Discovering The Boston Harbor Islands

Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands is an indispensable guide to help you plan your island adventures.Explore military installations that protected Boston during wartimeincluding Civil War era Fort Warren. Visit Boston Light on Little Brewster, site of the nations oldest lighthouse. Kayak into the coves where pirates and bootleggers hid. Wander the woodlands and meadows that were the seasonal camps of Native Americans and the sites of Revolutionary skirmishes. Sail to the outer islands, find the best year-round fishing spots, and discover why the islands are a birders paradise. Take in a jazz concert, an antique baseball game, or simply hop from one island to the next to experience the stunning natural beauty of this most storied national park area.

The Boston Harbor Islands: Discovering the City's Hidden Shores is an indispensable resource for those who want to uncover the best kept secret in the Northeast. Part history, part travel guide, Christopher Klein has written the most compelling invitation to explore the Boston Harbor Islands national park area to date. Explore the military installations that protected Boston during wartime—including Fort Warren, home of Confederate prisoners during the Civil War. Visit Boston Light on Little Brewster, the nation’s oldest lighthouse site. Kayak into the coves where pirates and bootleggers once hid. Dive amid century-old wrecks, or climb to the top of Spectacle Island for an altogether different view of Boston. Take in a jazz concert, an antique baseball game, or simply hop from one island to the next to experience the stunning natural beauty of this most storied national park. Complete with resource listings of recreational activities on and around the harbor islands and richly illustrated with over 150 full-color photographs, Klein’s comprehensive coverage and keen wit will inspire thousands of landlubbers and mariners to leave port for many summers to come.

A reissue of Edward Rowe Snow's first book, covering the legends and history of nearly every rock and island in Boston Harbor, including Boston Light and Graves Light. The first (1935) edition resulted from research Snow did at Harvard under the tutelage of the great maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison. When the 1971 edition of the book was published, a critic for the Boston Post wrote, "Mr. Snow has the gift of making his subject vivid and personal in its anecdotal touches . . . It is a volume of chatty yet dignified essays, with many a light touch brought in." This centennial edition contains the complete 1971 text, with annotations by Jeremy D'Entremont to bring the information up to date.

How much does the current landscape of Boston, Massachusetts, resemble the place that Captain John Smith referred to in 1614 as "the Paradise of all these parts"? John Hanson Mitchell explores a variety of habitats as he ranges outward from the core of the peninsula where the Puritans first settled to the ancient rim of the Boston Basin, within which the modern city now lies. Endlessly readable and full of personality, The Paradise of All These Parts offers Boston visitors and residents alike a whole new perspective on one of America's oldest cities.

The Boston Harbor Islands have been called Boston's "hidden shores." While some are ragged rocks teeming with coastal wildlife, such as oystercatchers and harbor seals, others resemble manicured parks or have the appearance of wooded hills rising gently out of the water. Largely ignored by historians and previously home to prisons, asylums, and sewage treatment plants, this surprisingly diverse ensemble of islands has existed quietly on the urban fringe over the last four centuries. Even their latest incarnation as a national park and recreational hub has emphasized their separation from, rather than their connection to, the city. In this book, Pavla Simková reinterprets the Boston Harbor Islands as an urban archipelago, arguing that they have been an integral part of Boston since colonial days, transformed by the city's changing values and catering to its current needs. Drawing on archival sources, historic maps and photographs, and diaries from island residents, this absorbing study attests that the harbor islands' story is central to understanding the ways in which Boston has both shaped and been shaped by its environment over time.

The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.” In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death. An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe. Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.

A Map Of The Harbor Islands is the long-awaited novel from J. G. Hayes, the critically acclaimed bestselling author of This Thing Called Courage and Now Batting for Boston. This book charts the turbulent life courses of two South Boston friends, Danny O'Connor and Petey Harding, from their childhoods through their adult lives. `Golden Boy' Petey has it all going for him - brains, charisma and his close friendship with Danny. Then an accident on the baseball field changes everything. Petey wakes from a coma a different person, completely different from the boy Danny knew and loved. Gone are the old habits, the old joy of baseball, the old way of thinking. Petey is left with a stutter and a new appreciation for life that Danny sometimes just cannot understand. Petey begins to tell stories and make maps - dragging a grudging Danny along. Over the years Danny begins to understand Petey, and slowly, he also begins to learn more about himself. Then Petey confesses that he is gay, which sends Danny on an odyssey he never dreamed could happen. Petey's map is one of hope for Danny and him, to escape the urban ghetto of South Boston. They are two wayfaring friends who swear a love for one another until the very end. A Map Of The Harbor Islands carries the reader on a journey into the beauty of the world, physically and emotionally, along a current of love, friendship, self-growth and redemption.

In 1891, four intrepid women from Lowell sailed to a remote island in Boston Harbor for a 17-day escape from New England's prim and proper society. Calling themselves the Scribe, the Aristocrat, the Acrobat, and the Autocrat, the women rusticated in a cottage on Great Brewster Island, reveling in the chance to shed their identities of wife, mother, and daughter. Relive their sojourn through their remarkable journal, filled with observations, illustrations, photographs, and poetry, reproduced here by the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands.