History Lesson: Boston from the 1600s to Today
November 19, 2012
From everyone here at ABC, we hope that you and yours have a happy and restful Thanksgiving! Thanksgiving has a special significance in the Boston area, so close to the site of the first thanksgiving feast. The holiday got us thinking about how Boston has been transformed since the time of the first settlers, in the 1630s.
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Thanks to our friends at BC for the animation! http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/sequence.html[/caption]
Most of the landmass of Boston as we know it simply didn’t exist when the town was first settled in 1630. As this animated image shows, in the beginning Boston was a small spit of land, the Shawmut Penninsula. Over the years, intrepid Bostonians used land fill to create many of the neighborhoods we know today: the West End, the Back Bay, Fenway, South Boston. Even Logan Airport is almost totally man-made.
When we talk about “city building” today, we mean strengthening civic institutions, public spaces, infrastructure and communities. But earlier generations literally built Boston. It’s an amazing and humbling legacy that we should all be thankful for, and that we all need to work to protect from threats like sea level rise associated with climate change. Our forefathers worked too hard building our city to lose it again to the sea.
