When the North End had a beach
By adamg - 6/5/10 - 12:08 pm
With sand and everything. Matt Conti posts a couple of photos from 1927 of the beach - which was where Langone Park and the pool are now.
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Comments
Amazing!
Amazing!
yuck, Can only wonder how bad
yuck,
Can only wonder how bad the harbor was in that day and age before treatment and EPA standards....
Lots of brown flounders floating by I'd bet.
What they didn't know didn't
What they didn't know didn't hurt them. My parents brought me to Wollaston beach in Quincy when I was a kid in the 1960s. I'm sure the water was nasty, but we never noticed.
Kind of to anon squareds point....
You wonder if Wollaston Beach is cleaner now than it was 50 years ago.
Moon Island stands right off
Moon Island stands right off Wollaston beach. There were giant concrete pits out there, where raw sewage was pumped. When the tide began going out, they'd open the doors and dump the sewage into Quincy bay - the idea being that the tide would carry it out. I can only assume that there was plenty of backwash to the beach. And they never tested the water, at least as far as the public knew.
Soaking In It
It worked before the Boston area started cranking out modern quantities of sewerage ... well, sorta.
The rest of the story: the Federal Government offered up much money for modern treatment facilities, but the MDC did not take advantage of it. When a federal judge jogging on the beach stepped in some human waste, the Clean Water Act, which had freed those funds for modernization, got brought down full force on the Boston Area. That's when the MWRA was formed to clean up the mess.
Unfortunately, the federal funds were no longer available by the time the enforcement action landed down hard. That's why the bond debt was so steep and water and sewer prices skyrocketed. But those who complain are not accounting for the fact that they got severely UNDERpriced water and sewer services for decades because the MDC thought that dumping their crap into the harbor was wonderful and fine.
It was Mike Dukakis who
It was Mike Dukakis who dithered while the clock ran out on the federal money - which allowed G.H.W. Bush to slam the Duke as an environmental failure and a management dunce. True dat.
It was the Quincy city attorney who ...
Was jogging along the beach and through raw sewage, who filed the lawsuit that led to the cleanup, not a judge (although Paul Garrity later did become known as the Sludge Judge, and yes, his brother was the judge involved in the Boston busing crisis).
http://massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=368
And after all that money was
And after all that money was spent, Quincy bay is still filthy, and it's because of run-off from.... Quincy.
Did the water taste of molasses?
Given the location and all.
Great photos. Here's a map of
Great photos. Here's a map of the location:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12157608@N07/4671861699/?addedcomment=1#comment72157624085369115