What Lies Beneath

Abstract

The importance of good harbors to nineteenth-century cities cannot be overestimated. Many cities would not exist in their current forms—and might not exist at all—without access to the calm anchorage and deep ship channels embedded in their harbors. Yet urban and environmental historians have yet to study how the efforts to manage these complex natural systems shaped urban development. This article explores how a particular scientific theory used by nineteenth-century Bostonians to explain Boston Harbor's hydraulics influenced decisions about where to make new land along the city's coast. Subsequent shifts in scientific thought would show that the theory was wrong. But its legacy remains visible in Boston's very shape today, demonstrating that natural systems and our scientific understandings of them have played a central role in the construction of the urban environment.