Heaven for map nerds: Mass. Historical Society's online collection of colonial-Boston maps.

Via J.L. Bell, who points out some of the highlights.

And let's not forget the BPL's online Boston map collection.

Third Decade comes across a 1912 Times article on a bill that would have let Boston annex every city and town within 10 miles of the State House. In the end, of course, Boston only annexed the town of Hyde Park, but he wonders how things would be different today if the bill had succeeded - and Boston had taken over all those communities:

... Issues related to busing, school desegregation, housing patterns, and transportation would probably have been decided in completely different ways. Or, if it happened today, would people be fighting over relatively small parcels of land in Allston or tunnels through downtown when the overall city would be much, much bigger? ...

Also interesting to note in the Times article: Even then, Boston's population was larger than it is today (Boston hit a peak of 800,000 shortly after World War II). Another thing to ponder: This being Massachusetts, the bill required towns to vote to annex themselves to Boston. What if some towns voted yes and some no? Would a map of Boston look like a piece of Swiss cheese? Brookline, after all, had the chance to join the city and refused.

Chris Devers reports that if the statue is life-sized, then Thoreau was pretty short.

Used under this Creative Commons license.

Third Decade posts some photos from the 1910 accident, in which a train plunged to the ground without killing anybody.

From the air?

Goes with Shopping Days in Retro Boston, which is a blog all about the halcyon days of yore on Washington Street, when people actually had a choice of department stores.

A "video" of our local bard reciting "Old Ironsides," by somebody who is "animating" lots of dead poets:

J.L. Bell provides a map of Cambridge drawn by an Englishman shortly after he arrived back in England after Evacuation Day.

In the mid to late 1950s, MIT professors Kevin Lynch and Gyorgy Kepes did a five-year study on city planning which involved studying and photographing various parts of the city. The MIT libraries have put up a portion of the Kepes-Lynch Photograph collection on flickr, with more supporting documentation available in the DOME repository.

I recently wrote a story and made a video about the lighthouse in Scituate. It has a pretty interesting history...and a new lightkeeper. You can read my article and watch the video here.

...there's also a sidebar: Benefits and drawbacks of lighthouse living

This is why schools and city offices are closed in Boston today.