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I have a really stupid question.

What was on the sites of the Bayside Expo Center/JFK/UMass before they were built? Both immediately prior and historically. Was it built on fill? Was it open land? An industrial area? Or was there once a neighborhood there?
 
Both were pretty much just fill. The only sewage pump/outflow station was at the top of Columbia Point where this brick building now is. Bayside was largely also dead fill, though there was a strange gridded pattern (storage area? not a parking lot) on it in the 50s.
 
statler said:
I have a really stupid question.

What was on the sites of the Bayside Expo Center/JFK/UMass before they were built? Both immediately prior and historically. Was it built on fill? Was it open land? An industrial area? Or was there once a neighborhood there?
Click to expand...

Yeah i think mostly fill - i think it was actually referred to as cow pasture at one point?
 
statler said:
I have a really stupid question.

What was on the sites of the Bayside Expo Center/JFK/UMass before they were built? Both immediately prior and historically. Was it built on fill? Was it open land? An industrial area? Or was there once a neighborhood there?
Click to expand...

It was mostly marsh and cow pasture used by residents of Dorchester before it was completely filled in.

Interestingly enough, the period of time when it most probably resembled a neighborhood was during WWII when Camp McKay existed.

During World War II there was a prisoner of war camp near Carson Beach for Italian prisoners of war by the name of Camp McKay. The prisoners were allowed out on liberty from time to time, and many of them went to the North End, where some of them settled after the war. Joe McNamara remembers: My memory of Camp McKay has to do with Sundays at the beach in the mid 40's. There were lots of visitors on Sunday and they would bring the prisoners gifts of food and items of clothing that were passed through or over the fence. The guards didn't seem to care and I don't recall anyone being shooed away from the enclosure. Many visitors were from the North End and Italian was the predominant language spoken. The prisoners were also allowed to have and tend to fairly large gardens and lots of tomatoes were passed out to those visiting or those just curious.
Click to expand...
http://www.dorchesteratheneum.org/page.php?id=1448

2222-Camp-McKay.jpg
 
Columbia Point was a cow pasture for most of the 18th and 19th centuries, then the city garbage dump for about 50 years. The dump landfill was capped during the mid-Depression as part of the same Works Progress Admin. project that landfilled the Day Blvd. area for development.

The grid pattern thingy that lasted until the 50's was an overflow P.O.W. camp during WWII (for real)...then converted into military barracks used through the Korean War. Military use was phased out when B.C. High and the first housing projects were built there early-50's couple years prior to the SE Expressway's construction.


Yeah...it was 2 centuries of pretty much nothing until the dawn of modern/BRA-led urban renewal era in town.
 
A Decent Place to Live by Jane Roessner is a good history of Columbia/Harbor Point if anyone's interested. It mostly covers the history of the housing development, but there's a bit of history about what was there prior as well. The discussion of Columbia into Harbor as a sort of ongoing "housing experiment" is pretty interesting for those of us into the minutia of housing policy.
 
Speaking of City Hall, ablarc once posted an impassioned defense of New City Hall, but now I can't find it. If anyone knows what forum it might be in or may even have a copy of it, please let me know.
 
^ "Previously, only the passive melting of Antarctic ice by warmer air and seawater was considered but the new work added active processes, such as the disintegration of huge ice cliffs."

What's amazing is that there was ever an assumption that the ice would only melt in place like an ice cube in a cup of water, and not also flow, crack and crumble like a pile of snow on top of a storm drain.

Note also that the entire Northeast US is expected to have above-average rate of sea level rise because of changes in the Gulf Stream.

Time to build the harbor barrier - and with a set of locks, not just a storm surge gate.
 
Don't worry. Westie will be in shortly to tell us why this is all nonsense and nothing needs to change. (Actually I'm pretty sure he doesn't read the General thread too often, if at all)
 
That article should probably go in the climate change thread, but Whigh reads that one... so we'll have to decide if its worth it.

Edit: I just checked and Whigh has actually never posted directly in this thread. Only 1 of his comments are in this thread and it was moved from a different thread (BCEC expansion) into here.
 
on the sea level topic - heads up that there's another 'king tide' coming next Friday and Saturday (12.5 ft. tide, as high as the one last October), and this is what the weather forecast looks like at the peak of the tide:

gfs_mslp_pcpn_frzn_us_32.png
 
CSTH said:
on the sea level topic - heads up that there's another 'king tide' coming next Friday and Saturday (12.5 ft. tide, as high as the one last October), and this is what the weather forecast looks like at the peak of the tide:
Click to expand...

Winds will be coming from the south-southwest, given the position of that low pressure system. I would expect minor flooding in the city- something akin to the submersion of long wharf, which we've seen a few times in the last few years. Wind will be working against the tide.

(Source: I'm a weather nut)
 
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