CultureNOW - Roxbury Canal (Albany Street at Massachusetts Avenue): Peter Vanderwarker

Roxbury Canal (Albany Street at Massachusetts Avenue)

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"The Roxbury Canal looks much the same in the 1925 photograph as it did when Boston's legendary mayor, James Michael Curley, was a boy living in poverty on its banks in the 1870s and ‘80s. The canal was an extension of Fort Point Channel, where the South End meets Roxbury. The canal then functioned as a kind of servant’s entrance to the city. We can see coal and lumber being unloaded, and there were also brickyards, soap works, power plants for the transit system, and city gas, water, and sewer facilities. The canal was a place for the back-door, below-stairs activities that made the more elegant ‘front rooms’ of the city run smoothly. More than 40 percent of the nearby population was Irish-born as late as the census of 1905.

In the new photo, taken from the same spot as the old, we're looking north toward downtown Boston along Albany Street. The traffic jam in the foreground is on Massachusetts Avenue. Most of the cars are heading for the Southeast Expressway, which is partly visible at right. The Roxbury Canal isn’t visible, though traces of it remain. Most of it was filled as a public works project beginning in the 1930s.

At left in the new photo is the boldly sculpted power plant of Boston Medical Center, designed in the 1970s – when it was known as Boston City Hospital – by Stubbins Associates of Cambridge. The Medical Center was formed in 1996 by a merger between Boston City Hospital and Boston University. City Hospital dates to the 1860s, when it was founded to combat a cholera epidemic. It was easily visible to the young Curley from his window across the Roxbury Canal. In later years, in four terms as mayor, Curley poured money into the hospital, adding many new buildings in his role as ‘The Mayor of the Poor.’ Curley died there in 1958, in sight of the house where he was born.

The Roxbury Canal reminds us that Boston was once, even more than it is today, a city in intimate contact with the water. About three-fourths of Boston is filled land, land that once was ocean, bay, or tidal flat – the largest percentage of filled land of any major city in the world. Shipping lined the waterfronts in the early years, followed by railroads and industry, then by automobile arterials. Now a fourth cycle is beginning: The waterfront is seen as a public amenity, attracting such uses as housing, offices, hotels, marinas, parks, and entertainment."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Roxbury Canal," Boston Globe, 13 June 1999

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Location

Albany Street & Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, MA 02118
United States

Nearby Items

Art on View at the Moakley Building		733 feet
South End		0.3 miles
Boston University School of Public Health		0.4 miles
South Bay Harbor Trail		0.4 miles
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Washington Street at Northampton Street		0.4 miles
Washington Street at Massachusetts Avenue		0.4 miles