Introduction: Unsettling Greater Boston

Boston, like any particular place, is many people from elsewhere have settled. Indeed, things. Among those who have celebrated it, its very name comes from a town in England or do so now, it is that “City on the Hill”—a from where a number of the original Puri- biblical phrase used by the Massachusetts tan settlers came in the early 1600s. When Bay Colony’s first governor to highlight the one speaks of colonial Boston, it is this first dangers of failure —but now (mis)under- face that is typically intended. It is one, par- stood to suggest the promise of great things ticularly in its earliest manifestations, that to come. In addition, as the physician and embodies a colony’s most unjust form: one poet Oliver Wendell Holmes once baptized involving a relationship of domination (by a the city, it is “the Hub” (of the universe), the “mother country”) and subjugation (of the center of the world. Moreover, it’s the “Ath- colonized land and people). Its second face ens of America” due to Boston’s preeminent reflects the fact that Boston has also long place in the intellectual and cultural life of been a place involved in the colonization of the United States, and its leading role in the places and peoples. One manifestation is the establishment of educational institutions— area’s dispossession of the non-European, from public schools to elite universities. And indigenous inhabitants and the absorption it is the “Cradle of Liberty” (a title claimed of the Native lands upon which the city and by others, not least Philadelphia) for helping its environs now sit. to birth and nurture the American Revolu- Prior to European contact, many Native tion and subsequent freedom struggles. groups—from the Massachusett and Nipmuc But Boston is also a colonial enterprise— to the Pennacook and the Wampanoag— and has been since its very founding—one populated the area. Moreover, there were with two faces. First, it is a colony in the points during the first several decades most literal sense of the word: a place where of European settlement when relations

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between settlers and Indians were construc- And for those who survived the new tive and respectful—even if often only diseases, as many did, other challenges superficially so—or when dissenting colo- abounded, which together greatly trans- nists challenged war-making against Indian formed the area’s landscape and the groups. The potential of these relations was socio-ecological relations of its indigenous significantly limited, however, by a larger peoples. These challenges included new context: the quest—at best, paternalistic—to goods and trade networks, as well as novel “civilize” the indigenous population. Such labor regimes—which involved the enslave- efforts were thus part of a project to “kill ment by English settlers of large numbers of the Indian, and save the man,” as Richard Indians as laborers in the emerging colonial Henry Pratt, a US Army officer credited economy and for sale in the Caribbean. with establishing the first Indian boarding Also central was the sheer number of arriv- school, phrased it in an 1892 speech. These ing colonists with their voracious hunger civilizing endeavors are inseparable from the for land and, with it, for trees to build and many episodes and various forms of overt fuel their homes, to construct ships, and violence against Native peoples. for export. Moreover, there was the matter These speak to another project, one that of European plants and animals. As they saw Indians and their claims to the land as encroached on Indians’ traditional lands, the obstacles to the colonial enterprise, and that settlers’ cows and pigs consumed their food thus focused not on “saving” Indians, but sources, while, like English plants in relation instead on “removing” them. It was a proj- to flora indigenous to the region, crowding ect facilitated not only by direct violence— out local fauna. And as colonial settlements violence intensified by rivalries involving and agricultural establishments grew, so too competing European projects in North did roads and fences, which greatly inhibited America and shifting alliances among Native the mobility of the Native population and groups—but also by a combination of thus their ability to access the land’s diver- economic, ecological, and epidemiological sity to provide for themselves as was their forces that led to drastic reductions in Native custom. numbers and far-reaching changes in how Such developments challenge a domi- they lived. Even before English colonists nant perception of nature, one which sug- settled what is today eastern Massachusetts, gests that the city is nature’s antithesis. In pathogens introduced by European traders fact, urban areas depend upon and embody had wreaked havoc on many Indian groups. nature. Hence, the urban and the rural, Between 1616 and 1618, for example, an cities and the countryside, are tightly tied. epidemic or a series of them killed upward Indeed, they make each other. Take, for of 75 percent of southern New England’s example, the largest inland body of water coastal Algonquian population, according to in present-day Massachusetts, the Quabbin one estimate. Reservoir. Sixty-five miles east of Boston, it

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is today the city’s primary source of water— to the making of a capitalist and highly as well as that for forty surrounding munici- unequal world economy. Merchants in palities. Encircled by forested land and roll- Salem, for instance, dominated the world’s ing hills, this “natural” body of water and black pepper trade in the beginning decades its bucolic environs were built in 1930s. It of the nineteenth century, and a Boston- involved the destruction of four small towns based company that focused on bananas and the relocation of about 3,000 people and came to be the world’s largest agricultural 7,613 graves. enterprise in the early 1900s. Area merchants The example demonstrates how the and industrialists helped to fuel the slave commandeering, transformation, and use trade through cotton textile production of environmental resources have been cen- and sale, while some of Greater Boston’s tral to the making of Greater Boston, as leading figures enriched themselves and they have been to any place on the globe, the local economy by buying and selling from the time of its founding. As an afflu- enslaved human beings of African origin, ent region of the modern global economy, as well as by hawking opium in Asia. Even Greater Boston consumes a grossly outsized while sermonizing in anticipation of his slice of the world’s resources and similarly New England voyage, Puritan leader John produces a disproportionate share of its Winthrop was contemplating the riches that pollutants. That the region’s residents (as a slavery in the West Indies would produce for whole) are able to do so is not unconnected his family. Later, in building the city and his to the fact that local actors have played key personal estate, Winthrop would rob both roles, politically, economically, and intel- land and labor from the region’s indigenous lectually, in giving rise and contributing to, people. and perpetrating, imperial violence against The hierarchy of humanity applied not distant lands and peoples. From the violent only to Native and African-origin peoples. annexation of much of what is today the Since the time of its founding, inequality US West as well as the Southwest (and its has been at Boston’s core. John Winthrop, “taking” from Mexico and the peoples liv- a member of England’s landed gentry, saw ing there) and the colonization of Hawaii in poverty and the need for the destitute to the 1800s to the brutal US wars against the submit to the powerful as part of God’s Philippines at the twentieth century’s dawn plan. He was similarly explicit about his dis- and Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, and the dain for democracy, calling it “the meanest present-day and seemingly boundless post- and worst of all forms of Government.” 9/11 wars, Greater Bostonians have been Responding to a shortage of arable land pivotal figures. in England as common holdings were being Boston has also been, since its establish- enclosed and privatized, Winthrop had ment, a place predicated on global trade, encouraged settlers to head for the Massa- and Greater Bostonians have been central chusetts Bay Colony by boasting of the rich

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availability of low-priced land. The vision and much of it done by individuals who lack of religious freedom was in fact less of a basic rights and many of the key protec- lure than the vision of profit, and, among tions of citizenship—a significant number the twenty-one thousand individuals who of them “undocumented”—provide many arrived in the 1630s, the Puritans were a of the goods and services consumed and minority. According to historian Nancy Isen- enjoyed by those at the upper end of the berg, “For every religious dissenter in the income hierarchy. exodus of the 1630s, there was one commer- That the top 5 percent of households in cially driven emigrant from London or other the City of Boston have incomes of at least areas of England.” The majority of settlers $266,000 provides insight into who resides arrived as extended families, and many of in its tony areas. These areas include old- them with servants in tow. While many of money neighborhoods such as the Back Bay the new elite “owned” enslaved people of and the new and gentrified high-end resi- Indian or African origin, they far more com- dences of the South End, as well as Down- monly used heavily exploited child laborers town’s Millennium Tower (where the small- and indentured servants (those forced into est apartments sell for just under $1 million servitude due to debt or for having been and the “grand penthouse” sold for $35 mil- convicted of a crime). lion in 2016). And then there is the Seaport, Slavery, child labor, and indentured Boston’s newest area, one that benefited servitude are, with occasional exceptions, from about $18 billion in public investment long gone in present-day Greater Boston. and that city planners pledged would be for Marked inequities and highly exploited all Bostonians. This key center of the city’s labor, however, persist. A 2016 report found “innovation economy” so celebrated by area that the City of Boston had the greatest elites is, instead, a playground for the afflu- income inequality among the one hundred ent. Households in the Seaport have (as of largest cities in the United States. Among 2017) the highest median income of any of metropolitan areas, Boston was the sixth Boston zip codes. It is also one of Boston’s most unequal, with the top 5 percent of least racially diverse areas, with a popula- households averaging $294,000 in annual tion that is 3 percent black, and 89 percent income, and the bottom 20 percent averag- white—this is in a city, with a population ing $28,000. A 2017 Boston Globe “Spotlight” of almost 700,000, where people of color series on race in the Greater Boston area constitute a slim majority. This is just one revealed a shocking statistic: the median net manifestation of a metropolitan area that is worth (meaning half are above, and half among the most racially segregated in the below) of African American (nonimmigrant) United States. households was $8. The corresponding What makes such stark socioeconomic figure for whites was $247,500. Immigrant inequality and residential segregation all labor, typically very poorly remunerated the more remarkable is that Boston, and

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the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as fueled by federal research funds and venture a whole, is dominated by the Democratic capital. Also key are the real estate and hos- Party. Author Thomas Frank calls Boston pitality sectors. “the real spiritual homeland of the liberal The outsized influence of these inter- class.” It is, he writes, “the city that virtually ests helps to explain the seemingly endless invented the blue-state economic model, in construction in recent decades of high-end which prosperity arises from higher educa- buildings in and around Boston’s down- tion and the knowledge-based industries town and significant gentrification, which that surround it.” These very strengths, he is wreaking havoc in many of the city’s opines, help explain why Boston and the neighborhoods, as well as in surrounding wealthy areas that surround it embody one municipalities. Waterfront development is of the country’s most unequal cities in one particularly intense—this in an area greatly of its most unequal states, one composed of threatened by climate change and, relat- many struggling, postindustrial municipali- edly, rising sea levels. A study in 2018 found ties marked by deep and pervasive poverty. that 22 percent of Boston’s housing stock In a state that purports to be progressive, its will be at risk of permanent inundation or income tax is a flat one, meaning the rich chronic flooding by 2050 if greenhouse gas and poor alike pay at the same rate. emissions continue to climb. In neighboring The dominant political-economic narra- Cambridge, the figure is 33 percent. Particu- tive is one that embraces meritocracy. The larly vulnerable are those who already live at convenient story (convenient for those on the region’s socioeconomic margins. the upper ends of the proverbial food chain) The focus on such matters speaks to our is built on the notion that Greater Boston’s taking a perspective on Greater Boston that successful and affluent deserve what they is explicitly one “from below,” a perspective have. The flip side is, of course, that the of “the people”—while appreciating that have-nots get their just rewards as well. In who constitutes “the people” is ever chang- other words, inequality is a result not of ing. A people’s perspective privileges the how society’s resources are organized and desires, hopes, and struggles of those on the allocated—of how political-economic power receiving end of unjust forms of power and functions—but of individual (and group) those who work to challenge such inequi- strengths, and failings. ties and to realize a Greater Boston, and the Central drivers of the model are “knowl- larger world of which it is part, that is radi- edge industries”—higher education (the City cally inclusive and democratic and that cen- of Boston alone has more than 150,000 college ters on social and environmental justice. It students, and the metropolitan area has eight- also privileges spatial justice by focusing on five private colleges and universities), hospitals the places “the people” inhabit, work, and and medical research, and high technology claim, and where their memories, hopes, (with much of it tied to US militarism)— visions, labor, and histories are embedded.

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Here we bring you to sites that have contributes to, the best of the implicit and been central to the lives of “the people” of explicit futures envisioned by the people’s Greater Boston over four centuries. You’ll dreamers, agitators, rebels, dissidents, orga- visit sites associated with the area’s indig- nizers, and movements—those of yesterday enous inhabitants and with the individuals and today. and movements who sought to abolish Trying to capture a place as diverse and slavery, to end war, challenge militarism, dynamic as Boston is highly challenging. We and bring about a more peaceful world, to thus want to make clear that our goal is not achieve racial equity, gender justice, and to be comprehensive. Given the constraints sexual liberation, and to secure the rights of of space and time as well as the limitations workers. We take you to some well-known of knowledge—both our own and what is sites, but more often to ones far off the available in published form—we have not beaten path of the Freedom Trail, to places included many important sites, cities, and in Boston’s outlying neighborhoods. We towns. Our modest goal is to paint a sug- also visit sites in other municipalities that gestive portrait of the greater urban area make up the Greater Boston region—from that highlights its long-contested nature. In Lawrence, Lowell, and Lynn to Concord and many ways, we merely scratch the region’s Plymouth. Our travels also include homes, surface—or many surfaces. because people’s struggles, activism, and In writing about Greater Boston as a organizing sometimes are born and unfold place, we run the risk of suggesting that in living rooms and kitchens. the city writ large has some sort of essence. A “people’s city” is a place not only of Indeed, the very notion of a particular place struggle, activism, and organizing. It is also assumes intrinsic characteristics and an asso- one of dreams, ones that envision a funda- ciated delimited space. After all, how can mentally different world. Insofar as powerful one distinguish one place from another if it forces and interests stymie the realization has no uniqueness and is not geographically of those dreams, they remain deferred. But differentiated? Nonetheless, we conceive of given the pronounced challenges, and even places as progressive, as geographer Doreen existential threats (at least for many people Massey insists, as flowing over the boundar- and species) faced by Greater Bostonians, ies of any particular space, time, or society; the area’s denizens no longer have (and of in other words, we see places as everchang- course never did) the benefit of an unlimited ing, as unbounded in that they shape and future. History’s debts, nature’s hard limits, are shaped by other places and forces from and the rift between nature and our politi- without, and as having multiple identities. In cal and economic institutions, practices, exploring 400 years of Greater Boston from and relationships necessitate a reckoning. many angles, we embrace this approach. For these reasons and more, we hope that That said, we have to reconcile this with this people’s project, is suggestive of, and the need to delimit Greater Boston—at

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least simply to be in a position to name it This book is about both the stopped and thus distinguish it from elsewhere. We frame and the continuous film of the place likewise also “freeze” the city and its many called Greater Boston—past, present, and sites at various points to be able to capture future—and many places within. May we all it in time, all while trying to keep in mind drink from them. that what we’re discussing has an ancestry and is helping to lay the foundation for what A NOTE TO THE READER is yet to come. As geographer Don Mitchell writes, “Place is the stopped frame in the This book has many entry points. We have continuous film of change.” organized it geographically, grouping our Place is also tightly tied to who we are, sites by neighborhoods (in the case of the how we live, and what we know—and do City of Boston), and we conclude the book not know. In his acclaimed book Wisdom Sits with a series of tours. Each neighborhood or in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape, municipality has a brief introduction and is Keith Basso asks a Western Apache elder by followed by a selection of site entries. the name of Dudley to define wisdom. Dud- For each entry, we provide (under “Get- ley responds by recounting what his grand- ting There”) directions via public transit. mother told him: “Wisdom sits in places. Typically, we also provide the walking dis- It’s like water that never dries up. You need tance from the closest MBTA (Massachusetts to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, Bay Transit Authority) station or bus stop, you also need to drink from places. You and the amount of time it would take an must remember everything about them. You average walker from that point to reach the must learn their names. You must remember destination. A map of the MBTA system is what happened at them long ago. You must available on page 287. think about it and keep on thinking about it. Within many entries, readers will come Then your mind will become smoother and across sites and municipalities that are in smoother. Then you will see danger before bold and italics; these are discussed else- it happens. You will walk a long way and live where in the book. a long time. You will be wise.”

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