Boston's Back Bay: The Story of America's Greatest Nineteenth-Century Landfill Project (review)

Walking through Boston's elegant Victorian Back Bay is always a pleasure. It is a neighborhood of parks, epicurean restaurants, trendy shops, upscale hotels, art galleries, and modern office buildings. Its Commonwealth Avenue, with a central mall and flowering trees in the spring, delights the eye. The authors of this book, William Newman, a geologist, and Wilfred Holton, a sociologist, teach at Northeastern University, whose campus borders on the Back Bay landfill. They present a fascinating account of the politicking, planning, and engineering involved in filling and developing the former tidal marsh that was Boston's Back Bay. (It appeared to be a bay only at high tide.)

In 1852 a state commission was formed to develop a master plan for creating America's largest landfill. Strict zoning was to preserve the exclusive character of the emergent neighborhood, largely destined for wealthy Anglo Protestants confronting a tide of poor immigrants into old Boston. The filling of the mud flats was accomplished between 1858 and 1890 using sand and gravel from nearby glacially formed hills that was transported to designated locations via rail. Hence the book is partially about railroad technology, and the authors demonstrate their knowledge of metallurgy, link-and-pin coupling, braking before air brakes, and the operation of the 1,400-pound-capacity side-dump cars used to haul fill.

A geological introduction frames the presentation. A rifted, rafted, and docked terrane fragment about the size of California, originating in the continent of Africa–South America, underlies the Boston region. Running water and glacial movements greatly eroded the uplifted, faulted, and folded terrane and successions of depositions on it. With the retreat of the recent Wisconsin glaciation, the current land forms and their deposits emerged, including the filled valley encompassing the Back Bay. As an overcrowded Boston grew beyond the natural confines of its 750-acre island-like configuration, and as it became the commercial focus of New England with connections to the trans-Appalachian West via the Western Rail Road and Erie Canal, it seemed essential to fill the Back Bay marshland. A further incentive was provided by the stench and pollution. Small earlier ventures in filling tidal waters had proved to be successful and provided a model for a very large venture.

In 1859, the Great and General Court (that is, the legislature) of the Commonwealth ceded the tidal flats to Boston. Then the state commissioners, paying heed to "gentlemen of taste and judgment," developed their filling plan with wide streets framing rectangular blocks. Early financing was provided by the sale of lands, but cash payments were made to contractors thereafter. Fill was excavated by means of steam-powered shovels and transported behind steam locomotives. Contractors experienced in the construction of railroads proved essential to the success of the project. They had to lay and remove often-subsiding spur tracks and coordinate the movements of teamsters who attended to the dumping of railcars. The filled Back Bay was a product of the railway age.

Filling moved forward throughout the Civil War and the hard times of the 1870s. Contractors covered filled lots with loam and seeded them for grass. Each of the posh brick or stone townhouses built on the truly new lots required support on wooden pilings driven into the soft fill. Newman and Holton rewardingly depict the physical and sociocultural development of the proper Bostonian cityscape, and it would be churlish to pick at omissions in a work covering so much ground. One might be mentioned, however. The urban University of Massachusetts, Boston, had originally been sited on a former railroad yard located on Back Bay fill. But it was eventually relegated by moneyed interests to an outlying filled garbage dump. "Proper Boston" often has been money over "culture," as the authors show. Their original and broadly informing book should please all readers interested in...