Every work day, I walk about a ½ mile from my home to the Newtonville MBTA Commuter Rail Station to take the Worcester/Framingham train to work in downtown Boston. I trek past rambling Victorian houses and through a busy little shopping district to the railroad station, which is next to the Mass. Pike. I am fortunate to be living the dream of “walkable urbanism” that so many people around the country are advocating for today.
You could say that these morning and evening walks helped inspire my new book The Hub’s Metropolis: Greater Boston’s Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth (The MIT Press, 2013). This book seeks to explain Boston’s metropolitan growth by describing nine periods of suburban development. The book’s key theme is embodied in its subtitle “From Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth.” As a long-time observer of cities and suburbs, I have been surprised to see how railroad suburbs that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries have been rediscovered by the “smart growth” movement.
The Hub’s Metropolis explains how railroad-oriented residential development was an accidental by-product of the first railroads. My “village” of Newtonville (Newton is made up of 14 “villages,” not “neighborhoods”) developed after Greater Boston’s first railroad line was opened up through Newton. On April 7, 1834, the first railroad train headed out on the Boston & Worcester Railroad line to West Newton, which was called Squash End at the time. The company’s investors had wanted to route the rail line through Watertown and Waltham, which boasted flourishing textile factories, but those communities rejected the proposal. Newton, a rural community, welcomed the iron horse and set on a course toward becoming one of Boston’s first and most prestigious suburbs. Congressman William Jackson, a leading Newton businessman, helped the railroad company acquire the right-of-way through his town.
The idea of building railroads caught fire, and Boston investors quickly built railroads to Providence, Worcester, and Lowell (1835), Salem (1838), Newburyport (1840), and Plymouth, Fitchburg, and Fall River (1845). These train lines were spokes emanating from the “hub” and still serve as the commuter lines of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
The railroad entrepreneurs built their trains to transport freight. Little did they realize their infrastructure would spur the development of a new type of built landscape—railroad suburbs. It took the railroad companies a few years to figure out there was a potential commuter market living on the outskirts of Boston. The Eastern Railroad, which operated between East Boston and Newburyport, introduced the first season tickets in 1839. The Boston & Worcester Railroad started offering reduced commuter fares and scheduling rush-hour trains—the “Newton Special”—four years later. The term “commuter” originated with the “commuted” price reduction for yearly passes.
By 1849 there were fifty-nine commuter trains coming into Boston every weekday from less than fifteen miles away, and another forty-five trains traveled from longer distances. According to the Boston Directory, the number of suburbanites commuting into the city grew from 1,600 in 1845 to over 10,000 by 1860. The Boston Evening Transcript identified a dozen railroad suburbs: Dedham, Milton, Quincy, Dorchester, Brighton, Newton, Medford, Melrose, Malden, Winchester, and Somerville, and West Cambridge (Arlington).
The railroad opened up land near railroad stations for residential development. Speculators laid out subdivisions and street arrangements that optimized development opportunities—there was no municipal planning or land use regulation in the nineteenth century. Railroad suburbs like Newtonville flourished across Greater Boston, producing a legacy of distinctive, well-built commercial structures and houses that form the foundation for current-day redevelopment. Railroad suburbs stopped growing around 1920, when the automobile started to reduce railroad use and produced a low-density suburban landscape.
Railroad commuting declined rapidly after World War II. During the 1950s and 1960s, several passenger lines were eliminated and service was cut back on the remainder. In 1969, 29,500 passengers road commuter lines each day. Fortunately, Boston never completely abandoned the commuter rail lines, although it came close. In 1973, the MBTA bought up the remaining bankrupt commuter lines, which had been operated by the Boston & Maine, the New York Central, and the New Haven Railroads, to insure continued commuter rail service.
By the 1980s and the growth of the downtown Boston office sector, use of the commuter lines increased. By 1990, 76,000 people were riding commuter rail each day. Under Governor Michael Dukakis, the state remodeled South Station, which had almost been demolished in the 1970s, into a handsome terminal that also serves Amtrak. A new North Station was opened in 1995 with the construction of the TD Garden. These station improvements spurred the expansion of the MBTA commuter rail system.
The most important factor in expanding commuter rail service was the 1990 environmental settlement that accompanied the “Big Dig.” The Conservation Law Foundation brought a lawsuit over the environmental impacts of the “Big Dig,” seeking to balance the highway project with expanded transit service. The lawsuit led to restoration of commuter rail service on the Worcester Line (1994), Kingston-Plymouth Line (1997), Middleborough Line (1997), Newburyport Line (1998), and Greenbush/South Shore Line (2007). With approximately 130,000 passengers per weekday, ridership on Boston’s commuter rail system today is only surpassed by New York and Chicago.
The expanded transit service has spurred an increasing amount of development around commuter rail and “T” stations in Greater Boston. The extensive MBTA transit system has approximately 130 railroad stations and more than 130 subway and trolley stops, not to mention hundreds of bus stops. Going back to the mid-nineteenth century, these transit stations have been nodes of development, which are still vital. Between 2000 and 2010, according to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), nearly 400 projects with 15,000 housing units and 15 million square feet of commercial space were built within a half-mile of transit stations. And twice that amount of development is on the drawing boards. This marks a significant turning from auto-dependent, low-density suburbia to transit-oriented development (TOD).
Boston’s transit system provides a competitive advantage over most American cities. Despite its aging rolling stock, somewhat unreliable service, and heavy bonded debt—all issues that need to be addressed with increased tax revenues—the transit system provides a platform for future development that more auto-reliant cities only wish they could replicate. Some may take the Newtonvilles for granted, but they are models that other parts of the country are trying to emulate.
The Hub's Metropolis 