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A fascinating look at the people, politics, and technology behind the massive landfill project that filled Boston's Back Bay
Sociologically speaking, the Back Bay is Boston's fashionable residential quarter -- or so it was until the great depression of 1929 began the gradual conversion of its aristocratic dwellings to more modest uses. Occupying about two hundred acres in the center of the greater filled region, the limits of this smaller area are the river, the Public Garden, Boylston Street, and Fenway Park. The Back Bay is interesting to Bostonian and visitor of the present day for a variety of reasons. Some will look at the area as a remarkably complete example of nineteenth century American architecture. Some people with a sociological interest will study the area's changes in property use and occupancy over the last thirty-five years and try to foresee the role the Back Bay is to play in the future development of the metropolitan center. Still others are concerned with the area as a convenient place to live or with property values and tax rates. With a precision almost unique in American history, the buildings of the Back Bay chart the course of architectural development for more than half a century. - Introduction.
“Tells the story of Boston’s growth in the 19th century, a time of immense cultural and physical expansion in the city.” —The Patriot Ledger Venture back to the Boston of the 1800s, when Back Bay was just a wide expanse of water to the west of the Shawmut Peninsula and merchants peddled their wares to sailors along the docks. Witness the beginning of the American Industrial Revolution; learn how a series of cultural movements made Boston the focal point of abolitionism in America, with leaders like William Lloyd Garrison; and see the golden age of the arts ushered in with notables Longfellow, Holmes, Copley, Sargent and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Travel with local historian Ted Clarke down the cobbled streets of Boston to discover its history in the golden age.
One of the largest development projects in nineteenth-century America, Boston's Back Bay was essentially a tidal basin until the construction of the Mill Dam (present-day Beacon Street) just after the War of 1812. By 1837, the area bounded by Charles, Boylston, Beacon, and Arlington Streets was filled in and laid out as the Public Garden, later the site of Boston's famous swanboats. In the late 1850s, the massive infill of the Back Bay commenced, and the earth collected from the hills of Needham was deposited in the city's "west end" for nearly four decades. As the new land began to reach Muddy River, the streets assumed a grid-like plan. The grand avenues eventually comprised Victorian Boston's premier neighborhood, and became home to the most impressive religious, educational, and residential architecture in New England.
Meet the Pratt clas. Driven men. Determined women. Through six turbulent generations, they would pursue a lost Paul Revere treasure. And turn a family secret into an obsession that could destroy them. Here is the novel that launched William Martin's astonishing literary career and became an instant bestseller. From the grit and romance of old Boston to exclusive -- and dangerous -- Back Bay today, this sweeping saga paints an unforgettable portrait of a powerful dynasty beset by the forces of history...and a heritage of greed, lust, murder and betrayal.
Why and how Boston was transformed by landmaking. Fully one-sixth of Boston is built on made land. Although other waterfront cities also have substantial areas that are built on fill, Boston probably has more than any city in North America. In Gaining Ground historian Nancy Seasholes has given us the first complete account of when, why, and how this land was created.The story of landmaking in Boston is presented geographically; each chapter traces landmaking in a different part of the city from its first permanent settlement to the present. Seasholes introduces findings from recent archaeological investigations in Boston, and relates landmaking to the major historical developments that shaped it. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, landmaking in Boston was spurred by the rapid growth that resulted from the burgeoning China trade. The influx of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century prompted several large projects to create residential land—not for the Irish, but to keep the taxpaying Yankees from fleeing to the suburbs. Many landmaking projects were undertaken to cover tidal flats that had been polluted by raw sewage discharged directly onto them, removing the "pestilential exhalations" thought to cause illness. Land was also added for port developments, public parks, and transportation facilities, including the largest landmaking project of all, the airport. A separate chapter discusses the technology of landmaking in Boston, explaining the basic method used to make land and the changes in its various components over time. The book is copiously illustrated with maps that show the original shoreline in relation to today's streets, details from historical maps that trace the progress of landmaking, and historical drawings and photographs.
"..a vivid and absorbing account of one man's efforts to construct a building that would create "a new way of life for Bostonians-and Americans-to live." Not only does Henry Lee Higginson (best known for founding the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and his housing gamble come to life, but a whole social class, indeed, all of nineteenth-century urban America, spread themselves before us in the narrative. Perspectives abound,. Anecdotes enrich. Details, statistics, and little-known facts amaze." -- From jacke
This history of Harvard's architecture examines the Federal architecture of Charles Bulfinch, H.H. Richardson's Romanesque buildings, the Imperial manner reflected in Widener Library, and the work of other architects such as Charles McKim, Gropius and Le Corbusier.
"Herein, we bring you to sites that have been central to the lives of 'the people' of Greater Boston over four centuries. You'll visit sites associated with the area's indigenous inhabitants and with the individuals and movements who sought to abolish slavery, to end war, challenge militarism, and bring about a more peaceful world, to achieve racial equity, gender justice, and sexual liberation, and to secure the rights of workers. We take you to some well-known sites, but more often to ones far off the well-beaten path of the Freedom Trail, to places in Boston's outlying neighborhoods. We also visit sites in numerous other municipalities that make up the Greater Boston region-from places such as Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn to Concord and Plymouth. The sites to which we do 'travel' include homes given that people's struggles, activism, and organizing sometimes unfold, or are even birthed in many cases in living rooms and kitchens. Trying to capture a place as diverse and dynamic as Boston is highly challenging. (One could say that about any 'big' place.) We thus want to make clear that our goal is not to be comprehensive, or to 'do justice' to the region. Given the constraints of space and time as well as the limitations of knowledge--both our own and what is available in published form--there are many important sites, cities, and towns that we have not included. Thus, in exploring scores of sites across Boston and numerous municipalities, our modest goal is to paint a suggestive portrait of the greater urban area that highlights its long-contested nature. In many ways, we merely scratch the region's surface--or many surfaces--given the multiple layers that any one place embodies. In writing about Greater Boston as a place, we run the risk of suggesting that the city writ-large has some sort of essence. Indeed, the very notion of a particular place assumes intrinsic characteristics and an associated delimited space. After all, how can one distinguish one place from another if it has no uniqueness and is not geographically differentiated? Nonetheless, geographer Doreen Massey insists that we conceive of places as progressive, as flowing over the boundaries of any particular space, time, or society; in other words, we should see places as processual or ever-changing, as unbounded in that they shape and are shaped by other places and forces from without, and as having multiple identities. In exploring Greater Boston from many venues over 400 years, we embrace this approach. That said, we have to reconcile this with the need to delimit Greater Boston--for among other reasons, simply to be in a position to name it and thus distinguish it from elsewhere"--
When Jim Botticelli launched the Dirty Old Boston Facebook page as a salute to the gritty city he once knew, he discovered that thousands of people were equally nostalgic and curious about Boston's recent past. And for good reason; after World War II, Boston changed rapidly, without apology, for better and worse, and in many ways forever.Dirty Old Boston chronicles the people, streets, and buildings from the postwar years to 1987. From ball games to dive bars, Dirty Old Boston also covers some of the city's most tumultuous events including the razing of neighborhoods, Boston's busing crisis, and the continual fight for affordable housing.Photographs—assembled from family albums, student projects, institutional archives, and professional collections—reveal Boston as seen from the streets. Illuminating Boston's tenacity and spirit, Dirty Old Boston presents our proud moments and our growing pains. Raw and beautiful, this book is an evocative tribute to the city and its people.