What's amazing is the Cambridge side of the river. There's absolutely no development over there. Maybe the artist just didn't fill in the detail in Cambridge but if that's accurate there's been a tremendous amoung of developmeent in the last 110 years.
The land that has since become MIT (they moved there in the 1910s) was built on landfill, and I believe that when this map was drawn the landfill was relatively new. (The Harvard/Smoot bridge was only completed in 1891.) Obviously once MIT moved in they built a lot of buildings. So the blank green emptiness is probably surprisingly accurate.
Past MIT, the drawing is blurry enough that it's hard to say. I mean, many of those parts of Cambridge still have plenty of trees to this day, so it's a matter of whether they exaggerated the tree-to-house ratio. Although certainly a lot of the buildings in Cambridge were built in the 20th century.
The land immediately adjacent to the river, and west of Kendall Square, had just been filled, similar to the Back Bay on the Boston side; but the developers hadn't found any buyers for the newly-created land. M.I.T. would buy the land east of Mass. Ave. in 1913 and turn it into their campus; later they bought the land west of Mass. Ave. as well. The one large building you see in this area of the map is the Armory, still standing at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Vassar St.
Behind the Grand Junction railroad tracks, you see a lot of development on this view. The "vacant" land behind that development is just too far away, it was developed then but the artist didn't show all the details since they would be too small.
A similar situation existed east of Kendall Square, where the land between First Street and the river (today's Land Blvd.) had just been filled and was not yet developed.
Except around Lechmere - quite a collection of factories spewing smoke along the Miller River there. I think Revere Sugar was there then - of interest to me because my grandfather worked there, and I've wondered if he started before it left Cambridge, since sometime in the early 20th C he bought a 3-decker in E Cambridge. (Odd to think he probably bought it new!!)
Darn, I'm now getting a plug-in failure so I can't view the map any more.
Comments
What's amazing is the
What's amazing is the Cambridge side of the river. There's absolutely no development over there. Maybe the artist just didn't fill in the detail in Cambridge but if that's accurate there's been a tremendous amoung of developmeent in the last 110 years.
Well, a lot of stuff did happen to Cambridge in the 20th century
The land that has since become MIT (they moved there in the 1910s) was built on landfill, and I believe that when this map was drawn the landfill was relatively new. (The Harvard/Smoot bridge was only completed in 1891.) Obviously once MIT moved in they built a lot of buildings. So the blank green emptiness is probably surprisingly accurate.
Past MIT, the drawing is blurry enough that it's hard to say. I mean, many of those parts of Cambridge still have plenty of trees to this day, so it's a matter of whether they exaggerated the tree-to-house ratio. Although certainly a lot of the buildings in Cambridge were built in the 20th century.
Some was newly filled, some was developed
The land immediately adjacent to the river, and west of Kendall Square, had just been filled, similar to the Back Bay on the Boston side; but the developers hadn't found any buyers for the newly-created land. M.I.T. would buy the land east of Mass. Ave. in 1913 and turn it into their campus; later they bought the land west of Mass. Ave. as well. The one large building you see in this area of the map is the Armory, still standing at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Vassar St.
Behind the Grand Junction railroad tracks, you see a lot of development on this view. The "vacant" land behind that development is just too far away, it was developed then but the artist didn't show all the details since they would be too small.
A similar situation existed east of Kendall Square, where the land between First Street and the river (today's Land Blvd.) had just been filled and was not yet developed.
Except around Lechmere -
Except around Lechmere - quite a collection of factories spewing smoke along the Miller River there. I think Revere Sugar was there then - of interest to me because my grandfather worked there, and I've wondered if he started before it left Cambridge, since sometime in the early 20th C he bought a 3-decker in E Cambridge. (Odd to think he probably bought it new!!)
Darn, I'm now getting a plug-in failure so I can't view the map any more.