Why is Dartmouth St so wide?

vanshnookenraggen

vanshnookenraggen

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This is random but I remember when they were filling in the plaza in front of the BPL and I just realized that the building line from St James Ave to Beacon St on the south side of the street is set back like they filled in half the street with an extended sidewalk.

Does anyone know what the deal is with this?

Check out what I mean http://goo.gl/maps/QThA7
 
Because there was supposed to be another bridge across the Charles at Dartmouth Street. Botolph's Island was also to be created in the middle of the Charles River Basin at this point as a continuation of the Back Bay landfill development. The explosive growth of the suburbs with the advent of the automobile, Mayor Curley's identity politics scaring all the money out of the city, World War I, and to a lesser extent the Great Depression, of course rained on this parade.

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But that plan was an after through well after the Back Bay was laid out. I have seen ideas for a bridge there but nothing exact.
 
Inventing the Charles River by Karl Haglund I believe had the details about the various bridge schemes which never materialized. Darmouth Street had to be sufficiently wide ( 2 lanes each way) to carry as much traffic as the eventual Cambridge (Longfellow) and West Chester Park (Harvard) bridges.
 
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If I get what you're trying to say... it appears as though there was a wide sidewalk which is now essentially a left-turn-only onto Huntington? Is this where you're talking about?
 
BostonUrbEx said:
If I get what you're trying to say... it appears as though there was a wide sidewalk which is now essentially a left-turn-only onto Huntington? Is this where you're talking about?
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Yes but you can see the lot line continue north to Beacon St.
 
Ohh! I gotchya.

Well, I took a look at Historic Aerials and the 1955 imagery shows Dartmouth being a two-way street. It appears the southbound lanes were converted to sidewalk.

Interesting.
 
Lurker said:
Because there was supposed to be another bridge across the Charles at Dartmouth Street. Botolph's Island was also to be created in the middle of the Charles River Basin at this point as a continuation of the Back Bay landfill development. The explosive growth of the suburbs with the advent of the automobile, Mayor Curley's identity politics scaring all the money out of the city, World War I, and to a lesser extent the Great Depression, of course rained on this parade.
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You've got your timeline scrambled. The Back Bay was already filled in, streets laid out, and houses built by the time this plan was drawn. There wasn't 'supposed' to be an island in the middle of the Charles. Two architects came up with the same kind of plan between about 1896 and 1906. They were proposals by private citizens with an interest in grand landbuilding/landscaping projects - nothing more. And it was Beacon Hill residents who wanted no part of it. Curley probably would have favored it just to tweak them, if it was a serious proposal.

Not long after this proposal was made, we had the First World War, the Depression, and WW II. And the days of filling Boston's waterfront were over. The city's economy had been in decline since the mid-late 19th century, and there was no money to spend on such grand vanity projects, Curley or no.
 
Island or not, Dartmouth St was always supposed to be the location of a bridge, hence the width. They apparently scrapped the plan because it would have been redundant on the Cambridge side and marred the "water park of unrivaled beauty, which is at once the envy and the pride of every other city in the United States." Its a shame they scrapped the plans too, it would be really helpful today.

Here's the city planning board talking about it.

Edit, here is another book from 1928, but I can't find it anywhere.
 
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That city planning board book is interesting. Seems like every other topic is a proposal for street widening. And they are very proud of their system of one-way streets because it "reduces confusion." Sigh.
 
I've always thought it is so odd how few river crossings we have compared to other cities like London or Paris, for example. Granted, that area is the widest part of the Charles, but still not like we're talking about bridging the Bosphorus. I wonder how different things would have turned out if Boston and Cambridge were united as one municipality.
 
^ It's a fun counterfactual. Boston, unlike many other cities, didn't succeed in gobbling up the whole surrounding metro-area into it's municipal city-limits. This concept is GREATLY confusing to many non-New Englanders who visit/move here and just assume that Cambridge/Somerville/Brookline etc are neighborhoods of Boston. It still boggles my mind that West Roxbury and Hyde Park, which are solidly suburban neighborhoods are part of Boston, while the solidly Inner Suburban/Urban Residential neighborhoods in Cambridge and Somerville aren't. Boston's old southern suburbs were much more eager to gain city services via annexation than Brookline, or those cities across the river or harbor.

Vagrancies of local political development I guess. I'm sure we have a local historian or two on this board who could tell us exactly why it developed the way it did.
 
A lot of it had to do with water, actually. Towns with their own water supplies were able to resist annexation. Needham was actually nearly annexed but because its water source was the Charles it managed to resist the lure.

Wealth probably played a role, too - there's a reason Brookline was an exception to the rule.

In other cities that have amalgamated (New York, Toronto) there were waves of previous amalgamations as well. For example, Brooklyn and Queens used to be compendia of different towns, gradually brought under central control. So NYC didn't need to annex Williamsburg, Gravesend, etc. separately, potentially leaving a patchwork; it only had to fuse with Brooklyn.

I don't think Boston's situation is so unique, really. There are independent towns and cities completely surrounded by Detroit, LA, and Montreal in ways that are similarly confusing and confounding for out of towners - if not more so - than the situation with Cambridge or Brookline. Until fairly recently, London didn't have a real all-city government and the various boroughs were virtually independent fiefdoms. And Sydney still faces the problem - the actual City of Sydney only has 40,000 people; everything else that makes up what most people think is Australia's largest city is really an independent suburb. (Because this is so common in Australia, non-downtown neighborhoods there tend just to be referred to as "suburbs".)
 
If the Cambridge side had developed into a Back Bay-style neighborhood, as originally envisioned, I bet the Dartmouth Street bridge would have been built. Instead it stagnated for a few decades, then became MIT.
 
davem said:
Island or not, Dartmouth St was always supposed to be the location of a bridge, hence the width. They apparently scrapped the plan because it would have been redundant on the Cambridge side and marred the "water park of unrivaled beauty, which is at once the envy and the pride of every other city in the United States." Its a shame they scrapped the plans too, it would be really helpful today.

Here's the city planning board talking about it.

Edit, here is another book from 1928, but I can't find it anywhere.
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1922 is hardly 'always.' A little historical context. For over 200 years, 'Boston' was that land north of today's Arlington street. Beyond there was the Back Bay and South Cove. There were two bridges, one to Lechmere Point, and one running towards Cambridge center, which was in the Harvard Square area. Any other bridge to Cambridge would make no sense.

Well after the Back Bay had been filled in, the possibility of another bridge was floated. The third bridge made no sense until Cambridge had filled in its Charles river wetlands, which extended in to Brookline st (Central square). When Cambridge finally did fill in its shoreline, then there was a reason for a bridge - primarily for Cambridge. For Boston, there was little advantage. Boston was eventually convinced when the Boston & Albany railroad tracks were dealt with as part of the bargain.

By the time of the 1922 discussion linked to above, MIT was across the river, and there was no main road on the Cambridge side to connect to. All in all, it just wasn't a very good idea. Running the bridge from West Chester Park/Mass ave. put through traffic at the very edge of the Back Bay residential district. A similar road/bridge connection at Dartmouth would have pulled through traffic into the heart of the residential district - hardly an attraction for residents.

Both West Chester and Dartmouth sts were planed with grass islands. I suspect that was simply to break up the grid, and had nothing to do with bridges. If you look at a map, you'll see that a bridge running straight from Dartmouth street would have reached Cambridge exactly where the Cambridge street bridge already did. It's hard to imagine that was the intention of those who drew Dartmouth st. with the island running down its length.
 
JonFrum said:
1922 is hardly 'always.' A little historical context. For over 200 years, 'Boston' was that land north of today's Arlington street. Beyond there was the Back Bay and South Cove. There were two bridges, one to Lechmere Point, and one running towards Cambridge center, which was in the Harvard Square area. Any other bridge to Cambridge would make no sense.

Well after the Back Bay had been filled in, the possibility of another bridge was floated. The third bridge made no sense until Cambridge had filled in its Charles river wetlands, which extended in to Brookline st (Central square). When Cambridge finally did fill in its shoreline, then there was a reason for a bridge - primarily for Cambridge. For Boston, there was little advantage. Boston was eventually convinced when the Boston & Albany railroad tracks were dealt with as part of the bargain.

By the time of the 1922 discussion linked to above, MIT was across the river, and there was no main road on the Cambridge side to connect to. All in all, it just wasn't a very good idea. Running the bridge from West Chester Park/Mass ave. put through traffic at the very edge of the Back Bay residential district. A similar road/bridge connection at Dartmouth would have pulled through traffic into the heart of the residential district - hardly an attraction for residents.

Both West Chester and Dartmouth sts were planed with grass islands. I suspect that was simply to break up the grid, and had nothing to do with bridges. If you look at a map, you'll see that a bridge running straight from Dartmouth street would have reached Cambridge exactly where the Cambridge street bridge already did. It's hard to imagine that was the intention of those who drew Dartmouth st. with the island running down its length.
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A little historical context: I've spent the last six years of my life academically studying the back bay.

1922 was the first online reference I could easily link to as a citation for evidence of the bridges planning. The width of Dartmouth Street is directly attributed to the idea of a bridge in that location.

Having the bridge land in the same location as what we now know as the Longfellow makes a lot of scene if you look at the development of Cambridge at the time the Back Bay was being filled. The area around Kendall Square was already somewhat built out due to the access to Boston as well as the intersection of Main, Third and Broadway. By contrast, the area where the West Chester Park bridge would have landed was still a tidal swamp, all the way up to the south end of Central Square, as you mention. Draw a line on a map, it is a straight shot on Dartmouth into the heart of Kendall.

Traffic across the bridge and onto Cambridge St in Boston was already bad at this point, I imagine the new bridge was planned as a relief valve, as well as a way to add to the prestige of the new Back Bay; Copley Square would be the receiver of one of three Charles River crossings (I'm not counting the bridges further up, basically the boonies at this point). Having important things happening in the Back Bay was important at the time, it is no accident that so many schools, museums and churches moved there as the bay was being filled: they were lured there by the city to entice developers to build luxury housing befitting the new neighborhood they were attempting to create.

The civil war really set back the back bay being filled in. Then the panic of 1873 and a whole slew of other recessions and minor wars. Just as the filling and building was finally wrapping up, WWI hit. By the time the Dartmouth Street bridge plans were dusted off in the 20s, the esplanade had already been built out, Cambridge Street had been widened to accommodate the traffic coming over from Cambridge, and the idea for a unified "Massachusetts Avenue" began to take hold.

So yes, there was always a plan for a bridge at Dartmouth Street. Evidence, citations aside, exist in the continuity of the street though the South End, its width in the Back Bay, its connectivity in Copley Square, and its direct alignment to the intersection of the three major streets in Cambridge.
 
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