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As the region’s industrial economy began to harness new energy sources, like the swift-moving rivers of the New England interior and fossil fuels like coal, Boston’s urban metabolism underwent a total transformation in the middle of the nineteenth century. The city was the terminus of some of the earliest railroads in the United States, and a dense transportation network soon evolved linking Boston to smaller cities like Lowell and Worcester, as well as farther out to the industrial and agricultural heartlands of the west. Now able to draw on food and resources from distant locations, the city quickly densified. Rapid transit lines between neighborhoods knit together what had previously been more than a dozen independent towns into a functionally unified metropolitan area, and Boston began to annex formerly independent towns like Roxbury and Dorchester. Some people grew wealthy from this supercharged economic growth, and developed elite residential enclaves adorned with grand cultural institutions. Many others, however, found themselves crowded into hastily-built neighborhoods that swelled with the city’s growing population.
