Mapping Boston

"There are two great books about the assembling of the physical city. Mapping Boston is the one that is still widely in print. It’s a group of essays and catalogue entries edited by an urban planner from the Harvard School of Design and an eminent map curator. It’s a place where you see the earth on which all of the social dynamics that we’ve discussed grow. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A city that starts as a tiny peninsula connected by a little neck of land to the mainland is transformed, in Dutch fashion, with infill over the course of the first half and into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Many of the things that were floating in the harbour in Winthrop’s day are now under the city streets. You can see, in the maps that are so beautifully reproduced in the book, the coming together of the various neighbourhoods that Horton and Lukas take us into. You can see the cutting down of the hills. Winthrop’s ‘City on a Hill’ was a city on three hills in the West of Boston (the most famous of which is Beacon Hill). These hills loamed mountainously over the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but in the beginning of the nineteenth century they were carted away, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow, to make the neighbourhood known as Back Bay. “Boston has a more interesting, ground-up built environment than most American cities.” Boston is a physical incarnation of the preposterous ambition that we talked about at the beginning of the hour: the shape of the city isn’t suited our residential needs or our commerce, so let’s just remake it as a regular-sized land. You can see the organic city; that is, where the paths are marked out by the traffic of horses and feet, to the gridded city that is making way for streetcars, then subways and then cars. Boston has a more interesting, ground-up built environment than most American cities. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many American cities are planned; Boston is really made ."