Before Displacement

How Can we observe a city's changes over time?

This is the question that two semesters of students in Prof. Amy Finstein's course, Making the Modern City, sought to answer about a specific area of Boston, Massachusetts. The land in question is currently filled by the Rose Kennedy Greenway – a linear park that runs south-north across the city atop a tunneled 10-lane highway. This green ribbon obscures two episodes of major change along its same path: the construction of an elevated highway (the Central Artery) from 1951-59; and its subsequent removal and replacement thanks to Boston’s “Big Dig,” from 1991-2007. The Greenway serves as a “green scar” that lets us see where these events unfolded. It also provokes a related question: who and what occupied this land before?

Relying on digitized records about Boston history from local libraries and archives, students investigated the history of specific parcels of land that later hosted the Central Artery and its attendant on-ramps. The scope of research followed primary source evidence, yielding a wide variety of stories about the people, businesses, buildings, and landscapes that previously filled this corridor. A first class of students undertook their research in the Spring 2021 semester; and in Fall 2022, a second cohort of students researched an additional set of parcels. This website features the findings of both groups, organized first by cohort, and then by neighborhood groups. The map and links below will introduce you to their parcels. Come explore what happened before displacement!

Partners

This project benefitted from the resources and expertise of the Boston Public Library's Leventhal Map & Education Center, and particularly its Atlascope tool, which students used for foundational research to understand their parcels of land. We also are grateful to the College of the Holy Cross' ITS Department, Dinand Library Research Librarians, and Center for Writing, who provided essential guidance and support in the development and execution of this project.