's now an affluent neighborhood if you look at these old photos you can see this big tidal flat muddy area that's where Back Bay now stands there was a Dam built there so that it would operate similar to mil Pond but it wasn't very effective and never worked really well and then later railroads were built across it which made it even less effective but the railroads did provide a much easier way to bring in a lot of soil for the landfill it was built in the mid 1800s to appeal to the upper class they wanted this to be this very attractive residential area the reason for making this an upper class neighborhood was to keep the wealthy taxpayers and voters in the city and to keep the Irish out this was a time where the Irish famine was happening Irish were just pouring into Boston and they wanted the Yankees to stay in the city the streets here are all labeled in alphabetical order starting right here with a and working their way west they were trying to appeal again to the upper middle class so they have all these English sounding names H which that's the wide one I'm sorry that's bostonese Commonwealth Avenue Commonwealth Avenue was always intended to be sort of the central East West so there's a Central Mall down the middle and has all these statues along the way to give it a nice walkway feel it's all based on Parisian boulevards what's funny to me is that in this neighborhood you have all these fancy sounding names that were like English names of streets to appeal to the upper class but then you just get public alley and then it's numbered when I asked Nancy about these public alleys she explained that they were mostly used for like servicemen to access the buildings and to clear the garbage and stuff so that none of that would have to be done in the pretty beautiful fronts and it could appeal to the upper class still the odd thing about Back Bay is that when it was built very little attention was paid to how it was connected to the rest of the city if you notice how these streets connect with the grid system of Back Bay they don't at all when they laid out that Back Bay Street grid they never even seem to think about the south end if you spend any amount of time learning about early American cities you're probably going to come across a huge destructive fire that burned down a large portion of the city and Boston is no exception to this in fact this unassuming Corner that I'm on right now is where a fire started just a year after the Great Chicago Fire that burned down a massive portion of the city one of the reasons that the fire spread so much was because of the narrow streets so the fire actually promoted a lot of Street widenings in the downtown area you know the myth is that the debris from the fire was used for land making honestly I have found very little evidence of it one thing I haven't yet mentioned is the central artery and that's because it doesn't necessarily fit in a neighborhood but it was actually built in a way that divided them Cuts Like a scar through the city multiple neighborhoods were demolished to make way for the highway these old narrow Colonial roads were built through this tiny Peninsula long before cars were ever made so a ton of issues began to arise when cars started flooding the streets one of the original proposed solutions to this was to build an elevated highway right through downtown it was designed in an era when cars didn't move as fast so the the idea was that there were entrances and exits almost every block after being finished in the ' 50s it was basically immediately a problem in 1991 an Infamous Public Works project referred to as the big dig began which was the most expensive public works project in the history of the country the goal was to move this elevated Highway underground 16 years later the project was finally completed the overhead Highway here was demolished The Rose Kennedy Greenway was constructed which is the park we're looking at now and right beneath our feet is um is 93 North and South which cuts through the city the scar from where the highway used to run is still visible but the actual roadways are under ground now and the traffic night nightmare still exists it's just not visible up here it's just hidden from my point of view it's just move the traffic jam underground you know out of sight on the mine I just can't imagine the amount of work that goes into a singular one of those Maps it took it took a while Ed's love for this city and its history is so infectious so I'm going to put the link to his website where you can go buy one of his Maps right in the description give him a big thanks go buy one of his Maps thank you Ed

Channel: Daniel Steiner

Views: 723,897

Keywords: bostons map explainer, understanding bostons map, how the map of boston works, bostons big dig, how to navigate boston, boston travel vlog 2023, Boston long wharf, Boston MA, boston map animation, boston map learning, boston map history, how boston formed, map explainer, boston 4k walk, things to do in boston winter, things to do in boston at night, things to do in boston fall, things to do in boston in one day, map of boston, old map of boston, Built land in boston

Id: UA63zaIXCZw

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023