East Boston, a neighborhood across the harbor from downtown, has the largest amount of made land (also called filled or reclaimed land) in the City of Boston.[1] Most of East Boston’s made land accommodates Logan International Airport, which has a fraught history with the neighborhood.[2] East Boston residents remember how the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) aggressively took neighborhood space by eminent domain for the airport’s expansion only a few decades ago. Massport bulldozed Neptune Road one morning in 1967 with almost no warning to the residents, and gradually removed the homes along the road up to the 1990s.[3] Many East Boston residents mourn Massport’s destruction of Neptune Road and the once-treasured Wood Island Park to this day.[4] However, the Wood Island Park area is more than a story of loss from twentieth-century urban development.
East Boston was originally comprised of five islands connected by acres of fluctuating tidal marshes and flats. The largest island, Noddle’s Island, contained hills connected by marshland that overflowed at high tide.[5] Tidal marshes frustrated Euro-American settlers in North America for centuries due to their ambiguous mix of land and water and despite the benefits of wetlands for ecosystem health, flood control, and water quality.[6] Since the nineteenth century, private corporations and state authorities attempted to “improve” the acres of tidal marsh on the southeastern edge of Noddle’s Island, hereafter referred to as “the Great Marsh.”[7] Landowners regulated the Great Marsh through street planning, landmaking, plumbing infrastructure, and the airport. The remaining fragments of the Great Marsh in East Boston serve as a reminder that settlement was not confined to the colonial period, but rather is a process that persists to this day.[8]
Nineteenth Century “Improvement”
Throughout much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, individuals visited Noddle’s Island to fish, and sparse tenant farmers lived on the land, but the island remained outside of the changes and development in Boston’s urban core.[9] By the early nineteenth century, businessmen identified Noddle’s Island as a potential connection between Boston and Salem.[10] In 1833, General William H. Sumner capitalized on the opportunity to profit from Noddle’s Island and established the East Boston Company as a land development corporation.[11] The Company divided Noddle’s Island into three sections and imposed an orthogonal street plan. The grid accommodated even and quantifiable lots, which allowed the company to easily use proceeds from sold lots to credit the fund from which stockholder dividends were paid.[12] The orthogonal plan required filling significant portions of the landscape, especially the tidal marshes. As Sumner explained in A History of East Boston, even if the planned streets intersected natural obstacles, “by making straight and wide streets … the money would be well spent because the lots would bring greater prices.”[13] The Company anticipated the necessity to even the terrain in their 1833 bylaws: “the directors shall cause such streets, ways, and passages to be made and maintained as they may deem needful, shall cause such marshland and flats to be filled up as they think requisite.”[14] From their foundation, filling and regulating marshland undergirded the Company’s goals to profit from the landscape.
The East Boston Company targeted the Great Marsh for improvement throughout the nineteenth century. The Company welcomed the Eastern Railroad’s tracks through the Great Marsh by 1835, and as Sumner described, “the railroad company [will] be furnished gratuitously with all the material necessary for filling up the marsh and wharf and making the road.”[15] However, the lots in the Great Marsh area, especially the area called “the Basin,” remained unsold. The Company attributed the lack of interest in the area to a limited fresh water supply, and after the city built a water system from Long Pond (Lake Cochiuate) in 1848, the Company invested in more improvements.[16] By the early 1850s, the Company built a seawall from West Wood Island to Maverick Street as an attempt to regulate the marsh and sell the lots.[17] The Company understood both infrastructure and land filling as necessities for improvement.[18] Reflecting upon the extension of fresh water supply to the Basin, the directors wrote in 1859 that the Wood Islands area “will form a very important portion of the Company’s property” and was “most eligibly situated” for “the facility of communication with the thickly settled parts of East Boston, which this improvement gives them.”[19] However, in the years leading up to the Civil War, the Company sold few lots and delayed further filling of the Great Marsh.[20]
After the Civil War, the City of Boston purchased the Wood Islands area from the East Boston Company and imposed a similar strategy for improvement. In 1876, the Parks Department expressed interest in the area for a public park in East Boston, but recognized that the site necessitated landscape alteration.[21] The officials noted that West Wood Island was “a bare, unimproved hill, used as a pasture, surrounded at its base by marsh and flats.”[22] By the 1880s, the city hired landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, well known for his design of Central Park in New York City and the Back Bay Fens in Boston, to design the Wood Island Park.[23] Olmsted described the site as attractive due to the “fine view down the harbor […] and in the sea-breezes by which it is swept in summer.”[24] Olmsted also proposed a parkway, Neptune Road, as a component of the pleasure ground, but the “south-west marshy ground” at the edge of the park necessitated filling to realize Olmsted’s plan for Neptune Road.[25] The city completed the filling for the Wood Island Park in the 1890s, after which the park had significant space for recreational facilities––including tennis courts and gymnasiums––and plantings to offer shade.[26] However, the city failed to entirely abate the encroaching salt water. In 1910, the Olmsted Brothers firm reported that the “shallow fill on [the] salt marsh” resulted in “salt on the surface of this ground [which] indicates that the drain valve is not working properly.”[27] Even though the city created a different type of space than the East Boston Company’s private lots, the city also contended with the Great Marsh’s blur between water and land.
Twentieth-Century Growth and Loss
In the twentieth century, Wood Island Park remained an island of improved land within stretches of the Great Marsh. Despite the East Boston Company’s maps and surveys that proposed streets and lots, the Company struggled to sell the undeveloped landscape. The Company attributed the lack of development to the city’s refusal to build sewage lines to the area, and after the city built plumbing infrastructure to Neptune Road by 1913, the area grew as a working class residential enclave.[28] From the 1920s to the 1940s, the homes along Neptune Road accommodated two families at each address, most of whom were immigrants from Italy, Portugal, England, and their descendants.[29] The wooden, three-story homes were in close proximity to one another, but many of the buildings had outdoor decks and bay windows, which facilitated access to light and air. Borrowing significantly from the benefits of triple-deckers, which were multiple-family homes that became increasingly popular for working-class residents in Boston in this period, the homes along Neptune Road were likely comfortable and especially desirable due to the close proximity to Wood Island Park.[30] The architectural types and density of homes on Neptune Road followed the patterns of development in other working-class districts and streetcar suburbs in Boston.[31] However, the enclave was distinct from the rest of the city as an island in a sea of undeveloped marshland. Not only did Neptune Road demonstrate that residential growth relied upon infrastructural improvements to the landscape, but the enclave also showcases that real estate companies and state authorities did not entirely settle the Great Marsh.
Despite the East Boston Company’s struggle to profit from the Great Marsh, a new infrastructure project replaced most of the tidal marsh landscape in the postwar period. By the 1920s and 1930s, the city, state, and Chamber of Commerce invested in an airport northeast of Jeffries Point.[32] Building from gradual growth in the 1940s and 1950s, Massport took Neptune Road and Wood Island Park (also called World War Memorial Park after World War I) by eminent domain to further expand the airport in the 1960s.[33] East Boston residents expressed significant outrage, and the loss of the Neptune Road residential enclave and Wood Island Park charged activism in the 1970s onwards to hinder further airport expansion.[34] Despite the more cautious approach to expansion since the loss of Wood Island Park, Massport continues to own the remaining fragments of the Great Marsh, and renamed the area the “Wood Island Bay Marsh Urban Wild.” In the late 1990s, neighborhood partners worked with the Boston Natural Areas Network to convert the rail corridor between Constitution Beach and Jeffries Point into a greenway, and the first draft of plans included pedestrian access to the Wood Island Bay Marsh area.[35] However, Massport limited the greenway’s access to the area, and solidified their restrictions after 9/11 increased security at Logan Airport.[36] Many stakeholders continuously expressed frustration that access to the Wood Island Bay Marsh area was not an initial component of the greenway’s plan, so by 2014, Massport opened an overlook of the marsh to the greenway.[37] The small overlook invites visitors to learn about the flora and fauna hidden in the cordgrass, but the plethora of signs posted on lampposts remind visitors that the area is under surveillance. Even as a fragment, the Great Marsh is still carefully regulated.[38]
Ongoing Settlement
The history of the Great Marsh exemplifies centuries of efforts to regulate and control the ambiguous space between land and sea. Indeed, planners today have not forgotten about the troubles that tidal marshes pose to dry land. The City of Boston recently developed the Climate Ready Boston plan, which proposes floodwalls and other strategies to mitigate the impacts of climate change, particularly sea level rise. In 2022, the city planners proposed a raised berm at the edge of the Wood Island marsh area “to prevent the coastline from being overtopped during storms.”[39] The Great Marsh serves as a potent reminder that “settlement” was and is an ongoing process. Landmaking, plumbing, airports, and, arguably, climate resiliency planning, in effect regulated and solidified the Great Marsh for residential or infrastructural settlement. The remaining fragment of the Great Marsh may be forgotten or overlooked, but its persistence in the current Wood Island Marsh Bay area reminds us that landscapes were not only consistently made and remade over centuries, but also continue to rely on the clear delineation between land and water to this day.
Plans, Maps, and Images of East Boston
Slideshow
A map of Boston, Massachusetts with three colors that denotes the original and filled land since 1630. The legend describes that the red color indicates Boston in 1630, the tan color indicates land added to the original land between 1630 – 1880, and the blue color indicates land made after 1880. Chan Krieger & Associates. “Boston Over Time.” Map. 2008. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:q524n559t 
The 1801 survey indicates that before the East Boston Company’s improvements, Noddle’s Island was mostly composed of upland hills connected by stretches of marsh, especially the “Great Marsh” between the Wood Islands and Camp Hill. Taylor, William. “A plan of a survey of Noddle’s Island.” Map. Boston, Mass: J.H. Bradford’s Lith., 1801. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:9s161f35s 
The first orthogonal plan of Noddle’s Boston by the East Boston Company divided the island into sections, and denoted the lots for sale within the grid. “Plan of sections of 1, 2 & 3, East Boston.” Map. Boston, Mass: Pendleton’s Lith., [1833]. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:9s161f37b 
The 1844 plan of Noddle’s Island proposes Section 4 and 5, but also exemplifies that the proposed streets on the eastern edge of the island remain only a plan across the Great Marsh. The plan also labels “the basin,” which would be solidified by a seawall by the 1850s. Eddy, R. H. (Robert Henry). “Plan of East Boston.” Map. Boston, Mass: Bouvé Lith., 1844. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:9s161f337 
The image of the Wood Island Park demonstrates how the space incorporated recreational facilities and intentional plantings as a method to “settle” the space for use. “Gymnasium and running track, Wood Island Park, East Boston, Mass.” Photograph. N.d. Historic New England, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/197484 
The photograph shows Wood Island Park in the foreground, and Neptune Road’s residential enclave by the 1920s. On the lefthand side, stretches of the marsh remain as graded streets, but do not have residencies constructed. Fairchild Aerial Surveys, inc. “Boston. East Boston. Wood Island Park.” Photograph. 1925. Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/8k71nx83x 
This photograph shows Neptune Road’s rows of three story wooden homes, and the pathway to Wood Island Park. “Wood Island.” Photograph, 5 x 4 inches. Historic New England. 1923. Historic New England, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/273331 
This photograph demonstrates that the three-story wooden homes had outdoor deck space on each story, and many had bay windows on the longer elevation. Both of these architectural design features facilitated light and air access for the tenants, which likely created a comfortable living experience along Neptune Road. “27 Neptune Rd., East Boston, Mass.” Photograph. 1949. Historic New England, https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/gusn/197579 
This 1955 aerial photograph demonstrates Logan Airport’s growth by the 1950s. In the upper left hand corner, the photograph demonstrates the airport’s close proximity to Wood Island Park. “1950s Historical Aerial Photographs,” Aerial Archives Aerial and Satellite Imagery, https://aerialarchives.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/1950s-Historical-Aerial-Photographs/G0000q_nllychCZg/I0000Jlp1tD.vYV0 
The sign at the Wood Island Bay Marsh Urban Wild orients the viewer to the flora and fauna within the cordgrass, as well as the islands visible across the harbor. However, this is the only informational signage in the entire small overlook. Author’s photo, 2024. 
The photograph demonstrates the path to the small overlook at the Wood Island Bay Marsh Urban Wild. The lamp post on the lefthand side includes a sign that reminds visitors that the area is under surveillance, and many similar signs are posted throughout this small overlook. Author’s photo, 2024. 
The figure in Climate Ready Boston’s recommended plans for climate resilience recommend a raised berm between the dry land and the Wood Island Bay Marsh Urban Wild, which demonstrates planners’ discomfort with tidal marshes to this day, especially in the face of sea level rise. Coastal Resilience Solutions For East Boston And Charlestown (Phase II): Final Report (Boston: 2022), 145.
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[1] Nancy Seasholes’ book documents the made land throughout the city of Boston, and devotes one chapter to East Boston. Nancy Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 355 – 384. For further reading about the history of landmaking in Boston, see Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 179 – 232.
[2] Many dissertations and theses discuss the history of Logan Airport and the impact on East Boston, including Molly Patricia Copeland, “Changes in Place: Urban Renewal, Loss, and the Memory of Greenspace and Community in the East Boston Greenway Council Oral Histories,” (Master’s Thesis, Simmons University, 2022); Saritha Ramakrishna, “Land, Sea, and Sky: Environmental Histories and Planning Conflicts in East Boston” (Master’s Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019). Marian Scott Moffett’s thesis discusses a broader context, especially the East Boston Company. Marian Scott Moffett, “The Physical Development of East Boston” (Master’s Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1971).
[3] Seasholes, Gaining Ground, 380; Dorothy Nelkin, Jetport: The Boston Airport Controversy (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974), 82; Andrew Blake, “Final chapter in the taking of Neptune Road,” Boston Globe, 27 April 1997: WKC, 1:2.
[4] Jeremy Siegel, “How Logan Airport almost destroyed East Boston — and how East Boston is still fighting back, GBH News, December 13, 2022.
[5] Noddle’s Island originally contained 663 acres of land and about 1200 acres of tidal flats. Annual Report to the Stockholders of the East Boston Company, May 7th 1860 (Boston: J.H. Eastburn’s Press, 1860), 3.
[6] Anne Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands (Washington DC: Island Press, 1997), 5.
[7] By the eighteenth century, improvement was a way to denote investment in the land, and often served as a way to explain profitable operations and changes to property. Throughout the essay, I use the word “improve” in this way, with or without quotations, to borrow the language of the time. In my use of the word in the twentieth century, I emphasize my argument that regulation of tidal marshes expended from this period and changed in this sense. Ted Steinberg, Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 59.
[8] When I use the word settlement, I mean regulation of the land as property upon which many American laws and regulations were built. This inherently linked to an Anglo-American understanding of the land as owned by individuals. Even when city and state authorities purchased and land and no longer stewarded it for real estate sale in the way that the East Boston Company did, these tenants of ownership, maintenance, and regulation from the colonial settler understanding of land remained. Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape, 5. For further reading about the different conceptions of the landscape between colonists and Indigenous people in Massachusetts, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land, Revised Edition: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1983) and Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[9] Seasholes, Gaining Ground, 356.
[10] William H. Sumner, A History of East Boston; with Biographical Sketches of its Early Proprietors and an Appendix (Boston: J.E. Tilton and Company: 1858), 425.
[11] Sumner, A History of East Boston, 426.
[12] Annual Report to the Stockholders of the East Boston Company, May 7th 1860 (Boston: J.H. Eastburn’s Press, 1860), 3; Sumner, A History of East Boston, 452.
[13] Sumner, A History of East Boston, 461.
[14] Bylaws of the East Boston Company, Incorporated March 1833 (Boston: Eastburn’s Press, 1847), 10-11.
[15] Sumner, A History of East Boston, 613.
[16] Annual Report to the Stockholders of the East Boston Company, May 3rd 1858 (Boston: J.H. Eastburn’s Press, 1858), 9. For further reading about Boston’s water supply in the nineteenth century, see Rawson, Eden on the Charles, 75 – 128.
[17] Sumner, A History of East Boston, 466; Seasholes, Gaining Ground, 358.
[18] In her comprehensive book about Boston’s expansion, Nancy Seasholes explains that “landmaking” is the term typically used by archeologists, and it is more technically accurate because the process of expanding the shoreline involves making more land. Seasholes also states that the term can be misleading because the developers and builders were not filling in land that already existed, but instead, they were literally making more land. Throughout this essay, I use “landmaking” and “land filling” interchangeably as well. Seasholes, Gaining Ground, 2.
[19] Annual Report to the Stockholders of the East Boston Company, May 2, 1859 (Boston: J.H. Eastburn’s Press, 1859), 12.
[20] Annual Report to the Stockholders of the East Boston Company, May 6 1861 (Boston: J.H. Eastburn’s Press, 1861), 3.
[21] The Parks Commission explained that the park would advance “the health of the population then living in their vicinity.” City Document No. 42: Second Report to the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks for the City of Boston, 1876 (Boston, 1876), 5.
[22] City Document No. 42: Second Report to the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks for the City of Boston, 1876 (Boston, 1876), 26.
[23] Olmsted’s landscape plans included the Back Bay Fens, which was a major land reclamation project as well as a sanitary improvement project. For further reading on Olmsted and his work in Boston, see Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
[24] City Document 7: City of Boston Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks for the City of Boston for the Year 1884 (Boston: 1885), 21.
[25] City Document 7: City of Boston Tenth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks for the City of Boston for the Year 1884 (Boston: 1885), 21.
[26] City Document No. 26: Annual Report of the Department of Parks for the Year 1891 (Boston: 1892), 24.
[27] City Of Boston Department of Parks Thirty-Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners for the Year Ending January 31, 1911, “Report of Olmsted Brothers” (Boston: Parks Department, 1911), 90; Seasholes, Gaining Ground, 366.
[28] Seasholes, Gaining Ground, 366.
[29] U.S. Census Bureau, 1920 United States Federal Census, Suffolk County, Boston Ward 1, District 0016, database with Images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/6061/images/4311553-00395?ssrc=&backlabel=Return); U.S. Census Bureau, 1930 United States Federal Census, Suffolk County, Boston, District 0007, database with Images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/6224/images/4607677_00889?ssrc=&backlabel=Return); U.S. Census Bureau, 1940 United States Federal Census, Suffolk County, Boston, 15-12, database with Images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/2442/images/m-t0627-01657-00349?ssrc=&backlabel=Return).
[30] For further reading about the history of triple-deckers in Boston, see James O;Connell, The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 69-88. Douglass Shand-Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb 1800 – 2000 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 101-132. See also: Boston Society for Architecture, “Past Present, and Future Decker.” Accessed September 16, 2024.
[31] Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962), 15.
[32] Seasholes, Gaining Ground, 375 – 378.
[33] Seasholes, Gaining Ground, 377.
[34] The Mary Ellen Welch papers at the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections have countess newspaper articles collected by East Boston activists, and many newspapers captured how protests connected “MPA go away” with “Wood Island Park is Gone.” Newspapers in Folder 6 particularly capture this sentiment about the loss of Wood Island Park. Activism, Development, Modernization, Noise Pollution, ca. 1966-2011, Folder 6, Box 1. Mary Ellen Welch papers, M198. Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
[35] Peter F. Jackson, East Boston Greenway Stewardship Plan (Boston, 2005), 1. East Boston Greenway Stewardship Plan, 1998-2005, Box: 1. Mary Ellen Welch papers, M198. Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
[36] Jackson, East Boston Greenway Stewardship Plan, 14.
[37] City of Boston Open Space & Recreation Plan 2015–2021, Section 7.2.6: East Boston (Boston: 2021), 224; “A greenway in East Boston,” Boston Globe, 2 December 1998: A22.
[38] Despite the small overlook, some state conservation departments continue to express concern about Massport’s stewardship of the space. The City of Boston wrote in the Open Space Plan 2015-2021 that “Other state agencies whose mission is not natural resource protection have urban wilds under their jurisdiction, and therefore these wilds are not protected from public improvements, development, or encroachment. This includes the Massport’s Wood Island Bay Marsh in East Boston.” City of Boston Open Space & Recreation Plan 2015–2021, Section 7.1.3: Urban Wilds & Natural Areas (Boston: 2021), 4.
[39] Coastal Resilience Solutions For East Boston And Charlestown (Phase II): Final Report (Boston: 2022), 145.
*Cover Image: Photo by the author.
[Cover Image description: A tidal marsh, with trees and other green vegetation in the foreground and a distant airport in the background.]
Edited by Morgan P. Vickers; reviewed by Evelyn Ramiel.