Tip: Highlight text to annotate itX
Bob: The filling in of the Back Bay is one of the great engineering projects of the
nineteenth century,
and if you want to learn more about the Back Bay, or if you want to learn more
about Boston,
the book to read is Back Bay, a novel by William Martin.
And William Martin happens to be here with us right now.
William: Thank you, Bob.
Bob: So how'd you come to write this book?
William: Well, I needed to write something I could make some money from, and that was a
story that needed to be told, the story of the history of Boston
and its landfill and a lost Paul Revere
tea set that sinks into the mud somewhere around here
when all this was mud, which was less than 150 years ago now.
Then, in the late 1850s
they started the process of filling the Back Bay, and they
created a whole city where once there had been an enormous marsh, washed twice
a day by the tides.
And the excitement for me as a storyteller
was simply giving you the opportunity to see
that city as it evolves in front of you, while a lot of modern characters go looking for
that lost Paul Revere tea set,
and it's very near to where we are, I'm not going to tell you where, but it's close.
Bob: You'll have to read the book! Do they find it?
William: I'm not telling!
Now, the story of something triggered your imagination when you
were in
elementary school... William: Right, well
I can remember in the fourth grade
Miss Houghton, at the Robert Gould Shaw school out in West Roxbury,
describing for us the way in which the Back Bay
had looked to people in the 18th century, that
wide-open marsh land. People fished here in the streams.
And then of course the landfill came,
and then in the modern era, in the 20th century,
buildings have risen where once there had just been landfill.
She describes New England Life Hall, which is right down there.
When they dug the foundation they dug down through the mud,
down through the landfill into the mud,
and in the mud they found the remnants of a 2,000 year-old Indian Fishweir.
She talked with us about
all of the layers of time that we're standing upon when we stand in the Back Bay,
from that 2,000 year-old Indian civilization
to the 18th century, to the 20th century. And she said, "What if there
was buried treasure down there underneath all those buildings?"
And I filed that idea way for about
twenty years until I was in Hollywood writing screenplays that nobody wanted to
produce,
and then I dusted off the old fourth-grade story of buried treasure
beneath the
landfill of the Back Bay and that's how it started,
and the book now is 34 years old.
It's been in print for 34 years and people have been
reading it ever since, because it really does capture something
about this city, and people love reading about it and they love
traveling with me and my imagination
across this landscape as it evolves
over two hundred years. Bob: And your other books also convey something about the
character of
New Englanders, the character Americans; we get up in the morning we go to work
and we solve our problems.
William: That's right, that's a line from the lost Constitution!
A line uttered by the people building the mills down on the
Blackstone River Valley in that book!
But that's the thing that I've always tried to do in my novel, is capture
the American character in some way.
What makes us resilient, what makes us
different, what makes us like everybody else, you know.
All of these questions, as they get answered in fiction,
just help to explain something more
to us about ourselves, at least I like to think so. Bob: So, your book has a
central family, the Pratt family, a fictional family,
and their interactions over the generations with other Bostonians,
Irish immigrants, others, you really convey
the whole sweep of the city's history. William: Right, well the character
of the Pratts in this novel,
that family is based upon a
series of families that you can read about, whether you're talking about the
Darbys of Salem, or
any one of a number of the old Yankee
founders, not the political founders but the
economic founders. In many instances they intermingled, as we know,
but they are modeled after a lot of different families, a little piece of all
of them.
And they come into contact with a lot of historical figures
in the same way that all of my fictional characters do, in this novel and in all
of them,
from Back Bay to the most recent which is called the Lincoln Letter,
where you have lots a fictional characters running up against Abraham
Lincoln, getting to know him,
and Booth and all the rest. The idea is that
in my kind of historical fiction there is usually a story running in parallel
to the actual history.
In this case, the actual history is that
slow and steady, block by block
filling of the Back Bay that begins in
the late 1850s and comes forward into the 1880s.
The building behind us, of course, was one of the
the last great structures put up here and one of the most
amazing, "the palace of the people," the wonderful McKim,
Mead, and White Boston Public Library, which
opened in 1888 finally, a majestic thing inside and out.
In all my novels I try to capture that parallel movement of fictional
characters
and the real world that they would have inhabited. Bob: Where do you do your research?
William: Right in here! I do a lot of the research in this library or up at the
Massachusetts Historical Society which is
up on the edge of the Fenway up there, right at the edge of with what was the
Back Bay landfill.
Between those two institutions I can get pretty much anything that I want
in the world,
and then of course the Internet provides me with a lot of
access to things I wouldn't get otherwise as well.
Bob: One fun thing I found really amazing is in the center
of this development we have Copley Square,
which civic and cultural amenities.
William: And religious amenities as well. Once they had figured out
that Huntington Avenue wasn't going to cut all the way across
or that there wasn't going to be a building right over here, because
in the early days Huntington Avenue did cut across, once they had figured out that
this
really what would make a marvelous open space
the people who founded this, this part of the city, and supported it, the people who
built Trinity Church and
who built what used to be here on the site of the
Fairmont Copley Plaza, which, of course, this was where the first Boston
art museum was. All of these people came to understand
what a marvelous resource they might have here,
where they would be putting art and culture
and learning all surrounding an open space
and all of it together, expressing something
about Boston that, I think, those people really felt was a significant thing
to say;
We are one of the centers of learning, we are one of the centers of
intellectual life in America, the Hub of the Universe.
Of course it was all built on landfill, as we know,
and so it's still a little shaky
here. If you look over at the Old South Church over here, directly across the
street from the library,
people don't know that
by the 1920s the tower of that church was starting to tip because of
the landfill and the way in which the ground had been disturbed
by the cutting of the subway out Boylston Street, which was an open cut and cover
subway. And they had to take that tower down completely
and rebuild it with new architectural features that would hold it
upright, so that it wouldn't go off of line by
about two feet between the time that it was built in 1878
and the 1920s, and that's just one of these the interesting stories of what
happens with
landfill anyplace, But the people of Boston
had the opportunity to do something special when they started filling this
Back Bay,
and I think they succeeded in doing something special because,
as I describe it in this book, after everything is filled in,
after all the buildings are built, and each lot
was a certain prescribed size
-and the builders and the people who did the landfill
were a given one lot
for every five that they would make and they could sell that one lot, the
state got to sell the rest of them-when they were done
they envisioned that they would have created an American Paris
and when you look at the architectural beauty around us and when you go over to
Commonwealth Avenue and look up and down the mall
you might be inclined to agree. Bob: Thank you very much,
good to see you, we look forward to your next book. William: Thank you!
