Review Essay: Shaping Boston's Site and Cleaning Its Harbor Waters

In 1855, Viele conducted a study for a committee of the New Jersey Legislature dealing with Encroachments upon the Bay and Harbor of New York (Trenton, NJ: True American Office, 1855). See also, Egbert Viele, The Topography and Hydrology of New York (New York: R. Craighead, 1865). Sections of I. N. Phelps Stokes's six-volume work, The Iconography of Manhattan Island (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915-1928), can be viewed as part of the NYPL digital collection at: http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgtitle_tree.cfm?level=1&title _id=258154. For more recent studies see Ann L. Buttenwieser, Manhattan Water-Bound: Planning and Developing Manhattan's Waterfront from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 1987) and Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall, Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

Lois Wille, Forever Open, Clean and Free: The Struggle for Chicago's Lakefront, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Craig E. Colten, "Chicago's Waste Lands: Refuse Disposal and Urban Growth, 1840-1990," Journal of Historical Geography (April 1994), no. 20: 124-42. Colten has studied industrial waste disposal practices in other cities, some of which involved landfill.

Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); ibid, "Reintroducing Nature to the City: Wetlands in New Orleans," Environmental History (April 2005), no. 7: 226-46; Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Richard A. Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). See also, Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America's Wetlands (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997).

Walter Muir Whitehill, The Topographical History of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1959); ibid, The Topographical History of Boston, 2nd enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968); Walter Muir Whitehill and Lawrence Kennedy, The Topographical History of Boston, 3rd enlarged ed., (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000); Lawrence Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Karl Haglund, Inventing the Charles River (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003).

See also her two essays in Alex Krieger and David Cobb, eds. with Amy Turner, Mapping Boston (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999).

Michael Rawson, "What Lies Beneath: Science, Nature, and the Making of Boston Harbor" (2009, Journal of Urban History). Rawson maintains that even though the tidal scour theory was incorrect, the Harbor Commissioner's application of it had some positive results. I am indebted to Michael Rawson for providing me with a copy of his unpublished article.

In a famous episode during the 1988 presidential campaign, George H. W. Bush, the Republican candidate, attacked his presidential opponent, Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts, for not cleaning the harbor. Dolin notes that "there was plenty of blame to go around," and that the Dukakis administration had worked hard to establish the MWRA.