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 9
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50
The zoning movement in Boston, as throughout the country, is a housing measure of the first importance. By segregating manufacturing and general business as far as possible in suitable areas and by insisting upon a high percentage of open space in the residential sections, as well as by other regulations, it opens up a prospect of better living accommodations for the people. It is also an industrial measure of the highest order. No phase of the Boston zoning law was more carefully worked out than this. While excluding factories from sections where their location would work injury to the neighborhood, it en- courages them to occupy definite areas in which superior facilities can be pro- vided. In general, the Boston zoning law aims to preserve the benefits which exist in the parts of the city now built upon, to enhance them by the gradual elimination of inharmonious types of occupancy, to build up new areas in a manner more wholesome, comfortable and agreeable, and to promote the larger conveniences and orderly arrangements which make for economic efficiency.
WORKINGS OF THE ZONING LAW
Two hundred and nineteen petitions for changes in the boundary lines of the zoning districts have been acted upon by the Board of Zoning Adjustment
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from its organization in 1924 to the end of 1930. In connection with these petitions sixty-four changes have been made in the zoning plan, thirty-seven petitions have been withdrawn, defaulted or dismissed without prejudice, and in one hundred and eighteen instances no change has been authorized, the peti- tioners having failed to advance sufficient reasons within the principles laid down by the statute for changing the zoning lines in the particular locality specified. This means that over a period of more than six years the integrity of the Boston zoning plan has been carefully preserved. In this time also there have been only seven attempts through certiorari proceedings to overrule a decision of the Board of Zoning Adjustment by parties who considered them- selves aggrieved by the action taken. Three of these appeals were dismissed by the court, three are pending, and in the remaining case, although the decision itself was quashed, the constitutionality of the Board was definitely upheld.
THE THOROUGHFARE PLAN
With the completion of its official map, with its zoning plan in operation, with figures of population growth analyzed and charted, and witli a mass of other preliminary data before it, the City Planning Board next undertook the study and preparation of a major thoroughfare system designed to meet the needs of the city for the next quarter of a century or more.
Boston's street problem is unique, just as Boston is itself unique among American cities. As so well described in the earlier volumes, Old Boston grew up on a small peninsula. Lots were small and streets were narrow because of the restricted area available. Old Boston became the Hub to which all roads led. It became the center of a cluster of some fifty communities. The streets of Old Boston have been patched and tinkered from time to time but no real attempt has been made to co-ordinate them with a major system of regional highways.
The individual streets are, with few exceptions, merely local ways giving access to the abutting buildings. There are sixteen radial highways leading from the environs to Old Boston, but no really adequate highway leading across or around it. There is probably no city in the United States where traffic conditions on the streets of the downtown business section are so near the saturation point as they are here in Boston today. The effect of this traffic congestion is reflected in the valuation of the downtown business district, which actually decreased froin $799,000,000 in 1925 to $765,000,000 in 1930, while during the same period the total valuation of Boston increased from $1,862,000,000 to $1,972,000,000. In addition the American Road Builders Association has estimated a monetary loss in Boston at the present time, due to traffic delay, of $81,000 per day, or the equivalent of five per cent interest on a capital investment of $591,000,000. This fact is also reflected in trucking, which, in Boston, is extremely expensive. There are 13,000 trucks registered in Boston City Proper and, assuming that the cost of operating a truck, in- cluding the driver's compensation, is five cents per minute or three dollars per hour, that one item alone amounts to over $19,000 per day, or $6,000,000 per year, if the delay is only one half hour per truck on the average. If the truck
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loses an hour a day,- and various truckmen have estimated that their trucks lose from one to three hours per day,- it means a loss of $12,000,000 per year.
This traffic congestion and the resultant delay do not mean a loss solely to truckmen and expressmen attempting to move vehicles through the down- town streets; it also affects merchants, manufacturers and everyone else through- out the suburbs and the metropolitan district.
In carrying on the work in connection with the comprehensive thoroughfare . plan for the City of Boston, the City Planning Board engaged the services of Robert Whitten, now president of the American City Planning Institute, as Consultant and under his personal direction the work was prosecuted. Un- usually complete factual data were available, including the admirable traffic survey made by the city in 1927 under the direction of Miller Mcclintock; the traffic counts which had been taken from time to time by the Boston Chamber of Commerce; and the traffic investigations of the City Planning Board itself and of the Division of Metropolitan Planning. These data in- cluded not only ample statistics of the traffic moving past any given point in a given period of time - that is, the volume of traffic,- but very complete records of the origin, the routing and the destination of traffic throughout the metropolitan district. Also full records were obtained relating to the average speed of movement from the heart of Boston outward to the metropolitan dis- trict in all directions. As a result of this latter investigation it was ascertained that in thirty minutes one can travel about two times as far to the west via Beacon street or to the northwest via the Northern Artery, as toward Chelsea, East Boston and the North Shore; and about one and three quarters times as far as toward Roxbury, Dorchester and the south.
It was on the basis of these facts and others of a similar nature that Mr. Whitten, for the City Planning Board, was able to demonstrate the economic worth of each project recommended. In other words, it can be shown how much traffic a given new route is likely to carry today, in 1935, or thirty or forty years hence, and how much time each vehicle moving over that route would save; and by allowing a proper unit of cost for the movement of that vehicle, including the time of the driver, it is possible to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the worth of the various proposed improvements. It was on such a basis that the merits of each of the various projects under consideration were studied. Some projects were discarded, others adopted and the result is a complete "Report on a Thoroughfare Plan for the City of Boston," issued by the City Planning Board in 1930 as the result of more than three years of intensive work.
Briefly, the Thoroughfare Plan includes ten major projects and fifty-six other projects, all of which have been considered with reference to their relative urgency, and a definite program of construction is proposed.
The first project of major importance is the building of the East Boston Vehicular Tunnel. This has been authorized and the work is already under way, involving an expense of $16,000,000. The second major improvement recommended in the report is what is called the Central Artery, a street extended through the heart of the city, cutting across the market district and skirting the
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edges of the banking, office and retail districts, following a route where land values are not excessive. This Central Artery, with its extension to the southerly city limits by the proposed Blue Hills Radial, forms the backbone of the new system. An important feature of the Central Artery, and of its south- erly extension via the Blue Hills Radial, will be an upper level roadway or via- duct extending from the North Station at Nashua street to the Dover Street Bridge, a distance of about two miles. This six-lane viaduct will have a capa- city of 60,000 vehicles a day, traveling at an average speed of thirty miles an hour. It will by-pass the chief centers of congestion and will attract to itself approximately forty per cent of the vehicles that are now clogging the surface streets of the central area. It will pass over Haymarket square, over the con- gested surface traffic of the market district, and over all cross streets, includ- ing Congress, Federal, Summer, Essex and Kneeland. A two-level street of this kind will have from four to six times the capacity of an ordinary city street.
These three major projects - the East Boston Tunnel, the Central Artery and the Blue Hills Radial - form part of a great North-South express road extending from the northerly city line bordering Revere to the southerly city line at Readville, a distance of 13.7 miles. It will connect the state highway system serving Revere, Lynn, Salem, Beverly and other North Shore cities and towns on the north, with the state highway system serving Stoughton, Taunton, Fall River, New Bedford and neighboring towns on the south. Other projects recommended in the report are the North Shore Radial, Canterbury Parkway and the Neponset River Parkway. Still other sections of the city are served by a proposed Roxbury Cross-town Thoroughfare, an express road from Old Colony Parkway north of Savin Hill to Bay State road at Ashby street; the Charles River Parkway as an express road and parkway from Longfellow Bridge along the southerly side of the Charles River to Cottage Farm Bridge; North Beacon street, Brighton, as an express road from Union square westerly to the Charles river; and a Boston and Albany Highway as an elevated roadway over the Boston and Albany Railroad tracks from Commonwealth avenue at Cottage Farm Bridge to Arlington square.
A legislative bill providing for a portion of the Central Artery, together with the widening of Albany street and of Castle, Motte and Way streets, was submitted to the 1931 Legislature as the first step in the comprehensive program outlined in the report, but, although supported by practically every business and civic group in the community, it was referred by the committee before whom it was heard to the next legislative session.
In the meantime a forward step was taken by the Legislature of 1930 in the form of chapter 168, authorizing the Mayor of the City of Boston, after receipt from the City Planning Board, the Board of Street Commissioners and the Board of Park Commissioners of their recommendations, to adopt an official Thoroughfare Plan, designed to include a system of major traffic streets, express roads and major traffic parkways to meet future, as well as present, traffic needs, in so far as they may be reasonably determined. It is the hope of the City Planning Board that its Thoroughfare Plan, produced during Boston's Ter-
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centenary year, may serve as the basis of the plan to be prepared under the provision of the aforesaid chapter and that it will be subjected to careful exami- nation and constructive criticism by public and private interests, to the end that it may be amended, supplemented, perfected and eventually approved as the official Thoroughfare Plan of the City of Boston.
TOPOGRAPHICAL CHANGES SINCE 1880
Boston has grown in area not only by absorbing neighboring territory but also by reclaiming land from the sea. At the close of the Revolutionary . period the city was topographically what it had been from the beginning. Its hills were as nature had made and left them and none of the numerous coves and inlets had been obliterated. The century from 1780 to 1880, however, witnessed most of the great physical changes which have brought such a trans- formation as no other great city of the world has ever undergone at the hands of man; the South Cove, the West Cove, the North Cove, the Great Cove and the Back Bay all yielding to the relentless march of progress and contributing hundreds of acres of filled land to the original area of the city.
Nor has the work ceased during the last fifty years. According to the Justin Winsor Memorial History, the city government, in 1880, exercised jurisdiction over about 23,700 acres of "upland," or thirty-seven square miles. In 1930 the land area is 28,134 acres, or forty-four square miles. Between four and five square miles of this increase is due to the annexation of Hyde Park. The rest is made land, created by fillings on the harbor front or along the inland water courses.
The filling in of the Back Bay, which had proceeded for about twenty years when the Winsor History was published, was "nearly completed" in 1880; but the great Fenway improvement, planned by Olmsted, and the gradual occupancy of the district by fine residences, churches and institutions, have completely changed its aspect in the intervening period, making it in some respects the most attractive section of the city.
The creation of the Charles River Basin, completed in 1910, incidentally added a wide strip, known as the Embankment, to the southern and south- eastern borders of the stream. This new territory is essentially a portion of the water park and, as such, is devoted to recreation and pleasure traffic. A further strip will be taken from the ample breadth of the Basin under the new plans for development, which have been substantially furthered by the generous gift of Mrs. James J. Storrow.
More radical changes have been made in the contour of East Boston, especially on the eastern shore. Here solid land has replaced the flats and is still pushing its way in the direction of Governor's Island, which may yet be engulfed and form a part of the mainland. Already the Airport has been constructed and the World War Memorial Park provides facilities for bathing, athletics and general recreation where formerly Wood Island, known to the older residents as Hog Island, stood among dreary flats and tidal marshes. Nearly two hundred acres of filled land have been added to the area of East Boston and this will be still further augmented by a strandway along the water-
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front, running from the World War Memorial Park to the Winthrop line, plans for which are now in preparation.
But it is in South Boston perhaps that the most extensive modifications of the shore line may be found. The incoming voyager, passing the Army Base, the Fish Pier and Commonwealth Pier, scarcely suspects that the land on which these imposing structures rest is all stolen from the sea and that the original boundary ran a mile to the southwest; yet long after 1880 swimming was a popular pastime at the corner of C and First streets, one mile inland from the waterfront of Commonwealth Pier. The development of this great area, still known as Commonwealth Flats, though the flats have disappeared, is not yet complete, but it is destined to be the seat of thriving industrial plants, as well as warehouses and railroad yards. Already it is the site of the world's largest wool market.
Farther east, along the South Boston shore, some eighty acres have been added between the Reserved channel and Castle Island, making the latter a mere projection of the peninsula. The uses of this new tract have not yet been determined. At present it is a rough, unfinished salt marsh, the resort of many species of water birds and of interest chiefly to ornithologists and a few patient line-fishermen.
Marine Park, with its Head House, Aquarium, bathing beach, long pier and the beautiful Pleasure bay, is a development of the last half century, as are the Strandway and Columbus Park. Through these fillings the waters of the Old Harbor have been contracted and purified. It is not too much to say that the sweeping curves of the South Boston shore from the Castle Island approaches to the crest beyond the new Stadium are unexcelled in this part of the country, either in their intrinsic dignity or in the loveliness of the prospects they afford. All, or nearly all, of this area is made land.
South bay, which onee covered an area of three hundred and sixty acres, has been gradually inclosed, particularly the southern and eastern sides. In 1880 and much later it was the scene of rowing regattas and the Shawmut Rowing Club had its clubhouse on the north side of Dover Street Bridge. At that time the Albany street frontage on South bay was an active and important part of Boston's conimereial waterfront. The half-century just passed has seen radieal changes in marine transportation. Most of the barges, schooners and other small craft which formerly came to these restricted waters have been displaced by larger carriers, vessels too large to navigate the narrow, shallow channel of South bay and of Fort Point ehannel above Dorchester Avenue Bridge. The water-borne commerce of the Albany street frontage has become relatively insignificant, and the waterway is a barrier to rail access to this district from the extensive railroad yards which in recent years have been built on land reclaimed from the easterly side of South bay. It is not unlikely that within the next half-century the remaining waters of South bay and of Fort Point ehannel, south of Dorehester Avenue Bridge, some thirty- seven acres, will be filled in, and the Albany street district rejuvenated as a thriving industrial and warehouse section, served by rail instead of by water. Such was the recommendation to the 1931 Legislature of a special commission which found that the cost of the improvement, estimated at $6,821,800, would
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be largely, if not fully, met by the enhancement of land values, while the project itself would afford opportunity for economical expansion of the city's business activities.
Along the Dorchester shore comparatively little filling has been done except in connection with local playgrounds and primarily as an adjunct to the Old Colony Parkway, constructed under the direction of the Metropolitan District Commission.
Such are the main extensions of the boundary line of Boston in the last fifty years. But the changes in occupancy - particularly the immense resi- dential growth in Dorchester, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and West Roxbury -- and the creation of our magnificent park system have rendered necessary the building or widening of main highways, so that the street plan of the city has been materially altered since 1880. It is in this period that we must place the development, in whole or in large part, of such great arteries as Blue Hill avenue, Columbus avenue, Huntington avenue, Commonwealth avenue, Geneva ave- nue, Columbia road, Morton street, Stuart street, North Beacon street, Cam- bridge and Court streets, Hyde Park avenue, Pleasant street, Bennington street, Belgrade avenue, South Huntington avenue, Chelsea street, Centre street and others of equal importance.
Similarly, the growth of Greater Boston has necessitated better highway connections with the surrounding cities and towns. To this necessity we owe the approaches to the Northern Artery, as well as the Old Colony Parkway and the Southern Artery, or Gallivan Boulevard.
Nearly all of the bridges out of Boston are either new constructions or replacements of the last fifty years,- including those over the Charles, the Mystic and the Neponset rivers, as well as over Chelsea creek, Fort Point channel and the Fenway waters.
It was primarily to obtain a pure water supply that John Winthrop and his companions abandoned their original settlement in Charlestown and, at the invitation of William Blaxton, the first white settler, took up their abode on the ancient peninsula which was destined later to become the site of the capital city of New England. The same reason is said to have largely governed the citizens of Dorchester and Roxbury when they voted for the annexation of their towns to Boston. The establishment of our Metropolitan Water System, which promises to perpetuate this happy condition, took place in the first half of our period. Its influence on the landscape of the city is seen in the development of the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and in the abandonment and dis- appearance of the old reservoir on Dorchester Heights.
One might mention the building (and later rebuilding) of the North and South Stations as changes topographical in character, for each of these struc- tures has exercised a powerful influence on the growth of business, the character of real estate, and even the street system in its neighborhood. They and the new railroad lines branching from them, with the railroad bridges that have come into being wherever there is a crossing of highways, are among the unfamiliar features that an aerial map of the city reveals today as compared with conditions as they existed in 1880.
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ZONING METHODS ILLUSTRATED - A BLUE HILL AVENUE SECTION SHOWING ZONING DISTRICTS AND THEIR APPLICATION
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Except for some of the sand-hills in South Boston, no hills have been leveled recently and Boston still remains what some wag has called a roller- coast city. It is only in the made land on the edges of the old town that one finds a condition similar to the flat areas that make up ahnost the whole of a prairie-built Chicago. Over most of our territory one can scarcely walk three blocks without feeling the rise and fall, gentle or rugged as the case may be, of the gradients, following the surface of the original hills and valleys.
BUILDING MATERIALS
The aspect of any city is affected almost as much by the materials of which its buildings are constructed as by the configuration of its highway plan. In this respect there have been notable, though, perhaps, not radical changes in Boston in the last fifty years. In the City Proper and the Back Bay, brick is more and more giving way to the building stones, especially limestone, granite and occasionally marble. Brown freestone, however, is much less popular than it was in the Richardson era and cement is rarely used. Steel, of course, is regularly used today in the framework of large buildings. On the other hand, the outlying residential sections largely maintain the Boston tradition of wooden construction for ordinary dwellings. The two-mile stretch of Blue Hill avenue, from Franklin Park to Mattapan square, is lined in great part with such dwell- ings; whereas Commonwealth avenue in Brighton presents a frontage that is almost solidly brick.
The influence of the material used on the architectural treatment is obvious and explains the different impression a visitor receives from a tour of Boston (outside the business section) and, let us say, Philadelphia. The residential parts of Boston, those to the south and west at least, suggest a group of sub- stantial New England towns, attached to a great modern city.
The pavements of a city, too, affect its general appearance, to say nothing of the comfort of the traveler, and those of Boston have changed considerably in this period. Fifty years ago dirt streets were the rule, and the city still has a large percentage of more or less improved macadam. But the hard, smooth pavement is a necessity for modern traffic and the more durable types are driving inferior surfaces into the byways. Of the 647.55 miles of roadway in Boston today, 313 miles are paved with macadam, 98 with asphalt concrete, 96 with granite blocks, 94 with sheet asphalt, and the balance with wood block, brick, concrete, gravel, etc.
The old-fashioned brick sidewalk also is yielding gradually to the concrete slab, while the dirt walk is becoming as obsolete, except in unimproved districts, as the oil street lamp which in 1880 was still its frequent companion.
CONCLUSION
Looking backward is but a natural precedent to looking forward. History and prophecy are never far apart in the human mind. Another fifty years will have tested the validity of many of the plans proposed for the development of Boston, even as the present era has witnessed the justification of many of the recommendations which were little more than prophecies on the part of Robert
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Fleming Gourlay, the city planner of nearly a century ago. The question of a Metropolitan Boston looms large upon the horizon of the fourth century in the life of the city, and future historians may have even more numerous annexations or consolidations to record than those that occurred in the earlier days. A crisis in traffic congestion is fast approaching and the next few years will of necessity witness the adoption of a variety of radical measures for the relief of the traveling public. The practically unlimited possibilities in the field of aviation must be met by correspondingly large co-operative measures on the part of the municipality. Problems of health, of recreation, of education and of public welfare lie in wait for each succeeding generation. Such is progress.
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