Alex Krieger and Matthew Kiefer’s useful article, “Boston’s new gilded age” (Ideas, Dec. 22), overlooked a critical catalyst of Boston’s mid- and late-19th-century dynamic expansion, which was accomplished through both extensive land filling and successive annexations. That catalyst was Boston’s first public water supply, the 15-mile-long Cochituate Aqueduct, in 1848, and its network of iron pipes that reached every lot in the expanding city, not just those of wealthy subscribers. Without Cochituate water, the residential Back Bay, that embodiment of Boston’s golden age, would not have been habitable.
Boston’s plentiful water supply continued expanding throughout the period, first with the larger Chestnut Hill Reservoir in 1870 and Sudbury Aqueduct in 1878, then steam pumping to higher elevations in 1888, and finally Lake Wachusett, which upon its 1906 completion was the world’s largest drinking water reservoir.
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Prominent in the 1877 bird’s eye view of Boston, which accompanied the article, are two of the Cochituate system’s most dramatic monuments. Quite visible on the Common is the 1848 Cochituate fountain, rising from nozzles in the Frog Pond. It operated, with different dramatic patterns of multiple jets, throughout the city’s golden age — and survives, much reduced, as today’s Frog Pond spray fountain. Also visible behind the State House is the massive 1849 Beacon Hill Reservoir, which survived only until the introduction of steam pumping in the 1880s.
Dennis De Witt
Brookline
The writer is a director and past president of the Waterworks Museum in Boston.
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December 29, 2019 at 12:04PM
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Key catalyst of Boston’s golden age: a public water supply - The Boston Globe
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