Island Studies Journal, Ahead of print “Minutes away, worlds apart”: The changing imagination of the Boston Harbor Islands Pavla Šimková Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich
[email protected] Abstract: The Boston Harbor Islands are a historically urban archipelago. Since its founding in 1630, the city of Boston has embedded them firmly in its urban infrastructure. The islands have served as sources of wood and building stone, common pastures, sites of harbor defenses and lighthouses, and as ‘dumping grounds’ for materials, businesses, and institutions undesirable in the city proper. In the middle third of the twentieth century, however, Bostonians imagined their city’s harbor islands in a new way: one that has obscured most of their long human history and has cast them in the role of a natural landscape fundamentally different from the city. This changing perception resulted in the islands recently becoming places reserved almost exclusively for conservation and recreation. This article explores the way in which a certain kind of island narrative that frames islands as isolated, extraordinary places of mystery and adventure came to dominate the imagination of Boston’s previously mundane urban islands. Keywords: Boston, Boston Harbor Islands, island history, island imagination, urban islands, urban archipelago. https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.169 • Received February 2021, accepted July 2021 © Island Studies Journal, 2021 Introduction “Calling all explorers,” a video advertisement for the Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park, begins, “all Alices in search of Wonderland, all Maxes seeking the Land of the Wild Things” (Bostonharborislands, 2012). From a bird’s eye view of Boston’s skyscrapers, the screen switches abruptly to a treasure map: suddenly the scene is not downtown Boston, but Treasure Island.