What was located in back bay fens in 1775

No one minds me, and in this bustle, it's easy to fade away, blend into the background, and just watch. It's hard to believe the ground I'm standing on used to be marsh. From the very start, humanity has asserted itself at the expense of nature. Not unlike a substantial part of Boston, Fenway owes its existence to man's timeless need for space.

The land which now beguiles developers, enthralls baseball fans, cradles luxury mixed-use skyscrapers, and fosters the play of young school children did not exist prior to the late s.

Rather, in its place was marshland. The momentum from the construction of the Back Bay Fens in the s through the s inspired the reclamation of the surrounding marsh, which birthed the Fenway area. A brief consideration of Fenway's topography reveals the dramatic evolution of the land, at the hands of man. The map from depicts a Boston almost unrecognizable from the one we know today.

The Fenway area appears to coincide with a combination of swamp and water - a far cry from the bustling urban area it now is. The map from shows that although some sort of terrain existed at that time, it was most likely very wet and hence unsuitable for extensive settlement. Unfortunately, the map boundaries preclude much of the land south of Boylston Street.

However, judging from the abundance of streams in the portion shown, one can reasonably infer the moistness of that region as well. Indeed, this conjecture appears to be corroborated by the map from , which definitively shows the existence of streams there. Not surprisingly, this environment proved unsympathetic towards settlement, and humanity responded to the inhospitable terrain by filling it in.

As can be seen from subsequent maps, the landfill for my site was completed by Interestingly enough, the south and east boundaries of my site seem very close to the "Back Bay Park", a semblance of the present day Back Bay Fens.

With this history in mind, the uneven topography of Fenway is odd; filled sites are typically much more homogeneous. In Fenway, the biggest disparities in elevation occur between alleys and their adjoining buildings. A plausible theory for such inconsistency may be differential filling.

It is conceivable that the land underlying the alley was not filled in as much because, simply put, there was no need. The structural integrity of the soil underlying an alley is not as important as it would otherwise be if it were supporting a building. Combined with a gradient's intrinsic benefit of stormwater drainage, the choice to save labor through differential filling, indeed, would have been tempting.

Although Fenway's birth set the precedent for human incursion into nature, human interference has not undermined nature's influence in shaping urban form and life.

The continental climate of Boston, characterized by regular snowfall in wintertime, has tangible implications for the entire city's livability. In Fenway, the adverse effects of snow on life manifest in stacked-up restaurant chairs, barren outdoor seating patios, and visibly uncomfortable pedestrians hunched over in ferocious winds. A "No Parking: Emergency Artery during Snow Emergency" sign posted along a slushy, salt-strewn road reveals the impact of climate on transportation patterns.

Unlike in the case of other natural processes, humanity has not been able to discount inclement weather completely. In short, natural processes have not deferred for sake of the new development in Fenway. The urban landscape remains under the jurisdiction of Mother Nature, even if only partially. In the tide of rapid encroachment and human caprice, nature has responded, adapting accordingly under the risk of extinction. Both the fauna and flora of Fenway have acclimated to human inconsistency to their fullest capacity.

In the small space man has permitted her, nature has quickly seized opportunity to grow and even flourish. Vines blanket the brick facade of the Peterborough Street apartments, creating intricate webs that proclaim nature's resilience. Most likely voluntary, the vines have thrived from apparent lack of human interference; the organic growth of these vines starkly contrasts the highly regimented plant life characteristic of the commercial district.

The chorus of birds emanates from the thick underbrush, indicating that despite human impingement, wildlife has managed to find refuge. Nevertheless, even in this place of atypical liveliness, nature has had to make considerable adjustments just to secure necessary sustenance. The trees lining Peterborough Street lean outward to catch more light, risking in the process the lopping off of branches extending too far over the sidewalk. Indeed, unsightly stubs on tree trunks remain behind to warn of the ghastly fate that accompanies the mistake of trespassing into human territory.

These truncated branches epitomize the unsympathetic subjugation of nature by humanity. Given the hardships the trees in this relative nature-haven face, one cannot help but suspect even worse for the trees elsewhere - and a survey of the area does nothing to refute such a sentiment.

Sickly evergreens sequestered in miserable, diminutive plots of sterile soil outside the Shaw's Supermarket evince their caretaker's apathy: someone wanted the trees there for beautification purposes, just not enough to provide the bare minimum for life.

Adjacent to the stunted evergreens, empty plots of dirt prove that such conditions simply are not life-sustainable. In her book The Granite Garden , landscape architect Anne Spirn notes, "A city street does not provide the space, nutrients, or water that a tree needs in order to grow.

It is an environment hostile to life. The lamentable conditions in Fenway validate Spirn's depressing appraisals. Granted Fenway's vegetation could benefit from more enthusiasm, even so, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the efforts by more recent developments to be more plant-friendly. The Boylston side of the Fenway Triangle Trilogy has thirteen reasonably healthy-looking trees. Unlike the trees discussed before, these trees are afforded 3.

Although the the sunlight impediment for trees on the south-facing side of a building is well known, these trees appear to be sufficiently far away from the building's foundation to avoid substantial detriment.

He continued to say that unless some extensive and expensive improvement of the whole valley were to be soon made, it was seemingly inevitable that this "squalid and unsanitary occupation of it would cover all parts of this valley and discourage good occupation of the neighborhood.

These Bostonians, pejoratively called "marsh people," were ordered out to make way for Boston's new fashionable and elite neighborhood. Socially and financially more endowed citizens took the places of the "marsh people" who were financially unable to remain unless they were able to secure positions in the Back Bay residents' houses as servants or other service personnel.

Randomly placed wooden houses and vegetable gardens were traded for unified, deed restriction-bound brownstone walkups and tree lined boulevards. Where Back Bay had earlier accommodated a variety of activities and social classes, it was now a unified urban design, as one visitor nicely summed it up, " a class environment of an unusually homogenous kind. Civic Infrastructure The populations of Stony Brook's watershed had increased so dramatically that the City Board of Health's annual report speculated that "there is not probably a foot of mud in the river, in the basins Plus, the openness of the vast bay, much loved by many Bostonians, was quickly becoming filled with four and five story buildings that threatened to obliterate the city's intimate relationship with the natural landscape.

In prominent citizens and business people petitioned Boston City Council to take lands to preserve unbuilt landscapes within the city by making them parks. As others have argued, Olmsted designed "ecologically" by reconstructing the biotically degraded fen. His landscape embraced citizens' memories as well as the site's ecological memory. The design was no mimic of the historical landscape.

It was clearly transformed into a contemporary urban expression. What Olmsted delivered was a landscape rooted in the history of the city and its collective memory. It was not a cultured park aesthetic of the 19th century elite. It was a landscape valued by years of ordinary citizens. Municipal Utility Because of the creative conjoining of park and stormwater utility, the Fens functioned as everyone had intended.

Stony Brook was encased in two, 9' rubble stone tunnels; the brook was then diverted through a gatehouse just as it reached the Fens and channeled into a 7' brick bypass conduit that released it into the Charles River. Thus, only diluted sewage entered the Fens, and the Fens effectively functioned as a storage basin for stormwater for the Back Bay area.

But the city grew, and soon the Fens was overwhelmed with sewage. Consequently, the city built the Commissioners Channel, a new channel and new bypass channel that would avert sewage being discharged into the park. The problem was that the city constructed the Commissioners Channel before constructing its link to the bypass channel.

Raw daily sewage flowed into the Fens for two years until it was diverted to the Stony Brook bypass conduit in December Plus the Fens was used on numerous occasions as a temporary holding tank for dewatering sewage- and deposition-laden portions of the marsh that were being filled for development.

So distasteful were the conditions that the boats introduced in were not-surprisingly removed in because of "lack of patronage,"19 a sentiment echoed in accounts of people avoiding the park. By the Fens was transformed from being primarily a park landscape that also functioned as flood prevention to being a municipal sewage landscape that hardly functioned as a park. It is true that the city chose a plan of action that would allow the Commisioners' Channel to remain unfinished for eight years.

Conduit beneath Back Bay Fens for sewage and storm waters. Thus, park and institutions were conjoined. So conjoined were they that residents and administrators began to complain of the Fens' "misshapen," "ruined," and "overcrowded" trees that according to Olmsted, Sr. And once the dam was constructed on the Charles River, the Fens was no longer tidal, prompting administrators and designers to completely realign the Muddy River, the water course that structured the Fens.

As partner to the institutions, the Fens still fulfilled desires and activities specific to parks. But to some degree, it was relegated to being a mere foreground to the institutions, a stage setting for the institutions that comprised the main events. One of those things was a series of active recreational fields. And another of those things was garbage. The marshes were filled with excavated material from various subway construction projects, a combination of coal and wood burning ashes, common city garbage, and "old boilers, bricks, and up-rooted plumbing,"23 Just as it had in the 18th c.

A highly visible, upscale urban infrastructure of a park simultaneously fulfilled a marginal infrastructure need of waste disposal. Grounds for Collective Civic Expression In Bostonians quit filling the Fens with garbage and instead began filling it with expressions of civic ideals.

The first of these expressions was the Fens Rose Garden. Its archways and brocade treatment so expressive of the city's valuing of public gardens that it was more than doubled to its present size three years later. The Victory Gardens site was a playfield until WWII when the federal government launched a campaign supposedly aimed at stemming a potential food shortage and investing people personally in the war effort.

Citizens have continued to add monuments since: the Korean War and the Vietnam War ; the Temple Bell a peace offering from Japan ; monuments to sports heroes like Roberto Clemente; and famous citizens like John Everett a pilgrim forefather and Katherine Bates writer of the poem that became the revered alternative American anthem "America the Beautiful". The point is that originally the Fens' primary aesthetic vision was of one man, Olmsted. Yet, once his vision was literally overturned in the earth, the Fens became a ground for a collection of civic expressions, a place for Bostonians to display a series of values that the city as a whole understood about itself.

Displaced Landscape By thes the larger Back Bay area was an eclectic collection, too. It included hospitals, movie theaters, concert halls, music conservatories, women's colleges, religious colleges, art museums, historical societies, and corporate 'institutions' like the Seagram Company and Fenway Park.

The businesses and residents were just as diverse. Leonard Bernstein lived among hardware store owners, and soon-to-be famous artists lived near prostitutes. But in thes many of the same institutions threatened the healthy diversity. The economic dynamics are fascinating but too complex to thoroughly examine here. The result was the influx of new populations. Those without the money to patronize drinking establishments turned to the Fens as their outdoor bar.

Even then, pollution was a problem, and Bostonians demanded a solution. Enter Frederick Law Olmsted. He proposed to flush out the stagnant waterway and add naturalistic plantings to emulate the original tide marsh ecology of the Fenway area.

His plan was true to both the character of the land and the needs of the growing population. Today we find in the Fens different charms from the ones Olmsted created. The damming of the Charles River changed the water here from brackish to fresh, rendering his plantings unsupportable. Only two of the original "strong but unobtrusive" bridges, the parks general boundaries and some early trees remain of Olmsted's design. The Fens continues to be much loved and utilized.

The design of the Fens today mostly reflects the work of landscape architect Arthur Shurtleff. He added the Rose Garden, turned the focus to the Museum of Fine Arts on the east side of the park, and gave us the more formal landscape style popular in the s and s.