USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 17
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There was, to be sure, a considerable part of the territory of the peninsula unoccupied for dwellings. The hill tops, and especially the top and slopes of Beacon Hill, remained unoccupied. It is a curious fact that most of the settle- ments in the Massachusetts. Bay Colony were made at sea level. In Salem, in Lynn, in Boston, Cambridge and Watertown, in Dorchester and in Braintrec, the level land was occupied. In Plymouth, on the other hand, the earliest settlers built their houses on a hill. Whether this difference was due to the fact that the majority of the inhabitants of Boston and other Massachusetts Bay settlements came from the eastern fens and lowlands, while the inhabitants of Plymouth came from the hilly counties, would be a nice question for stu- dents of the history of the settlements, but cannot be further considered here. The fact remains, however, that with the whole of Boston Common and Beacon Hill unoccupied, the inhabitants of Boston were straitcned for house room. By the beginning of the eighteenth century this condition became acute.
As it happencd, the borders of the peninsula were indented by a number of large coves, or bays. On the north side there was a great cove, or pond, shut in by an island on the north; on the east was the East Cove, taking in all the waterfront between the South Battery and the North Battery, that is, between Fort Hill and Hanover strect; on the south was the South Cove, and on the west was the Back Bay. During the eighteenth century the work of filling in those coves began.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a strong tendency to divide all the older towns. From Braintree, Dorchester, Lynn and Salem, new towns were set off. So in Boston, Brookline was set off in 1705 and Chelsea in 1739. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century the opposite tendency came into existence. In 1804 what is now South Boston, and was then known as Dorchester Heights, was annexed from Dorchester to Boston, and in 1855 Washington Village was likewise taken from Dorchester and annexed to Boston. During the same period the process of enlarging the
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limits by filling in the coves continued. Beacon Hill was lowered 110 feet, and all the material taken from it was used to fill in the mill pond at the north end of the city, extending from Haymarket square to Causeway street, and the filling of the eastern inlet was completed.
The greatest of these works, however, was the filling in of the Back Bay. The Back Bay was filled in as the final result of a proposed industrial develop- ment by which the bay was to be inclosed by danis and used for the production of power by tidal gates.
In 1814 the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation was formed and work was at once begun on the main dam. The Back Bay was then an expanse of water and marsh from the foot of the Common to the uplands of Brookline, and from the Charles river to Boston Neck. The corporation built a dam known as the "milldam," following what is practically now the present line of Beacon street from Charles street to Sewall's Point at Brookline, also a cross dam along what is now Brookline avenue to Gravelly Point in Roxbury. Roadways were to be constructed and the dams used as toll roads. The tide- water within the area of the milldam was to furnish water power for mills. Parker Hill quarry furnished the stone, and Irish laborers were imported to furnish the labor. The property of the Mill Corporation passed in 1824 to the Boston Water Power Company, while the Boston and Roxbury Mill Cor- poration retained the roads and property north of the dam. The milldam became a famous speedway, and was so used winter and summer until about 1880.
Disputes having arisen between the state and eity and the corporation, a commission was appointed which in 1852 recommended the filling of the Back Bay. The lands were divided by agreement. About 570 acres were added to the eity by this filling, and thus the land devoted to dwelling houses was greatly increased.
This increase of territory by filling was not enough to aceommodate the population, which early began to seek homes in the surrounding towns. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century the cities and towns in the neighbor- hood of Boston had lived each to itself. Each had its business center, its schools and churches, its independent town meeting; and most of the inhabi- tants went seldom outside their own town for business, for society or for pleasure. With the inerease of rapid transit and of immigration from the city, the inhabitants came more and more to look to downtown Boston for business and amusement, and, to a considerable extent, to the residential portion of Boston for society. This has constituted in reality a revolution in the character and social ways of the smaller cities and towns. To a greater and greater extent the old ways have been superseded by new ways molded on those of the central city, or even have been merged in the eity life.
In 1854 modern rapid inter-urban transit was inaugurated by the construc- tion of the first street railway. This railway, begun in 1854 and completed in 1856, led from Cambridge to Boston, and was operated by horses. Several other roads were at onee built, from Boston to Roxbury, to Dorchester, to Brook- line and to Charlestown. The result of this inauguration of rapid transit was the settling of various parts of the metropolitan district by business men of
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Boston who moved from the congested city limits into the more rural surround- ings of the neighboring towns. Those parts of the suburbs which were reached by the street railways were first occupied.
Beginning with the nearest and most accessible places, Roxbury, Dorchester, West Roxbury, Chelsea, Charlestown, Somerville and Cambridge, the inhab- itants who had been brought up as townspeople in small towns had been suc- ceeded by a generation trained in urban politics, in urban society and in urban industry. The immigrants from Boston, still in substance Bostonians, so filled up the vacant spaces in these towns as to give them many of the characteristics of Boston. The plan of local government which had grown up independent of state and national politics and was carried on in the traditional way by the older class of inhabitants has been entirely superseded in many of the local cities and towns by a government modeled on that of Boston. In the cities and towns farther removed from Boston this movement has been less pronounced, but in all of them deviations from the old New England social and political customs have taken place by insensible gradations, until today the City of Boston is in fact the center of life in them.
As early as 1854 an attempt was made to enlarge the boundaries of the City of Boston by further annexation. An act was passed permitting the annexa- tion of Charlestown to Boston, provided this was approved by the inhabitants. Apparently little interest was taken in it, either by the people of Boston or by the inhabitants of Charlestown. A pamphlet written by Josiah Quincy, ex-Mayor of Boston, played a considerable part in the rejection of the plan. The same arguments still used for the increase of the size of the city, that Boston's "dignity suffers by having so few numbers that foreigners would regard Boston with greater respect and interest if her number were greater and if she occupied a wider space," were used in favor of annexation, as if, Mayor Quincy added, "the weight and value of cities were to be ascertained like those of beef cattle, by the scales." The recent action of Philadelphia in absorbing her suburbs was cited in favor of annexation. Quincy argued for a continuance of that happy division of the New England population into small communities, with limited powers, of a size and extent easily to be watched over and managed by the people them- selves. He opposed annexation on the ground that it would lead to a new social organization, namely, that of a great city. The existence of great cities "is as little reconcilable with the spirit of republicanism as it is with the pre- dominancy of sound principle." Whether because of Quincy's arguments or for other reasons, this plan for annexation was defeated. But in another decade the demand for annexation would not be denied. In 1867 the city of Roxbury, nearest to Boston and most affected by immigration, voted for annexation to the greater city, and in 1868 the territory of Roxbury was absorbed into that of Boston. Two years later the neighboring town of Dorchester was also annexed and after four years more the towns of Charlestown, Brighton and West Roxbury were added.
In the legislation of 1873 the town of Brookline was named as one of those which might be annexed to Boston, but, while the other towns voted in favor of the annexation, Brookline voted strongly against it, and so far as that town was concerned, therefore, the annexation failed. Although the city immigration
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HATCHED-THE PRESENT CITY AREA IN 1930, 47.8 SQUARE MILES POPULATION, 781,188
WITHIN THE FRINGED LINES - THE METROPOLITAN DISTRICT AREA IN 1930, 457 SQUARE MILES POPULATION, 1,955.168 COMPRISES 43 CITIES AND TOWNS
WITHIN THE OUTER BOUNDARY - GREATER BOSTON (AS DEFINED BY THE U. S. CENSUS BUREAU) AREA IN 1930, 1,021 SQUARE MILES POPULATION, ABOUT 2,300,000 COMPRISES 19 CITIES AND 61 TOWNS
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had greatly changed the character of the eastern part of that town, nevertheless the greater part of it was up to this time unaffected by the wave of civic life and retained the aspects of a country town. Until now (1931) the predominant opinion in Brookline is opposed to any kind of union with Boston.
The immediate result of the annexation of Dorchester and the other adjoin- ing towns was that the movement of population from Boston was stimulated and available land was soon filled with the homes of business men who came out from Boston to live there. Within ten years from the date of annexation Dor- chester, for instance, had become thickly populated with persons coming out from Boston and its older characteristics had been entirely submerged by those of the new urban population.
The motive of this annexation was not merely to provide a place for Boston business men to live. Two of the annexed localities, Charlestown and Brighton, were already well populated, Charlestown being a considerable city. The census of 1870 had shown that the population of the cities and towns near Boston was considerably larger than the population of Boston itself. Other cities in the United States were pressing Boston in population. A very considerable motive at work in the annexations of 1874 was the desire to have those cities and towns in which the industrial population of Boston largely lived counted in the census of Boston.
Whether or not the centennial celebrations in 1875 turned the thoughts of the citizens of the smaller cities and towns to their origins, at any rate from that time an increasing aversion to annexation possessed them. With the exception of the annexation of the town of Hyde Park in 1912, there have been no annexa- tions since those of 1874, and no probability of consent to annexation on the part of any suburban district. Nevertheless, as census after census has shown the population of the City of Boston almost stationary, while the suburbs grew very rapidly, the question of some reorganization of the territory has become important.
By the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century a determined movement for the establishment of a city to include the whole urban population of Boston and its surrounding district was made. The father of this movement, who gave the name of Greater Boston to his proposed enlarged city, was Sylvester Baxter. In a series of articles in the Boston Herald he advocated the formation of a single federated city, taking in the entire metropolitan district. The substance of these articles was later published in a pamphlet, "Greater Boston; A Study for a Federated Metropolis," dated Boston, 1891. In this pamphlet he urges that the true geographical Boston "is really Boston just as much as Philadelphia and Chicago are entitled to the credit of the population within the limits which they now occupy. . Philadelphia was the first of the great citics to extend its limits comprehensively. Chicago has recently done the same. It is now proposed that New York do the same.
"The population within the limits has been injured by a form of govern- ment it has long since outgrown,- a government that has been made to work at all only by a patching. Boston has also been placed at a disadvantage by exhibiting a much slower ratio of growth than it is really entitled to."
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He favored a ten-mile radius which had a population in 1890 of 884,815 and an average tax rate of $14.025.
The only objections, he says, outside of opposition from the counties which by his plan would be changed, would come from certain of the inunicipalities which are now favorably circumstanced in respect of large property values, low tax rates and the like, and from those persons who would fear the effect that such a metropolitan organization might have upon various political interests. A plan for the equalization of taxation would be likely to reduce to a minimum the opposition based on low taxes. It is really just as undemocratic to permit under the sanction of the law inequality of privileges among the various com- munities composing the Commonwealth as it is to permit similar inequality among individuals. He favored a county government, similar to the London County Council, by extending the County of Suffolk to include all the metro- politan area.
The government of greater London has become the type of federated local government. Up to the present time, the great cities of America have grown by annexation, that is, by incorporating suburban territory in the city. In this way Philadelphia increased in area from a territory of two square miles to an area of 128 square miles. The mileage of Chicago has been increased front four-tenths of a mile to 205 miles; of New York from 22 to 314; of Los Angeles, from 28 to 420; of Detroit from three-tenths to 139; while Boston remains much the smallest among the cities of anywhere near its population, with a mileage of 44 square miles. Baxter's plan did not contemplate an increase of the territory of Boston, but (following the model of London) the creation of a new County of Boston, governed by a county council. This plan involved a change in the territory of three counties.
Mr. Baxter's proposal was seriously considered, and a state commission was appointed to report a plan for "a system of metropolitan control." An elaborate report was presented in 1896, following the lines of Mr. Baxter's suggestion, but no action was taken by the Legislature.
For twenty years nothing was done in the direction of a federated city. But in 1919 Andrew J. Peters, then Mayor, published a pamphlet in which he urged a federation like that suggested by Sylvester Baxter. The chief points of his pamphlet may be suinmarized as follows:
The population, spreading out from the original scattered centers, has expanded and coalesced in many places so that the town boundaries retain scarcely a local significance. The district has one main water supply, one general park service, a principal sewerage system, administered by a single board. It is one district for fire prevention, one postal district, one banking, commercial and distribution center.
In order to achieve the utmost possible benefit, a union should be made largely and boldly, so as to include the whole district in the scope of its provisions. In that event it would be accompanied by a general reorganization, which might very well preserve to the separate cities and towns full local jurisdiction, while creating a metropolitan council composed of representatives of the district at
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large, to administer affairs of metropolitan interest. The most powerful and far-reaching advantage is the stimulus it will give to commerce and industry.
"I have been asked whether I think mere size is desirable in itself or will of itself attract business to Boston. Obviously, it is not for an empty boast of numbers or to advance a few places in the list of cities that we ask for this radical remedy. It is for the weight of authority that goes with mass. We want all the credit and advantage that should come to us for having built up on the shores of our magnifi- cent harbor a flourishing city of a million and a half souls. In this sense, I submit that size will attract business. It will advertise us in a legitimate way, but it will do more than that. I hold that our metropolitan unity will be the symbol of a newly awakened interest and the expression of a new common will. A City of Boston, quickened and thrilled to higher ambitions by such a union, and en- larged so that within twenty-five years it will number two million inhabitants, will be better able, by the very volume of its resources and the weight of its appeal, to create the conditions that must be estab- lished if commerce and industry are to flourish here in full measure."
A second advantage is that it would give the federated city a better bal- anced citizenship. Probably a hundred thousand people a day come in town to work. These nonresident workers are as a rule people of character and intelligence. Since the congestion in Boston makes it less attractive to live in, the natural tendency of these people is to remove to the open suburbs. The city is more and more a place of business with enormous foreign populations. Some of the suburbs betray a tendency to social exclusiveness.
"The separation of the two elements is an injury to both, in that it prevents mutual understanding and necessary assimilation. A fed- erated city would bring them together on common ground and round out the electorate where it is now excessively one-sided. Not only should it be the right of Boston business men and Boston workers, living a little beyond the present limits, to vote on affairs of large interest to the district. It should be their duty to do so and to take part in the general government."
A third gain would be the organization of fire and police services and the highway system on a metropolitan basis. Another large benefit would be in the city planning which could direct the flow of population. Finally, there are administrative improvements and economies to be gained.
The government of the new city, if it realizes its best possibilities, may include men of the highest distinction, just as eminent men of all shades of opinion, from Lord Rosebery to John Burns, have sat in the London County Council.
Boston is in the second class of cities in population. It has the smallest area of all the large cities except Baltimore and the most congested population
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of all except Baltimore and New York. Greater Boston would stand in the first class in population, would have the largest area and very mnuch the least congestion.
In forty years, from 1875 to 1915, Boston increased in population 118 per cent and Greater Boston 154 per cent.
Two downtown wards of Boston are valued at about one third of the whole valuation of Greater Boston. Boston in 1918 paid three fifths of the metro- politan assessments. The tax rates of about half the metropolitan district were in 1918 higher than that of Boston, and in the other half, lower. The weakness of the Boston trade is in its exports. In imports Boston stands second, in exports fifth among the commercial cities. In manufactures Boston ranked seventh in 1914 and Greater Boston ranked fourth.
Thus may be summarized Mayor Peters' important proposal. Nothing came of his able contention for ten years, but in 1930, his successor, Mayor Curley, asked representative citizens from a number of the cities and towns of the metropolitan district to meet and consider the question. The result of these deliberations will be stated later.
While these efforts at annexation or federation were being made, the need of metropolitan action for many functions of government that were of interest to the whole district had become clear. In 1870 a plan was put forth for metro- politan parks and boulevards centering on the Charles River Basin and the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. `The next year, in response to this first suggestion, a further proposition for a Grand Avenue through the city was put forth. In 1872 one of the first suggestions was made for city planning. It was proposed that the development of the city should be anticipated by a plan for laying out avenues and for preserving the beauty spots. A few years later a medical commission was appointed and published a report on the sanitary condition of Boston, which advocated joint control of sanitary matters. These led to no immediate action; but as population increased around Boston Harbor the need of some method of disposing of the sewage of the cities and towns sur- rounding the harbor became acute. Suburban towns were turning their sewage into the rivers which, emptying into Boston Harbor, created a great danger to the health of the entire district. It was essential that all the sewage of the district should be taken in charge and carried a sufficient distance out to sea to secure its healthful disposal by the operation of the tides. Accordingly, the Legislature created in 1889 a Metropolitan Sewer District, which built an intercepting sewer and carried the sewage far out to sea.
A few years later, in 1895, this exercise of metropolitan co-operation had so commended itself that two metropolitan district boards were appointed. The Metropolitan Water Board was charged with the duty of securing a pure and sufficient water supply for the towns of the metropolitan district. It was necessary to go far away to secure a sufficient supply of pure water. It seemed undesirable to have this done by the City of Boston alone, particularly since several other places were in acute need of an additional supply. The Legis- lature, therefore, created in 1895 the Metropolitan Water District, which undertook to secure such a supply for Boston and any of its suburbs that chose
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to join. The Metropolitan Water Commission procured a large supply of excellent water nortli of Worcester, and managed the distribution of this supply. At the same time, the question of securing breathing spots throughout the metropolitan district to take care of the vastly increased population presented itself, and a Metropolitan Park Commission was appointed, which secured some of the most beautiful tracts of land in metropolitan Boston for parks. Along with other smaller parks they took as metropolitan parks Nantasket Beach, Revere Beach, the Blue Hills, the Middlesex Fells about Spot Pond, and the Lynn Woods, leaving the local parks, those of Boston, for instance, under local jurisdiction.
In 1901 the two boards first mentioned were consolidated into the Metro- politan Water and Sewerage Board. Work in the metropolitan district con- tinued under charge of this consolidated Board and of the Park Commission until 1919, when the two existing boards were consolidated into a Metropolitan District Commission.
The creation of the Metropolitan District Commission completed this history of co-operative action. There thus came into existence a system of metropolitan operations which most efficiently solved the problem of joint district action. This Metropolitan District Commission was, however, organ- ized and governed by the Legislature of the state, and the whole state deter- mined the scope of the operations and the expenses, assessing the expenses, nevertheless, upon the cities and towns of the metropolitan district. In this way, while the work is efficiently done, the principle of local self-government is violated.
There have, in fact, been two objections made to the present situation. The most important practical objection is that the metropolitan district is unorganized and there is no person, commission, or organization authorized to speak the will of the district. The Metropolitan Commission is an organ of the state and can express its will only. The district, itself, is unincorporated and inarticulate. As a result, there is no way in which the needs of the district can be presented, whether to the state or to any department of the National Government. In a recent able publication of the National Municipal League, entitled "The Government of Municipal Areas," it is said (on page 315) that there is "no political organization today in the Massachusetts Metropolitan District which represents the district, expresses the will of the residents and fights for their interest before the Legislature." The other objection, which is based on political reasons, has already been stated; that the money of the inhabitants of the metropolitan district is spent, not on the vote of voters of the district, but on the vote of the State Legislature. There is no local self- government.
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