“Minutes away, worlds apart”: The changing imagination of the Boston Harbor Islands

Abstract

The Boston Harbor Islands are a historically urban archipelago. Since its founding in 1630, the city of Boston has embedded them firmly in its urban infrastructure. The islands have served as sources of wood and building stone, common pastures, sites of harbor defenses and lighthouses, and as ‘dumping grounds’ for materials, businesses, and institutions undesirable in the city proper. In the middle third of the twentieth century, however, Bostonians imagined their city’s harbor islands in a new way: one that has obscured most of their long human history and has cast them in the role of a natural landscape fundamentally different from the city. This changing perception resulted in the islands recently becoming places reserved almost exclusively for conservation and recreation. This article explores the way in which a certain kind of island narrative that frames islands as isolated, extraordinary places of mystery and adventure came to dominate the imagination of Boston’s previously mundane urban islands.