I don't get up at aaagh o'clock for everybody, just partisan songs, Yiddish theater, and the dead.
There were twenty-one dead of the molasses flood, wrecked by the shrapnel of the tank's burst brittle steel or the debris cresting its sticky, stiffening wave or suffocated outright in what Stephen Puleo in his definitive account called the dark tide; it splintered buildings, tossed cars, flattened streetlights, crumpled the tracks and trestles of the Atlantic Avenue Elevated. Photographs of the time show an almost absurd devastation of matchsticked houses and warehouses, sheared-off roofs decorated with buckled girders and dismembered wheels, livelihoods and lives all wiped across the smeary plain of what's now Langone Park. Everything glistens balefully. A hundred and fifty injured were recorded in addition to the dead. I assume the numbers come from the landmark class-action suit successfully brought against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, parent company of Purity Distilling which had built the tank in 1915 and maintained it so poorly from the start that local families were accustomed to collect their own molasses from the constant leak. It is not true that on hot days in the North End you can still smell molasses, although it is apparently true that for weeks after the disaster Boston itself was generally sticky.
Seven years ago,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I joked about baking molasses cookies for the centenary and eating them on Copp's Hill. Instead we joined a memorial organized by the City of Boston Archaeology Program and the Boston Parks Department. January 15, 1919 was unseasonably warm; it was one of the contributing factors to the perfect sugarstorm that was the Great Boston Molasses Flood. January 15, 2019 was bright and biting, the sky and the harbor the same pale streaked floe-blue and my fingers numb by the time we'd walked up Commercial Street from North Station. With the rest of the small crowd which included a_reasonable_man, we stood in a ninety-foot circle following the remains of the molasses tank, whose location and perimeter had been recently mapped by UMass Boston's Fiske Center. Boston Archaeologist Joe Bagley spoke briefly about the occasion before yielding home plate to Boston Parks Commissioner Chris Cook, who read the names of the dead and held a moment of silence. Together with Representative Aaron Michlewitz they laid a wreath of white roses at the center of the tank. And then everything broke up very quickly, because everyone was very cold. Probably due to our position against the third-base fence, we do not really show up in any of the coverage I've seen, but there were cameras everywhere, so if you see one person in a black hoodie and a green canvas coat and another in a leather jacket and a sort of fur-lined-looking hat, hello.
Afterward we wandered up the granite steps and switchbacks of Copp's Hill Terrace and then down into the North End, where we did not eat at Antico Forno because they opened half an hour later than we could stand to wait around in the cold; we walked to the Boston Public Market, where we had respectively shakalatkes, a bagel, and ramen, and collectively a nice conversation with the vacationing couple from Maine sitting across the table from us. Then it took me and Rob forever to get home because the new schedule of the 89 is awful; it has stripped out easily half the buses; they no longer run on the twenty-minute or even half-hour schedule that allowed us to get to Sullivan or Davis on a reasonable timetable rather than much too early or slightly too late or just not at all. That, too, is Boston. I guess.
I'm very tired, but I am glad we got up for this ceremony. It was the kind of magic that needed a critical mass to work: enough participants to form the circle, to map the space that failed and killed and to remember why we need regulations as well as heroes. I liked the commissioner's promise that the park would always stay open and safe for children, the best way he could think of to redeem it from tragedy. It was a good thing to be part of.
Someone had left a jar of molasses on the wall.
There were twenty-one dead of the molasses flood, wrecked by the shrapnel of the tank's burst brittle steel or the debris cresting its sticky, stiffening wave or suffocated outright in what Stephen Puleo in his definitive account called the dark tide; it splintered buildings, tossed cars, flattened streetlights, crumpled the tracks and trestles of the Atlantic Avenue Elevated. Photographs of the time show an almost absurd devastation of matchsticked houses and warehouses, sheared-off roofs decorated with buckled girders and dismembered wheels, livelihoods and lives all wiped across the smeary plain of what's now Langone Park. Everything glistens balefully. A hundred and fifty injured were recorded in addition to the dead. I assume the numbers come from the landmark class-action suit successfully brought against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, parent company of Purity Distilling which had built the tank in 1915 and maintained it so poorly from the start that local families were accustomed to collect their own molasses from the constant leak. It is not true that on hot days in the North End you can still smell molasses, although it is apparently true that for weeks after the disaster Boston itself was generally sticky.
Seven years ago,
spatch and I joked about baking molasses cookies for the centenary and eating them on Copp's Hill. Instead we joined a memorial organized by the City of Boston Archaeology Program and the Boston Parks Department. January 15, 1919 was unseasonably warm; it was one of the contributing factors to the perfect sugarstorm that was the Great Boston Molasses Flood. January 15, 2019 was bright and biting, the sky and the harbor the same pale streaked floe-blue and my fingers numb by the time we'd walked up Commercial Street from North Station. With the rest of the small crowd which included a_reasonable_man, we stood in a ninety-foot circle following the remains of the molasses tank, whose location and perimeter had been recently mapped by UMass Boston's Fiske Center. Boston Archaeologist Joe Bagley spoke briefly about the occasion before yielding home plate to Boston Parks Commissioner Chris Cook, who read the names of the dead and held a moment of silence. Together with Representative Aaron Michlewitz they laid a wreath of white roses at the center of the tank. And then everything broke up very quickly, because everyone was very cold. Probably due to our position against the third-base fence, we do not really show up in any of the coverage I've seen, but there were cameras everywhere, so if you see one person in a black hoodie and a green canvas coat and another in a leather jacket and a sort of fur-lined-looking hat, hello.Afterward we wandered up the granite steps and switchbacks of Copp's Hill Terrace and then down into the North End, where we did not eat at Antico Forno because they opened half an hour later than we could stand to wait around in the cold; we walked to the Boston Public Market, where we had respectively shakalatkes, a bagel, and ramen, and collectively a nice conversation with the vacationing couple from Maine sitting across the table from us. Then it took me and Rob forever to get home because the new schedule of the 89 is awful; it has stripped out easily half the buses; they no longer run on the twenty-minute or even half-hour schedule that allowed us to get to Sullivan or Davis on a reasonable timetable rather than much too early or slightly too late or just not at all. That, too, is Boston. I guess.
I'm very tired, but I am glad we got up for this ceremony. It was the kind of magic that needed a critical mass to work: enough participants to form the circle, to map the space that failed and killed and to remember why we need regulations as well as heroes. I liked the commissioner's promise that the park would always stay open and safe for children, the best way he could think of to redeem it from tragedy. It was a good thing to be part of.
Someone had left a jar of molasses on the wall.
