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When sewers were built like brick outhouses
By adamg on Sun, 05/29/2011 - 10:16pm
Paul Levy recounts when sewers were built brick by brick, including one under Centre Street in Jamaica Plain:
I have been inside some of those large old sewer pipes and I have seen the interior construction. The pattern of the brickwork is pure artistry. Many have lasted over 100 years in a environment that is extremely corrosive.
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Comments
Odd. . .
. . . I was reading about the history of water works in this city at the Boston MWRA site just out of curiosity this weekend. The first water system in the 1700's used tree trunks for pipes.
Hollowed out tree trunks and limbs as pipes!
I remember being in the late Joe Casazza's office in City Hall one day about 13 years ago. I asked him what the funny looking petrified log mounted on his wall was all about.
"This was an original water pipe that we pulled out of State Street a few years ago," said he.
Ah, the wonders of being an "old" city.
Wooden pipes are ancient technology
Where ever there were very large trees to put to use, log pipes were used. Consider that the earliest ones only distributed water - sewer service came in with flush toilets.
Most early settlement cities of the west coast had log pipes, too - SanFrancisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, etc. It all makes sense when alternative materials aren't available and the demand is still low.
There were, apparently, several different ways to make them.
The log pipes were laid by
The log pipes were laid by the Jamaica Plain Aqueduct Company, starting in 1796. They dug up a bunch of them when they built the Fens, and crews continue to find them.
I'd pay . . .
. . . for a length of one. So - any road crew guys out there who dig one of these old pipe-logs up- give me a poke.
Built for next to nothing,
with the underpaid manpower of Irish and Italian immigrants.
Irish and Italians in the 1700s?
I would be surprised to find out that underpaid Irish and Italian immigrants were building things in Boston in the 1700s. I think it was more likely that those immigrants were of the non-voluntary variety, and probably hailed from Africa.
Not the 1700s
The brickwork being described doesn't go back to the 1700s - and was in fact constructed by Italian and Irish laborers. Go look at the linked item in Adam's original post.
Slaves weren't generally used
Slaves weren't generally used as laborers in the northeast in the 1700s.
Depends on what you mean be
Depends on what you mean be generally. There certainly were slaves in every colony in the 1700s, and here in Massachusetts. Slavery in Massachusetts started with the first supply ship reaching Boston, and extended until the 1780s.
Slavery still exists
in New England.
Not sure what you mean by
Not sure what you mean by underpaid. They were paid enough to get them to do a dirty job.
Not sure what you mean by
"They were paid enough to get them to do a dirty job."
This was the only work these immigrants could get because of racism. Just like today where you have Brazilians standing in Home Depot parking lots. They're not waiting there for someone to give them a job on the MBTA.