assignment2

Site Through Time

Looking at old maps is like walking in and out of a movie theater throughout the feature. While you learn a whole lot, you are more concerned with what you did not learn, and while you may understand the general idea of the film, huge plot elements are missing and you are left wondering how the transitions were made from one point to another, and whether the parts you missed were more or less important than the ones you saw.

In the more than 300-year history of Cambridgeport, it is impossible to find a map of each year, let alone ones that have information about demographics and land use. But I have managed to find some general trends in the development of my small site. We see little change for the first 200 years, followed by great growth and change from 1830 to 1930, and between 1930 and today the site has remained relatively stable. This observation seems true both for the street layout of the site as you would see on most maps, as well as for the types of land use that existed here over the years.

Development of Current Street Plan

Early History
Cambridge, originally called Newtowne, was first established in 1630 (6 years before Harvard College), but there is not much to tell of the first two hundred years, judging by this relatively empty map from 1830. A few roads extend from the current Central Square area towards South-Western Cambridge; my site at this time was on the border between the marshlands and the water. Fort Washington, a public park since 1857, dates to 1775, and was a 3-gun Battery for the Revolutionary War (CHC). If you click on the image, you can see some of the street names and the location of Fort Washington.

Railroad Era
The next fifty years saw a change much more rapid than the past 200, and by 1883, Cambridgeport is already laid out in nearly as it remains today; the streets on my specific site (north of the railroad) have not changed at all, except for that on an 1874 map, Putnam St. was labeled Walnut. A map from 1876 and this map from 1883 call it Putnam, however, so I’m not sure whether the first map had a typo, or if the street was just renamed in those two years.

With just these two maps—the one from 1830 and from 1883—I can’t pinpoint when those streets were laid out, or when most of the development took place (it’s possible that in 1883, there were still only a few houses on each street). These maps also do not tell us when the railroad was first put in: It is part of the much greater Bostson-Albany Line, the result of a merger that took place in 1867 between many smaller lines (Groves, p. 1), but it is harder to tell when each portion was built. The railroad’s first appearance in Cambridgeport undoubtedly had a great impact on the development there, for it allowed much more convenient access to Boston and to other parts of Cambridge—I suspect that by the time plans to construct the railroad were underway, the current street grid for my site and much of the rest of Cambridgeport was already laid out, although perhaps no houses were built until after the railroad was already in place. In Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson refers to this time period as the Transportation revolution, when not only rail but many other new forms of transportation were causing the end of the walkable city (Jackson, p 42). Other new transportation factors contributing to the development of Cambridge were the building of the Longfellow Bridge in 1773 and the Canal Bridge (where the Museum of Science now is) in 1809, which could be traversed by the omnibus. There were also ferryboats taking passengers from Boston to Cambridge in a matter of minutes.

Landfill & Skepticism
Another interesting fact to note on the map from 1883 is that while Back Bay was already filled in at that time, the area where MIT now is remained marshy. What you will notice on this next map from 1903 is that the land finally has its familiar shape, with a straight bank along the Charles parallel to the Boston shore. But unlike today, the land is not filled up with Kresge oval and Briggs field, but has a distinct grid pattern covering nearly the whole footprint of MIT.

Looking at maps and pictures from around the turn of the century led me to question more what I saw. I realized that just because something is shown on paper does not mean that actually exists at that point in time. The reason for my mistrust another map, not pictured here, from 1897. At this point in time, most of the area south of the railroad was filled in as it is today, but there are some chunks of land, near the current BU Bridge, which were still occupied by water (this suggests that most of the filling was done in the years directly before, and finished soon after). Even more interesting from this map is this: there is a street pattern drawn in, but it is entirely different from the one in 1903! Instead of having the perfectly regular grid, it has two roads parallel to the Charles, and the rest of the streets are all at fairly random angles running across them.

An interesting component of this plan is that Putnam Street, one of my streets in question, was extended across the tracks and continued to the water, presumably in an attempt to connect the two regions—a noble but unsuccessful idea, as there is now virtually no continuity between these regions. Usually, when seeing streets drawn on a map, one assumes that the blocks are divided up for some sort of development—residential, commercial, industrial, or planned open space. But it seems to me very unlikely that these streets were laid out and developed by 1897, then leveled, laid out, and redeveloped by 1903: rather, the two different street patterns suggest to me that the 1897 map depicted one planner’s ideas for the site, which never got built, and that there was never any physical manifestation of these lines on this newly filled section of Cambridgeport.

One further source of confusion for me is a drawing of Boston from 1880, with Cambridge in the background. This drawing has more or less the same grid system as the 1903 map, but it was drawn 17 years before the map or 1897 showed a different street pattern there! Considering that the map from three years later does not have this land filled in at all, I will just assume that plans for the infill were already underway, and the artist was either instructed to or just decided to draw Cambridge, not how it was with a big marsh and empty space, but as it was intended to look in a few years’ time.

MIT
By 1919, the half of the MIT campus west of Massachusetts Avenue was already occupied by MIT—the main building was finished in 1916, so MIT had probably owned that part of the property for a few years. But the rest of the fill has the same grid pattern as the 1903 map. The 1930 Bromley’s Atlas of Cambridge shows that by then, MIT owned all of the area below the Railroad and Vassar St., and had cleared it of the grid, but I don’t know exactly in which year between 1919 and 1930 this transfer occurred. Nevertheless, the 1903 version of the grid pattern was in place for about 20 years of time, and at a time of great development, and I assume that there must have been houses in the area that MIT had to tear down.

Land Use
By 1930, the street pattern as it is today was set in place. The roads, the train tracks, MIT, and Fort Washington Park have remained the same for the past 70 years. However, we would hardly say the area had remained the same if in 1930 it was purely residential and currently was home to, say, several dot-com office complexes. Even more important to the shaping of a neighborhood than the street pattern is how the land gets used, and that is the topic for the next section.

Reardon & Sons
All the maps I have come to from before 1916 indicate that my entire site north of the railroad was purely residential, or particularly early on, not yet developed. The first signs of industry in my area appear in a map from 1916, where Reardon & Sons Soapworks is situated just southwest of Fort Washington. On this map, the neighboring plots between Allston and Putnam seem vacant, but everywhere else north of the train tracks is residential. By 1930, this area is still occupied by Reardon and Sons, as are all the plots on the other side of Waverly between Chestnut and Hamilton, the next street after Allston. Or rather, the sons seem to have split up because the Bromley Atlas labels some sites as belonging to John Reardon and others to Edmund Reardon. Between Waverly and Sydney, all the lots east of Putnam seem filled with industry, and to the west the northern half of the block is residential, and the half along Waverly is all industry. Above Brookline, the area is still residential, and while I don’t know exactly when the buildings are from, I know that the MIT Independent Living Group, pika, which is located on Chestnut St., was built in 1910, and I expect most of the houses, having the same style and feel, were also from about the same decade. As for the space between the railroad and Vassar street, this was entirely commercial by 1930, but vacant in 1916. Now it remains commercial and industrial.

Growing Industry
A map from 1943 had some vaguely circled sections of Cambridgeport showing that at that time, this area was “residential and industrial.” Well, that’s not the slightest bit surprising, but since the next land use map I have is from 1971, showing about the same patterns as 1930, it’s good to know that there was never a zoo or anything put there in the forties! While the line separating residence from industry has moved slightly outward over the years, the general pattern is about the same as in the thirties, characterized by a sharp switch from one land use to the other. While the 1916 map had small buffer zone of what seems to have been vacant land, the two areas are now adjacent with residence above and industry below Sydney St.

Real Estate
Despite being next to an industrial area, the residential part of my site is very picturesque and pleasant. Data taken in 1996 (City of Cambridge, p. 21) says that the Cambridgeport area is about 28% double-family housing and 23% each single and triple family, with not much in the way of condos and apartments. In 1996 as well, 32% of residents were reported as high income, an increase in 10% from 1990, while the percentages of moderate and middle income decreased slightly, and low income went from 22% to 13%. Similarly, the number of residents over 25 with a college degree has gone from 30% in 1980 to 47 or so in 1990, and is probably even higher by now—basically, Cambridgeport has been getting more affluent over the past 20 years. Not knowing what the class of this area was before, it is hard to see trends or how they may fit in with what I have learned about my site, and the question still remains, why is it that such a well off group of people is happy to be living next to an industrial area?

Conclusions:
I think probably that most places where industry has a negative impact on nearby neighborhoods, it is the case that the industry was in place first—in the case of industry bordering train tracks, I think the usual case is that the new ease of access a region inspired the founding of various industrial facilities, which were able to sprawl out in the unpopulated areas surrounding the tracks, and over time residence from a nearby down town expanded until there was an unclear and uncomfortable boundary between the two types of development. In the case of Cambridgeport, however, the land seems to have been used for residential purposes first, regardless of the noise of the train (currently the train only comes by twice a day so it is not a huge source of discomfort). By the 19-tens and twenties, light industry started to find its way into the area right along Vassar and the train tracks (there is no heavy or noisy manufacturing in the area), but because of the existing surrounding density, which had filled in rapidly between the 1830s and 1880s, industry was not able to spread out much. With just a strip of industry acting as a buffer between the train and the residences, the expansive, dark, and dangerous spaces that tend to accompany industrial areas never got a chance to develop, and for at least eighty years industry and residence has commingled peaceably in Cambridgeport.