When the South Boston Waterfront Had a Fleet of 20 Aircraft Carriers, And No Lattes - An Exploration in Historic Aerial Photos and Maps - Part 1

I love how historic maps and aerial photos can lead you to stories that surprise and delight you. This post will link the carrier above to the South Boston Waterfront and introduce you to Mapjunction - A historic mapping tool I've been working on for years, in partnership with the Boston Planning and Development Agency. It provides a fast, easy way to understand history by comparing maps and aerial photos throughout Boston and Massachusetts. It runs in any browser, or can even be embedded, as I've done further on in this blog post.

It was by looking at a 1952 aerial photo in Mapjunction that I discovered Boston's fleet of mothballed aircraft carriers. The escort carrier USS Bougue, shown above as a 3D model in The World of Warships, will serve as a visual reminder as we explore the history of the South Boston Waterfront. 

This post begins with a man walking in a man-made limestone cavern in Lenexa, Kansas. 

He retrieves a metal can containing a roll of original 9" square aerial photo negatives taken by the US Government over Boston in 1952. 

The man works for the National Archives (Headquarters in Washington shown above) and he's now sending these negatives to the giant facility in College Park, Maryland, where our agent, Joe McCary of Photo Response will don white gloves and scan these negatives for our historic mapping system called www.mapjunction.com

Here's an original scan of the 9" x 9" negative. You can see the exact date 8-24-52 on the upper left, and flight and frame number, DPU-8K-124 on the upper right. You can view/download the original 122 MB TIFF here.

We bring each map into a system called Mapwarper to align it to the ground. Here we've only just started placing the individual images in their correct locations. (Actually, this is an example from a 1978 aerial)

With a combination of Photoshop and Mapwarper, we've seamed together all of Joe's scans into a single, huge image that is aligned to the ground. We combined 15 scans into one. Now with a click of a few buttons, we can link directly from Mapwarper into our viewer called Mapjunction. Now the discovery process can begin.

Mapjunction is embeded below...give it a try. Or Click here to open in a new window.
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Mapjunction is embeded above. Give it a try. Or Click here to open in a new window.

Here's the 1952 Boston Metro Aerial in Mapjunction. You can clearly see the fleet of aircraft carriers that originally caught my eye and got me to do this research. Most of them are small carriers made by modifying cargo ships. They are called escort carriers because they were invented originally to escort commercial shipping and attack German U-Boats. Now 19 of these carriers are in mothballs at the Naval Annex in South Boston, awaiting their fate.

1. Grab the green control on the right and slide it to left. You'll see the current Google map appear.

2. Slide the green control back to the right, and then up and down. You can compare 1952 and today.

Bring up a new aerial: 

3. Now click the map name on the lower right to bring up maps and aerial photos. There's 96 for this location.

4. Click the Aerials tab at the top to reduce the selection to just aerials,

5. Now scroll to the bottom and choose our oldest aerial, 1938 to see this area before WWII started.

Have fun trying out Mapjunction at www.mapjunction.com. You'll see almost 400 maps and aerial photos that are the result of combining about 3000 individual maps and aerial scans. 

Based on the 1958 Navy photo above, we'll explore the story and the fate of Boston's carrier fleet in more detail in Part 2.


A Horror Story With Bulldozers - It Happened in Boston and Almost Happened in Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline: Urban Renewal, The West End and The Inner Belt Highway (I-695)

As an engineer, I'm fascinated with our ability to create inventions of great power and scope. The Saturn 5 rocket and the moon landings. Giant airplanes like the Boeing 747 or the Airbus A380. In a more down-to-earth realm, things like highways and bridges. I'm also endlessly fascinated by the design of cities - which I believe to be mankind's most complex and enduring invention.

In this post, I'll look at three bad uses of engineering -- two that did happen - the demolition of Boston's West End, and Boston’s Central Artery and one that did not - the Inner Belt Highway that would have gone through Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline.


You can view the 1962 planned route interactively here. We seamed together all the DOT plans into a single overlay. Zoom in to see details of exactly how the highway would have affected each area. On the lower right of the viewer, you can change the background map to see the highway against current and past maps.

Open Overlay in Mapjunction Viewer (opens new window)

This rendering shows the Inner Belt (I-695) as it would have passed down Elm Street at Broadway in Cambridge. After a huge community organizing effort, the Inner Belt was cancelled. Click here to view this video, which was taken at the Inner Belt Symposia in April 2012, sponsored by The Cambridge Historical Society and MIT.


The West End of Boston was demolished in 1958 to 1960 as part of Urban Renewal. The new land made way for suburban-style apartments (“If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now) and for Government Center.


The West End before demolition. Lowery Aerial Photos/West End Museum 

The West End after demolition began. Amazingly, this photo doesn’t show the full extent of the removal, since the many of the buildings taken for Government Center are still standing.  Lowery Aerial Photos/West End Museum


This 1953 photo shows the initial construction of the Central Artery highway in Boston, Over 1000 buildings were cleared to make way for the highway. Later, in a feat of engineering prowess, the elevated highway was removed by the Big Dig and placed underground. Photo - Boston Public Library

This 1955 USGS aerial photo shows Boston after the Central Artery was built but not opened. Note the construction on the lower right near South Station.

This USGS aerial photo from 1969 shows City Hall and Government Center under construction, and also shows the new apartments in the West End. Note that the area that was reconstructed is easily larger than the entire North End. 

As Spider-man was told: "With great power comes great responsibility." I think this is very true of engineering, and it leads me to celebrate when things are done well, and to want to understand the opposite -- when engineering goes awry. I love to understand engineering disasters and what led to them. Usually, the problem isn't with direct engineering errors -- although the Hubble Space Telescope did need eyeglasses delivered to it simply because of a calculation error. Usually the problem relates to the overall environment in which the engineering work being done. It might even be unfair to use the term "engineering disaster" in some of these cases - For example, the Shuttle Challenger crashed when it was launched at a temperature way below its true design parameters. 

In the 1950's, cities were in trouble. People were moving to the suburbs. The car was taking over as the main means of transportation. The idea of Urban Renewal began to take hold after World War II, and the concept was to completely demolish parts of inner cities and start over. Federal money was allocated for this purpose, and in Boston, the West End --  a neighborhood of brick buildings just across Cambridge Street from Beacon Hill -- was torn down.

Also, highways were seen as one antidote to urban problems. Get more cars into the urban core, even if the people lived in the suburbs, and the city would recover its activity. Boston was performing this experiment on itself with at the same time with the construction of the Central Artery (see photo below from 1953). The highway opened in 1959, just as the bulldozers were in full swing at the West End.

Meanwhile, across the river, more demolition and highway construction was planned. It was all part of a vast and detailed plan for Boston's new highway system. I find that you get the best sense of the times when you can see original documents. An online archive called www.archive.org has some beautiful scans of the documents involved in this drama. 


Four proposed routes through Cambridge and two through Brookline are outlined in this illustration from the Inner Belt and Expressway System: Boston Metropolitan Area (1962). The routes through Cambridge caused the most controversy and generated the most vocal opposition. This eventually led to the cancellation of the Inner Belt.

Importantly - look at the pink shaded areas. These were all areas in the planning stages for Urban Renewal. Given that the thinking was to tear down whole portions of a city, it wasn't so hard to think of inserting an elevated highway through the same area.

Note that the West End area is shown in the darkest pink. "The Execution Stage". Truly.


This Google Map shows the proposed path of the Inner Belt (and other unbuilt highways, including Route 3 and the Southwest Expressway) Click here to view on Google Maps. Source: User "BigRock" on Google Maps.

Ever since I learned about the Inner Belt, I wondered exactly what was the planned route? What buildings would have been taken? Where would it have crossed Mass Ave? How would it have gotten through Brookline? With the advent of the original documents on archive.org, and from other newer sources,  I was able to find that out in great detail.

In a horror movie, the bad guy hides in the shadows, waiting to strike. In the this case, the horror story of bulldozers demolishing key parts of Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline didn't happen. But it almost did. And I plan to show you some of the "crime scenes" that never happened. 

The highway story begins with the 1948 Master Highway Plan that details a whole range of highways, some that were built, and many that were later cancelled. This 206 page document contains a wealth of drawings and illustrations, as well as traffic studies that of course make the case for the new highways.

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Archive.org provides a nice thumbnail view of these large documents, so you can quickly find what you're looking for. Click here to see the 1948 Plan online. It’s worth looking at to get a detailed sense of how highway planners were thinking in 1948.


This map from the 1948 Master Highway Plan shows an early routing of the Inner Belt. It was changed in many ways later, but the basic idea remained the same. Notice how the city itself seems to be a willing canvas for innocent red lines. Notice Cambridge -- which seems to have only a few buildings, as if the highways would pass through farm land rather than an intensely built urban area.

Fourteen years later, in 1962, The Massachusetts Department of Public Works released a detailed plan for the new Inner Belt and Expressway System. This document has all the detailed routing plans that lets us find out exactly where the highway would have gone. While many battles would ensue about the routing, it seems that the DPW stuck pretty much to the 1962 routing, all the way up to the cancellation of the Inner Belt in 1971.

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The 1962 Plan contains very detailed drawings of the entire Expressway System.


This reference map from the 1962 Plan is particularly useful. It shows the detailed plans for each part of new highway system. For example, Maps B-11 and B-10 cover most of Somerville and Cambridge, while B-9 covers Brookline and B-8 covers Boston and Roxbury. Note that of the areas shown with red boxes -- those designed in this plan -- almost all were cancelled. Route 3 from 128 never connected to Route 2 as shown. Route 2 did not continue to the Inner Belt, as Map B-24 had planned.  The Mass Turnpike Extension was later built. So was the extension of the Mass Pike to Logan Airport as part of the Big Dig. The Southwest Expressway was cancelled as well, and part of its routing is now the Orange Line.

Map B-10 Shows the 1962 planned route through Cambridge. Look at the massive interchange that would have occurred where the full length of Route 2 connected to the Inner Belt.

By 1966, a new route for the highway was being proposed by a group called the Cambridge Comission. It avoided the path through Cambridgeport, and instead went closer to MIT, following the train tracks near Albany Street. In this 1967 Location Restudy by the Mass DPW, a detailed analysis of the proposed route and road designs are offered. Mass DPW finds the Portland-Albany alignment consistently unacceptable and makes it case that the Brookline-Elm alignment is best. It claimed that some sections would require a 12' thick concrete slab to avoid the floatation of the roadway due to high water table. And the route would have gone right through Tech Square, which had just started construction.

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This 1967 Location Restudy  sought to move the highway out of route through Brookline St in Cambridgeport. The suggestions here were later roundly rejected by Mass DPW.

The 1967 Relocation Study offered to put the highway in a depression (not a tunnel) that would pass along MIT.

Here's the routing of the Inner Belt from the 1962 plan. A giant elevated highway crosses at Mass Ave, and continues down Brookline Street. From the Cambridge Historical Society website.

The highway would have taken down a number of buildings in Central Square, including the building housing Hi-FI Pizza, as shown on this Google Map


Governor Francis Sargent began to take up the cause of those who wished to stop the highway. He created the Boston Transportation Planning Review (BTPR) in 1970. Their report became the model for what we now know as the Environmental Impact Report. On December 29, 1971, Governor Sargent gave a speech from prepared remarks about the State's approach to highways and mass transit, and in that speech, he made it clear that the Inner Belt was dead. He even used those words. The text below can found in the BTPR's final report from 1973


The Governor's comments on the Inner Belt were straightforward and direct. "The much discussed Brookline-Elm and Portland-Albany Street alignments are now officially dead." Without the path through Cambridge, there could be no Inner Belt.


This mural in Cambridge commemorates the citizen action taken to stop the Inner Belt.

As bad as the West End demolition was, I believe that actually building the Inner Belt would have been much worse. It would have dramatically changed the fabric of our inner city. It would have divided neighborhoods and it would have routed high speed traffic right through city areas. The original Central Artery did much the same damage, and I believe it is a testimony to our region that we were able to fix that mistake via the Big Dig and do it in a way that improved the city.

A future post will cover the path of the Inner Belt in detail, and will look at many more sources of maps and other visuals to illustrate where the Inner Belt would have been built, and what it would have looked like. Was the Inner Belt a monster that lurked just outside your door? Find out next time.

Photos of Boston's John Hancock Tower

One night I was out roaming around boston with my new Sony RX-100 digital camera. It’s a 20 megapixel digital camera that fits easily in a coat pocket, yet has an unusually big sensor, and a big F1.8 lens. These photos are shot at about 1 second exposure, handheld! The image stabilizer works that well that it almost becomes a tripod.

I’ve always loved the Hancock tower. These nighttime pictures capture some of the mystery of the building.

The HP D7360 Photosmart Printer from 2006 - A Photo Printing Classic

In high tech, you're used to the latest being the best. But these days, I'm collecting printers that came on the market in 2006! But beware, it needs special paper that HP has stopped making. See below.

I'm a photographer. Cameras are magic to me. But printers are beyond magic. In a few minutes you can go from a photo on your screen to one that you can hold in your hand. Over the years, I've been buying only HP printers, and making better and better photos.  In 2006,  HP announced the HP Photosmart D7360 printer. I was in love.

I couldn't believe how good the prints were (and still are). Using a specially-formulated paper called HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, HP was able to get 108 years of permanence using notoriously unstable dye-based inks. Somehow, the paper, made in Switzerland (by Ilford, I hear) absorbs the ink and protects it from UV exposure. The photos are better than what you get from a photo lab.

The 7360 uses five color ink cartridges and one black cartridge.

Unlike newer printers, HP's H02 Ink system has cartridges that can be easily refilled, and the on-cartridge chip behaves well. Put in the refilled cartridge, and the printer recognizes it as genuine and accurately tells you the level of ink in the cartridge. $16 for the whole set of ink cartridges! How good is that? Newer HP printers work hard to defeat these ink refiners. For example on new printers, a remanufactured cartridge will show as empty.

The HP 02 ink system used on the Photosmart D7360 uses dye inks. Dye inks are thin, like what you use in a fountain pen. They absorb into the paper. But the inks are easily hurt by UV light, as the photo above shows. The photo on the right uses pigment inks, which clearly have higher permanence. But that's not the entire story.

Up until 2011, HP was selling the Original HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, which had amazing properties. First, it absorbed the dye ink and protected it from UV light. The photos are glossy and beautiful, and they last and last. None of mine have faded at all. So they got the best of both worlds. The beauty of dye inks with the permanence of pigments (when using special papers)

Then HP changed their printers to use pigment inks. They no longer had to protect the ink with an expensive system to absorb and the ink and protect it from UV. Instead, they used their "Advanced Photo Paper" which had been on the market for years. This paper grabs the ink and dries quickly. It's fast, its cheap, and it doesn't last. (Note the "Instant Dry" on the right hand photo). I believe they simply switched the formula under the same brand, so they could have a much cheaper paper under the premium brand they established. Instead of coming out with a new name for a totally different product, they just switched it.

This is no small matter. Photos printed on old printers using the new paper will fade almost immediately! 

This is the one you DON'T WANT: http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/HP-Paper/Premium-Plus-photo-paper/CR664A It's really just re-packaged HP Advanced Photo Paper . Maybe it's thicker.

This is an example of what you DO WANT: http://www.ebay.com/itm/250386369891 - Make sure you see the back where it says "Switzerland" 

Using the older HP 02 dye inks, HP claims that their reformulated Premium Plus paper will last 35 years "under glass." Well, I can report that photos last about a week with no glass. People who print on a paper they trusted will not realize that what they are using is just not the same. I know this is melodramatic, but it's like a glass vendor changing out bulletproof glass for something that is merely "transparent". When those bullets come your way, it makes one hell of a difference.

So I've bought a ton of the wonderful old paper, and lots of cheap ink, and I merrily make beautiful 8 1/2 x 11 glossy prints for about $0.50 each. If I can keep finding a source for that paper from Switzerland, I'll be good to go. If not, my use of the great HP 9360 printer will have to fade like the supply of the magic paper.

She-Devils and Upside-Down Hackers in Photos from Vampire Hackathon 2012

Hosts Nick Tommarello and Mike Norman survey the crowd at Vampire Hackathon 2012

Anna Callahan came dressed as an elegant vampire. See the full photo set - she draws blood (well, almost.)

Coding devil Sherry Zhao sneaks up on an unsuspecting hacker.

Julia Winn poses for a classic Halloween/British Phone Booth combination.

Angel investor and Wefunder backer James Alvarez enjoyed the action. Word on the street is that he did not do any coding.

Wefunder co-founder Mike Norman wields his video camera looking for postable moments.

And finally, this. Can you figure out what's going here? Thanks to some willing models - Fredrik Kaupang and Elise Moussa.

Here is the full set of photos: (online and downloadable here)

Photos from Fashion Week: Luke Aaron's Amazing Gowns - Inspired by Boston's History

My brother-in-law, Steve Welch, studied fashion design. Last Saturday, we were looking to do something new, and rather magically we ended up at Boston Fashion Week's major runway show at a tent at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

It was an eye-opener to say the least. Steve saw three shows, and I saw two - local designers Luke Aaron and Maria Victoria (Victoria Domingues-Bagu) 
The first show I saw was by Luke Aaron, and featured flowing gowns that were just stunning. I had a front row seat, right near the all the press cameras. Shooting with my tiny Canon S100, I got some amazing shots.

Both shows were beautiful. I was really struck by the designs from Luke Aaron. I'm still thinking about them days later. And to think, he is a local designer. Furthermore, he's not just located here, he takes inspiration from Boston's history, and makes it part of his designs. From his bio:

An avid history buff, Luke draws inspiration from Boston’s mythological connections to early America; from the stately elegance of Beacon Hill to the Seaport’s weathered utilitarianism.  His designs reflect an appreciation for past traditions while embracing reinterpretation. Influenced by the romantic allure of the stage & screen, Luke continues to cultivate a storyteller’s approach to design; creating a visual narrative through each collection in which the wearer becomes the muse.

Selected photos from the Luke Aaron show are below.  

Luke Aaron full photo shoot is here. (82 of them. And you can download if you want.)
Maria Victoria full photo shot  is here. (96 photos, also downloadable)

1 - Luke Aaron

2 - Luke Aaron

3 - Luke Aaron

4 - Luke Aaron

4 - Luke Aaron

5 - Luke Aaron

6 - Luke Aaron

7 - Luke Aaron

Audio from my MITX speech: Thoughts on building startups that deliver joy instead of pain relief

https://vimeo.com/43951163

A speech that starts with the very first social network -- announced in the '70s and delivered in the '80s. It now has over 300M users. I then make connections with the intentions and beliefs of that original social network. I believe that there's a new way to create businesses. While the "normal" way to create a business is to create product/market fit, I believe another way is what I call "founder fit" -- where you design the company to fit the "DNA" of the founders. While market fit companies are good at delivering pain relief, I believe that these founder fit companies are great at delivering joy. And I believe that products that fundamentally deliver joy instead of pain relief can create their own huge markets. Twitter, Facebook and Apple are examples that spring to mind.

418 lines of code. 313 Million Users. The First and Most Successful Social Network

I've been thinking about the power of social networks. About how Twitter has become a tool to fight tyranny. About how Facebook has linked people all around the world. And of course, I love American history.

And then it hit me. The Constitution defines a social network! Hmmm. How many lines of code is it? I figured six thousand. It was 418 lines when it was released. (with Bill of Rights) And that's when using a 13 point font!

Now, 225 years later, with 27 ammendments, its up to a whopping six hundred and eleven lines of "code." This code defines the underlying structure of our country - our social network, that has 313,728,401 users as of June 12, 2012. 

Now that's tight coding.

The Declaration of Independence was the original statement of intent. The first press release for the first social network. It was 113 lines long. It took 11 years from that declaration, and one war of independence, to deliver Release 1.0 in 1787. We put Release 1.0.27 into production in 1992 when the 27th amendment was ratified. And that brings us to the full 611 lines of code that we're running today.

PDF of the Constitution of the United States with Bill of Rights:

Constitution of the United States with Bill of Rights is 418 lines long.

The Constitution with Amendments is 611 lines.

PDF of the Constitution with Ammendments:

The Declaration of Independence - 113 lines

PDF of the Declaration of Independence: