Journals 1-4 to be added soon.
A few brief thoughts--I suppose I should have expected that the first settlers of Boston had a "devotion to education" and had set public education down as a tradition; one of my first impressions during my initial visit to Boston several months ago was surprise at the sheer number of schools, colleges, and universities. It was slightly jarring, however, given modern associations of the term "Puritan", that it was largely the Puritan mindset that led to Boston's identity as "...a city of high taxes and many services."
More relevant portions of the reading to my own site were about State St. and the Faneuil Hall area serving as a "business spine of the city". One thing I have yet to do is walk through and explore the areas connected to but outside my site--this "business spine", also known as the "Walk-to-the-Sea", will definitely be important when it comes to the next study (the site through time). How the Old State House, Long Wharf, and the historical buildings from further up the hill have affected and been affected by the structures in my own site will be interesting to look at.
Furthermore, I hadn't known that the Quincy Markets were a product of the Pre-Civil War period of prosperity, as Boston (as with the rest of the United States) grew as a presence on the international market. So that's why there's an India Wharf and an India Street! And on the topic of foreign trade and influence, I'd like to look into the different ways that immigrants influenced my site--given that my site has an identity as one of the "core" areas of the original, "traditional" Boston, how much of that "core" was actually affected/created/developed through the lives of immigrants?
Our observations for the first map (1873) largely determined what details and aspects we looked for in the following maps. Our site, site 7, was the triangle of land now bounded by Main Street, Massachusetts Ave., and Osborn Street. There was no predominant land use in this area in the 1873 map, but rather, several different yet likely interrelated uses. Institutional, a church; residential, a series of single residences, duplexes, and apartments; industrial, a few factories/companies; along with a large area of undeveloped land owned by individuals. We postulated that the residences belonged to the employees of the factories/companies directly adjacent to them, and that they and the wealthier factory/land owners were mostly of Anglo-Saxon descent, given their last names and their assumed socioeconomic standing.
Another aspect we noted was the undeveloped land that constituted almost of a third of the 1873 site. This land included two large, rectangular plots owned by individuals; we identified these plots as the current location of the Novartis buildings, which occupy the entire area--we predicted, then, that this land had always been bought and sold as relatively large plots.
Lastly, other details we noticed were that Mass. Ave. used to be "First St.", and that Windsor St. did not yet exist. Windsor does, however, appear in the next map (1903), and actually cuts through the land that used to be entirely occupied by a bacon curing factory.
I'll elaborate, then, on the rest of the maps through these initial observations. Through the rest of the maps, we saw the residential area stay largely architecturally unchanged, while the names and owners changed frequently--until the 1930s map, where the entire residential area has been bought out by commercial interests. Furthermore, it is within and after the 1930s map that major shifts in building material are indicated. The industrial areas morph from one type of industry to another; sometimes to a completely different type of company, but sometimes to a related industry that speaks to larger technological develops, such as the change of a carriage service company's land (1916) to a motor service/garage (1930).
The initially undeveloped areas of land in the 1873 map are first sectioned off into small plots that were then sold to individuals; eventually, however, by the 1930s, that entire area has been bought out by commercial interests. The overall trend of our site, then, is an area that was once mixed-use between residential and commercial purposes, but develops into an almost entirely industrial/commercial area; likely a common story in several of the other sites, given the American industrial and technological revolutions concurrent with the timeline of these maps.
The forgotten creek is a character from my own childhood, as well. The patch of woods closest to my home, full of ravines and densely packed with looming oak trees, is cut through by a dry creekbed. In a section of the creekbed close to the front of the woods sits a pile of enormous, rectangular granite blocks--clearly out of place among the smaller, rounded stones that were clearly shaped under rushing water. The blocks are from the entrance archway of a demolished Purdue University building. Traces of the sculpted embellishments that once crowned the top of the arch--a woman's face surrounded by intertwining vines--are still identifiable on the worn sides of the blocks.
I'm not entirely sure why they ended up there. Maybe the demolition crew didn't know where to dump such a heavy mass of stone, and settled on the old creek, where they wouldn't become roadblocks or obstacles. But the fact that the creekbed was identified as a "dumping ground" speaks to how it's slowly become a "forgotten creek" over the last decade--because I remember when the creek wasn't dry. In grade school, my parents used to take my younger brothers and I to the woods on July afternoons, when the leafy canopy of the oaks and maples and the shallow, ice-cold water of the creek made for a full afternoon of play.
And reading through this prologue made me realize that I, too, do not know the language of the landscape, because I couldn't tell you a single possible explanation for the drying out of the creek. I haven't kept track of what kind of landscape or infrastructure changes my town has made during the last 10 years; I don't know if the weather patterns or the neighboring Wabash River has any connection to the creek's water supply; I don't have any sense of context or intuition for this slow death of a childhood playground. I wish, now, that I did--and hopefully, I can learn enough of the language to understand not only what my site's landscape can speak of, but what my own hometown's landscape can tell me.