O Solo Red Sox -- The Canals of Boston

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Almost 20 years ago the Cambridge Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop came out with the anthology Future Boston, a shared-world vision of what would happen in the future*. They made the assumption that water levels would rise in the city **, a decision apparently made because it reversed the trend in the past of filling in low spots and reclaiming land, like in Back Bay.

With the massive flooding due to Hurricane Sandy, which wrought havoc in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere, flooding previous un-inundated areas, including several subways, people have reconsidered flooding in Boston. I’ve seen it in several places in the past couple of years. The mean height of Back Bay above sea level is only 5-7 feet in most places. If the sea level rises, even temporarily a la Sandy, Boston could take a huge hit.
So some Boston-area thinkers have considered what might be done. One answer was to put canals in Back Bay. There’s even a picture:
Yahoo Image Search…+novel+%3Cb%3Ecanal%3C%2Fb%3E+system+in+Back+Bay+%3Cb%3ECanals%3C%2Fb%3E±+Pictures±+The+%3Cb%3EBoston%3C%2Fb%3E+Globe&p=Boston+canals&oid=e1810f5b257f3e8d2357ced8d937e9db&fr2=&fr=yfp-t-901&tt=…+novel+%3Cb%3Ecanal%3C%2Fb%3E+system+in+Back+Bay+%3Cb%3ECanals%3C%2Fb%3E±+Pictures±+The+%3Cb%3EBoston%3C%2Fb%3E+Globe&b=0&ni=288&no=1&ts=&tab=organic&sigr=159ihqpcr&sigb=13cdeiam0&sigi=132g2d27r&sigt=12sib111e&sign=12sib111e&.crumb=KF3D/tqJmTZ&fr=yfp-t-901
Here’s the article. I heard a report on public radio in Boston this morning, too:

The thing is, not even those proposing this seem to take it seriously. It makes for a pretty image, but the Boston buildings weren’t intended to front on Canals. All those basement dwellers are going to be SOL, and I suspect a lot of building foundations will be in trouble (not so the big building, like the Hancock and the Pru – they’re built on piling hammered way down into the ground, and are supposed to be able to withstand earthquakes).

Still, the idea of gondoliers on the alleyways of Back Bay replacing the Swan Boats is an interesting one (god knows the alleys could use a good inundation). But look at that chart in the linked article for Boston as it looks with 7.5 feet of flooding – canals through the alleys wouldn’t be an option, they’d be the new order of things. Boston wouldn’t even be old Shawmut peninsula anymore, it’s be an island. And MIT would be drowned out.

*Besides the anthology, David Alexander Smith’s book In the Cube was set in the same background. They don’t seem to have published any other material relating to it, although I suspect there’s more that’s been written.

** In their future, the flooding isn’t due to global warming, but to the effects of the alien’s building a transit site near the city.

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More on this:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/29/venice-charles-boston-solution-rising-seas-includes-novel-canal-system-back-bay-canals/F7u38NjMW9htumJ9GK2VnI/story.html

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Nobody’s really taking it seriously because the prediction is based on an erroneous assumption. Not global warming; Boston does science, thanks, and we’re aware of sea levels. No, those ‘Boston will be underwater by $scary_upcoming_year’ statements are all predicated on the shoreline and elevation of the city remaining the same, or at least that the shape of the coast is only subject to nature.

On the contrary, dumping large amounts of cruft into the water is a long-standing tradition. Everyone’s heard of the time Bostonians protested taxes by dunking a shipload of tea, of course. Less well known is the fact that whenever they ran out of valuable waterfront property, they made more by hiring a bunch of guys with wheelbarrows to level a hill and throw the results into Boston Harbor. Faneuil Hall was originally right on the water.

They ran out of places to put an airport, so they built an island. They built several, actually; if you go out into the Harbor, anything you see with a suspiciously tidy white granite retaining wall running along the shoreline is man-made.

The Back Bay, through which the canals in the OP run, is 5-7’ above sea level because it used to be river, and they basically filled it until it stopped squishing when you walked on it. (Mostly.) I think they’ve been taken out for the recent construction, but the Boston Public Library had some maps on the floor for a while, contrasting the original Boston with the current city – the amount of manufactured land is shocking.

I figure if the seas tried to eat us, we’ll be more likely to turn into Holland than Venice. It’s probably for the best. If you saw how these people drive cars, you REALLY would not want to see them in speed boats. :smiley:

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Shouldn’t it be “O Sole Boston”?

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NM

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I don’t know about the library, but there’s an office building a few blocks away, at Stuart and Arlington, that has maps of Boston through the years laid out in the floor tiles. I’ll be damned if I can find any pictures online, though, or the right magic words to get google to show them to me.

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I found some vague hits image-searching on
“75 arlington” atrium boston
…is that the one? If so, I work in that building and still can’t find anything better.

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I’m well familiar with how Boston, more than most big American cities, has been built on landfill. Lower Manhattan, for instance, has grown to put Castle Clinton, originally offshore, right at the Battery. Coney Island used to literally be an island, and so forth. But Boston used to be a peninsula so narrow at the neck that ship’s bowsprits could reportedly cross over it. The main part of Boston looked like a three-leafed clover, instead of the bulge it now looks like, and MIT is built (along with a lot of East Cambridge) on a swampy marsh.

Nevertheless, I don’t understand your first sentence. Those maps are predicated on global warming, sea rise, and the shoreline and elevation remaining the same Your distinction between global warming and the shoreline remaining the same doesn’t make any sense. The point is that the elevation of a lot of Boston that’s built on landfill will flood if waters rise by a surprisingly small amount, and I am frankly surprised at how little that needs to be to flood essentially all of Back Bay.

It isn’t just the Boston Globe predictions – I see the same predictions at the MacAuliffe-Shepard Science Center in Concord, NH, exhibits at the Bostyon Museum of Science, and elsewhere.

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There are a couple pics of a flash mob doing something; that’s the right building, and the right atrium, but not the right map. There’s one big map of Boston, with streets, parks, etc. That’s the one you can see in the flash mob pictures. But there are also eight smaller maps that show just land and water, and with the year they represent. Starts at about the time of the first European settlers and goes to the 1950s (I think), which is when things took on their current form. They’re fascinating to look at; there’s a parking garage in that building that I always use if I’m in the area, just so I can look at the maps. The original coastline is unrecognizable; the Back Bay, Seaport District, Logan Airport, all were water once upon a time.

Thanks for letting me know the address, Maserschmidt; couldn’t find the right search terms to track it down. And still no pictures. First time google has let me down in a long while.

Cal, I can easily believe that a bowsprit would span the isthmus that connected Boston with the mainland; it looked about as wide as a two-lane road. Made me wonder about the strategic and traffic implications. You could defend the city from land assault, or shut down a lot of commerce, by just blocking a very narrow strip of land.

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I was mainly being snarky, but my point was that the maps are all of the flooding that will happen if nothing is done to raise the land or build retaining walls. Boston has historically been really bad at doing nothing about things like this. And has hundreds of years of experience at chucking things into the water to make more shoreline.

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It’d be really hard to raise the land at this stage. Maybe shortly after they built there, but not now*. There IS a flood control system – the dam near the Museum of Science is there to keep too much water from coming back into Back Bay. But a 7.5 foot surge would overwhelm that dam, as everyone acknowledges. In short, if Boston had to cope with rising sea levels, there’s no easy fix.

The Future Boston series I mentioned had future Bostonians solving this by performing extreme cofferdamming of the city, eventually building it into an enclosed three-dimensional structure called The Cube (hence the single stand-alone novel set in that shared history, In the Cube by David Alexander Smith). But they had alien and future technology to help. I can’t see Bostonians in the immediate future carrying out the expensive and heroic measures that would be needed to do this (even with the example of the Netherlands to inspire them). I suspect that New England’s formidable Nor-easters would end up going over the top of any dam built. And, even in that Future History saga, the lower levels of the encubed Boston still got flooded.