Boston in Transit

This week, we post our conversation with Steven Beaucher, the proprietor of WardMaps on Massachusetts Avenue. We talk about his new book, Boston in Transit — this veritable encyclopedia of facts about transit in Boston.

Boston — by which we mean Boston and the entire Boston region — is wonderful for so many reasons. It holds a place of primacy for being the first at so much. I was reading yesterday that the first English to row up the Charles River and disembark at what later became known as Harvard Square created the first town plan in British North America when they laid out where houses would be building. The year was 1630.

Likewise with transit, the first public transit in the new world was a ferry boat — really a large canoe that could carry people — that ran from Charlestown to Boston. The ferry was required because although the first settlement happened on the Charlestown peninsula, some in the group decided to head south one peninsula to the Shawmut (soon renamed Boston) for better water. From there transit continued through the centuries into the Industrial Age and the nation’s first subway running under Tremont Street in Boston — originally traveling only one stop from Park Street to Boylston Street.

Steven states that he wanted to fill the gap he found in the documentary sources about the T. There was no “one stop shop” for information about the history of the whole endeavor, and he sat down to write his book and self-publish it to create that unified resource.

We also spend some time talking about the current T map — the one created by Cambridge Seven Architects in the mid-1960s. The history of transit maps has always had a fascination for me, because the connection between a transit system and the mapping of a transit system are — it occurs to me — inextricably linked.