Local Stories in Suffolk County
Massachusetts·26 places·Page 1 of 2
History
Charlestown Neck
Charlestown Neck was the narrow isthmus joining the Charlestown peninsula to the mainland, roughly where Main Street runs today toward Sullivan Square. In 1775 it was, in Richard Frothingham's description, an artificial causeway so low that the tides often flowed over it, and Main Street ran from the Neck down to the ferry.
History
Cows on the Common
For almost two centuries Boston Common was a working pasture. After the town bought out the first settler, William Blackstone, in 1634, with each householder paying at least six shillings, it laid out the land as a training field and for the feeding of cattle, common to all the inhabitants. Grazing soon had to be rationed.
History
Gage's Lines
Gage's Lines were the British fortifications across Boston Neck, the narrow strip that was then the only road into the town, during the siege of 1775 and 1776. At high tide the Neck was about 120 feet wide, and the road over it, Orange Street, is today's Washington Street in the South End. General Thomas Gage began fortifying it in September 1774, and by the summer of 1775 there were two lines.
History
Gray's Ropewalk
Gray's Ropewalk was one of seven long rope-making sheds that lined what is now Pearl Street, and the fight there between ropemakers and British soldiers on Friday 2 March 1770 led, three days later, to the Boston Massacre. The business was begun by Edward Gray in 1712 and run in 1770 by his son John, whose walks were 744 feet long.
History
Griffin's Wharf
Griffin's Wharf, where the tea ships Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver were boarded on the night of 16 December 1773, no longer exists. It ran out into the harbour from the foot of Hutchinson Street, now Pearl Street, and its site lies under landfill beneath Atlantic Avenue near Pearl Street. The shore street of the time was Purchase Street, so everything east of it was once water and wharves.
History
Hub of the Universe
Boston's nickname "the Hub" began as a joke about the Massachusetts State House. In the sixth instalment of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s series The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, printed in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1858, a jaunty stranger brought to the narrator's boarding-house table offers one more wise saying he has heard about the town, though he does not know who said it: "Boston…
History
Hutchinson's House
Hutchinson's House, the brick mansion of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson on Garden Court Street in the North End, was gutted by a crowd on the night of 26 August 1765, the most destructive of Boston's Stamp Act riots. Hutchinson was at supper when the crowd arrived.
History
Moulton's Point
Moulton's Point, also called Morton's Point, was the south-eastern corner of the Charlestown peninsula, where General William Howe's troops landed on the afternoon of 17 June 1775 to attack the American works on Breed's Hill. Richard Frothingham, the historian of the siege, wrote that the name was as old as the settlement of the town.
History
Ponzi's Office
Charles Ponzi ran his Securities Exchange Company in 1920 from an office in the Niles Building at 27 School Street, at the corner of City Hall Avenue beside Old City Hall. He promised investors 50 per cent in 45 days, or 100 per cent in 90, and said the profit came from international postal reply coupons, which cost about one cent in Spain and could be redeemed for six cents in the United States.
History
Pope's Night
Pope's Night, the 5 November anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, was one of colonial Boston's liveliest holidays and by the 1740s a yearly battle between the North End and the South End. Each side built a stage carrying effigies of the Pope, his attendants and later the Devil, which servants and Black men hauled through the streets collecting money from householders before the figures were…
Industry & Science
Prince Spaghetti
The Prince Macaroni Company was founded in 1912 by three immigrants from the same village in Sicily, who opened a small macaroni and spaghetti shop at 92 Prince Street in the North End and named the business after the street. By the company's account, Gaetano LaMarca was the administrator, Giuseppe Seminara the salesman and Michele Cantella the pasta maker.
History
Sacco and Vanzetti
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists convicted of the 1920 South Braintree payroll murders after a trial now widely judged unfair, were executed in the electric chair of the Charlestown State Prison death house just after midnight on 23 August 1927.
History
The 1768 Landing
The 1768 Landing was the arrival of British regulars to occupy Boston, at noon on Saturday 1 October 1768, when the troops came ashore on Long Wharf and formed up at its head, where it met King Street, today's State Street at Merchants Row. Warships from Halifax had anchored in the harbour the day before.
History
The 1903 Chinatown Raid
On the evening of Sunday 11 October 1903, Boston police and federal immigration officers sealed off the city's Chinatown, then centred on Harrison Avenue between Beach and Kneeland Streets, and arrested every Chinese man who could not at once produce the registration certificate required under the Chinese exclusion laws. At 7.
History
The 1919 Police Strike
At 5.45 pm on 9 September 1919, 1,117 of the Boston Police Department's 1,544 officers and men failed to report for duty. The policemen had organised a union under a charter from the American Federation of Labor in August, and Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis, who held that police had no right to such a union, suspended 19 of its officers and on 8 September found them guilty of union activity.
History
The Anthony Burns Riot
The Anthony Burns Riot broke out on the night of 26 May 1854 at the Suffolk County Court House, a granite building by Solomon Willard that opened in Court Square in December 1836, on the footprint now occupied by the City Hall Annex at 26 Court Street.
History
The British Coffee House
The British Coffee House was a tavern on the north side of King Street, now State Street, on the site of today's 60 State Street, and a favourite of British officers and Crown officials. It was there, at about seven in the evening of 5 September 1769, that James Otis Jr.
History
The Burning of Charlestown
Charlestown, a town of about 1,600 people across the Charles from Boston, was burned on 17 June 1775 during the Battle of Bunker Hill. Most residents had already left. When colonists fired on General William Howe's troops from the empty buildings, Howe had the town set alight, by shells from the Copp's Hill battery in Boston and by marines landed from HMS Somerset.
History
The Copp's Hill Battery
The Copp's Hill Battery was a British gun position on the summit of Copp's Hill in the North End, near the south-western corner of the burying ground, aimed across the mouth of the Charles at Charlestown. Admiral Samuel Graves had it thrown up in the spring of 1775 to cover his ships.
Transport
The Elevated Artery
The elevated Central Artery, officially the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway, was a six-lane steel viaduct raised 30 to 50 feet above downtown Boston, and through the North End it followed Cross Street, between the neighbourhood and Haymarket Square. The state began condemning property for it in 1950, and demolition started in the North End in the autumn of 1951.
History
The Garrison Mob
On the afternoon of 21 October 1835 a crowd that the Boston Commercial Gazette put at fifteen hundred or two thousand broke up a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, called for 3 o'clock in the hall adjoining the Anti-Slavery Office at 46 Washington Street.
History
The Gravel Trains
Much of the Back Bay stands on gravel carried nine miles by train from the hills of Needham. The contractors Goss and Munson, hired to fill the Commonwealth's 100 acres of the tidal basin behind the Mill Dam, began work about the middle of May 1858.
History
The Lost Fort Hill
Fort Hill was the most easterly of the three prominent hills of the Shawmut peninsula, about 76 to 80 feet above tide water, covering the ground between Pearl, Batterymarch and Broad Streets and the harbour. First called Corn Hill, it took its name from the town's first fort, begun on it on 24 May 1632.
History
The Mill Pond
The Mill Pond was a tidal cove on the north side of the Boston peninsula, dammed for water power in the 1640s and filled in between 1807 and the late 1820s to create the streets now known as the Bulfinch Triangle. On 31 July 1643 the town granted the cove to Henry Symons, George Burden, John Button and John Hill on condition that they build one or more corn mills.
History
The West End Clearance
Between 1958 and 1960 almost all of Boston's old West End, a working-class neighbourhood of three- to five-storey apartment houses at the foot of Beacon Hill, was demolished under the federal urban renewal programme. Mayor John Hynes's administration had marked it for "slum clearance" and luxury apartments.
Elsewhere in Massachusetts
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