Boston

A good deal of Boston is not natural ground. The Back Bay was a tidal marsh until 1857, when the city began filling it with gravel brought by train from Needham — a trainload every forty-five minutes, day and night, for more than thirty years. The result is the only large-scale grid in a city otherwise famous for having none.

Photographs from the filling years are worth finding. They show a half-built neighborhood with water still at the end of the street, and Commonwealth Avenue laid out across mud.

Boston Common is the oldest public park in the country, set aside in 1634 as common grazing and militia ground. It was still being used for both within living memory of the earliest photographs. Cows were banned in 1830, which is later than most people guess.

Faneuil Hall and the Old State House appear constantly, and by the time of these photographs they were already being treated as relics — Boston had begun preserving its Revolutionary buildings while other cities were still knocking theirs down. That instinct is why so much of it survives.

The Great Fire of 1872 took sixty-five acres of the downtown business district. It is less famous than Chicago's the year before but the photographs are similar: masonry shells, crowds, and a rebuilding that came fast.

Fenway Park opened in 1912, the same week the Titanic sank, which is why the coverage was thin. The left field wall was built tall because the lot was small, not for any romantic reason; the nickname came decades later.

The harbor runs through everything. Boston was still a working port throughout this period, with wharves, packet ships and later steamers, and the waterfront photographs show a commercial edge to the city that the Beacon Hill images do not.

Massachusetts is also one of the deepest states in the panoramic collection — one hundred and four bird's-eye view maps and one hundred and thirty-three panoramic photographs, covering towns far beyond Boston itself.

The City That Photographed the Century It Built