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Describe how the city of Boston and the people living there changed between 1850 and 1900. Lisa A Burns

The history of Boston is one of many changes and growth since its renaming in
1630. Going from a small British settlement initially limited to the Shawmut Peninsula to a busy merchant seaport in 1850 to the industrial metropolis by the 1900’s. The changes can be seen in three main areas sizes, population, and ethnic composition. The city more than tripled its sizes by filling in marshes, mud flats, and gaps between wharves down by the waterfront. Starting in 1807, they used the crown of Beacon Hill to fill in a 50­acre mill pond area now known as Haymarket Square area. Land reclamation also help created the
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“The money of this period paid for the expensive homes of the South End and Back Bay, the estates of Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Brookline, Milton, and Dedham.
Municipal enterprise went forward on an unprecedented scale. The streets were widened, marshes filled and hills leveled, parks laid out, and miles of waterworks constructed.”
Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870 –1900 By Sam B Warner, Jr.
Harvard University Press and The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1962
During this time much of the original part of the city of Boston became the industrial and commercial areas and much of the tenements were use as lower­income housing. Many of these working–class neighborhoods were “crowded and unsanitary, with inadequate public services. Many workers lived in houses once occupied by middle–and upper–class residents, now divided and subdivided to accommodate more people than the original builders had intended. Others squeezed into tenements, which were specially constructed to house as many families as possible. Small apartments were dark and stuffy and often had windowless rooms. A study of working–class families in
Massachusetts found the family of one skilled worker living “in a tenement of five rooms in a pleasant and healthy locality, with good surroundings. The apartments are well furnished and [the] parlor carpeted.” The family even had a sewing machine. But

unskilled and semiskilled workers
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