Research Trip, Post #3: Boston's Urban Wilderness

When I mapped the course I'd need to walk to get between two of the places where I was doing research one day--the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Museum of Fine Arts--I saw that my route was going to run along a mysterious patch of green labeled as the "Back Bay Fens." I knew that a fen was a swamp, so I wasn't sure what to expect on my mile-long walk. I was pleasantly surprised by a curving drive along the edge of a slightly-marshy wilderness.


The area wasn't always naturally beautiful. The park was created in 1879 to solve the problem of putrid waters in the area. Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape designer, came up with a plan that flushed out the waters and restore the tidal marsh. The area was still connected to the sea at that time, but that changed in later decades and the fens are now freshwater. Little of Olmsted's original design remains, replaced by sports fields and formal gardens.

Olmsted's vision for the "Emerald Necklace" of parks he developed in Boston was to create

a ground to which people may easily go when the day’s work is done, and where they may stroll for an hour, seeing hearing and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets, where they shall, in effect, find the city put far away from them...

The appearance of the fens may have changed in the past century, but it remains a retreat. I certainly found it to be a calming walk after a morning of hurried scavaging in the archives.