Sewers - from Seasholes "Gaining Ground" Indespensible reference book for Underground guides |
| A third mid-nineteenth-century development that affected landmaking was increasing pollution from wastewater disposal. The problem was not new. Boston had an extensive system of underground drains that dated back as far as the seventeenth century Called sewers even though they carried only storm and household wastewater rather than sanitary wastes, Boston's drains emptied at the nearest shoreline and for that reason were also often termed "common shores." These early drains were privately owned, but after 1701 the town regulated the digging up of streets to lay or repair drains and also apportioned the costs among the users. Emissions from underground drains polluted the shallow waters into which they emptied. The part of the Town Dock that remained open after 1729, polluted not only by refuse but also by an underground sewer that drained into it, was described by contemporaries as a "very stinking puddle" and "nauseous & offensive" (see chapter 3). This malodorous body of water was also considered a real threat to health, for at that time it was thought that diseases were caused by bad odors-characterized as the "putrid exhalations" or "miasmas" from rotting animal and vegetable matter-a belief sometimes called the miasmatic theory of disease. The polluted Town Dock was eventually dealt with as were almost all polluted shallow waters in Boston-the offending flats were covered with fill, making new land in the process.
Pollution from wastewater disposal continued to be a problem in the early nineteenth century In 1804 the abutters of the Mill Pond, listing the sources of the foul odors emanating from the pond, cited "a great number of common sewers" and "the unwholesome draining of a number of sugar-houses and the fetid returns of several distilleries and breweries." They also claimed that more than ninety privies drained into the pond. In this period human wastes were disposed into privies and cesspools and, although privy vaults were supposed to be cleaned out periodically, they sometimes overflowed or seeped into the surrounding ground or, as in the case of the Mill Pond, into nearby bodies of water. Pollution from an underground drain was also one reason for undertaking the Faneuil Hall (Quincy) Market project near the Town Dock in the mid-1820s. A major sewer emptied into the head of the remaining part of the Town Dock and, with the addition of refuse generated by oyster boats moored there, had turned the dock into a "receptacle for every species of filth." And it was undoubtedly a sewer draining into the Mill Creek that caused it to become such a "dangerous & intolerable nuisance," "greatly alarming" nearby residents in 1829 and 1830. In these and other similar cases, the problem was solved by covering the polluted water with fill (see chapters 3 and 4). In the forty years after filling the Mill Creek was completed in 1833, changes to Boston's system of underground drainage affected the amount of sewage being discharged onto the surrounding flats. When Boston became a city in 1822, it had assumed responsibility for the underground drains. In 1833 the city passed an ordinance permitting liquids, although not solids, from privy vaults to drain into the sewers, and in 1834, to help flush out the sewers, permitted roof downspouts to be connected to them. Thus Boston had a de facto sewerage system earlier than other American cities, where the first municipal sewerage systems were not constructed until the 1850s. Permitting sewage in Boston's underground drains meant that greater amounts of sewage were discharged onto the flats surrounding the city, most notably in Back Bay, which by mid-century was described as a great cesspool." To eliminate the pollution in Back Bay, two solutions were pursued-filling the polluted flats (the usual Boston fix) and changing the system of drainage (see chapter 7). The changes made to the drainage system were influenced by the work of Edwin Chadwick in England, who had concluded that disease was related to poor drainage and found that water flowing through an egg-shaped pipe would also remove the solid wastes in the pipe, thus introducing what came to be termed water-carriage sewerage. His ideas were soon applied in Boston when an egg-shaped sewer was built the length of Tremont Street in the South End in 1850-1851, intercepting the sewers that had formerly discharged into Back Bay and conveying the sewage into South Bay instead. The original plans called for flushing out the sewer periodically with water from the full basin or from Boston's new public water system, completed in 1848, but by the time the sewer was built the availability of running water had increased water consumption-and thus the amount of water in the sewers-so much that special flushing was not necessary. The introduction of piped-in water not only increased water consumption but also made it possible to employ a new technology for disposing human wastes-the water closet, or flush toilet, first patented in the United States in 1833 but not generally adopted until running water was introduced.24 Water closets further increased water usage and, consequently, the amount of raw sewage discharged on Boston's shorelines where, instead of being flushed away by the outgoing tide, much was brought back by the incoming tide and lay festering on the flats at low tide. This increase in the amount of sewage being discharged onto the flats was reflected in the increasing number of landmaking projects undertaken in Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century to eliminate pollution (see figure 1.2). In addition to Back Bay, polluted flats were filled at the foot of Beacon Hill (see chapter 6), in front of Massachusetts General Hospital (see chapter 5), and in Prison Point Bay in Charlestown (see chapter 14). In South Bay, the city, anticipating that sewage draining onto the flats would detract from the South End's appeal as a residential area, filled the flats and extended the sewers out to deeper water in advance of residential development (see chapter 10). In the case of the Atlantic Avenue project, filling the polluted docks on the central waterfront was not the project's major impetus but was certainly cited as one of its benefits (see chapter 3). And the Back Bay Fens project, which created the first park in Boston's new public park system, was undertaken not to create a recreational area but to deal with the sewage that had been carried into the full basin by Stony Brook and the Muddy River. In this case, the basin was not filled but instead was converted into a holding basin for storm overflows from the Stony Brook sewer (see chapter 8). By the 1870s the sewage putrefying on the flats surrounding the city and the noxious odors emanating from the sewers, which were still thought to cause disease, were being blamed for Boston's high death rate. The result was a new sewerage system, soon known as the Main Drainage, built between 1878 and 1884. New sewers were constructed around the perimeter of the city, intercepting the old ones so that they no longer discharged onto the shores. The intercepting sewers carried the sewage into a new main sewer, which conveyed it to a pumping station where the sewage was raised high enough to flow by gravity through an outfall sewer to reservoirs on Moon Island where, still untreated, the raw sewage was released into the ocean at ebb tide (see figure 1.2 and chapter 12).
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