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Revisiting the Ruins: The Great Boston Fire of 1872

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/tneq_a_00995

1937-2213

Christina Michelon,

Fire effects on ecosystems

AROUND four o'clock in the morning on Sunday, November 10th, 1872, artist James Wells Champney scurried to the rooftop of the Studio Building on Tremont Street in Boston's Beacon Hill. A fire had begun shortly before midnight in the nearby downtown area, and the flames were a sight to behold. With pencil and brush, Champney recorded what he saw. (Fig. 1) In a fluid wash of monotone ink, Champney captured the smoke-filled air and billowing flames while frenzied pencil strokes articulated nearby rooftops and fellow spectators. From Champney's vantage point, the conflagration threatened Old South Meeting House and the Boston Evening Transcript building on Washington Street. Firefighters managed to save Old South later that evening, but the Transcript Building became one of several hundred structures devoured by the Great Boston Fire. Fig. 1.—James Wells Champney (1843–1903), Rooftop View of the Great Boston Fire, November 10, 1872, 1872, graphite and wash on paper. Boston Athenæum. Gift of William B. and Nancy Osgood, 1995.Champney's ink wash drawing offers a view similar to what would have been seen from the rooftop of the Boston Athenæum at 10 ½ Beacon Street, just three stories high at the time. The Athenæum's building survived the fire by a mere two blocks, but the event still impacted the institution. Today, a century and a half later, the Athenæum holds one of the most significant collections related to the Great Boston Fire. Revisiting the Ruins: The Great Boston Fire of 1872, a special exhibition that ran from April 7 through July 29, 2023, in the Athenæum's new Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery, looks critically at the ways artists, photographers, reporters, and bystanders documented this event, an important moment in the longer history of representing disaster.1 (Fig. 2)The Great Boston Fire burned for nearly twenty hours, ravaging sixty-five acres of the city's central commercial district and resulting in the destruction of approximately 776 buildings. Over a thousand people lost their homes and another 20,000 lost jobs. Historians estimate that thirty people, mostly firefighters, lost their lives. The fire began in a hoop skirt factory on the corner of Summer and Kingston streets. A horse flu epidemic meant that firefighters had to haul their own engines, carts, and other machinery, leaving them exhausted by the time they reached the scene. Narrow streets and newly built but highly flammable, wooden Mansard roofs enabled the flames to jump from building to building. Hoses with water pressure too low to reach the rooftops offered little relief. These are but a few of the complications that contributed the fire's great scale.The fire occurred not long after the havoc of the Civil War (1861–65), which was covered extensively in newspapers and illustrated magazines and acknowledged as the first war to be documented through the then-new medium of photography. The Great Boston Fire also occurred exactly one year and one month after the infamous Great Chicago Fire of 1871, another catastrophe that was heavily photographed, illustrated, and reported on, and to which the Great Boston Fire was frequently compared. Newspapers regurgitated the same comparative assessment: that Boston's loss was financially greater than Chicago's, but thankfully, the fire occurred in a mercantile district and not a residential one, so, unlike Chicago, fewer were killed or left homeless. Additionally, Boston would, and did, rebound more quickly due to the amount of capital concentrated in the older, more established city. In addition to its more developed commercial aspects, Boston's strong print and photography industries played an important role in how the city documented the catastrophe. Though numerous newspaper offices, printing firms, and photography studios were destroyed in the fire, these businesses quickly set up temporary shop in unscathed buildings nearby and continued work.Champney's drawing is the only picture in Revisiting the Ruins that was created in the moment of the fire. The rest, ranging from lithographs and wood engravings to albumen photographs and stereographs, were made in its wake. Champney's rooftop drawing achieved what photography at that time could not: capturing an event in motion. Most representations of the Great Boston Fire were created after the blaze and featured ruins as the subject. Photographers created romanticized images of the Burnt District, the area of the city decimated by the fire. Newspapers printed pictures and sensationalized accounts of the disaster. Relics, written remembrances, maps, and works of art became material commemorations of the fire. Stereographs, a popular form of nineteenth-century entertainment, transported viewers to the ruins from the safety of their homes. Revisiting the Ruins brought together this range of objects to convey how much this disaster permeated the lives of people in Boston and beyond through an array of media, at a crucial point in the development of pictorial and print technologies.Despite the fire's relative obscurity for contemporary Bostonians, several recent publications survey the causes of the catastrophe, firefighters’ efforts to contain it, and the rebuilding that followed.2 Rather than striving to provide a comprehensive history or socioeconomic account of the event, the exhibition, as well as this essay, considers pictorial representations of the Great Boston Fire and its translation across a variety of media. Below, I offer a closer look at highlights from three of the exhibition's major sections that examine how the fire and its ruins were pictured, romanticized, and experienced in November 1872 and beyond. Developed during the slow burn of a three-year global pandemic and amid loss that is not yet quantifiable, this exhibition asks: after 150 years, what can we learn from revisiting the ruins?A week after the fire, physician, poet, and photography enthusiast Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to a friend from his home near the Burnt District: “Any reporter for a penny paper could tell you the story [of the Boston Fire] . . . You will have it in every form, —official, picturesque, sensational, photographic; we have had great pictorial representations of it in the illustrated papers for two or three days.”3 Illustrated or not, newspapers devoted a lot of ink to descriptions of the Great Fire and its aftermath. Often referring to the metaphorical “pen,” journalists lamented how it could never truly paint a picture of the devastation. Still, they tried. The Boston Daily Globe designated one particularly ekphrastic column as “vivid pen photographs.” Even as the author describes in great detail everything he encountered among the ruins, he writes, “No words can fittingly describe the blank and awful desolation that haunted the place.”4 Though the pen may not capture the scene in the same way a picture might, it had the advantage of being timelier. Words could travel quickly by telegraph, but pictures took more time to create and distribute. Just as photographic technology did not yet allow for faster shutter speeds to capture movement, it was also not yet possible to print photographs alongside text. That would not be common until the halftone process, still in use today, became popular in the 1890s. This meant wood engravers had to translate the imagery of a photograph or drawing onto woodblocks to reproduce the image alongside the text. Wood “engraving” is a slight misnomer—engraving indicates that this is an intaglio process when in fact it is relief, so the image stands proud with the type. Holmes, like many other readers of the time, associated some wood engravings directly with photography and the documentary. Indeed, most illustrated periodicals credit specific photographers as the source of their images, granting the renderings greater documentary authenticity.One of those photographers, James Wallace Black, whose own studio survived the Great Boston Fire by the width of a street, took at least 150 photographs of the ruins. Many of these served as sources for illustrations in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Though bookstores and stationers’ shops sold photographs of the ruins by Black and others, most viewers would have seen Black's pictures as wood engravings. At the time, a large photograph by Black cost three dollars, whereas a mass-printed issue of Harper's Weekly cost only ten cents. Revisiting the Ruins featured some of Black's most striking photographs throughout the gallery, engaging with the photographs themselves as well as their afterlives in print, offering visitors the opportunity to view both photographs and wood engravings side-by-side.Black's photographs were aesthetic and technical feats for the time and would later earn him awards and accolades. His masterpiece, and a highlight of the exhibition, is a four-and-a-half-foot-wide panorama. (Fig. 3a) After he created the earliest surviving aerial view by shooting Boston from a hot air balloon in 1860, Black gained notoriety for going to great heights to take pictures. This time, in November 1872, Black hauled his cumbersome camera and glass plates to the top of a still-standing building on Summer Street, mere feet from the site where the fire began. While James Wells Champney took to the roof to document the fire in progress, Black did so to document its aftermath. There, he photographed the Burnt District in sections. He then combined three large, individual photographs to create one seamless panorama of the scene. The panorama shows the expansive Burnt District with a clear view to the harbor. Among the leveled structures, people sift through the rubble, and carts transport supplies. This area was primarily a commercial one, and most of the buildings destroyed were warehouses, office buildings, and shops. Ironically, it was the same site Black had photographed from the sky twelve years earlier.James Wallace Black took weeks to complete his panorama; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper took even longer publishing the wood engraving that reproduced it. (Fig. 3b) Like other illustrated periodicals of the time, Frank Leslie's used Black's photographs as sources for their pictures. Their version of the panorama of the Burnt District took at least a month to create, finally making its way to Frank Leslie's readers as a fold-out supplement to the issue published January 4, 1873. The wood engraving rivals the size of its photographic counterpart and remains mostly faithful to the scenery depicted but with the welcome addition of captions that identify landmarks, street names, and the fire's starting point. By the time Frank Leslie's produced its printed panorama, it likely no longer resembled the scene in Boston. The sheer scale of this long, unfurling vista meant that viewers could not take in everything all at once. Instead, the ruins unfolded slowly before the viewer. Both the printed and photographic panoramas pull viewers into a disorienting and desolate scene through their immense scale and unusual format with a sweeping view that magnifies the extent of the disaster. In Revisiting the Ruins, Black's photographic panorama hung in its original frame above a case that displayed the Frank Leslie's printed panorama, offering visitors a rare opportunity to study these two works together.Many of Black's other photographs take a closer look at individual ruins. Evocative of a Roman triumphal arch, the ruins of 17 Milk Street as photographed by Black appeared repeatedly in coverage of the fire's aftermath. (Fig. 4a) The remains of the building's facade, resembling an M-shaped double archway, are the focal point of the image. Monumental hunks of masonry that once graced its many stories now lie in a heap at its base. On the left, a group of figures stand on a receding hill, dwarfed by the towering yet toppled structure. Several of these men stand closer to the camera, their features crisp and in focus, while others dissolve into the haze of ash and smoke. Three men in the foreground pose beside the ruins, mirroring the pillars that remain. In the distance, a seated figure sketches the scenery. Fig. 4a.—James Wallace Black (1825–1896), 17 Milk Street, 1872, albumen photograph, Boston Athenæum.Fig. 4b.—“Milk-Street Looking from Washington-Street,” The Illustrated London News, November 30, 1872. Boston Athenæum.Fig. 4c.—“The Present Condition of the Birthplace of Benjamin Franklin, on Milk Street,” Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, November 30, 1872. Boston Athenæum.Fig. 4d.—“Resuming Business—On the Site of Franklin's Birth-Place,” Harper's Weekly, November 30, 1872. Boston Athenæum.On November 30, 1872, the ruins of 17 Milk Street appeared in at least three different illustrated newspapers. Readers of the Illustrated London News, Frank Leslie's, and Harper's Weekly encountered the building's crumbling archways accompanied by lurid coverage of the conflagration responsible for its demise. However, the Great Boston Fire itself was hardly news, having occurred three weeks prior. These three printed adaptations of Black's photograph vary in significant ways. In the Illustrated London News, readers saw a quiet and desolate place where the building's archways appear ready to topple into the heaps of stone and debris in the foreground. (Fig. 4b) In the distance, a small group of men traverse the ruins. A highly-detailed engraving, minute lines articulate every rough contour of the crumbling structure, suggest indistinct ruins beyond, and fill a mournful, gray sky. Conversely, Harper's uses the ruins as a backdrop for unfolding drama amid the flames. (Fig. 4c) Captioned “Resuming Business—On the Site of Franklin's Birth-Place,” Harper's artists depict men using safes as tabletops where they consult their ledgers, even as flames and smoke billow ominously in the background. Several news outlets refer to this site as the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin, but the house he was born in was consumed by a previous fire that occurred in 1811. What was actually destroyed was a multi-story granite office building (about as far as you could get from a colonial house at this time). Frank Leslie's, too, promoted the Colonial-Era significance of the site and captioned their wood engraving as: “The present condition of the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin,” which is perhaps even more misleading.The Illustrated London News made minor alterations to Black's photograph, emphasizing the scene of devastation in an almost timeless void, while Harper's embellished the image significantly, inserting a narrative of in-the-moment financial concern. Meanwhile, Frank Leslie's wood engraving is the most simplified of the three, and its economical use of line resulted in a higher contrast image. (Fig. 4d) It differs from the other two engravings also in its border or, rather, its lack of one. Instead of mimicking the tight rectangular frame of Black's photographs, as the News and Harper's had, the borders of the Leslie's image dissolve, resulting in a dreamlike vignetted scene. Though the Leslie's image is also the most faithful to Black's original photograph, the composition deviates from it by removing the artist in the midst of sketching the ruins and who peers obliquely at Black and his camera. The artist, seated among a throng of standing figures, is positioned closest to the ruins and, in the act of sitting, of rooting himself to the fragments of masonry that surround, becomes part of them—and yet, like them, was eventually cleared away. In Frank Leslie's, this omission amid an otherwise faithful reproduction underscores the role of anonymous and unseen artists in translating Black's photographs to wood engravings for broader consumption.Rebuilding efforts began just days after the fire, and newspapers frequently warned that the “picturesqueness” of the ruins would soon be gone. An advertisement in the Boston Evening Transcript from November 25, 1872, reads: “[James Wallace] Black has photographed every interesting point, and produced an enormous collection. . . . Some exquisite art studies are among them, of great future value. . . . The Burnt District as it was, and as it is now, will always possess great interest. The ruins are fast being leveled, so that but few more views can be taken.”5 Though the ad is clearly leveraging the ephemerality of the ruins to sell more photographs, the sentiment permeated reports from mid- and late November in Boston newspapers. On November 15, the Boston Daily Globe proclaimed that “the sentimental associations with the ruins are fast vanishing” amid the rebuilding.6 On November 26, the Boston Daily Advertiser laments: “The picturesque look of the burnt district is slowly disappearing. Those who strolled about it yesterday noted fewer fine effects than on Saturday, fewer lonely, broken columns, fewer towering, ragged walls, fewer smoldering fires, fewer heaps of debris in the crowded ways, and fewer novel curious sights.”7More than asserting the fleetingness of the ruins, these reports underscore the ways in which artists and authors aestheticized the ruins by aligning them with the visual characteristics of bygone eras.8 One newspaper described the “ruddy glow” of the Burnt District and the “mysterious, intense Rembrandt effects of fitful light and shade . . . blending with the flickering firelight, the exaggerated shapes of lonely columns and irregular masses of wall.”9 A painting of Boston's ruins by John J. Enneking seems to visualize this in its embrace of warm tones and an “Old World” aesthetic. (Fig. 5) Enneking eschewed references to anything overtly modern or industrial in the foreground, opting to include a simple rowboat and a horse-drawn cart. At the very center of the painting, a dark-haired woman with a shawl—evocative of the Italian peasant “type” in genre paintings—traverses this crumbling wharf. A smoky fog gives way to blue skies over the State House dome and spire of Park Street Church in the distance. Hung perpendicular to Black's photograph of Macullar, Parker & Co., which Enneking may have used as a source, the painting opens the exhibition's discussion of how artists and reporters romanticized the ruins. Fig. 5.—John J. Enneking (1841–1916), Boston, After the Fire of 1872, 1872, oil on canvas. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, gift of Dr. and Mrs. Samuel J. Mixter, through Dr. John Collins Warren.While some reports invoked Boston's Colonial history, others evoked the otherworldliness of ruins from distant times and places. Journalists constantly likened Boston's ruins to those of Pompeii, Rome, Athens, and other archeological sites undergoing excavation. On November 11, after the fire was contained, the Boston Daily Globe wrote, “Against [the flames] loomed in huge outlines the bare and broken walls, which, as they were burnt, had been left in such picturesqueness, that the dullest imagination could not avoid conjuring up many scenes garnered in romance or woven in poetic measures.” The report continues, “One might at this point have easily supposed themselves standing in the midst of the Roman Colosseum, whose huge ruins had been made vague by smoke, and were lit from all sides by smoldering fires. The tall walls were outlined against the sky. Here one stood like a solitary column, and there others had fallen, so that the remains appeared like broken porticoes, gates, and archways.”10 From crumbling columns to archways evoking aqueducts or abbeys, artists like Enneking and Black used this visual vocabulary when composing pictures of the Burnt District. The resulting images defamiliarized the comparatively modern structures and gave them a nostalgic quality.Boston's reputation as a refined cultural center and its historical associations with democracy earned it a reputation as the “Athens of America” which had a particular resonance in the aftermath of the fire. In his photographs of the ruins, James Wallace Black gestures toward the storied structures of the Acropolis, and of Rome, Pompeii, Herculaneum and other European cities, capitalizing on viewers’ familiarity with and appetite for these images. Black's close cropping of 60 Pearl Street transforms the modern ruin into something evocative of a Greek or Roman one. (Fig. 6) One newspaper describes a similar sight in Boston's Burnt District: “The columns all stand . . . but the superimposed stone work . . . has fallen. The stones which remain in place have had all their edges crumbled off by the heat, so that they look like courses of boulders, and the whole effect is something like that of a ruined ancient portico.”11 Shortly before the fire, photographer and diplomat William James Stillman produced and marketed his portfolio The Acropolis of Athens in 1872. Like some of Black's images, Stillman's views of the Acropolis emphasize the weathered but enduring structures surrounded by heaps of rubble, occasionally with a human figure included for scale. Stillman's portfolio is but one of many ventures by artists to picture ruins at this time in the nineteenth century, building upon centuries of artistic fascination with the subject. In early 1873, the Boston Athenæum acquired this portfolio at the very same time as James Wallace Black's photographs of the fire's ruins. More than a coincidence, this demonstrates a broad interest in ruin imagery among the residents of Boston, or at least among the patrons of the Boston Athenæum.Black's photographs also inherently retain an association with the Civil War and the visual culture that conflict generated. His photograph of the corner of Summer Street and Kingston Streets—where the fire began—recall Civil War ruins in Richmond. Scenes of the violent conflict's aftermath fill Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. In “Ruins of Arsenal, Richmond, Virginia,” the standing walls in the distance are the ruins of a paper mill destroyed by the “great fire” Confederate soldiers started when retreating from the city. Created instantly rather than by the slow ravages of time, ruins of both the Civil War and the Great Boston Fire were cleared away almost as quickly as they appeared.In 67 Milk Street, Black transformed the ruins of a factory into something resembling a Gothic church by standing close to the structure and shooting upward. In other photographs, such as those of Old Trinity Church and St. Stephen's Church, Black isolates the damaged buildings, effectively removing them from the built (and destroyed) environment of Boston and instead evoking the crumbling abbeys tucked away on English country house estates. As a result, the ruins appear as something from history rather than the recent past. For viewers at the time, this transformation gave Boston's ruins an air of nobility that was perhaps a welcome distraction from the devastation. In Revisiting the Ruins, Black's photographs hung above the comparative examples of ruins from other times and places, offering visual context for some of the pictorial decisions made by Black and other artists who pictured the ruins.While much of the ruin imagery circulating in the aftermath of the fire removed the viewer from the present moment and place, some photographs, coupled with written firsthand accounts, offer a glimpse into lived realities. The final section of the exhibition combined a range of artifacts and images that speak to how the people of Boston witnessed and experienced the fire and its aftermath. (Fig. 6) The Burnt District and surrounding area, such as Beacon Hill, saw a flurry of activity after the fire. A volunteer militia secured the area and, in order to control who could access the Burnt District, required a special pass to receive entry. One such pass, now part of the Athenæum's collection, was on view in the gallery. Printed on vibrant vermillion paper, the coveted ticket would allow business owners and residents inside the boundary lines of the Burnt District to recover what they could. Curious tourists and “ruin-gazers,” as newspapers called them, gawked at the desolation and pocketed the occasional relic if they were able to get close enough. Meanwhile, salvaged belongings and merchandise filled nearby open spaces such as Boston Common and the Granary Burying Ground, just beside the Athenæum. Eyewitness accounts provide details like these unseen by the camera's lens, while sentimental books published immediately after the fire ensured that it would be remembered as “great.”The Boston Athenæum has its own relic of sorts from the fire: a key to a storage unit that no longer exists. In 1872, the Athenæum was housing a collection of historic arms and armor in a warehouse on Pearl Street. The fire destroyed the building along with its contents. Though the hefty iron key is all that remains from the storeroom, the Athenæum used insurance money from the loss of the artifacts to purchase sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian textiles that still reside in the collection.12 In Revisiting the Ruins, this key was installed beneath a high-relief cast of The Horses of Anahita by William Morris Hunt, an artist who lost his studio and all of its contents, save for the mold of that sculpture, which was fortunately in use at a plaster shop elsewhere in the city.Emily Eliot Morison, then a teenager, penned a firsthand account of the fire and its aftermath in her diary. Morison's handwritten pages were displayed alongside the Athenæum's storeroom key and other artifacts related to the fire. As a young woman, Morison was not allowed to tour the guarded Burnt District. However, she observed the ruins, debris, and personal belongings that littered the surrounding areas. On November 10, while the fire was still raging, she wrote, “After breakfast I went downtown to look at the sad state of things. The Common is full of . . . clothing, furniture, trunks, and all sorts of household goods. I saw a silver tea set and two Sèvres China flower pots on the grass.” Louisa May Alcott, then a resident of Beacon Hill, witnessed the fire and wrote to her sister Anna Alcott Pratt: “The Common was a scene of distraction, for the poor shop keepers carried their goods there & stacked them up in great heaps with men to stand guard. . . . Our waiter told us that in Summer St. he walked knee deep in silks, laces & elegant shawls thrown out from the great stores. . . . I ran off to the steps of the Granery Cemetary [sic] & there watched the flames rising & falling behind the low, old stores in Washington St.”13After reading reports of the historic catastrophe and its picturesque ruins, residents and tourists flocked to the Burnt District to see it for themselves. However, the smoldering and unstable structures were not only dangerous but also highly guarded. Stereographs, an affordable nineteenth-century parlor entertainment, provided a safe and accessible alternative.14 Stereographs consist of two nearly identical pictures that, when viewed through a stereoscope, merge to create a three-dimensional image. More interactive than a typical photograph, stereographs provide an immersive simulation akin to virtual reality. Just days after the fire, the Boston Daily Globe described photographers descending upon the Burnt District, especially with the goal of creating stereographs. “Among the incidents of the day it may be mentioned that the photographers appeared with their apparatus and selected with artistic judgment points of view for the most picturesque representations of the scene of desolation. The early appearance of stereoscopic views of peculiar interest may be predicted.”15 In Revisiting the Ruins, we embraced the analogue appeal of stereographs by framing thirty-six and offering three viewing stations, complete with custom-designed stereoscopes by artist Colleen Woolpert. We complimented the immersive experience of the stereographs by installing ten-foot-high vinyl enlargements of the ruins on walls throughout the gallery as a nod to the experience of traversing the Burnt District. (Fig. 7)Downtown Boston was rebuilt in less than two years, a remarkable feat given the scale of the disaster. The rubble was cleared away, making way for the areas known today as the Financial District and Downtown Crossing. Insurance payouts enabled business owners to begin construction immediately, and some of these structures still stand today.16 Rubble from the ruins was used to fill in the harbor and expand Atlantic Avenue.Revisiting the Ruins, in the Athenæum's intimate gallery, included just a small sample of the numerous pictures and publications inspired by the Great Boston Fire. Despite all of this documentation, the event remains little known, even among many of the city's residents, in stark contrast to other major fires such as those in Chicago (1871) and San Francisco (1906). Still, these representations offer insights into the myriad ways residents grappled with loss and a range of media memorialized it. A variety of related programs held at the Athenæum prompted audiences to consider ruin and preservation from a range of perspectives, including Syrian cultural preservation efforts amid displacement to postwar ecologies in Berlin. Ruins represent the past, but they are ever-present today amid urban redevelopment, climate change, and geopolitical conflict. Revisiting the ruins prompts us to wonder what and how we remember.