The Blackstone Block

Photo via the Boston Public Library Flickr stream.

A narrow alley, only six feet wide: hardly the sort of careful, modern road we’d lay downtown today. Once more, we take you back to the environs of Quincy Market, where you can walk the last traces of the city’s original street grid.

The ‘Blackstone Block’ is the area sandwiched between Union, Hanover, North and Blackstone Streets. These are some of the city’s oldest routes. Sadly, the city was not laid out laid out along cowpaths. That’s a charming urban myth. The cramped layout owes more to “unscientific” planning and natural obstacles like hills and brooks. Blackstone Street actually lies on top of the old Mill Creek, which was crossed by drawbridges and, you guessed it, powered a mill.

That’s the wide open City Hall Plaza in the center, and the Blackstone area in the bottom right.

Author/historian Walter Muir Whitehill once wrote that the Blackstone Block “represented a chronological history of buildings in Boston.” The 17th century streets and alleyways are lined with mostly 18th and 19th century buildings, all built within what was then spitting distance of harbor (land later expanded as real estate grew more valuable than the old docks). The original structures would have been made of wood.

The streets were once busy and noisily commercial. The neighborhood’s still home to the famed tourist trap, The Union Oyster House. The Blackstone Block’s restoration was carefully done to suggest just how cramped conditions originally were. Borders of brick and cobblestone outline the original streets and buildings (cobblestones = streets; brick = buildings).

In a classic mish-mash of good intentions, “Historic street lamps were found in a scrap metal yard, restored, and fitted with energy-saving lights.”

That Muir quote comes from a fascinating document from the urban renewal area on how the Blackstone Block should be handled and preserved from the wave of change that swept through the areas around this old pocket. The report is from 1964 and observes the block has many vacancies but the future “is very promising.”

Tadeusz Kosciuszko, hero of two continents

Tadeusz Kosciuszko:

Polish national hero – check.

Lithuanian national hero – check.

Belarussian – check.

And American – that too.

Kosciuszko was one of many of the European continent (see: Lafayette) in the Continental Army, serving under Generals Gates and Washington in the Revolutionary War. Afterwards, he was rewarded with: a promotion to Brigadier General, American citizenship, and a plot of land in Ohio.

An abolitionist, he left his property to be administered by Thomas Jefferson when he returned to Europe – to be used to buy the freedom of slaves and pay for their educations (Jefferson abdicated his assignment after Kosciuszko’s death).

But, as noted, before Kosciuszko died, the Revolutionary war hero returned to Europe, signed up with the Polish military, and made his reputation on the Continent.

Though he doesn’t seem to have made much of his own history in Boston, his tenuous connection to the city is this statue on the Boston Commons that was put up by the city’s Polish Community in 1927 (that’s 150 years since he joined the Continental Army). The female artist was Bostonian, Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson (who deserves her own post). He’s also the subject of memorials in Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Washington DC, St. Petersburg.

An interview with his biographer.

Photo of the Boston Common statue by apparent Boston statue connoisseur, Wally Gobetz. One favorite that he’s documented, frankly too recent for this blog, is the Tortoise vs. Hare race of Copley Square, installed 1994.

The many lives of Paul Revere’s house

Photo by Thomas Marr, via the Boston Public Library’s Flickr stream.

This small wooden house in Boston’s North End belonged to  American revolutionary, Paul Revere — the one who went riding to Concord to warn the original “patriots” that the British were coming. But in the years between housing the famous silversmith and becoming a shrine to revolutionary history, the building housed at a various times a cigar manufacturing operation, a bank, and a vegetable market.

The North End, an old neighborhood in an old city, had long been a point of arrival for new immigrants. So after Paul Revere sold the building in 1800 it became a tenement, and the  first floor went commercial.

By the latter half of the century, the new arrivals to the neighborhood would have been mostly Jewish and Italian. From 1880 to 1905 the neighborhood went from 4% to 80% Italian. That’s what we call a boom, and you can hear it in the names of the Revere house’s late tenants: the FA Goduti and Company Cigar Factoryand the Banco Italiana (1905 photo). The vegetable shop was apparently Jewish.

Back to revering Revere

It’s now the stuff of high school history class discussions that it was Longfellow’s 1861 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and not Revere’s own life, that posthumously made him an American icon. Architect and preservationist Joseph Everett Chandler championed the restoration of the Revere House in 1907 for the Paul Revere Memorial Association. His renovations included knocking off the building’s third story (I would love to see more of Chandler’s thinking on the renovation if anyone’s seen some primary docs).

This all took place just two years before the photo above was taken by Thomas Marr. He was a society photographer who took pictures of many of the most notable people and places of his era.

Happy Evacuation Day

“It was one of these wink, wink, nudge, nudge things in it was a way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in a cloak of historical significance,” said Charles Swift, a historian who is the executive director of the Gibson House Museum in Back Bay. “Also, for Irish politicians, Evacuation Day was a way to tweak the British.”

from: This South Boston map won’t help on St. Patrick’s Day, Boston Globe, March 17, 2008

Let Them Eat Cake, Election Cake

During the colonial period, when the main elected office in certain of the American colonies was the colonial governor, voters had to cover long distances to reach their polling locations. They often stayed overnight.

Election Day became a happily celebrated secular holiday in Puritan New England, where celebrations of religious holidays were often quite thin. Public festivals, called “Election Day Drinkings” were held by major families and the governor’s own household.  To feed tired and hungry crowds of dutiful citizens, townswomen began baking thick, fruit studded election cakes, large species of English fruitcakes.

The first documented election cake was served in Hartford, Connecticut, at the colony’s expense (roughly £3). The first known recipe appears in Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery in 1796, the first cookbook for an American market–British cookbooks dominated up to this point (Simmons notably substitutes ingredients like maize for English oats). That recipe called for thirty quarts flour, 10 pound butter, 14 pound sugar, 12 pound raisins 3 dozen eggs and a quart of yeast.

By the 1830s, the politicians of Hartford reportedly offered Election Cake only to men who voted a straight party ticket.

In a letter found by old foodie, Janet Clarkson, young solider, Frederick Osborne, stationed in North Carolina in 1862 writes wistfully home to his family in Massachusetts:

“Aunt Jane has been making ‘lection cake I suppose, or is the time for it past?”

By the end of the century, it largely was.

Recipe for Election Cake, from the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1911, orig. 1896)
1/2 cup butter
8 finely chopped figs
1 cup bread dough
1 1/4 cups flour
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon soda
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sour milk
2/3 cup raisins seeded, cut into pieces
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon clove
1/4 teaspoon mace
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon salt

Work butter into dough, using the hand. Add egg well beaten, sugar, milk, fruit dredged with two tablespoons flour, and flour mixed and sifted with remaining ingredients. Put into a well-buttered bread pan, cover, and let rise one and one-fourth hours. Bake one hour in a slow oven. Cover with Boiled Milk Frosting.

You can locate your modern polling location here. The Culinary Institute of America offers one modern take on the Election Day recipe here.