USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 2 > Part 33
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South Boston also has the Marine Park beach bath at City Point. But South Boston is not the only place. There are beach baths at Wood Island Park, at Savin Hill and other places, nine in all - all of them for women as well as men.
The Metropolitan Park Department also, in 1897, provided its two miles of surf bathing at Revere, where over 100,000 baths are taken each season, and in 1902 its mile-long Nantasket Beach, with 60,000 - thus bringing to every citizen of Boston one of the chief resources of a seashore resort, enabling him to start in the middle of the business section of the city and in half an hour find himself among the big waves rolling unbroken froni the sea.
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The first Boston public shower bath, at Dover street, was opened to the public on October 15, 1898, crowning the long agitation by Robert A. Woods and others. There are shower baths in all the eleven city gymnasiums and in some of the twenty-five gymnasiums. There are four great swimming pools, including one in the Roxbury Memorial High School, two seventy-five feet by thirty and one forty by thirty-three, of which the one on Cabot street, estab- lished in 1905, was the first. Incidentally, the Paul Revere School with its ten showers for boys and ten for girls, installed in 1899, set the example for school baths in this country.
These are some of the more outstanding of the physical provisions, other than parks, made by Boston for the play and recreation of its citizens. But before leaving that subject I must remind the reader that for city children the principal playground is the street. It has always been so, in Boston and elsewhere, and it has not always been regarded as an evil. As we read in the "Wonderworking Providence in New England," published in 1654, "The hidcous Thickets of this place were such that Wolfes and Beares nurst up their young from the eyes of all beholders in those very places where the streets are full of Girles and Boys sporting up and downe, with a continued concourse of people" - the Puritans thus fulfilling the happy prophecy of Zechariah that "the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof."
It is interesting to note how Zechariah insists that it was the street, and though there are now more automobiles than there were in Jerusalem in Zecha- riah's time or in the Boston of 1654, yet the street will continue, in many cases, to be the children's principal playground for many years to come - until bigger back yards or playgrounds within the block or within a radius of one quarter of a mile, reached without crossing traffic streets, have been provided for the short-legged children in every residential district. Meantime Boston has play streets especially supervised as such - a few in the West End and elsewhere - and still sets aside some streets for coasting.
And in a city there is always need of space-economizing games like volley ball. The question of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle has in our more practical age become the question of how many boys can at the same time play a violent game on one square yard of ground. There is there- fore need of demonstrating new games and even of inventing them. Of the latter, basketball and volley ball - invented, one in 1893 by an instructor and the other in 1895 by a student, in the International Y. M. C. A. College at Springfield - are instances.
But physical provision for play and recreation is not the most important. A piece of level ground, appropriately surfaced and neatly kept, furnished with all the necessary apparatus and surrounded by an iron fence, is not a play- ground. Of itself it may be less popular with children than the street - indeed it is only the most successful playgrounds that rival the street in popularity - and may have less educational value than the city dump. The important things arc leadership and games. With the latter the boys and girls sporting up and down the streets of Puritan Boston, especially the younger ones, werc
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far better supplied than are the Boston children of the present time. The beautiful old songs and games of England were treasured by the Puritans. As William Wells Newell says in his "Songs and Games of American Children," and as he well demonstrates in the one hundred and sixty of these therein preserved, "Nowhere have the old sports been more generally maintained than in the localities famous for Puritanism." In this matter our aim must be to win back to the standard set for us by our predecessors.
And in general we must remember that a good game is greater than a playground. Baseball planted anywhere will grow. It and its modifications (sometimes crossed with "cat") are played in every residential side street in New York not encumbered with a car track. Like the cat it has nine lives. It cannot be exterminated. Similarly, mnen will piteh horseshoes along the railroad tracks or anywhere, as you can see in entering alinost any city. Play- grounds are important; games are necessary.
And supervision.
The thing that first got me interested in playgrounds was the disconcerting discovery that the new playgrounds provided by Josiah Quincy's legislation were not being used. Here were thousands of boys, as I had contended and believed, thirsting for a chance to play and getting into all kinds of misehief for lack of opportunity; and here, on the other hand, were the long-needed playgrounds ready and waiting to be used. Yet one could visit these play- grounds on a summer afternoon and find not a boy on them. What was the matter?
Well, I found that there were several things. One was, as one boy told us: "There's a tough crowd down there would knoek the stuffing out of you." There were in some localities groups of young men with leisure time for politics and baseball who thought they owned the playgrounds and stole the boys' bats and balls if they ventured on them. This was not the case with all the play- grounds - not for instance, with Boston Common, which since the time of General Gage, and doubtless before his time, has had a special deity watching over it - but it was with many of them. Then, of course, there must be somebody to say whose diamond is whose and when. And there is the shy boy who does not yet belong to any gang, and must at first be provided with something - traveling rings and slides for instance - that he can use alone. And, finally, there is the very important function of a playground leader in seeing that every boy shall succeed at something every day, whether he is a good player or a cluinsy one and whether his specialty is baseball or stunts or track or making aireraft. (To the present repertory of our playgrounds sailing regattas on the Frog Pond and elsewhere, now being demonstrated by Com- munity Service of Boston, will doubtless soon be added.)
To find out what was the trouble with the playgrounds and what, if any- thing, could be done about it the Massachusetts Civic League in April, 1900, started an experiment at North End Park. The city next season took over the work on that playground and the League moved to Columbus Avenue Play- ground (now the William E. Carter Playground), which it carried on until 1906. In each of these playgrounds the League, besides making provision for
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baseball and football for the bigger boys, started a "children's corner" after the model set by Miss Tower; also a "boys' corner" containing gymnastic apparatus for the middle-sized boy, including, at Columbus Avenue, a vaulting buck, a horizontal bar, flying rings, traveling rings, trapezes and long slanting bars to slide down on,- the most popular being the trapeze to jump, catch, swing on and drop off from at the end of the swing, the bar being sct low enough to make you hold your legs up as you neared the ground, to the great benefit of your "stomach muscles."
On Columbus Avenue, also, there were, in 1904, 230 gardens, about three fcet by eight, carried on individually by as many boys and girls. The number varied somewhat from year to year.
The need of expert leadership on the playgound, recognized by the city when it took over the sand gardens, has been, in Boston as in most other cities, slow of fulfillment on the larger playgrounds, owing chiefly to the lack of trained leaders,- most of the available instructors being either baseball or football. coaches or teachers of gymnastics. Good work, however, was done under Mayor Fitzgerald and there has been great advance under the administrations of Mayor Nichols and Mayor Curley within the past few years, as a result of which there has been a remarkable increase in attendance.
The match games on the nincty-nine ball fields on the forty-one principal city playgrounds were last year ten times as many as they were three years ago, and in this Tercentenary year there has been, under the strong backing of Mayor Curley, again a remarkable increase. There have been this summer forty-two local leagues with 290 ball teams playing 139 games every week for fourteen weeks, the older boys in the evening, the younger during the day, an increase of about a hundred per cent over last year. The principal result of these league games is seen not so much in the league games themselves as in the many independent games resulting from the favorable relationship estab- lished between the different teams participating in the league and in the habit established among the nearly four thousand young men and boys of playing on the city playgrounds.
There have also been a local championship contest in pitching, running bases, throwing for accuracy and for distance on each playground, with finals at Fenway Park; wagon races for the younger children; competition in hand- work, costume, squash ball and other stunts; a series of track meets preceded by district elimination contests, and a sports circus for the children on August 30. There has been the definite organization not only of baseball but of foot- ball, soccer, cricket, hockey, curling, handball, golf, volley-ball, track, tennis, quoits (with many teams of adults), roller skating with finals on the Charles- bank, and many other games and sports, not omitting skating (one great center for which is the Public Garden pond), coasting, swimming, wading, boating and even fishing. In the Park Department's basket ball tournaments, carried on for ninc weeks last winter in the municipal gymnasiums, sixty-four teams participated.
How many people were reached by all these activities provided in our baths and gymnasiums and on our playgrounds and how adequate such pro-
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visions may be for Boston's 800,000 inhabitants, including its 130,000 school children,- to say nothing of the million odd additional population of Greater Boston,- it would be impossible to state with any accuracy. We have some reliable figures for the playgrounds and gymnasiums and the indoor baths. But when it comes to estimating how many thousands have disported them- selves on all the beaches, coasted on the Common or skated on the Public Garden pond,- so black with skaters on a winter's day,- solemnly paraded in the swan boats or swatted the ball on Sunday afternoon, we are outside the sphere of mathematics. And these uncountables are among the most important. Moreover, it is the imponderables, forever unaccountable, that count, - not how many played but how they played and what was happening to them when they did it.
For boys and young men of baseball age it may be said that something approaching adequacy is in sight. The baseball tournaments this summer had 3,905 participants. All competitive sports together, including 679 competitors in the aircraft tournaments conducted independently by Community Service of Boston, had 7,926 entries, - these figures representing not an optimistic guess but the names and addresses of active members of the several teams, as listed in the records of the Park Department. The total number of different boys taking part, as shown by a card catalogue giving their names and addresses, was 7,217, of whom about 4,580 were between twelve and seventeen years old, inclusive. There are in Boston about 36,000 boys between these ages. Allowing for those using the great beaches or taking part in other sports outside the playgrounds and those (an unexpectedly large number in my experience) who pass some weeks with relatives in the country or are kept busy selling papers, it may be said that these totals represent a considerable proportion of those for whom active games especially need to be provided.
For the little children also there is, in the school playgrounds something like adequate provision.
For girls above the age of those who can find satisfaction on the children's playgrounds - say fourteen or so-it must be said that, in spite of good beginnings, comparatively little has been done.
For the rest, half a million baths are something (the figure is somewhat near the truth), but these are chiefly taken in the summer, and nine months is a long time between baths, as I hope the Mayor of Boston will soon be saying to the Mayor of Cambridge. Thousands of people skating means a lot, but on most ponds and playgrounds the days of skating average some twenty-five in a year. And yet, in summarizing this fragmentary estimate, it may be said that a great deal of most pleasant and valuable recreation is provided, that the amount of it is increasing in a geometric ratio and that, with public feeling and political leadership as they are, the achievement, compared with that of fifty years ago, is amazing and the outlook for the future very bright.
People ask what the results of all this work have been. We must answer that we do not know. What are the results of any form of education, of the public schools or of the church? We can say that lawbreaking is chiefly by boys and young men and mostly in the summer months, and that it is also in
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the summer months, which have hitherto oeeupied this bad eminenee, that the baths and playgrounds are at their fullest. And we may add, with Horatio,
If he steal aught the whilst this play is playing, I will pay the theft.
Again, sinee Sunday games were legalized, the Sunday erap game is eertainly less played. The National Reereation Association, also, has a great mass of testimony from poliee sergeants, juvenile eourt judges and others especially familiar with the ehild life of cities to the effect that a playground reduees by half the lawbreaking within its radius - about half a mile. Play also does more for health than all our hospitals. But the purpose of play, ineluding recreation, is not to eut down disease or lawbreaking, though it does more toward these ends than all our laws and our poliee eourts. Play is not police or medieine but life, and until we have a formula for life we shall not be able to measure what it does.
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CHAPTER XIII EVERYDAY LIFE IN BOSTON
ITS CHANGING ASPECTS By ARTHUR A. SHURCLIFF
CHANGING BOSTON AND HISTORY
Imhotep built the Pyramids from accurate plans three thousand years before the Christian era. Three thousand years later Ictinus planned and built the Parthenon. Two thousand years after the Parthenon Boston was settled, but the work of building the city began without plans and for two centuries no plans except for the placing of forts in strategic positions were made. This date brings us to about A. D. 1880, which is the beginning of our period.
I bring in the ancient planners and their far dates as a reminder of the obvious fact that Boston, though it is considered old reckoned by the settle- ment of America, is young measured by history and that the settlers of Bos- ton did not aim at perfect work like that of Imhotep and Ictinus. The Bos- tonians did not have resources which would enable them to try for that kind of perfection. They were forced to aim at mere food-getting, shelter-finding, and self-protection against a political control which became a tyranny.
However, the merit in the history of Boston which justifies the city in recording it does not lie in the hand-to-mouth struggle, in the stress to find shelter, in the need to establish a new kind of government, or in the willingness to build with enthusiasm without planning. Struggles, needs and willingnesses . like these are a part of the history of every land. The historical distinction of Boston lies in the combination here of these old struggles on the soil of a new continent, in an era of a new experiment in democratic government, and during a time when the invention of looms, locomotives and other mnechanical aids to men has made growth and change more rapid than ever before in the history of the world.
Boston stood on the strand of the new world at a place where the western surge of migration struck very early and made a pause. When that human wave gathered strength again at the coast and swept over all the western lands to the Pacific and then across to the northeast coast of Asia, the wave carried along as flotsam and jetsam the ideas and inventions of Boston and her sister cities. The history of the new world cannot be written without bringing in the history of Boston.
THE CHANGING INTEREST OF THESE NOTES
In this year of the Tercentenary these Boston notes of mine can be of little interest if they be true, because they cannot escape being trite. Especially
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if they relate to small matters which are now commonplaces, they will convey no news to the man in the street. But at the next centenary the interest of the notes perhaps may increase in proportion to their present triteness and they may become news of a small kind. The wars which have taken their blood toll of Boston, the conflagrations which have laid it waste, the scourges which have cut us to the bone, cannot be recorded here; nor can the rise of the famous Boston poets, painters, scholars, scientists, engineers, and of all the artists and divines. Only events seemingly commonplace to us in 1930 will be brought into these notes.
THE SEA DRIVEN BACK
Few men are living today who saw Boston as a peninsula connected only on the south and west by narrow necks of natural and artificial land. In 1930 these necks, dams, causeways, railway trestles over water and salt marsh have been absorbed in the solid fills of earth which have united them into one vast fabric. This amazing transformation is no longer mentioned as a thing in progress or accomplished. The vast labor is not dreamed of by the thousands who now live upon this new earth. Only a comparison of the old and the new upon maps and the reading of the ancient events show the labor and the achievement.
The ponding of the five hundred acres of the Charles River Basin about 1905 by a damn to keep out the tides which once ran up to Watertown is a fur- ther reminder of the great preceding labors. Tides still ebb and flow in the Mystic up to Medford and in the Neponset to the falls at Milton, but dams are being discussed in 1930 for keeping the water always at an acceptable level in both these estuaries. Of late the large area of Columbus Park has been reclaimed from the tide. Also the large territories of the airport at East Boston and the area for Cominonwealth docks in South Boston have been reclaimned. The reclamation of the great flats which separate the Island of Fort Winthrop from East Boston is now contemplated.
THE OVERWHELMING OF OPEN COUNTRY
Before 1900 much open country surrounded Boston within fifteen miles. Every traveler who journeyed from town to town passed through long reaches of landscape in which pastures, cultivated fields, woodlands, extensive salt marshes, fresh water swamps and rocky hills were common sights. Cambridge was separated from Boston, from Brookline, from Belmont and from Somerville by such free spaces, including much tidewater. The individuality of the built-up section of every city and town was accented by the undeveloped lands which surrounded it and which lent local suburban color and interest to each urban center.
The church steeples of the towns and cities could be seen afar off and the visitor on reaching the center of each town felt that he had made an arrival. He looked with interest at stores and houses because his eyes had only a few minutes before rested upon the open fields, farm lands and woods. The arrival in Boston was similarly notable to those coming from Lynn through Revere and Everett, and from every other quarter except from the south through the
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closely built regions of Dorchester. To the coming generations of Bostonians this ancient loveliness of the individual villages, towns, and cities will be a picture which can only be imagined, for no drawings or photographs show it. Maps of those days will eke out the fancy and will give a hint of the good fortune of the men of 1900, who did not need to make long journeys to find "natural" beauty.
In 1930 most of the nearby cities and towns, owing to the upbuilding of their surrounding free spaces, have lost the individuality and (to our eyes) the beauty which they possessed a third of a century ago. Cambridge, except for the narrow thread of embankment by the Charles which singles out the township on one side, is now only a map name. Cambridge is hardly dis- tinguishable in the continuous blanket of streets and buildings which covers hill, valley, swamp and pond for miles on all other sides. The traveler must. know by sight the doorways, the roof forms, and the store-fronts in order to become aware, unless street signs tell him, that Arlington or Somerville or Watertown and Waltham have been left behind on the journey to Cambridge.
Near Boston the largest area of open country which has held its own against building operations is the great expanse of the Lynn Marshes which in 1930 lies south of Lynn, east of Saugus and Malden, and north of Revere. For nearly a third of a century the long embankments of the two railroads have been the only intrusions upon the broad expanse of these tidal meadows, whose simple surface of salt grass has lain open to the sun since the days of the Indians. No area of salt marsh as noble as this one has been taken for a park. Here, one would say, is an opportunity, lying at our doors, to preserve this type of vanish- ing and beautiful landscape.
In 1930 there are men in Boston who are urging greater park areas to be used not for recreative purposes (in the 1880 sense of that word) but to break up the endless monotony of the almost uniform blanket of streets and buildings, which is smothering the varied universe and which possesses no redeeming pattern of its own to make a pleasant compensation. Beauty of the buildings and the streets begins to pall upon the spirit when such beauty is spread out endlessly and uniformly.
THE BACK-TO-NATURE URGE
In the Boston settlement of 1630 and in the village and the town which grew up afterwards we hear no complaint for at least two hundred years (except from hermits) of the urbanizing of living conditions. Then there was no "back-to-nature" cry. Escape from nature was reckoned an advantage. Water from pipes was considered better than water from springs. Houses built side by side and close to the streets were considered better than single isolated houses. The horse car, the electric elevated railroad, the subway, artificial light and forced ventilation were considered gains when they caine. Detachment from contact with food getting, food storage and food preparation was considered to be a gain. Nearness to automobile traffic, to theaters, to churches and to museums was gain.
Cities like Boston grew so rapidly and so compactly that by 1880 the sur- rounding "natural" world had been pushed back as far as Malden, Arlington,
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Weston, Dedham and Milton. Partly because regret was felt for the vanish- ing landscapes and partly for recreative reasons, open ground for a system of parks was acquired by Boston about 1880, and this system has been constantly enlarged until the present time. The extension of the Boston Park System into the metropolitan area followed by action of the Commonwealth in the 90's. The continuing demand for county, state and national parks is one of the notable signs of our times in 1930.
It is unfair to the comforts and to the general attractiveness of our cities to say that the extension of parks represents a dissatisfaction with city life. City life has found an opportunity, through modern transportation, to add the enjoyment of the great parks to the list of urban pleasures. Conversely the transportation facilities which have brought the natural countryside within reach of the city dweller have also brought the city as a place of work and pleasure within reach of the country dweller. This advantage is enhanced by the facility with which the country dweller may enjoy in his own village the electric light, telephone, radio, water supply, food delivery, schools and churches, which were a few decades ago within reach only of the man living in the city.
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