CultureNOW - Norumbega Park: Peter Vanderwarker

Norumbega Park

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Canoeing has been the sport of choice for a century on this bend of the Charles River, where the communities of Newton, Weston, and Waltham come together.

The old photo was made in 1906. It depicts Norumbega Park. This was an amusement ground created in 1897 by the Commonwealth Avenue Street Railway for the purpose of generating weekend rail traffic - the same reason Nantasket and Revere beaches were developed. A 1903 Boston guidebook tells us.

"Our terminus is the favorite pleasure ground called Norumbega Park, where the trolley
company has provided on the shore of the stream a variety of attractions for many tastes - an open-air theater, an extensive menagerie [i.e., a zoo], a cafe, and a large boathouse, where canoes and rowboats may be hired."

Norumbega flourished at the height of the fad for country outings. Thousands of canoes, literally, once filled the river here on a sunny weekend, emanating not only from Norumbega but from the nearby Riverside Recreation Ground and private boat clubs. Norumbega also provided 1,000 parking spaces for bicycles and a network of trails for horseback riding. Norumbega Park survived into the 1950s, best known in its later years for the Totem Pole Ballroom, which presented the big bands of Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and the local Baron Hugo.

The park derived its name from Norumbega Tower, a monument erected nearby to
commemorate a fort supposedly built by the Norse explorer Leif Ericson in the year 1000 - a tale no one now credits. Architect Samuel J. Brown designed the handsome stone and half-timbered Norumbega buildings. One that remains is now the Charles
River Canoe and Kayak Center, whose owners, Larry Smith and Dave Jacques, are the paddlers in the foreground of the new photograph, made this year.

Once so bucolic, so genteel, the scene is now overwhelmed by a Massachusetts Turnpike interchange and a Marriott Hotel. The hotel offers its guests an experience of the natural landscape from their windows. But it denies, by its looming presence, any such experience to the canoeists on the water.

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Down by the River", Boston Globe, 1990

map not available at this time.

Location

Commonwealth Ave & Islington Rd
Boston, MA 02466
United States

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