Transcript

Introduction to Hub History

Music

Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the History of Boston, the Hub of the Universe.
This is episode 288 a History of Boston with Daniel Dain.
Hi, I’m Jake in just a few minutes. I’m gonna be joined by the author of an ambitious New History of Boston, which is called a History of Boston.
Back in early 2021 I got an email from a listener who said that his day job was a lawyer, but he’d been working on a manuscript about Boston history for a couple of years when he sent me a PDF.
I was shocked to see that it was a hefty 800 pages and it followed Boston history from the formation of the continents out of the mega continent, Pangaea.
Right through the actions of the, at that time, current Walsh administration, we went on to trade a series of favorite Boston history anecdotes over email.
He said that he liked the incident where the crew of the US S Constitution had to resort to cadging or towing the ship to outrun a British foe during a battle with no wind.
I responded that I always chuckle over the time when Captain Stewart ordered the US S constitution sails thrown aback, letting the wind catch the front edge of the sails and suddenly stopping the ship.
But at the risk of shearing off the main mast, I joked that it always reminded me of that scene in top gun when Maverick says.

Music

Jake:
[1:38] Imagine my surprise when I got a package in the mail. Two years later with a bound copy of the manuscript, the author had helpfully flagged page 217 with a post it note, I flipped the page open and there was my top gun joke in a footnote.
That author is Daniel Dain, who will join me in just a moment to talk about his new book.
But before we talk to Daniel Dain, I just want to pause and say a big thank you to everyone who supports Hub History on Patreon.
Your support allows me to create this show, your contributions, pay for web hosting and security, podcast media hosting and the processing tools we use to make the show sound better over the past couple of months.
You’ve also allowed me to use A I to automatically generate richer show notes for recent episodes to everyone who already supports the show. Thank you.
And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy, just go to patreon dot com slash hubor or visit hubor dot com and click on the support us link and thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

[2:48] I’m joined now by Daniel. Dain Dan is the president and co-founder of the boutique law firm Dain Torpey, which specializes in real estate and development.
He sits on a number of boards including the board of the Vilna Shul, the historic Immigrant Synagogue on Beacon Hill that we recently featured in episode 257.

Daniel Dain’s Book: A History of Boston

 

[3:08] He’s a true Boston history nerd and he’s an enthusiast of cities more broadly.
Dan’s new book is a History of Boston and it blends his interest in urbanism with his deep love of Boston history to relate a series of boom and bust cycles in the long term health and viability of Boston.
I’ll ask him not only what’s happened in Boston’s past, but also what challenges and opportunities he sees on Boston’s Horizon, Daniel Dain, welcome to the show.

Daniel Dain:
[3:38] This is a great treat for me to be on because I am both a fan of your show as well as uh you are a great resource to me in writing, writing the book.
I, I was, I was that sort of nerd who listened to your episodes with a pad of paper and pen and took notes.

Jake:
[3:55] That is incredibly flattering and also a little bit frightening whenever I think of anybody relying on my research, I wince a little bit and hope that they’re also backing that up with, with their own.
Let me start listeners off with what the book is. So, Daan, you’ve written a new book called A History of Boston.
And it is a very hefty tome. I will admit, as I was preparing for the interview, I thought, oh, I’ll drop it the book on the table and just give people a sense of how it weighs in.
But that almost destroyed the table, my laptop’s on. So instead I hold it up and go.
It’s a very hefty tone. It weighs in at about 770 pages minus index and appendices.
And as somebody who does some historical research and tries to put, put a historical podcast together, I know it’s really hard to do history as a side gig.
So you must be a history professor, a park ranger, some sort of history professional, right.

Daniel Dain:
[4:54] So, so, yeah, so no. Uh so I, I am a trial attorney and the clients I represent are generally commercial real estate developers and property owners in Boston and Greater Boston.
The book was sort of a, a pairing of my passion for urbanism issues is the book is really a an urban studies by using the history of Boston as a case study for discussion and thinking about what makes cities successful, which is really what my, what my passion is and what it marries is as a trial attorney for the industry.
The way I do my job is I take a series of facts, you know, a set of documents, uh interview notes, deposition transcripts.
And I take a, you know, a whole bunch of what might be disjointed facts and try to put them into an interesting narrative and tell stories, right?
And so the process of telling history is, is very similar to advocacy of a trial trial lawyer, which is just tell interesting stories and try to lead your reader to the conclusions you want your, your reader to, to, to draw.
So the the the process of writing the book is actually very similar to what I do every day in my day job.

Jake:
[6:02] If you had asked me when I was in high school, I would have never guessed that.
Well, first of all, podcast didn’t exist.
So I couldn’t have guessed that’d be hosting a history podcast.
But just to say that I’d be doing anything around history.
I would have been very skeptical because history in school is, you know, its names, its date.
It’s when did this battle occur and who took the day?
It’s really great to see uh somebody else tackling history as narrative and this, the story of people.

Daniel Dain:
[6:28] Yeah, it’s a series of, of short stories that are really, really interesting.
And then the challenge for someone who does a book is to then tie them together in some kind of narrative arc that, that has a con you know, has a, a thesis essentially and, and tell stories that try to back up what, what is also the conclusion.
And so you have, there’s a unifying theme to it and that’s part of the challenge is to make things relevant and, and relate and, and you know, how do you tell all these disparate stories and yet have them uh have some kind of cohesion so that that’s sort of the challenge of it.
But uh people have said to me that they feel intimidated by the length of the book.
Um And uh you know, to a certain extent, I hope people do read it from beginning to end because there is a sort of an arc to the storytelling.
And yet I also say, don’t feel compelled to, to pick it up and, and think that you have to read it straight through because it is a series of short stories.
And so flip through and, and pick out the short stories that are interesting.
You know, if you’re interested in, in Boston’s role in the American revolution, read those sections.
If you’re interested in the rise of the industrial revolution, that really gets its start in Massachusetts, you know, read those sections if you’re interested in, uh you know, James Michael Curley and, and uh you know, Boston in the first half of the 20th century, read those sections.
So there’s no need to, to read it all at once, I think.
And I think it, it’s, it can stand on its own as a series of short stories or as a, as a whole narrative arc.

Jake:
[7:53] Well, I can attest that you can dip in and read it as a series of short stories because the first thing I did when I got a copy of this book in the mail was flip to the page that you had helpfully flagged with a post it for me on page 217 to find unexpectedly a footnote citing Jakes goers. And uh.

Daniel Dain:
[8:11] Because I loved our email exchange that we had had a couple of years ago.

Jake:
[8:15] And so I, I reread or I read a story that I was pretty familiar with about us S constitution.
And thank you. And the moment when the captain lets the wind catch the fore edge of the sail suddenly slamming on the brakes and the footnotes a joke I made years ago now on the podcast about that being akin to a scene in top gun when Maverick drops the flaps so that the plane suddenly decelerates and lets Jer fly by and get in his crosshairs.
Probably the best historical joke I’ll ever tell.

Daniel Dain:
[8:46] I started working on this project in December 2017 and was, was well into it when I was looking for podcasts that were relevant and found yours.
So, at a certain point, a few years ago, I reached out to you just say, hey, I think your, your podcast is cool and I’m trying to, to write a manuscript and uh I think we, we sort of exchange like, what are some cool historical stories?
And you had mentioned that one is, is, is, or, or one of us mentioned it as one of our favorites.

Discovering the Cool Historical Story

 

[9:13] And then, and then you provided the really cool uh uh uh analogy to Top Gun, which I just loved.

Jake:
[9:20] Well, that takes me to the question, you know, obviously you’re somebody who’s a history nerd like myself.
But there has to come a moment when you say to yourself, this might be a book.
How did you come to that moment?

Daniel Dain:
[9:32] Surprisingly, it was, it was well into the project. So I didn’t actually intend to write a book as funny as that sounds.
Uh As I, as I said, my passion is, is urbanism and city building.
And so, you know, I spend a, I do a lot of lecturing and, and writing on issues of, of urban planning and, and urban studies and what makes it successful and it all relates to my advocacy work.
If I’m going to advocate for a new development in Boston, I need to be able to articulate why say a new residential building is good for the city or, you know, we’re not, I mean, I, I always take the side of it’s good for the city, but I need to understand the arguments on both sides.
And so it’s, that’s really my area of study and I spend a lot of time reading books on, on uh you know, urbanism and, and city building.
And so what I was puzzling about going back.

[10:19] You know, maybe 10 years or so was when my clients make decisions to invest in the city or build a new building, they’re really making a prediction into the future, which is, if they build a new building, when the building opens, there’s going to be people who still want to live in Boston, who still want to work in Boston.
You know, there will be companies to, to lease offices or lab space or warehouse space.
Um And you know, this assumption, this prediction into the future is really based on this notion that we’ve been in this period of, of the last 30 years that I call high urbanism, which is a period of time that I de I describe as when people want to live, work, play, study shop, visit a city in, in, in our case, Boston.

[11:00] But I grew up in Boston in the 19 seventies and 19 eighties.
And I, and I remember when the best way to describe Boston when I was growing up was a basket case.
Um You know, the city had experienced 70 years of stagnation.
Uh in 1950 the US census, Boston’s population was 801,000 people in 1980.
I believe it was 520,000 people. The city lost almost 300,000 people in, in three decades in the 19 eighties.
Uh The Brookings Institute uh declared Boston one of the most blighted big cities in the country.
Um I read, uh Ed Glazer is a friend of mine and the head of the economics department at, at Harvard.
And he did a study that showed that in the 19 eighties, three quarters of all houses in Boston, all homes in Boston were worth less than the cost of construction that people were fleeing Boston so much in the 19 eighties.
I mean, we’re, we’re talking about, you know, just 40 years ago, less than 40 years ago, uh, people were fleeing the city so much that if you built a new house, you couldn’t sell it for what you would put into it.
So, you know, construction completely stopped.
Um But I also knew that in the 19th century, Boston was so successful and so many people wanted to be in Boston that to accommodate everyone, we needed to knock the hills around Boston down and, and do land fill of the.

Jake:
[12:13] Filled in the harbor. Yeah.

Daniel Dain:
[12:14] Back bay and, and south end and waterfront.
And you know, South Boston was a, a small peninsula off of Dorchester.
East Boston was a series of islands.
Uh And, and the city was growing so much that there was an annexation movement when, when the, the neighboring independent towns of, of uh Dorchester and Roxbury and West Roxbury, which at the time included Rosendale and Jamaica Plain, uh Hyde Park, uh Charlestown, um Alston and Brighton, all were annexed to the city and the movement really only ends when Brookline said no to annexation.
So what was I, what I was interested in was this swinging back and forth between periods of success and failure in the city?
And so I wanted to understand that better and just started doing research on my own and taking notes and then the notes got a little bit longer and, you know, I, I just wanted to have something that I could pull out and refer to sort of use as a cheat sheet or friends of mine came to town.
I could give it a quick read before giving a tour of Boston.
So I could remember some of the stories and it just got longer and longer.
And at a certain point I said, well, why don’t I actually try to finish this as a manuscript and try to see if I can get it published?

Jake:
[13:22] Plenty of authors would make a book of its own out of a study of sort of the, the decline and rebirth of Boston post-war decline.
And then sort of the, the Boston miracle rebirth in the, the eighties, the nineties say.
But your book has a much more sweeping scope than that.
I believe you start with the volcanic formation of Roxbury pudding stone some millions of years ago and it runs.

From Geologic History to the Boston Miracle

Daniel Dain:
[13:44] Yeah, I, I only go back 5, 580 million years ago.
Yeah, the formation of the Avalon Belt in the southern oceans which uh you know, it was volcanic and slowly drifted north and got smushed between the North American continent and, and Africa and formed Pangaea.
And then when they split, split apart again, it, it fused on to the North American continent and that’s the plane that we get between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic coast.
But I thought it was important. The reason I start with the geologic history is because, you know, for instance, the, the landfill that we talk about was only possible because of not going back to the volcanoes, but you have to go back to the, to the glaciers and the.

Jake:
[14:20] The glaciers at least.

Daniel Dain:
[14:23] And the uh the gravel deposits.
Uh if you didn’t have the, the gravel deposit, so you wouldn’t have been able to do the landfill.
So I felt it was important to start with the geologic history because it informs the rest of, of the history to understand that Boston is, has a harbor, you know, a natural harbor uh that there are, you know, there are rivers, the Charles river is not particularly navigable which, which affected the, the history of, of the region.
But, you know, the Merrimack, um you know, had a much greater flow um which, you know, plays a role in the, the rise of the industrial revolution.
And so the, the, the uh geologic and geographic history of the area was, is relevant to everything that comes after.

Jake:
[15:05] Well, besides just the, the sort of broad sweep of time, the book covers it, you also define Boston very broadly at times, the narrative, like you said, takes us from the Merrimack Valley in the north through, I mean, Nantucket or maybe even beyond in the South at the moment, you said, oh, this may be a book.
Did you realize how broad the scope was gonna be?

Daniel Dain:
[15:28] So defining Boston is really, really talent, not just Boston, defining any city, you know, this past summer, my family uh spent a vacation in, in Korea and Japan and we were so intrigued by the, by the mega cities there, Seoul and Tokyo and uh Osaka and just trying to, I was just trying to look up the s you know, what are the biggest cities by population in the world.
And you know, there’s, there’s not a lot of agreement as to how you define population of a, of a city.
And and um it really relates to when you’re defining an urban center, it depends on what parameters you’re using, right?
So if we’re talking about the political boundaries of Boston, Boston is time, Boston is not that much bigger than the Denver airport, I thought that was a good comparison, right?
Like like whoa, you know, it’s just just a single airport, it’s like the size of, of the entire city of, of Boston if you, if you’re talking about political boundaries, but those political boundaries as we talked about are just political, historical happenstance, right?
The housing market, if you’re talking about the housing market of Boston, you’re talking about southern New Hampshire. Um, you know, almost out to Worcester.
Um, you know, even down to, to parts of Rhode Island is the housing market.
If you’re talking about the economic market, then you really are, are talking about all of New England, right?
So, something like whaling. Well, there, there weren’t a lot of whaling ships that were leaving for Boston, but whaling was an enormously important to the economy of New England in the 19th century.
And the capital for whaling out of Nantucket, New Bedford was coming from Boston.

[16:56] Um you know, the mills of New England up in Lowell and, and all the way into New Hampshire, you know, enormously important to the economy of New England in the, in the 19th century.
You know, it’s all being the, the investors are all coming in investors and banking and everything else is coming out of Boston.
So if you’re talking about an economic area, you’re, you’re really looking at a much larger region where Boston is a center.

Boston as the Capital of New England

 

[17:22] And so it really meant that that Boston was essentially the, the effectively the capital of New England if you want to talk about.
And since I tell a social and cultural history, if you want to talk about, you know, where people’s, you know, where they recreate, you know, what, what, what’s recreation for people who live in Boston.
And then you’re talking about beaches, you know, around New England, you’re talking about ski mountains around New England.
And so I want to tell the, the a little bit of the history of beaches and ski mountains and things like that.
So it became a little bit of a challenge to decide what was in and what was out.
I wasn’t going to tell specifically the history of like Portland Maine, but to the extent that Portland Maine relates to Boston.
So for instance, the what we call the Indian wars um in, in what was then called Falmouth Maine, um you know, the, the fact that found with Maine was being attacked by French and their native American allies, the, the Penne Cook and the um.

[18:17] Abenaki that was important understanding Boston because Boston was sending militia up to Maine to, to defend what was the northern frontier in Maine and Maine, of course, was part of the Massachusetts Bay colony.
So, uh you know, it becomes difficult as to where to draw the line.
And ultimately, I just needed to make some decisions on that.

Jake:
[18:35] As a whole. And e especially the first chapter of the book. I really love note to the city of Boston.
And, you know, this town isn’t as old as Paris.
It’s not as big as Beijing. It’s not home to the automotive industry like Detroit or Hollywood, like L A or finance, like Manhattan.
It doesn’t have the beaches of Miami, it doesn’t have the mountains of Denver, even though we’re about the size of the Denver airport.
What makes Boston so important on the world stage? What, what makes it worthy of this treatment?

Daniel Dain:
[19:10] You know, that’s a question I had to ask in doing this book because it was really like, well, why would someone care about the history of Boston?

[19:17] And, and I drew the conclusion that actually Boston probably does have the most important history of any American city.
And you know, if you go back to the importance to the American narrative of, you know, the arrival of the separatists, the pilgrims in 1620 then followed in 1630 by the puritans and, and, and how that really sets the stage for, for European colonization and, and in North America, certainly British North America, um you know, through the role of Boston and the American revolution, um.

[19:47] You know, the importance of Boston as a center of trade in, in the colonial period in the early 19th century.
And how, you know, North American trade was all essentially run through Boston uh its role in the rise of the industrial revolution, its role in the abolition movement.
It’s, it’s the first civil rights movement in American history.
Um in Boston in the 18 forties, the, the rise of the women’s rights movement comes out of the abolition movement in Boston.
Um and then Boston becomes a case study of failed urban policy.
In the 20th century. Almost every p uh federal state and local policy in the, in the 20th century was about how to tear a city down and, and move people to the suburbs.
And that was the, you know, that was the stated goal of all these policies.
And so, um it becomes an important history in the 20th century because of, of how these policies failed the city uh for seven decades.
And, and the proof was that jobs and people were leaving the city at a, at a high rate for a very long time.

Jake:
[20:47] You capture that sort of cyclical, the rise and fall of Boston, the health of any great city through a series of five, what you call watershed moments and that they’re sort of the central organizing structure of the book.
So what’s that term mean to you or what’s it mean in the context of the book?

Daniel Dain:
[21:06] I started off with this notion that Boston had swung between periods of success and failure.
And you know, there’s a trap that one who’s looking into history can fall into which is trying to set parameters that are very neat, right?
And so obviously, these, these notions of, of success and failure, you know, Boston was a basket case in the 20th century.
Well, you know, it wasn’t perfectly a basket case.
There were some great periods of success for the, for the city and the region, right?
The Massachusetts miracle that I talk a lot about in the book can be understood both as a great success.
You know, Massachusetts in the 19 eighties had the lowest unemployment rate in the country, but also a real failure because it was a suburban phenomenon and it contributed to people and jobs leaving the city.

[21:47] Um You can fall into a trap of trying to be too specific and say, you know, oh you know, things flipped and then then you have a different narrative and yet you want to have some organizing principles in order to see larger trends in order to, to place yourself in the history in a way that’s comprehensible.
And so I felt that I needed to have some organizing principles.

Organizing principles for understanding Boston’s history

 

[22:10] And I noticed that there were these moments, they call watershed moments, meaning when there was just absolutely major changes in, in the nature of the, of the Boston area, you know, so I start with the great puritan migration of 1630 which fundamentally changes the, the nature of, of New England.
Right there, there already had been the separatists in 1620.
And the, you know, some puritans were coming over a little bit earlier than 1630.
Uh And the the native Americans had been decimated by disease that had been uh accidentally introduced by French explorers in 1616.
But a totally reordering of New England society in 1630 with the, with the puritans arriving.
Uh And then, you know, I think everyone would agree.
The American revolution was, was uh pretty disruptive of what was before and ushered in something completely different.

Jake:
[23:00] Yeah. Just a minor moment of global change. Sure.

Daniel Dain:
[23:00] Um Yeah, and then the industrial revolution fundamentally changes the relationship between um you know, how wealth is created.
It, it goes from a period of wealth really being created out of the land itself, right?
The New England economy is so much based on agriculture and, and fishing and whaling as well as trade.
But the trade products were uh you know, a lot of it was, was based on, on uh natural products uh to one where, you know, industry is the organizing, you know, economic principle for much of the 19th century.
And then by the 19 twenties, when the, when our manufacturing, industrial economy collapses in the 19 twenties, um we don’t reform.
And so you get, you get, you go from this period of, of, you know, continual success for Boston, you know, albeit not perfectly.
And there’s lots of things from the 19th century and early 20th century in Boston that aren’t so nice.
But overall, if you’re talking about success or failures of cities, Boston was highly successful.
And then, and then there’s really this, this flip for from the 19 twenties on and then very, very dramatically changes again by the 19 nineties where people are coming back into the city so much.
You know, I mentioned that in the 19 eighties, a house was, you know, not worth the cost of construction to today.

[24:21] You know, it’s unaffordable for, for anyone else than the, you know, the, the extremely wealthy and not just housing.
I mean, we, we, we focus so much on housing but you know, an average hotel room in Boston, something like $500 and we don’t talk about that.
But, but if you want to, if you’re a tourist from anywhere in the world and you want to come to Boston, only the very, very wealthiest can afford to stay in a hotel room in Boston.
And that changes the nature of the way people from all around the world relate to Boston.

Jake:
[24:48] Years ago, a decade ago. Now, I was a, a tour guide in Boston and my Back Bay tour.
I would very pointedly wrap up sort of at the, the turn of the 20th century because we’re coming out of this period of, you know, Boston in the latter half of the 19th century is, you know, we’re filling in the harbors.
We’re experimenting with ether and X rays where we’ve got the telegraph and the telephone and electrification and, you know, everything’s on the up slope as we head into the 20th century.
And I would just end it there and ignore the uh the decades to come as the long slow slide into sort of post-war malaise happened.

Daniel Dain:
[25:23] Back Bay is, is a great example, right?
So Back Bay is one of the great neighborhoods in the world, I think.
Um and it was a home for, for Yankees really fleeing the arriving Irish in the 18 fifties.
Um and moving out of downtown to the Back Bay.

Jake:
[25:37] Because it was also the, the moment, the first time you could commute a commu commuted fair on the Dedham railway was the first time that you could really live apart from your place of business for further than to walk.

Daniel Dain:
[25:47] Yeah, that’s right.

Jake:
[25:49] And so we had to fill in the back bay to keep everybody from fleeing.
The, the most desirable Yankee, wealthy tax base, at least from fleeing elsewhere.

Daniel Dain:
[25:58] And today it’s one of the, you know, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the, in, in the entire world.
Uh but I had lunch recently with Professor Emeritus at Northeastern Barry Bluestone, who’s one of the great urban and economic thinkers in Boston.
A very, he’s written some books about Boston and very influential thinker on, on urban issues and, and he uh rented an apartment on Marlborough Street in the 19 seventies and the, the uh he was told when he moved in that, that, that, that part of Back Bay was the had the highest incidence of, of theft and robbery of anywhere in Boston.
And the first weekend after he moved in his entire apartment was cleared out um by, by, you know, by burglars.
Um And it’s like, wow, like that was in the 19 seventies, Marlborough Street in the back Bay had declined so much that it was like a crime center for Boston.

Jake:
[26:49] I’m a transplant to Boston. And one of the things that hooked me on moving here as a kid, I would read novels by Robert B Parker who was a sort of hard boiled detective novelist.
But he, he started writing this series of novels in the mid seventies and he was a professor at Northeastern at the time.
So a lot of the, the books at the start of his series in the seventies and early eighties are set in sort of either the Back Bay area or the Fenway area and it’s all, you know, crime riddled and.

Daniel Dain:
[27:20] Grit and right, it’s better for hire. Yeah.

Jake:
[27:21] Yeah, pretty and it’s all multimillion dollar condos.
Every, every place where, uh, where a body was found now is just a, you know, a multimillion dollar condo in the back Bay, um, showing you how much.

Daniel Dain:
[27:30] Ok.

Unearthing Hidden Stories of History

Jake:
[27:32] Things have really changed for now, at least, what I try to do with this show is to find stories that I didn’t know.
And hopefully our li listeners didn’t know and highlight those because, you know, we all know about Paul Revere’s Ride, but there’s so much history and so many people who we don’t know about.
So, what are some of those stories or some of the people who you came across who are not as well known.

Daniel Dain:
[27:56] So one of them is the story of the, of the Remonstrance in 1646.
Do you know this story? I think it’s, it’s a really interesting one.

Jake:
[28:03] I don’t think I do.

Daniel Dain:
[28:05] Let me see if I get, if I get the story, right? So 1646 so we’re talking 16 years after the, the arrival of the puritans and, and the puritans were notable today for uh shall we say intolerance of other viewpoints.
Uh And so, uh you know, they become famous a little bit later for hanging Quakers uh Mary Dyer.
But um one of their first groups that they did uh religious battle with were the Presbyterian, you know, those, those crazy Presbyterians.
Um And the Presbyterians were not allowed to vote in Boston uh and were not allowed to take communion in the churches of Boston.
And so there were Presbyterians in Boston and they were upset about this and they petitioned the, the General Court, which is the legislative body in Massachusetts for the right to vote and the right to take communion.
Uh And the, the, the document that they submitted was called the Remonstrance.
Uh remonstrance and petition, you know, and what the, and the threat was that if you don’t grant us these rights, we’re gonna to take the remonstrance and petition to parliament.
And this was, these were fighting words to the puritans because they had, they had the Massachusetts Bay Charter, which was essentially self governing out of Massachusetts.
And they did not appreciate the notion that one could petition parliament to overrule their, their edicts.

Jake:
[29:27] That may have come to a head about 100 and 30 years later or so.

Daniel Dain:
[29:31] A little bit, right. These, these issues continue to, to, to uh come up throughout the entire period and uh colonial period.
So the General Court has John Winthrop, the governor write a response which they call the declaration and you know, being the freethinker that, that John Winthrop was.
He basically said, you know, well, you got two choices, you can become free men of, of the churches of, of Boston.
Uh in other words, the Puritan church or, you know, Rhode Island is very attractive.
So, you know, think, think about Rhode Island, it’s, it’s really quite nice and to top it off the General Court, find each of the signers of the remonstrance and, and petition up to £50 each, which was an enormous amount of money in 1646.

[30:17] So this was not the response that the group of Presbyterians were hoping for.
And so they uh booked passage on the ship, the supply, uh it was called to go to England with the petition and the Puritans found out that or believe that the, you know, as all these Presbyterians are getting ready to, to sail for England, they boarded the ship and searched all throughout the ship looking to see if the petition was on it and they found the petition, they, they took the petition off.

[30:47] But they were nervous that maybe there was, there was another copy.
And so they had the, the famous minister John Cotton give a sermon and what sermon did he did he choose?
But the story of Jonah and the whale has the lesson to any Presbyterians who might be thinking about, you know, going and pressing their, their case before the British Parliament and, and the after the, the sermon, the, the ship heads out.
Um and before they can even get past nn tat, enormous storm blows in and they get, they get pinned down just past nant Tat.
And in fact, there is a, another a copy of the petition hidden in the trunk on the, on the boat and the um the other passengers who had heard about that there were petitions and they worried that there might be more than one copy get very upset and they confront the leaders of the Presbyterian group and they say, are you guys carrying something on the ship that you shouldn’t be?
And they say, yes, sorry, here’s a copy of the petition.
And so the other passengers throw the petition overboard and the storm, you know, the storm ceases and they’re able to, to set off.
And so it’s this uh crazy biblical story of, of uh as the story of Joan and the whale are ringing in the ears of the, of the past years.
They throw this petition overboard.

Jake:
[32:02] The storm then abates one hopes. Right.

Daniel Dain:
[32:05] Yeah. Storm debates. The puritans sent emissaries to uh to England to make sure that uh their right to self govern uh was, was going to be respected.

Jake:
[32:16] Yeah, that gets to two lessons that are often lost in sort of the casual retelling of American history.
One being the puritans or anybody early on came here in search of religious liberty, sort of widely stated.
And not until the restoration did they stop hanging, relig religious dissidents in Boston.
And then also the idea that, you know, Thomas Jefferson wrote some flowery language and introduced the idea of self government in July 1776.
When if you go back and read anything written, in Massachusetts, at least in the decade or so before the revolution, it’s clear that our charter liberties were still central and the idea that we were a self governing colony based on our two charters get so lost in the revolutionary fervor.

Daniel Dain:
[33:05] Yeah, this leads to the story of the Dominion of New England, which you’ve probably maybe covered a little bit on the, on the podcast.
The Dominion of New England gets, gets declared by the lords of trade.
And again, I think the fact that it was the lords of trade who had uh power over the over the colonies is so interesting because the British were viewing the colonies as, you know, as.

Jake:
[33:27] Just a revenue generator.

Daniel Dain:
[33:28] As sources of natural resources to be shipped to uh you know, wealth extractors, right?
So they’re going to govern the, the colonies through an economic body instead of a political one.
And so the lords of trade who are fed up with these, you know, non listening uh colonists, uh you know, sort of uh crybaby colonist set, sets up the Dominion of New England, which is Maine and, and New Hampshire, uh Massachusetts Bay in Plymouth, which was a separate colony then Rhode Island, um Connecticut, New York, as well as I think what was called East and West Jersey then, um and the governor, the, the then governor of New York, Edmund Andros gets appointed royal governor for the Dominion Dominion of uh New England.

[34:14] And he comes up to Boston because the, the capital of the Dominion of, of New England was going to be Boston.
And so this is the royal authority asserting power over the New England and New York and New Jersey uh colonies.
Uh and doing away with the charter of the Massachusetts Bay.

Rebellion in Boston and Andros’ Escape to Rhode Island.

 

[34:32] With the, with the what again, what we called the Indian wars threatening on the northern frontier, Andros, once he comes to power in 1686 finds himself, you know, head up to Maine to defend the northern border.
And by the time he comes back to Boston, I think in 1689 Boston is in an absolute uproar over the over the royal royal authority over over the colonies.
And so the, it’s essentially open rebellion when he comes back to Boston and he flees, I think to the garrison house in Fort Hill uh for his safety and a group of, of Puritan leaders, Simon Bradstreet.
And I think, wait, Winthrop John Winthrop’s son and Cotton Mather go and try to talk to Andrews and say, Andrews, listen, we’ll assure your safety if you come out and meet with us.
So Andrew says, ok, and of course, being the honorable group, the pins where they, they have him arrested and word gets out to the rest of New England and New England militias start marching toward Boston as part of this open rebellion.
Andrews escape, he’s arrested, but he escapes and flees to Rhode Island and, and, and he’s captured in Rhode Island and put on a ship back to England.
So this is absolute utter rebellion and essentially revolution, right? It.

Jake:
[35:46] And almost to the day it was April 18th or 19th.
It was almost to the day on the, the pre anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Just about what, 75 years, 100 years too soon.
One of my favorite, it’s the weirdest piece of trivia at the Commonwealth Museum in Dorchester.
There’s a, a little display about Edmund Andros and there’s a video portraying him while he’s locked up uh briefly before he makes his escape.
And the actor who portrays him is Jim True Frost who’s basically o only other role ever was uh Re Belus on the, the HBO Show The Wire back in the early two thousands which.

Daniel Dain:
[36:32] 00. Yeah. Right.

Jake:
[36:34] And he’s not credited. I had, I had to look and look, I just say.

Daniel Dain:
[36:36] That is great. Uh.

Jake:
[36:38] I know I know this face and eventually I realized, oh, that’s Prez that’s Prez Belus.
And it, it’s not credited. It’s on IM DB, but it’s very clearly him.

Daniel Dain:
[36:46] That is hysterical.

Jake:
[36:48] I hope it’s still, I, I haven’t been to the Commonwealth Museum in a few years, so I hope it’s still there.

Daniel Dain:
[36:52] That is awesome. That is awesome.

Jake:
[36:54] But Andros, I mean, Andros didn’t do a great job of ingratiating himself when he arrived here.
Basically, the, the first thing he did was demand keys to Old South to hold a, an anglican worship in a Puritan meeting house.
And then he celebrated Christmas and it did a lot of things to get off on AAA bad first impression with the locals.

Daniel Dain:
[37:14] I think he imposed taxes which become an issue a little bit later on, uh generally rather autocratic.
So, yeah, the New Englanders were not too thrilled with, with royal governance.

Jake:
[37:24] And you know, we’ve talked a little bit about Andrews on the show in the past, but there’s a chapter in Boston history that, that I’m not super well versed with that.
That follows where folks like sir William Phipps and Increase Mather have to fight for a new Charter.

Daniel Dain:
[37:40] Increased matter, goes to England to try to figure out what’s gonna, what’s gonna follow and, and it ends up compromising and agreeing to uh you know, effectively a return of, of government based in, in the colonies in, it’s um but, but with concessions and with greater oversight, but the, but Massachusetts gets to appoint its own governors and, and remains essentially, you know, self governing in so many ways.
And of course, the fact that you had to take a ship to have any communication all the way to England uh affects that as well.
Uh Phipps is a really interesting character because he leads an expedition of Massachusetts uh militia to invade Quebec, which I just like, wait a second, Massachusetts was, you know, I think he leads 2000 seamen and like 32 ships or something like that to lay siege on Quebec.
And they get up there and the Governor General Frontenac, who the, the Great Hotel is named after, you know, has some great quote about something like, you know, uh Phipps tells them to surrender and he says, like, I’m gonna answer your, your request with the mouth of my cannons and, and uh muskets or something like that.
And then of course, it starts raining and, and smallpox breaks out and, you know, the expedition is a failure.

Jake:
[39:01] You know, I had read about that incident and then I traveled to Quebec City for the first time and took one look at the terrain and said these people were nuts.
You know, Quebec is situated on this almost impregnable cliff face high up above the Saint Lawrence river.
You can’t invade Quebec. That’s just crazy talk.

Daniel Dain:
[39:19] And of course, the, the, the final great battle of the French and Indian war, taking the plains of Abraham, um, with, with a lot of militia from Massachusetts.
Uh, you know, the night before they scale the cliffs below Quebec and the, the French Guard in Quebec just think it’s impossible and don’t even really guard it.
It’s very similar to, to, to the D day invasion.

Jake:
[39:41] Once the British are up on the planes, it was all over already. Almost.

Daniel Dain:
[39:46] Yeah, it was a general Wolfe and Montcalm. Both both die from their, their wounds.

Jake:
[39:49] Both died on the field. Yeah.

Daniel Dain:
[39:51] And, you know, I talk about it a little bit in the history of Boston because you have to understand the French and Indian War to understand, the fundamental difference in the way the colonists and the British thought about the obligations in, in British North American holdings.
You know, the British thought. Well, of course, we’re gonna tax you because you should be paying for your own defense.
We’re, we’re defending you against the, those nasty French and their, their native American allies and, you know, we’re gonna defend you out along the Appalachian mountains, and you should take on this burden and the, the colonists were like Well, a lot of this wasn’t our, our idea.
And, oh, by the way, it’s, it’s, you know, where that your manpower is, you know, greatly drawn upon, you know, colonial militia.
So, you know, I, we think we’re, we’re doing our fair share.
Um, but you do have to understand that period to understand, you know, what’s, what starts happening almost immediately after the end of the French and Indian War.

Jake:
[40:51] Well, just to put a little bit of a bow on that, the third great invasion of Quebec was also launched out of Boston in 1775.
Culminating I think it was on New Year’s Day in 1776 with General Montgomery catching a bullet in the neck in Quebec.
As Hamilton fans will know, it seemed like that became for Quebecois a great unifying moment where the British who had been seen as maybe occupiers for a decade or so after, uh winning sovereignty over all of Canada, were then unified with the French speaking locals in their defense against us meddling Americans.
Coming up from Boston under Montgomery and Arnold.

Daniel Dain:
[41:33] You know, and, and the other thing you’re, you’re, you’re bringing up here, brings us back to what we were talking about early on is, is how do you draw the line on what’s Boston history, right?
Like, you know, you do have to understand some of these events because they provide context to Boston.
And so you’re caught and when you’re trying to figure out how you tell Boston history, as you know, if you and I can call ourselves historians, which, which one could debate.
But to the extent that we, we uh role play as historians, the there’s constant tension, right?
How context matters. But if you tell too much context, then you’re no longer talking Boston history.
So you do have to make these choices and sometimes there are clear parameters and sometimes you include it just because it’s a really cool story, right? Like, you know.

Exploring Boston’s Influence on California Missions and Oregon Coast

Jake:
[42:15] Yeah, I am very guilty of that. I, I like to read Boston history very widely so I’ll find excuses to, you know, I talked about the California missions through the lens of somebody who, uh from Boston who built a gris mill at the mission San Bernardino, or I’ll talk about, you know, the American presence on the Oregon coast, because the Columbia sailed out of Boston because I just want to read about.

Daniel Dain:
[42:40] Yeah. Right. Or, or, or how about the great Halifax explosion?

Jake:
[42:41] It. Have an excuse to talk about it.

Boston’s Role in the Great Halifax Explosion Relief

Daniel Dain:
[42:45] Bostonians love telling the story of the great Halifax explosion and because we went up and, and provided the, you know, the relief trains.

Jake:
[42:51] I can almost never read that story with a dry eye.
I swear. I, I noticed yesterday that it was the, the tree this year was announced yesterday and I immediately get choked up reading about the, you know, the, the family who has decorated this tree every year for 40 years, but now it’s too big.
So they hope we enjoy it as much as they do. And thanks for the help after the explosion.
How can you not be affected by that?

Daniel Dain:
[43:14] It’s a tremendous tragedy, but it’s also a story of incredible effort by it in Massachusetts sending the relief up and the continuing story with a Christmas tree.
And so we continue to tell it in Boston because it’s such a compelling story, but it’s not really Boston history.
I mean, we’re related to it, but at Boston play a role in it.
But so you have to draw those, you, you have to make those choices and I think everyone says Great Halifax explosion makes the cut for Boston.
Uh because it is just, you know, because it is such a good story.
But those are the, those are the types of things that, that we decide to include or not include.

Jake:
[43:50] So something like the great Halifax explosion that’s during World War one.
It’s basically a result of munitions ships not being careful enough in Halifax Harbor.
When I read through the watershed moments in your book, that’s a moment when Boston, maybe it’s not in full decline, but it’s slipping at least.
So, what does it tell us about Boston or maybe just about history more more broadly that, you know, one of these eras that you’ve called out as being Boston on the downslope.
It’s also a moment when Boston has the resources and the people and the wherewithal to put this relief expedition, not only to put a train together the next day and, and, and provide the first relief, but to provide ongoing relief for months and years afterwards.

Daniel Dain:
[44:33] You try to come up with these neat time periods. So I end my section on sort of the triumph of 19th century Boston, which I have going up to 1920.
But I end it with the great Halifax explosion story because I think it’s like Boston at its absolute finest.
Um But then when I start the discussion of the 20th century, which is now 20 years in, I then start a little bit before 1917 with, with all the, you know, fear of, of immigrants with the, the uh anarchists and the bombings that are going on and this real terror that’s happening um as well as, you know, these slum areas that are the immigrant neighborhoods on the waterfront where it’s seen as a big sort of health crisis and, and fear of fire.
And so Bostonians then, you know, you get 9 1920 this very deep national deflationary recession.
Uh and when you have deflation, people put off spending decisions, if you can, you know, if you’re thinking about buying something today, we just wait a month and you can buy it more cheaply.
And so people stop spending and the mills of New England respond to this deflationary recession by looking for lower cost labor and relocating to the American South and overseas.
And it starts the decline of our manufacturing base.
And the way we respond to this crisis is we start doing things that.

[45:53] You know, each and each decision in and of itself, you know, has its defenders, but you put them all together, essentially destroys the city, right?
And so 1924 2 things happen that end up having enormous effects to the history of Boston.
One is the Immigration Act of 1924 which effectively ends the, the immigrant era of Boston, where Boston was continually being refreshed by new people coming to the city with new ideas who start businesses who um you know, leads to a lot of innovation.
Um And you know that the Immigration Act is the product of, of, of, you know, actually, you know, two decades of fighting by Henry, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to impose immigration restrictions and, and he gets his, his backing from the immigration restriction league founded by, you know, I think three Harvard Alums on Beacon Hill Brahmins, um who are, who are trying to end immigration into Boston.
And also in 1924 is the first zoning act in, in Boston, the f uh which essentially makes illegal, the neighborhoods of Boston that we love the most, right?
So the Back bay and the north end in Charlestown and the south end, um, all of these neighborhoods become effectively legal when Boston adopts zoning and zoning.
You know, everyone, you know who’s against zoning zoning is like, you know, apple pie, right?
Like everyone’s in favor of zoning and the, and the arguments for zoning all made complete sense in 1924 and no one questions it today.
It’s, it’s about separating uses and separating buildings. Yeah.

Jake:
[47:21] Yeah, I was gonna say expand a little bit on what you mean by the, the neighborhoods that people love the best.
What makes people love those neighborhoods like Charlestown, the north end and then what becomes illegal with zoning at that point.

Daniel Dain:
[47:35] The concern of the reform advocates, um which has various names.
The Garden City movement is generally the the name mostly given for it comes out of Europe.
And it’s supposed to address these crises of, of urban slums and urban slums had some real problems, right?
They were centers for disease.
There were fires that, that often spread, they were high crime areas and they tended to be polluted because they were, they were often located next to industry, right?
And so Reformers look at these uh these slum areas and say, you know, how do we respond to the slums?
And the notion the notion of the garden city movement was essentially let’s bring the suburbs to the city, let’s separate where people work from where people live and let’s separate building, let’s have lots of air and open space around buildings, let’s have parks around buildings.
And so you, so the idea was to isolate buildings from other buildings and from other uses uh and have lots of space between them, right?
And as a result of that disease doesn’t spread between buildings because you have lots of space and fire doesn’t spread between buildings and you don’t get crime because crime tends to flourish in dark and, and, you know, dark places where people can hide.
But when you have lots of separation of buildings, um, there’d be no place to hide and they’re less polluted because we’ve moved industry away from where people live.

Jake:
[48:56] Well, that all sounds great. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Daniel Dain:
[48:59] It does. Right. So, so the best of intentions. Right. Except that, that’s, that’s just not what cities are.
Right. And the better response to those things would have been crime reform and public health initiatives and more, yeah, more.

Jake:
[49:10] Mhm. Disease control eggs.

Daniel Dain:
[49:14] More uh fire prevention measures instead of essentially destroying what makes cities what they are, which is people can walk to where they, where they from, where they live to where they work and dense neighborhoods um.

The Impact of Zoning on Neighborhoods and Housing

 

[49:28] Makes housing much more affordable because you, because you can fit many more people there.
Uh and you and people interact with each other and, and, and we’ve learned through history and social science research that innovation happens when lots of people from different backgrounds come together and, you know, exchange ideas.
And so by making what I mean by making them illegal is that uh immediately upon the adoption of zoning, all of the properties in those neighborhoods became non conforming with zoning.
Um And so if you want, as soon as zoning was adopted in Boston, if you want and, and through today, if you had an open area of land and you said I love the north end more than any other neighborhood, let’s build a new north end.
You couldn’t do it, it, it would, it would not be allowed.
Uh, and it’s kind of crazy that the neighborhoods that if you, uh, if you asked any Bostonian what neighborhoods they love the most, they would all name those neighborhoods.
And even if they named a neighborhood like Dorchester as their favorite, that doesn’t comply either.
You know, the, the, the triple deckers do not comply with, with zoning.
And in fact, there was a great effort to, to, to outlaw triple deckers, which, which ends up passing of the triple deckers had been a form of inexpensive housing uh for immigrants, you know, in some ways to move out of what were called the slums, but were actually very dense and vital neighborhoods.

Jake:
[50:46] Anytime I’ve dealt with some of these questions on the podcast, it’s been the effect.
It’s been a few decades later, the slum clearance of urban renewal, the, you know, flattening of the west end, the New New York Streets, the, you know, so many great neighborhoods that just don’t really exist in Boston anymore because of sort of the mid century urban policy. Yeah, we, we knocked them all down.

Daniel Dain:
[51:11] Fed federal and local policy, right? Federal money. But local policy.

Jake:
[51:12] Um Right.
I never thought quite as much about some of the causes that created that situation.
So it’s revealing to have the conversation.

Daniel Dain:
[51:23] Until the 19 sixties, no one questioned urban renewal, right?
We tore down the New York streets and the west end and Scully Square and no one objected, right?
Like it was just what you did, you, you know, city, we had these city problems, people moving out of the city.
So let’s tear them down and start from scratch. But we tore down dense diverse neighborhoods and replaced them with low density and non diverse neighborhoods.

Jake:
[51:45] I mean, some people did object but it was the people who lived in those neighborhoods that had very limited political power and nobody was listening to them.

Daniel Dain:
[51:53] Yes. And by the 19 sixties, but in the 19 forties and 19 fifties, it was, there was much less of it in part because, you know, the promise was made that the new housing was going to be built for the people who were being displaced, which of course turned out to be a lie.
And once, yeah, once, once that was figured out, then you get Charles Town and Austin and Brighton rebelling against the urban renewal.
And it, it’s the beginning of this process of, of, you know, sort of a people’s rebellion um that starts in the 19 sixties, you know, it leads to the, by the 19 seventies opposition to the Urban ring and the, you know, the southwest expressway, which don’t get built, which are great triumphs of, of urbanism over bad urban policy. But then we learned the lessons too well.
And today we’re opposed to, we’re now opposed to everything and it’s, it’s one of the major contributors to the housing crisis we’re in is that we can’t build anything new.

Jake:
[52:45] Selfishly. I’m glad the southwest expressway didn’t happen because depending on which eras plans you look at, it would be basically right through my backyard here in Hyde Park, uh, within a block.

Daniel Dain:
[52:56] Oh, I don’t think it’s any, it’s, I don’t think it’s anything selfish.
It would have been an absolute catastrophe for the city.
I mean, you know, it, I mean, to build that in the urban ring, it was just destroying the, the city.
I mean, people forget with the, with these highway, we, we talk about losing neighborhoods through urban renewal when we tour down the west end and New York streets and Scully Square.

Highways as Displacement and the Triumph of Chinatown

 

[53:15] And later we tore down much of a lot of the south end in Charlestown.
But the these highways displaced almost as many people as urban renewal.
You know, you look at the, the central artery and, and there were thousands of people who lost their job, you know, lost their homes and businesses that went out of business.
People lost their jobs. And so the way the central artery was built was block by block, right?
They didn’t do eminent domain of the entire stretch all at one time, they would do eminent domain of a block and then build the high, the, the highway would March south.
It was built from north to south so that the central already was being built.

[53:50] Marching south and the eminent domain was just staying just ahead of the of the highway construction.
And so the people of Chinatown could see this highway coming toward them, right?
Like a slow moving tsunami and Chinatown which had been, had always lacked political power um comes together to oppose the eminent domain in the highway going through their neighborhood.
And miraculously, they’re petitioning uh that what they argued for was to put the central artery underground, a tunnel through Chinatown.
And incredibly, they get the government to agree that instead of the central artery being above ground, the way it is everywhere else, it’s gonna dip underground of Chinatown and then reemerge um to the south of Chinatown.
And so it was like, yay, what a great triumph. And then the government said, well, fu we’re gonna still take eminent domain and we’re gonna, and the way we’re going to build the tunnel is through cut and cover.
And so Chinatown still gets separated, you know, and you can see it today today, it’s part of the Greenway.
Um but you can still see this great swath that separates the Leather District from Chinatown, which before the central artery was all part of the same urban neighborhood.
Um So even though the central artery went underground, there, there still was this great scar that cut right through Chinatown.

Jake:
[55:04] There’s a great book uh just in the last couple of years by Michael Liu Liu Forever Struggle, which is based around political organizing in Boston’s Chinatown and how much of it comes out of resistance to the central artery project.
Um Definitely, I tried so hard to get Michael to come on the show and we couldn’t.

Daniel Dain:
[55:22] Yeah, I haven’t read the book, but that’s right.

Unique Approach to Research and Writing

Jake:
[55:27] Make it happen. But it’s a great book.
Anybody should read it Forever Struggle, Michael Liu all about Chinatown.

Daniel Dain:
[55:32] All right. I have to find that.

Jake:
[55:33] But that raises a question for me, which I may have should have asked earlier, as an attorney, as you know, not a professional historian, not somebody with a, a phd.
How do you research this book?

Daniel Dain:
[55:48] You know, for me, it was, it was storytelling and, and um, my approach to, to doing the research and writing, I think was different from the way a lot of people write history, which is often written chronologically and, and the, the book ends up being roughly chronological, although.

[56:06] You know, I pick up different, different threads and, and carry them forward and then loop back to it to a different thread.
So it’s not perfectly chronological, but I didn’t write it in, in that order.
I wrote it in whatever order of things that I was reading at the time.
And it was, uh I use mostly secondary sources. So, um because I wanted to learn the history of Boston, I was just trying to find as many books about Boston history as I could.
And I end up, you know, mostly buying uh 265 books on some aspect of Boston history.
And over a period of four years I read every book that I cite in the, um, in the bibliography, I read cover to cover and took notes on.
Um And so the discipline was, I tried to read one book a week for four years, take notes on it and then weave it into the weave it into the narrative.
And so since I didn’t read the books in chronological order, um it was kind of like a jigsaw puzzle.
So I would take notes in different periods and try to figure out how to tie them together.
And then as the manuscript was coming together, I would just embolden the manuscript, I would just make notes to myself, you know, what happened next? Why did this happen?
And then I, you know, try to find books as well as news, newspaper articles and magazine articles and journal stories.
Um as well as, you know, I, I tried to approach this as if I were a tourist and just had innumerable questions.
And so, um I visited, I think over 70 historic sites and museums.

[57:32] And I, you know, I was, as I said, like with your podcast, taking notes, I would bring a notepad and pen and I would go, you know, do the freedom Trail uh tour.
I would go to a historic house and take the historic house tour, you know, the Gibson House, the Nichols House and ask questions and take notes as you know.
Yeah, like as a tourist. And then, you know, I would take those notes home and, and type them into my uh manuscript and try to move things around and get into some kind of cohesive narrative and, and cohesive order.
And so, you know, I’m pleased with how it all filled together. I have to say that uh I started in December of 2017 and by early 2020 I was a little panic that I was like, I think I’ve taken on too much and then, then March 2020 happened and I would have, I just had hours and hours more time available than I had before and, and after the pandemic.

Jake:
[58:23] Along with the research you had to do reading. Uh what did you say?
263 books, something along those, yeah, something along those lines.

Daniel Dain:
[58:29] Five or something, like I forget. Exactly. It’s, it’s, it’s about that.

Jake:
[58:32] Um I, I will say I’m lucky that, you know, authors send me books when they want to talk to me. I don’t have to go out and buy them most of the time.
Um So along with your book budget, some of the research had to involve the visual aspect of the book, the book, like a lot of history books these days, richly illustrated with historical maps, paintings, you know, iconic photos like the soiling of old, of old glory, but it also has a lot of new, original modern photos that help set it apart.

Daniel Dain:
[59:05] So I finished the manuscript with no images and knew that I need to figure out how to do images.

Collaboration with Photographer Peter Van Der Worker

 

[59:09] And so I was familiar with, with a photographer named Peter Van Der Worker, who is probably the most well known and greatest of all urban photographers based in Boston.
I put it that way because he takes pictures outside of Boston as well.
But one of Boston’s great photographers of the last 40 years, uh he’s, he’s really brilliant and he’s got a number of books which I own and had and a mutual friend of ours introduced us.
We went to, we went out to dinner together um at a Chinese restaurant and had a few Mai Tai and I brought the manuscript with me.
II, I had no notion that he was actually gonna work with me on this project.
But I just, you know, I, I gave him the manuscript and just said, you know, here you go, you know, you’re welcome to it.
Um And his wife later told me that he has a DH D and, and never reads, but he sat down and read the manuscript um cover to cover in like three days and he called me up afterwards and said that he, he loved the manuscript and believed in the project so much that he was going to make his entire 40 year archive of, of photos of Boston available to me if I would put his name on the cover.
And it took me all of one second to say absolutely. Like, you know, I get 40 years of, of, of phenomenal images of Boston.
Um And by putting your name on the cover, you, you help the brand because you actually have brand recognition in a way that I don’t.

[1:00:29] Um So it was an absolute no brainer to me and it was really, really fun working with him.
And then, you know, I think it was important also to have historical images and maps and the like.
And so uh I worked with a photo researcher to, to track down images and ones that are, that are in the public domain, then they’re free and, and if they’re more recent, then we’d have to pay for them.
So like the soiling of old glory, I just had to have because it’s the most iconic of all Boston photographs.

[1:00:57] Um you know, similarly the uh the Bobby Orr flying through the air, I, you know, it was either that or Carlton fifth home run that I thought were the two most iconic Boston sports images because I have about 50 pages of Boston Sports history.
Um And I found out what the cost was to, to, to buy those two and they were both really, really expensive.
So I said it’s gotta be one or the other and I decided to go with Bobby.
You are over Carlton Fisk.
I wish I had both of them, but you have to make some choices.

Jake:
[1:01:24] So picking up a thread from our earlier conversation, the last of the watershed moments.
So the last of the, the known watershed moments, at least in your book is Boston resurgent.
Do you feel like the return to urbanism was as planned and deliberate as the attempt to suburbanize Boston a generation before?

Daniel Dain:
[1:01:49] No. Um I sort of, again, neatly packaged into what I call the three Ds density diversity and good urban design.

[1:01:57] That when cities embrace those principles, they do well, and when cities reject those principles as Boston did through much of the 20th century, they declined.
And Boston sort of just started re embracing those principles in the 19 nineties as people came back to the city.
But again, nothing is, is as neat, right? So what else is going on?
That’s contemporaneous with the return of people to the city, street crime and organized crime and public corruption all declined significantly in the 19 nineties for a bunch of reasons.
Some having to do with the economy and federal policy, some with, with local policing, some with the fact that the me administration was, was relatively clean.

The impact of crime and investment on communities

 

[1:02:33] Um you know, and, and uh you know, the, the, you know, whitey, you know, the grip of Whitey bulger becomes loosened in the 19 nineties.
Um And so the problem with that type of crime is that investment in the city flees.
So, so crime has really two victims, the direct victim, but then the the the victim of entire communities when investment flees the city.
Uh And so that, you know, sort of the, the loosening of the grip of ends up being a major factor to people returning to the city. The environment, right.
We finally start cleaning up. The environment goes back to the 19 seventies, but really not till the harbor is cleaned up in the Charles River, cleaned up by the 19 nineties.
Do people, does it just become a, a cleaner and healthier place to live?
Um You know, the the big dig, I don’t want to underestimate the importance of the big dig.
So a whole bunch of factors all come together by the 19 nineties as well as a greater recognition, certainly by companies of the importance of locating.

[1:03:28] In ecosystems where there’s lots of other companies and lots of other people around.
You know, the lesson of the Mass Massachusetts miracle from the 19 seventies and 19 eighties was those were companies that all had a really good idea mostly around the personal computer and they located in isolated suburban office camp, you know, campuses away from other people.
And so they were able to innovate a single time.
But with the rise of Silicon Valley and the internet in the 19 nineties, those Massachusetts miracle companies did.
We’re not being isolated, we’re not able to innovate a second time and all of the Massachusetts miracle companies are out of business today.
And so the lessons that companies learned in business was, you can’t be isolated or, you know, or at least when, when you are isolated from, from lots of other people, it’s much harder to continue to innovate.
And so there was a real embracing of the benefits of locating around other people and, and it, it gives rise to the great triumph of Kendall Square and then the seaport.
Um and so all those things come together uh to lead to a resurgence in Boston and get, get played out in cities around the country and around the world.
I mean, we’re sort of in this great period of people returning the city internationally as well.

Jake:
[1:04:37] You know, I first moved to Boston in 1997. So I’ve really only known Boston in its ascendancy.
You now have a perspective that’s at least 400 million or 400 years old, if not several million years old, going back to the formation of the continents.
Um when you step back and, and look, do you feel like Boston is on the rise?
Are we entering another period of, of decline? What do you think uh the health of the city is right now?

Daniel Dain:
[1:05:05] You know, the last chapter of the book I call, I can’t call it a watershed moment yet because we don’t know. But I asked the question, are we at another watershed moment?
We’ve had this great 30 year run. But are we pivoting to, to something that’s a little bit more worrisome?
Um And it’s, it’s hard to answer that question, but I guess I have two thoughts on it.
Uh Number one, I’m really worried about the future of the city because of the great crises we face today.
In terms of housing affordability, there’s a real transportation crisis about moving people around the city.
We have a climate change crisis, you know, depending on how you measure it.
There’s lots of um reports that say Boston is really one of the top 10 most exposed cities in the world for rising sea level um that we have so much of our infrastructure is susceptible to flooding.
Um And so that could, you know, you see the flood maps going out to 2050 or 2070.
Uh And it’s, it’s really scary for the, for the future of Boston.

Jake:
[1:06:02] I have a good friend who works for the MWR A in a pumping station, essentially.
Well, he did work for the MWR A in a pumping station and it doesn’t take much rain to flood some parts, parts of the city with the uh, machinery all doesn’t work perfectly at every moment.
So sea level rise, we don’t even need sea level rise. We just need a rainy weekend.

Daniel Dain:
[1:06:22] The subway system is totally exposed as well as lots of other systems.
Um and uh you know, the, the more immediate crisis we’re facing now with um with remote work and that with people not coming back to the office, a disproportionate amount of the city’s tax revenue comes from taxes on, you know, comes from, from property taxes disproportionately on commercial buildings, particularly office buildings.
And as those leases as current leases come up for renewal over the next couple of years, um company is going to be taking less space and we’re going to see an enormous amount of vacancy in Boston’s office buildings.
And you can bet the owners of all those buildings are going to be, you know, bringing uh abatement petitions.
Um and we could see an enormous amount of loss of, of revenue for the city of Boston.

[1:07:09] So there’s lots of reasons I’m very concerned and I’m not sure that um we have the political will.
I’m not blaming individual politicians. I think individual politicians all have the best of thoughts, but there’s some real structural um limitations on our ability to uh politically deal with these crises that we, that we face today.

Concerns about political will and structural limitations

 

[1:07:28] Um You know, the way we do our land use planning, it’s very, very, it’s gonna be very, very difficult to change that.
Uh Unfortunately, and so I have a lot of worry for the future of Boston.
On the other hand, I’m really not worried that we’re going to go back to the Boston in the, from the 19 twenties to the to the 19 eighties.
Um, you know, I think you could see a rise in crime, but I don’t think you’re going to see crime the way it was before with organized crime.
We’re not going to see pollution reach the levels that it, that it was at before.
And we’re not going to see these policies of just tearing their neighborhoods the way we did before.
And companies also, as I mentioned, embrace the the benefits of urbanism that I think we recognize now that innovation occurs best in cities and I don’t think we’re gonna lose that.
So I have reasons to be generally optimistic about the importance of cities and reasons to be pessimistic about the political will to, to.

Jake:
[1:08:17] To actually address those challenges.

Daniel Dain:
[1:08:17] To uh or the ability to solve some of the challenges we have today. Yeah.

Jake:
[1:08:21] For somebody who has never really thought about what makes a great, a great city.
I was gonna say a great American city, but any city or what makes a city thrive or wither.
What do you think? Some of the most important lessons? Somebody who’s approaching this topic with fresh eyes can take from your book?

Daniel Dain:
[1:08:41] I try to establish this notion of, of the importance of density and diversity and good urban design to city building.
And what I mean by that is cities are successful when they create those spaces.
And this is the the the the design or architecture aspect of it.
And you know what’s sometimes called social infrastructure. There’s a influential professor at NYU Eric King Beg who talks about social infrastructure is, is those spaces today that sort of replace the ago from Ancient Greece or the form from Ancient Rome, right?
What are those spaces that we create where you can bring lots of people together today, from diverse backgrounds, from lots of different backgrounds?
Um And it’s, it’s, you know, it’s racial diversity, but it’s, you know, Jane Jacobs talked about the importance of, of diversity in, in age groups, right?
Heavy neighborhoods with, with older people who, who are sort of neighborhood watch people as well as young people who bring vitality um and, and new ideas, right?
And so mixes of age mi mixes of different experiences and when you bring all those things together, you get innovation and you get, you get vital cities and I think that we just can’t forget that because we did in the, in the, we, we knew it in the 19th century intuitively, even if there wasn’t social science research, we totally forgot it in the 20th century.
And there’s a recognition today, vital cities. It’s so important for vital cities.

Jake:
[1:10:05] Well as I get ready to wrap up here today, is there anything that I haven’t asked that? You wish I had asked you today?

Daniel Dain:
[1:10:13] There are so many good stories. My favorite story is about the uh civil rights movement in Boston in the 18 forties, which I find so fascinating um in the case of, of Roberts versus Boston School committee, which is my fav as a lawyer.
That’s my favorite legal case in Boston history because it ends up providing the legal justification for, for Jim Crow plus CV.
Ferguson cites Roberts versus Boston school committees justification for it.
And then fast forward to 1854 excuse me, 1954. And Thurgood Marshall is looking for plaintiffs to, to bring a challenge to segregated schools.
And the challenge he had, he had lots of potential plaintiffs from the Deep South where the schools were incredibly unequal, but he, he didn’t want the lead plaintiffs in Brown V Board of Ed.
What became Brown V Board of Education to be from highly unequal schools because he was worried that the Supreme Court could affirm Plessy V Ferguson, the separate but equal doctrine. Um.

Jake:
[1:11:10] If they were truly equal schools, then it was more defensible. Uh, interesting.

Daniel Dain:
[1:11:16] He, he, he needed the lead case to be um from essentially equal schools so that if they’re gonna, if they’re gonna, you know, he needed that in order to strike down place CV Ferguson, he makes his argument based on the arguments that Charles Sumner had made and the, the losing side in Robert’s fee, uh Boston School Committee, which is that separate is inherently unequal.
And so the Roberts versus Boston School committee ends up being the legal justification for both Jim Crow, which was the, the, you know, the winning side in Roberts versus Boston School Committee, as well as the Sumner argument, the losing side in Roberts versus School committee becomes a legal justification for, for Brown V Board of Education.
And then fast forward to more recently with the Goodrich decision, which legalized same sex marriage in Massachusetts as a reaction to the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in Goodrich, uh Governor Romney and the General Court wanted to see if they could come up with with civil unions as a, as an alternative to gay marriage.

[1:12:16] And so the General Court sent a pit, sent a petition to the Supreme Judicial Court.
The General Court being the state legislature sends a petition to the prejudicial court asking the question of whether or not they could adopt civil union as an alternative to the good rich decision of, of gay marriage and the Supreme Court.
While it doesn’t cite Roberts versus Bram Board, excuse me, Roberts versus Boston School Committee uses goes back to the Sumner argument that separate is inherently unequal in saying that civil unions was not an alternative to gay marriage So this one case ends up being not only the justification for, for the end of Jim Crow and in the United States, but becomes a sort of the foundation for what, what solidifies the right to gay marriage in Massachusetts.
With that, of course, becomes the law, you know, everywhere in the United States. Eventually.

Jake:
[1:13:04] Well, I’m glad we had a chance to touch on the Roberts decision, the long reaching legal influence it had.
Now da I know you’re in the midst of a flurry of book events.
So if listeners have heard this conversation today and they’re excited, they want to come out and meet, you, learn more about the book, maybe get a copy signed.
Where should they go for information?

Daniel Dain:
[1:13:27] So because I’m not like a full time author and instead, I’m a lawyer, I’ve worked with our firm’s marketing person to have a page on our f our law firm’s website with information about the book and book events.
Dain Torpy dot com is our law firm website.
And if you go to that website, there’s a page uh a link to the history of Boston, the name of my book, which has um some book reviews, the reviews have been really great.
I’ve been excited about the book reviews as well as upcoming events.
I think I’ve now done about 45 book talks and interviews, but this one remains, uh this one has become, I think both the longest and one and one of my favorites because uh the person asking me questions today, you Jake actually knows Boston history incredibly well.
Uh And so it’s really kept me on my toes. Uh But yeah, a whole bunch of, of, of events coming up.

Jake:
[1:14:11] I blush, I blush.

Public Events to Learn About Boston’s History

Daniel Dain:
[1:14:17] Uh November 20th, I met the Quinn. That’s a private event.
But for anyone who is a member of the Quinn, you come out to that, but you, you’ll see there’s a whole bunch of other ones, Massachusetts Historical Society in January West End Museum, also in January, Needham History Museum in, in February.
Um So people who are interested in hearing more about my take on the history of Boston, you know, definitely come to some of these public events.

Jake:
[1:14:41] Well, I will put in an extra plug for your event in January at the West End Museum because I feel like that’s a very under visited museum that has a lot to offer.
Da Da. I just want to say thank you very much for joining us today.
The book again is a History Of Boston by Daniel Dain and it’s available in bookstores everywhere right now.

Daniel Dain:
[1:15:02] Thank you very much. It’s been a great pleasure being on. I had a total blast tonight.

Jake:
[1:15:07] To learn more about Daniel Dain in his new book, a History of Boston.
Check out this week’s show notes at hubor dot com slash 288.
We’ll have a link to Dan’s author page where you can find out more about him and see the list of his many, many upcoming book events in the Boston area.
And of course, I’ll include a link where you can support the show and independent bookstores by buying Dan’s book.
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Music

Jake:
[1:16:13] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.