USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > Brookline > History of the town of Brookline, Massachusetts > Part 27
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matter.' As in the case of the waterworks, there was the linger- ing notion that the thing might be done more economically in conjunction with a neighbor.
But this was not to be, and in the last month of 1876, the inhabitants decided to ask the legislature for authority to borrow $300,000 on six per cent, twenty-year bonds, for the construction of sewers. When the legislature refused, pre- sumably on the ground that the town had already incurred about all the debt it could carry, the amount was reduced to $125,000, for which legislative permission was not required. To this was added a tax appropriation of $20,000. Brookline would at least go as far as it could. Then, in May of 1878, the legislature provided for the assessment of part of the cost of sewers on the abutting property owners, and the town pro- ceeded, under those terms, with a comprehensive plan for a sewage system. Within fifteen years this comprised some forty- two miles, and was considered the best equipment of its kind among the towns of New England.
Meanwhile the allied problem of the Muddy River flats had been dealt with. Tides deposited much of the unwelcome débris of the Back Bay along the margins and shallow bottom of Muddy River. To remedy this, it was proposed that a dam, with tide gate, be constructed on Western Avenue in Boston, so that the tides could be excluded, and the waters of Muddy River released at low tide. This would keep out Boston sewage from the Back Bay, and would protect residents of the Boston as well as the Brookline bank of the stream. Under authority of the legislature, a dam was duly erected, with the consent but without the co-operation of Boston.
PUBLIC PROTECTION
A good deal of the activity in this direction was the out- growth, in one way or another, of the army Sanitary Service, forerunner of the Red Cross, during the Civil War. That work had served to dramatize the importance of health protection and preventive measures against disease. Thus, a smallpox hospital was established; measures were taken to manage even primitive sewage disposal as inoffensively as might be; and in 1876 town by-laws were passed in twenty-seven sections, relat-
WASHINGTON SQUARE IN 1887, LOOKING WEST The upper view comes to the left of the lower and somewhat overlaps. Beacon Street is at the left of the fork and Washington Street at the right.
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ing to the interment of the dead, the management of vaults and drains, the disposal of house offal, ashes and the like, and various other matters concerned with sanitation and public health. For the first time a physician was put in charge of pub- lic health work.
The older protective services, fire and police, were both ex- panded. The fire department had already been taken out of the volunteer class, and made a part of the town's business. The appropriation for its maintenance in 1872 was $4500, not including $1500 for new hydrants, $1500 for a new reser- voir, and $3000 for finishing the new engine and hook-and- ladder house. Ten years later, it was $10,500 'for the use of the Fire Department, and for purchasing a horse and chem- ical engine for Longwood.' By 1885 the fire-fighting force was enlarged to nearly fifty, mostly 'call' men, and it grew but little during the rest of the century. Equipment, however, was kept up-to-date and in good repair.
Old, hand-operated pumps were replaced by steam fire- engines. The meeting of February 6, 1873, voted to buy two of these, but on April I the motion was reconsidered and tabled; following which there was an appropriation of $6950 for one engine. Numerous reservoirs were constructed, how- ever, in various parts of the town, for without any extensive distribution of hydrants, only accessible artificial ponds could be relied upon in case of sudden need.
Fire stations were added and old ones enlarged as circum- stances seemed to require. In 1874 the highly advanced idea of a telegraphic fire alarm was presented for consideration, but nothing was done about it. The subject was 'indefinitely postponed' in 1877, and brought to adoption only after long delay, in 1887. This is one of the rare instances in which Brook- line was slow to adopt a really useful and progressive device; after its installation it was regarded as of the greatest impor- tance.
With the introduction of the water system, it was decided to put the steam fire-engine out of service, but to keep it in commission for possible emergencies. The men who were to be responsible for its operation in case of need, were to be selected from those whose usual employment was in the vicin-
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ity of the place where the engine was kept. Thus it is apparent that the firemen of those days were not 'full-time' firemen, but were subject to call whenever a fire broke out. They differed from the volunteers only in that they were compensated in money instead of chowder parties and other social advan- tages, and were under an obligation to serve when called.
In 1899 the town sought and obtained a legislative enact- ment permitting a reorganization of the fire department under a fire commissioner, and B. W. Neal, Jr., was appointed to that office. The force under his direction comprised twenty- seven permanent employees and fifty call men.
POLICE ADMINISTRATION
Brookline never had a 'crime wave,' but with a rapidly increasing population the number of those whom it was ex- pedient to lock up for a while, now and then, naturally grew larger. Arrests in the early 'seventies were about two hundred a year. In 1872, therefore, the town appropriated $3000 to buy 'a lot of land lying between the hose house on Washington Street in the Village, and Walnut Street' as a site for a police station. The next year, when the question of building came up, it was decided that the old Town Hall could be adapted at a cost of $3500 to provide a police station, a court room, accommodations for an evening school, four cells, and two rooms for lodgers. Evening school, if any, would meet in the principal hall, served by its own separate entrance.
Agitation for better police accommodations continued, how- ever. It was said that this use of the Town Hall afforded too much publicity for unpleasant sights, and that the effect on near-by school children was adverse. Finally, in 1898, a com- mittee was authorized to obtain plans, and an appropriation of $75,000 was made for 'a new public building for court and police purposes' at the corner of Washington and Prospect Streets.
A proposal to connect the Brookline police station by tele- graph with those in Boston was turned down along with the fire-alarm telegraph in 1877. Instances of desperate criminals whose flight might be intercepted by such a device were unknown in the town in those days, and the expenditure
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appeared unjustifiable. However, an appropriation was made in 1886 for a fire-alarm and police telegraph system, which worked out so effectively that Chief Alonzo Bowman praised it annually in his official reports and it has been elaborated almost every year since then.
The cost of police protection was consistently more than that for the fire department. It averaged around $15,000 to $20,000 a year during this period, most of which seems to have gone for preventive work - the maintenance of watchmen, and the like. The problem of inebriety does not seem to have claimed as much special attention as it did before the war. Liquor licenses were regularly granted under appropriate restrictions, and proposals to forbid the sale of beer and ale were voted down by considerable majorities. With expansion the town had taken on a somewhat more liberal complexion.
From 1886, Brookline regularly elected to exclude liquor- sellers under the local option laws; but this seems to have been purely a matter of home defense. A proposal for state pro- hibition was voted down by the town in 1889. Despite the conviction that four fifths of the disorderly intoxication in Brookline was due to the fact that citizens had only to walk across the Boston line, the town was not ready to impose its moral standards on others.
SUNDAY LAWS
But liberality did not extend to so serious a matter as work- ing on Sunday, even under the most extenuating circumstances, as appears from the case of George J. Walther who found himself in a very embarrassing situation indeed until Wil- liam I. Bowditch came to his rescue - the Mr. Bowditch who for so many years shared the honor of serving as moderator at town meetings, principally with Charles H. Drew and Rufus G. F. Candage. Mr. Walther was arrested by a Brook- line police officer on May 13, 1872, on the charge of illegally working on Sunday.
According to the policeman, he had watched the Walther home throughout the spring and never seemed to observe any outdoor work being done except on Sunday. On a Sunday in April there was raking of leaves and transplanting of flowers,
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and on the first Sunday in May the effrontery of Mr. Walther in repotting a passion flower for his wife, and screwing a hook into the waterspout of his house in order to train up a vine, was so offensive to Policeman Clark that he arrested the man.
Mr. Bowditch thought that this was going too far, and enlisted the interest of a number of influential citizens who petitioned the selectmen either to pay the small fine out of the town's funds or permit the petitioners as individuals to pay it, to drop the prosecution, and finally to instruct the police to take no notice of infractions of the Sunday law unless they were specifically complained of. The selectmen were in doubt as to their power in the matter, and voted that it was inex- pedient for them to take any action.
What seems particularly to have concerned Mr. Bowditch was the fact that Mr. Walther had been abroad during the early part of the spring, and could not possibly have performed the illegal work at which the annoying policeman testified he had seen him engaged.
Whatever the underlying explanation of all this, it should at least not be charged to the enlightened police chief, Alonzo Bowman, who with foresight observed, in 1891: 'I would make physical force the latent power of an intelligent policeman.' He knew how to build a police force, even if there were occa- sional individual failures.
THE TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM
Improvement of communications went ahead, although expensive projects received sanction only after careful consid- eration and sometimes bitter debate. When the Boston, Hart- ford & Erie Railroad Company sought to build a line through Brookline 'from the Reservoir station on Brighton Street, to a point near the Cottage Farm station, with the purpose of making an independent line into Boston,' it was resolutely opposed, except with the understanding that there should be no grade crossings in the town. The policy was one that saved a good deal of subsequent expense, when the general agitation for grade-crossing elimination began to be felt in 1889. Mean- while, in the late 'eighties, widening of the Washington Street railroad bridge was compelled by the town.
WASHINGTON SQUARE IN 1887, LOOKING TOWARD TOWN Beacon Street at left, Washington Street at right; tannery and gashouse in center
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Maintenance of streets imposed an even heavier burden. This could no longer be accomplished by the co-operative work of citizens, and the town established its own staff for the purpose, with a considerable investment in land, stables and other buildings, horses, carts, and a variety of equipment, for many years thereafter administered by the able Michael Dris- coll. In 1872 there was an appropriation of $6000 for water- ing the streets alone - simply a matter of dust prevention in summer. At the close of the century this item accounted for $17,000 out of a total appropriation of $70,000 for street main- tenance.
Large appropriations were frequently made to lay out new streets, or to relocate and widen old ones, including Washing- ton and Harvard Streets. A number of duties which had formerly rested upon individual property-owners were taken over by the town. Thus, in the spring of 1873, it was voted 'That hereafter the Superintendent of Streets be authorized to keep the sidewalks where the town has made plank walks or concrete walks, or has placed curbstones, free from ice and snow, and to keep other sidewalks as clear as circumstances will admit.' In the course of that year the town voted $51,000 for highways, $15,000 for sidewalks, and $7000 for street lamps. The sidewalks were almost all constructed at town expense, since it was agreed that abutting property-owners were not to be assessed except in cases where the walks were more for their convenience than for the general convenience of the town.
LIGHTING THE STREETS
Street lights were rapidly established throughout the town, and the appropriation mentioned just above, the selectmen thought would enable them to light up the few dark places that remained. The gas rate fixed was pretty high, even for manufactured gas, and the economies were long observed of leaving the lamps unlit on moonlight nights, and turning them out on other nights by the time all honest citizens were supposed to be in bed. In 1876 there was a concession to the night-hawks, or perhaps to the occasion of the centennial year, and it was voted to keep the gas burning all night at the street corners.
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Four years later Edward S. Ritchie, a Brookline citizen, doubtless well aware of the disposition of his fellow townsmen to make all practicable savings, put forward a scheme for using a special type of oil lamp on the streets instead of gas. This looked promising, and the annual meeting appropriated $9000 for its adoption. But on the very day of the next annual meet- ing the Brookline Gas Light Company circulated a pamphlet with the title, Why Brookline Streets Should be Lighted with Gas. The company, it seemed, had checked up on the efficiency of the new plan and found that under it seven times as many lights went out as when gas was employed. The pamphlet argued that oil, in addition to being less efficient, was really more expensive; and on behalf of the company a proposal was put forward to reduce the local gas rate for private consump- tion if the town would give up Mr. Ritchie's scheme and return to gas on a contract basis. An agreement was accordingly made for gas, at a flat rate of $16,347.33, though Mr. Ritchie continued to maintain oil lamps in some localities, and got $2100 for it. It was supposed that the moon would serve on five nights a month, no account being taken of possible clouds.
This lighting business was the subject of prolonged agitation. Electric arc lamps were introduced - very bright, and pro- portionately expensive. Then came incandescent electric lamps, and a new Welsbach mantle for gas lights, to say nothing of an improved fuel for the former oil burners. The town experimented with all these, endeavoring to get the most effective street lighting at the lowest cost, and dallying now and then with the idea of a municipal electric plant. Water got into the gas pipes, froze, and put out the lights; overhead wires to the electric lamps were objectionable in ap- pearance; carbon arcs often went bad; and oil lamps blew out on occasion, so the happiest solution was hard indeed to reach.
ADMINISTERING THE TOWN'S BUSINESS
After twenty years of service the wooden bridge over Muddy River on Longwood Avenue was found in such shape, in 1877, that it had to be replaced. The committee who advised on this exhibited a fine example of canny analysis. They figured that
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any kind of bridge would require about the same floor repairs, but that an iron substructure would last indefinitely, while a wooden one would have a life of about twenty years. How- ever, interest on the investment in ironwork for that time would amount to more than twice the total cost of building and maintaining a wooden bridge. Or, as they expressed it, if a twenty-year view of the thing were taken, a wooden bridge would cost $550 a year and an iron bridge with a wood floor, $1692 a year. So of course the town voted for the wooden bridge.
It is this kind of committee work that seems to discredit those who objected that the town government was in the hands of an extravagant ring. Undeniably, vast sums of money were spent, but there is every reason to believe that the town always got something the inhabitants really wanted, of the quality which they expected to get, and at a price which was eminently fair. One gains satisfaction in the discovery that, although a lot of hard-headed negotiation was done, in the occasional instances where a contractor perhaps lacked the technical right to enforce a claim morally due him, there was never any attempt at evasion on the town's part. On the other hand, when bills totaling $1100 were submitted for work in moving the pumping station, the town voted 'That in the opinion of this meeting the bills are excessive and unjust, and that they be referred to the Selectmen for settlement, and that the matter be discretionary with them whether to settle by arbitration or otherwise, as they shall deem best.' As the town was perfectly willing to pay for what it got, it was equally determined to see that it got what it paid for. The frequent reference of disputed claims to arbitration in preference to litigation is, by the way, a mark of enlightened business methods.
THE GREAT BEACON STREET PROJECT
Despite this evident soundness of management, however, the principal improvement project of the period became the subject of violent controversy. This was the widening and improvement of Beacon Street.
The movement was an inspired one, originating with the West End Land Company, which held property that would
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be materially enhanced in value if the plan was adopted. It was first formally brought to public attention by the petition of about a hundred citizens, on August 9, 1886, requesting the selectmen 'to lay out a townway, or townways, by the side of the highway in said town, called Beacon Street, beginning at or near St. Mary's Street, at the boundary line of the city of Boston, and ending at the boundary line of said city, easterly of the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, so as to make an avenue includ- ing the present area of Beacon Street 200 feet in width.'
Beacon Street runs westward from the State House in Bos- ton, about ten miles to Newton Lower Falls. It enters the limits of Brookline about two and a half miles from the State House, and leaves them at the Brighton line, a little over two miles farther. It was this section of the street, in Brookline, which was sought to be improved.
The street had been laid out in the town, the section west of Washington Street in 1850, and that east of Washington Street in 1851. This had been done, however, as a county way, and when it was sought to enlarge the thoroughfare as a townway, the technical point was raised that 'there might be some difficulty in the collection of betterments by the town if the selectmen were to proceed without special legislative authority.' On this account it was thought best to have the selectmen ask the General Court for permission to treat the street as a townway for the purpose in question.
A great deal of local publicity attended the plan, which was expounded in detail in The Chronicle and The Brookline News, and an exceptionally large town meeting gave it unanimous approval. The real estate interests, headed by Henry M. Whitney, owned about half of the land which would have to be taken, and this they volunteered to contribute without charge, together with half of the total cost of construction. But the burden on the town would still amount to something approaching a half-million dollars, and when the program developed such sudden momentum, the conservative opposi- tion began to organize.
Various objections were put forward: it was contended that the project was properly to be governed by the special legislation covering parkways; it was said that the town meet-
BEACON STREET CORNER OF CARLTON STREET BEFORE THE WIDENING Schoolhouse on the northwest corner
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ing's endorsement of the plan was so thoughtless and extrav- agant as to amount to ruinous incompetence; it was argued that the whole program was simply a promotion scheme to benefit certain private interests, and, on the other hand, that it was supported by large numbers of men who hoped to gain employment by it. But the symptoms, on close examination, revealed only an acute attack of a latent chronic affliction - inflammation of the pocketbook nerve. This had affected only forty-eight of the sixteen hundred voters of the town, but they were mostly men of property, and they felt that protection of their interests required them to engage counsel and oppose the efforts of the selectmen to obtain legislative authority.
At the hearing before the Committee on Roads and Bridges in January, 1887, the matter was ably and elaborately argued. Mr. Whitney, speaking for the land company, admitted that they expected to make money by the increase of values result- ing from improvement of the street, despite their offer of a large contribution. Other property-owners indicated their willingness to give land for the widening, and it was pointed out that the objectors, far from suffering actual damages, except in instances of a few unfortunately shaped lots, might expect to profit with the rest. Some of these, of course, reasoned that if they did profit, it must be at the expense of increased taxation, and Beacon Street as it was, was good enough for them.
It was suspected in some quarters that the opposition came partly from a representative of the Metropolitan Railroad Company, which had been petitioned three years previously by Brighton and Brookline to give them a direct line to Bos- ton, but without success. The widened Beacon Street was to include a central strip for car lines, with room for trees on each side, and the West End Railroad Company had been granted the right to build a line there, provided they did so within a year. The anticipated increase in population would require transportation facilities, and it was thought well to assure them without delay.
In its final outcome, the controversy was another victory for progress. The legislature acceded to the petition of the Brookline selectmen, not simply in acknowledgment of the
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wishes of a large majority of the town, nor yet in response to the persuasiveness of able attorneys, but in inevitable conse- quence of the wisdom and soundness and fairness of the plan.
The ultimate cost to Brookline was $465,000. Within six years the land in strips five hundred feet wide on each side of the street had increased by $4,330,400 in assessed valuation, with a resultant increase in revenue, at the tax rate of $11.80 per thousand then prevailing, of $51,000 a year. Economic justi- fication of the undertaking was prompt and convincing.
There was less excitement over the expenditure by the town of another half-million dollars for its share of a hardly less important project - the development of Riverdale Park, now the Fenway. Originally described as a 'preliminary plan for the sanitary improvement of Muddy River,' the matter was entrusted to the firm of F. L. Olmsted & Co., which meant that such terminology was sure to be an understatement.
RAILROAD SERVICES
Interest in cheap and convenient transportation to places outside Brookline had become a matter of public concern long before the Beacon Street car line was projected. The town that had at first resolutely opposed railroads, and re- mained firm in its reluctance to permit grade crossings, grad- ually became convinced of the importance of public carriers. A really large population could comprise but few who owned private conveyances; moreover, this new population was, for the most part, employed in Boston, and convenient getting to and fro was of vital, daily importance.
The town meeting of April 1, 1873, voted 'That a committee of five be appointed by the Moderator to examine and report upon the whole matter of the travelling accommodations be- tween Brookline and Boston and adjacent places.' Two weeks later, when they were called upon, they asked for additional time; and nobody seems to have thought of bringing the subject up again.
Almost four years later an article appeared in the warrant, 'To see what action the town will take to secure better rail- road accommodations at the station in the Village, and at Cypress Street.' The resulting votes reflect the sentiment
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of the meeting far more accurately than can any paraphrase. They were three:
That this town most earnestly expresses its conviction of the necessity, for the best interests of the town, of a new rail- road station in the village, with lower rate of fares and more frequent trains, at the earliest possible moment, and instructs the Selectmen to do all in their power to aid the project.
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