Book Review: Boston's Changeful Times: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America

I've just finished Michael Holleran's 1998 book on the evolution of the preservation movement in Boston and America. It started a bit dry and academic - no surprise there, given the subject - but it went on to be quite informative. Featured are the early battles over the old Brattle Square and Old South churches, the Old State House, and the loss of the Hancock house on Beacon Hill. Over time, we see questions of motivation arise - what is worth saving, and why? A chapter on parks and open spaces leads on to a exploration of the skyline and building height limits, with an emphasis on Copley Square and Beacon Hill and the State House. The book ends with the institution of zoning regulations around the time of the First World War.

All in all, an interesting entry in the story of Boston and how the past was integrated into the modern city.


Boston's Changeful Times: Origins Of Preservation and Planning in America, by Michael Holleran.

Book Review: Boston's Depots and Terminals

When I set out to cover the old train depots of Boston on this blog, I didn't know that there was a book that covered the same subject.  I recently came across a reference to it online, and was able to access it from within my suburban library network. It is exactly what you'd expect - photos, prints, maps, schedules and posters, along with short histories of each line. There are quite a few images you won't find online, appendices, and a bibliography. Definitely worth a look for anyone interested in 19th (and 20th) century Boston and in the railroads that served it.

Book Review: The Theatres of Boston

In an effort to learn more about the history of movie theatres in Boston, I searched out The Theatres of Boston, by Donald C. King. Much of the book's focus is on theatres proper, rather than cinemas, but the latter part of the book does feature cinemas, and the two naturally go together.

The book goes back to the Colonial era, with Puritan Boston's aversion to theatre - both John Hancock and Samuel Adams were firmly against. You get the full history of theatre development, slowly at first, and then the buildup of the first theatre district, the growth of vaudeville, and the gradual shift to moving pictures. For those who bemoan the lack of cinemas today, I found it interesting to learn just how much was lost by the end of the 1960s. I also learned that the first porn theatre in the Combat Zone was actually in 1960 - before the tearing down of Scollay square. The story that's usually told is that such businesses moved to lower Washington street after Scollay square was razed, which was 1962.

The book alternates between story telling and more reference-like passages. Some chapters are little more than descriptions of theatres - size, seating, interior design and materials, etc. This is of interest to the specialist, but for readers like me, such passages are easily skipped.

There are drawings, photos and posters to liven things up. I'd call this a good library book - not something I'd buy, but worth a read-through.

Book Review: Boston Lithography

The book is subtitled The Boston Athenaeum Collection, and presents 128 prints, about half black and white and half color. It features Boston lithographers, so while many represent images of Boston, it also includes portraits, sheet music covers and scenes from other communities. It opens with a text section that discusses the development and growth of the industry, and ends with a reference section on the various firms and artists. Some of the Boston-specific prints are already available online, but it's nice to have them in hand.

Book Club: Historic Photos of Boston

Here we have another book of photos, text and captions by Timothy Orwig. This one is a little different from those I've already looked at in that it covers the 20th Century as well as the 19th. In fact, only one of four chapters represents the 19th century, so this book is a good complement to any of the others I've covered. The 19th Century photos shown here include some of the 'usual suspects' from other sources - this is no doubt unavoidable given the paucity of material and the desire to cover the 'big' subjects. With the inclusion of the 20th Century, you also get away from downtown Boston, including a look at an auto race at the Readville track - half a mile from where I sit now, and a famous shot of Presidential candidate Eisenhower in an open car on Blue Hill ave.

All in all, this is well worth a look. It's not a book I'd go back to very often, but nice to see at least once.

Book Club: Lost Boston

Jane Holtz Kay's Lost Boston is a classic illustrated look at Boston's past. It features mainly photographs, with occasional prints and maps - all black and white. Themed chapters organize the content, with the themes representing, of course, the visual material available to the author. So you get the Great Fire of 1872, parks, churches, etc.; all the usual suspects. I remember - vaguely - when this book came out in 1980. It was the first time I had seen old photos of historic Boston, and it was a great pleasure.

My only criticism would be that some photos are made quite small to fit alongside the text. Space is always an issue with such books, but size really does matter when it comes to historical photographs. In any case, the book is well worth a look - it's a good book for browsing and for inspiring further investigations.

Book Club: Two Years Before the Mast

I'm taking a break from standard illustrated history books to discuss Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast. Originally published in 1840, the book tells of Dana's work on the brigs Pilgrim and Alert in the California cowhide trade. Dana was from a well to do family, and when measles caused his eyesight to go bad, he was advised to travel in hopes of improvement away from the strain of reading.

Life at sea for a common sailor in the 1830s was little different from slavery, and Dana wrote the book as an expose of the hard lives of sailors. So how is this a Boston book? I thought you'd never ask. Boston - and New England - boys sailed the world during the early 1800s, and some of those became captains and ship owners whose work generated the wealth that built Victorian Boston. The story of Boston's overseas trade is very much the story of the city itself. Dana's book gives us insight into a way of life that Bostonians would have taken for granted during the 19th Century, but is largely forgotten now. The book was very successful in its day, and Dana was a leading citizen of the city.

I will admit that I skimmed a good deal of the book - the details of rigging a sailing ship are less entertaining today than they were to the land-bound readers of the time. However, I would not hold that against the book. The good parts are very good stories of life on board ship, sailing around the Horn, dealing with a dictatorial captain, and the rest of a common seaman's life. The book is available online for free, or you can get a copy at the library.

Please note that there is a later, larger version that was published when Dana had traveled back to California and revisited the locations he knew as a sailor.

Book Club: Boston Observed

Carl Seaburg's Boston Observed is an illustrated book that was published in 1971. A majority of the illustrations are prints, which allows Seaburg to display scenes unavailable to the photographer. The book is divided into topical chapters, focusing on the harbor, military, lawyers and judges, ministers and religion and the like. You get historical text associated with illustrations, separated by inter-chapter 'interludes:' collections of short passages from contemporary letters, town records, travel diaries, etc. These include John Winthrop's journals, a passage from Dickens' American Notes, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and observations from Friedrich Engels.

Reading a book like this is like walking through a museum. In one room, you stay and linger, in another you pass through quickly. It's definitely worth a look, but as a whole not a lot that really grabs me. The illustrations are all black and white, and the printing isn't up to contemporary snuff, so maybe that fact puts me off just a little. A good library book - I just wouldn't pay for it.

As an addendum, I'll add a personal comment. Every so often through this book on Boston history, the author saw fit to insert his political opinions. Writing in the early 1970s, he drops in a "just as in past wars, so, today, in Viet Nam." I'm not sure if this sort of thing was in the air, or if he just couldn't help himself. I am surprised that his editor let it through, being entirely irrelevant to the text.

The more grating text comes here: "On March 14, 1859, a young Catholic pupil, Thomas Wall, was brutally whipped for half an hour by a bigoted Protestant teacher because he refused to read the Ten Commandments in the Protestant translation,which his father had forbid him to do. When charges were brought against the teacher, the School Committee blandly defended him. A century last such incidents would be repeated with Irish teachers whipping young Negro pupils for equally insane reasons."

Really? I went to those Boston public schools in the years referred to, and I don't remember many Irish teachers, much less half hour whippings of black students. I do, however, remember taking a few whacks of the rattan across my partially-Irish palm from Mr Clement in the sixth grade. This sort of 'make it up to make a point' editorializing is not uncommon, of course, among the 'ends justify the means' crowd. It's just a shame it was allowed to seep into this otherwise perfectly reasonable book. Bigotry in the cause of anti-bigotry is not a virtue.

Book Club: The Late George Apley

I'm taking a break from history books and picture books and map books to recommend a novel. The Late George Apley, subtitled A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, was written by John P. Marquand in 1937. The narrator has been asked to write the memoir by the son of the late Mr. Apley, and he does so using letters and other documents, and occasionally his own memories.

The Late George Apley is known as a picture of Brahmin Boston, but it was written at a time when the specific Boston Brahmin species barely existed any more - the suburbs and events having taken and overtaken them. We see Yankee Boston through the lens of a man already dead, his father, his grandfather, and the collective past of a parochial society.

What this book is not is an anthropological study of Protestant Victorian Boston. It is the study of a man's life - a man who happened to live in a particular place at a particular time. More than anything else, this is a story of how a man deals with middle age and mortality. The Late George Apley is as much the story of the end of the Boston Brahmins than of their lives. This is does with a subtle humor that retains a respect for its subjects.

Marquand was raised in Newburyport, attended Harvard, and worked as a reporter for the Boston Evening Transcript. He is probably best known today for his Mr Moto novels, but he won a Pulitzer prize for Apley, and was considered one of the best American writers of his time. All of his 'serious' novels fell out of print for a time - and lost their critical acclaim - probably due to his success as a popular writer. Where else but in criticism does popular success lead to distaste?

Book Club: Gaining Ground - A History of Landmaking in Boston

I was able to access this very nice book through the Minuteman library network - delivered straight to my local branch library. Nancy S. Seasholes put this book together out of her Ph.D dissertation - a common incubator for such books. And while it does bear the mark of such books - detail piled on detail in places - don't let that put you off. Within the fourteen chapters is the story of Boston's evolution from island town to metropolitan city.

The book's subject is the made land of Boston. This included the obvious - the Back Bay and the South End - plus the less-considered: Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston and the Dorchester shore. As Seasholes points out, the growth of Boston's land are didn't begin with the Back Bay - Bostonians were already filling in shoreline during the 18th Century. Wharves were built out, filled in and built out into the harbor again. Coves and mudflats were filled piecemeal and in 'projects.' And hills were leveled across the town to provide the fill.

Each new landmaking project is described in detail from primary sources, including the controversies that often arose from them. The book is very well illustrated with maps and photographs - for a map-o-phile like me, this is one of the prime virtues of the book. Throughout the book, the author gives you contemporary street maps with the original Shawmut peninsula outline (circa 1630) overlaying it. This is a great tool for keeping the reader oriented.

This isn't a book to read from cover to cover, but that is not a bad thing. Think of it as a reference book - a book to both study and browse. If you really want to know Boston, this is a book to have on your shelf.

Book Club: Boston's Back Bay

Two Northeastern University faculty members have written a book focusing on the filling and building of the Boston's Back Bay. William A,. Newman and Wilfred F Holton tell the story from geology to architecture, with special attention to why this area of wetlands and mudflats was filled. The answer to that question is that there were multiple reasons to fill the Back Bay, each needing to be examined in its turn.

The first answer is obvious only if we keep the original Shawmut Peninsula in mind - the town of Boston was tiny. Even after hills had been leveled and coves filled, Boston was essentially an island, and a small one at that. As Boston grew from town to city, it needed more space to grow.

Second, an failed attempt to dam and use tidal power in the back bay area lead to a hygienic and aesthetic disaster. Sewers poured into the now-damed bay, and artificially permanent low tide conditions within the damed area caused the obvious problems. Boston - now filling with immigrants - sat beside a permanent sewer.

The third reason to reclaim the bay was not so obvious to me. The city wanted to keep its well-to-do Protestant population, and they needed new homes. Boston Neck was being filled to create the new South End, but it quickly turned into a district of boarding houses and working-class homes. If Boston wanted to keep her upper class - now with railroad access to suburban communities - it needed to have a new district dedicated to their interest. And so, the new Back Bay district was designed and zoned to attract and keep Boston's WASP population.

All in all, a good read, and at less than 200 pages, a quick one as well. The story of the actual filling work is told, with a steam shovel specially designed for the work devouring sand and gravel in Needhan, and trains carrying the loads twenty-four hours per day, every day of the year. Different street layouts were proposed, and different funding mechanisms attempted. In the end, the work was done with remarkable efficiency.

Book Club: Boston - A Topographical History

This will be the first in a series of book recommendations. The first edition, written by Walter Muir Whitehill, was published in 1959. It is now in its third edition, with added chapters by Lawrence W. Kennedy that bring us past the New Boston period and right up to the year 2000.

This is the book you need to read if you want to understand the building of the city of Boston. And by that I mean both the architecture and the literal building of the land now considered Boston proper. The story - of hills removed and coves and bays filled - is both told and illustrated, with maps, prints and early photographs adding greatly to the effort.

If it was up to me, Boston would be laced with painted lines of different colors, showing the old shorelines and the sites of now-leveled hills. There was a sort of diorama of the growth of Boston thorough the years that sat on the observation level of the John Hancock building. When the owners of the building cynically took advantage of the 9/11 attack to close the observation room to take back the floor space to profit from, the diorama lost its home. Without such graphical displays, it is near-impossible for the average person to envision the evolution of the city.

You can get this book at the library, but if you have sufficient interest to read it, I recommend buying it. It's so chock full of information, that you'll want to keep it at hand, and return to it over and over again. Through the good graces of Amazon.com, you can have a used copy for the price of shipping - or at least the shipping charge Amazon allows its sellers. At that price, its worth it for the photos alone. Permberton square, Tontine crescent, Boston neck, with just a handful of buildings showing, the Back Bay, filled and virtually empty - each will change how you see the city.