bostonzest

Tag: Charles River Basin

  • Back When Harvard’s Weld Boathouse Was Drafted as a Navy Training Facility…

    For years, we have been collecting the materials from the history of the Charles River Basin. This week we purchased a postcard showing the U.S. Navy gathered on Harvard's Weld Boathouse.

    Harvard Weld Boathouse_0003

    We love reading the back of old postcards. Sometimes the messages are funny, often terse, occasionally educational. This one called the building "… the U.S. Navy's boat club house."

    Harvard Weld Boathouse back 0004

    The writer goes on to explain that the building, "… is on the Charles River, in this River we practice swimming & boat drilling, the sailors in this picture are waiting for their turn in boat drilling. This was taken on sat morning during one of our contests one regiment against the other. The boys to the left are on the bridge which crosses the river is 75 feet high & 600 feet long made of concrete. is very low on the edge."

    The building is the Weld Boathouse and the bridge to which the writer refers is the Anderson Memorial Bridge.

     

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    Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
    Photography: © 2015 Penny & Ed Cherubino  

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  • A Tow up the Charles River Cost $4 in 1886

    Today, this 1886 receipt for towing a boat from the Craigie Bridge to Cambridge is listed on eBay for more than twenty times what it cost for the tow.

    Charles River Towing Company reciept

    On September 11th, 1866, Captain Fred W. Stedman used the steam tow boat "Mattie Sargent" to tow the John Tara up river. Unlike other rivers that spurred upstream commerce, the Charles was not easlily navigable by large boats in its early days.

    Oysters Blocked the Way

    A very early description of the Charles by William Wood was reported in D. Hamilton Hurd's History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts. 

    Wood quote

    While some locals did take a gastronomic approach to eat away the problem, the needed dredging didn't happen. And, as bridges spanning the river were added, the river became even less welcoming to large boats.

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    Once, oysters were plentiful in the Charles, but the damming of the river and filling in of the marshlands have changed the character of the wetland making it unsuitable to sustaining an oyster population today. In 2008, the Massachusetts Oyster Project planted 150,000 oysters at the mouth of the river. There, the brackish waters and tidal flow might nuture an oyster bank to help filter the water coming into Boston harbor from the Charles.

    The Charles River Basin that we know today is a man-made creation. Author Karl Haglund opens the introduction to his book, Inventing the Charles River, with a quotation that is very descriptive of the change.

    "Today the Charles at Boston… Does not appear actually to flow at all. It is more like a great mirror held to the city's most favoring profile." David McCord, 1948

     

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    Details:

    Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
    Post Card: "Man and woman dressed in historical costume, man eating oysters." from the Boston Public Library Collection used under creative commons license.

  • Then and Now: Back Street Was Once the Shoreline of the Charles

    In the days before political manipulations created the dreadful Storrow Drive, Back Street was the shoreline of the Charles River. Here's a photo from the City of Boston Archives taken 107 years ago, on this day, in 1907.

    14390756006_0d01974f22_o copy

    Here's the scene in a photo I took last week.

    CHE_4945 - Version 22014-10-08-back-street-back-bay-boston-2014-© 2011 Penny Cherubino

    Below is a map of what the area looked like a few years later, after a new dam created the Charles River basin and the mud from the dredging of the river was used to create a parkland beyond Back Street.

    Back street map

    9681685030_e792c360df_o copy

    As you can see, what we call the Charles River Esplanade was identified as the Charles River Embankment.

    Embankment postcard_0002 copy

    This is an idealized postcard depiction of the embankment parkland. You could walk from your home on Beacon Street right into the park.

    Parkway postcard

    Next came the parkway along the river for pleasure drives. It was called a driveway back in the day and as you can see, you could pull over and enjoy the river scenes.

    Then, in the 1950s, the ugly scar called Storrow Drive became a barrier between Bostonians and their riverside park. 

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    Details:

    Words: Penny Cherubino
    Photography: © 2014 Penny Cherubino with this link provided to historic photo from the Boston City Archives. The postcards are from a private collection.