During the 1880s, the Boston metropolitan area grew rapidly. Baxter and Eliot describe a metropolitan area comprised of twelve cities and twenty-four towns. At the time of the plan, the metropolitan area population was 888,000, forty percent of the total population of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (p.xi).

TWELVE CITIES		TWENTY-FOUR TOWNS
Boston	Medford	Arlington	Hyde Park	Swampscott
Cambridge	Newton	Belmont	Melrose	Wakefield
Chelsea	Quincy	Braintree	Milton	Watertown
Everett	Somerville	Brookline	Nahant	Wellesley
Lynn	Waltham	Canton	Needham	Weston
Malden	Woburn	Dedham	Revere	Weymouth
		Hingham	Saugus	Winchester
		Hull	Stoneham	Winthrop



Notes: The City of Boston's population also grew during this period, from 362,839 in 1880 448,477 in 1890. The population of Lynn increased from 38,274 to 55,727. (In the plan, Baxter projected that Lynn would soon grow to a population of 100,000. The city reached its peak population of 102,320 in 1930.) The population of Cambridge increased from 52,669 to 70,028; Revere went from 2,263 to 5,668; Winthrop went from 1,043 to 2,726; Everett went from 4,159 to 11,068.

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MIT 4.213J/11.308J Urban Nature and City Design (Fall 2005)