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Before its transformation into buildable land by a 19th-century filling project, the Back Bay was a bay, west of the Shawmut Peninsula (on the far side from Boston Harbor) between Boston and Cambridge, the Charles River entering from the west.
This map by Benjamin Dearborn (1754-1838) is a proposal to construct what he called "Perpetual Tide Mills" across the Back Bay and South Bay in Boston. The plan details water and marshland as well as streets and roads of Boston, Roxbury, Brookline, Charlestown, Cambridge, Brighton, and Dorchester.
The first chapter in the filling of Back Bay was the filling of a strip along the eastern section of the bay starting in 1804, and the creation of the Public Gardens and a section of Beacon Hill (along the river) in 1837.
19 lip 2015 · Map of the Back Bay showing current streets, the 1630 shoreline, the Mill Dam and Cross Dam, and the Full Basin and Receiving Basin; provided by MapWorks, as published in Boston’s Back Bay by William A. Newman and Wilfred E. Holton, p. viii (map copyright MapWorks 2005).
THE PLAN OF THE BACK BAY AREA IN BOSTON BAINBRIDGE BUNTING THE BACK BAY district, Boston's well-known residential area, represents a significant chapter in the history of city planning in nineteenth-century America.1 The importance of this development lies in its spacious and monumental plan, the comprehensive building regulations which in-
However the most radical land-fill operation carried out in Boston was that of the Back Bay, which symbolized “Boston’s wealth and optimism in the late 1850’s and the pride and ambition of her civic leaders.” The Back Bay had been dammed in 1821, and crossed by railroad causeways shortly thereafter.
Following the map is a list of the 142 buildings constructed between 1865 and 1869 in the residential portion of the Back Bay. Original construction through 1869. Click here for a link to maps showing the progress of construction from 1855 through 2015, in slideshow format.
