Taking Care

After the Civil War, particular attention was paid to tending to public welfare. The urban atlases document the growing density of charities, hospitals, relief societies, and human services, putting the social element of the busy city directly onto the map.

ASSESSING THE GREAT FIRE OF 1872

Probably the best-known publisher of urban atlases used for rating fire insurance was Daniel Sanborn of Somerville, who started creating maps of this kind in 1866. Sanborn atlases featured a rich and evolving array of representational features, employing combinations of letters, colors, and lines to convey building materials, interior fixtures, and even window arrangements. All were relevant to assessing a building’s risk of catching fire and calculating insurance rates.

One of the symbols visible in this 1867 Sanborn plate shows the letters A through D , which classified warehouses according to their fire preparedness. “A” had multiple fire prevention measures while “D” had few, if any. The map shows the warehouses which were the tinderbox of Boston’s Great Fire. Spreading over 65 acres, the fire destroyed much of the waterfront downtown and growing financial district in 1872. This atlas shows many D-class warehouses in the area where the fire began, less than two decades before the disaster.

One consequence of the Great Fire of 1872 was the call for more fire departments closer to downtown, at the same time as the new Back Bay neighborhood was being built on filled land. This Bromley atlas from 1898 shows Engine 33 and Ladder 15, which still sit today in a Richardsonian Romanesque station not far from Copley Square.

DISTANCE AND ISOLATION: RESPONDING TO SMALLPOX

The presence of smallpox hospitals in atlases well into the 1930s is a reminder of the physical presence of the disease in the city as well as the great effort spent to mitigate it. Smallpox was an ancient affliction, but by the late eighteenth century medical professionals had methods to prevent its spread. Yet smallpox outbreaks in the twentieth century still brought social upheaval, as people coped with the disease and the social dislocations that followed in the wake of death.

From 1901 to 1903, Boston experienced its last smallpox epidemic. While most urban outbreaks by the twentieth century involved the virus’s minor strain, Boston’s outbreak involved the more dangerous major strain. The city mandated that, in all but extreme cases, patients be placed in a hospital. The primary location was the Southampton Smallpox Hospital, shown here in the 1882 Hopkins atlas.

A quarantine station on Gallops Island, visible in the (12 1899 map of Boston Harbor), received patients with milder cases.

Both the 1882 Hopkins and the 1931 Bromley atlases show a parcel of land which was owned by the City of Boston and the site of a smallpox hospital. In 1882, the area was nearly surrounded by South Bay. The map shows the isolation of the hospital from urban streets: the parcel sits on a small U-shape, cradled between two tidal creeks.

In the 1931 atlas, the hospital has moved and faces the renamed Southampton Street, just east of its intersection with Massachusetts Avenue. The hospital’s structure, still wooden, implies a modern medical architecture with hallways separating larger volumes of space. Despite the growth of the area, it remained an industrial periphery, with a nearby gas utility and a freight yard.

This area of present-day Jamaica Plain on Canterbury Street shows another simple wooden structure where those inflicted with smallpox were transferred, if not always willingly. Rural places on the outskirts of the city were seen as ideal locations for convalescence. In 1896, the map shows how thinly populated this area once was, and the hospital’s proximity to the cemetery evokes a somberness not often expressed in maps.