Historical Background



C A M B R I D G E is separated from Boston only by the Charles River, a placid enough stream navigable by shell, sailboat, or motor launch, and spanned by numerous bridges. From an airplane, or from the observation deck of the new Prudential tower, a stranger without local knowledge would have no means of knowing that this river separated two quite distinct places, each with its own city governments, institutions, and states of mind. Since the subway was opened from Park Street to Harvard Square in 1912, Cambridge has increasingly become a bedroom of Boston, to the grave detriment of elbow - room and the complete loss of rural amenities.

Cambridge first appears in the records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in a militia training act of 26 July 1631, where it is referred to simply as "the newe towne". But the order that specifically shaped its future was one of eight words only, passed on 15 November 1637: "The colledg is ordered to bee at Newetowne." As this first institution of higher learning in British North America was the work of Puritan Englishmen, some of whom held degrees from the University of Cambridge, it was ordered on 2 May 1638 "that Newetowne shall henceforward be called Cambridge."

And as the Reverend John Harvard of Charlestown, Master of Arts of Emmanuel College, Cambridge - "a Scholler and pious in his life and enlarged toward the cuntry and the good of it in life and death" - became its earliest benefactor by the bequest of half his property and all his library, the General Court ordered on 13 March 1639 "that the colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridge shal bee called Harvard Colledge."

In the colonial period, when Boston was a peninsula ringed around by water, one went to Cambridge either by ferry to Charlestown or by land through Roxbury and Muddy River Village (now more elegantly called Brookline). What one found on arrival was chiefly Harvard College, a number of handsome country houses along the line of Brattle Street, and various farms. At the end of the eighteenth century, the population had only just passed the two thousand mark.

The building of the West Boston Bridge in 1793, which provided more direct travel, reduced the distance between Boston and Cambridge from eight miles to three, and placed the town on a straight road between the farms of Middlesex County and Boston markets. It also led to a geographical reorientation. Old Cambridge, centered around Harvard College, was no longer the only significant settlement; two new villages, Cambridgeport and East Cambridge - both mercantile and industrial rather than rural and academic - grew up along the way to the West Boston Bridge. The nineteenth century history of Cambridge is essent ially the simultaneous growth of three different settlements, with filling of new land and the conversion of old to new purposes, in a chaotic, haphazard manner that obliterated most reasonable natural landmarks.

Cambridge was incorporated as a city in 1846. Fifty years later its population had grown to 81,000. The 1960 Census found that its 107,716 inhabitants made it the fourth city in Massachusetts, ranking in size after only Boston, Worcester and Springfield. To lovers of classical and baroque order, a city, however large, never seems like one unless its principal and finest houses are in symmetrical blocks, properly related to one another and to squares and public buildings. To them Cambridge is not a city at all, for its finest houses are country mansions, now grievously deprived of their surrounding fields. The rest is something amorphous that, like Topsy, "just growed." But this very chaos and confusion creates startling and unexpected surprises for the pedestrian and the photographer. Miss Knowles has chosen to bring her readers from Park Street in Boston by subway through the hurly-burly of Harvard Square, complete with motor scooters, as the best way of leading them into the relative tranquility of the Harvard Yard.

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