Last House Standing: How Once We Looked: Photographs of the Past

East Boston, Massachusetts was once bucolic, a place where people would find relief from a stifling summer downtown. Wood Island Park was one of its magnets, located off Neptune Road, with acres of trees and grass, ending at the Atlantic Ocean and its ocean breezes. Wood Island Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and treasured as one of his green spaces. In 1904 progress was represented by a subway tunnel connecting East Boston to the rest of the city. An airfield built in the early 1920s expanded into what is today’s Logan International Airport. It became the 20th busiest airport in the U.S., even while lacking the land mass of other major airports. Logan is almost completely surrounded by water, which limits its growth. Rather than utilize it as a feeder airport, officials expanded into East Boston, wiping out Wood Island Park and impacting the community with aircraft flights low overhead that at times resembled bombing raids. Construction sent noisy trucks through the streets. Taxis and busses and shuttle vans serviced the airport and added to the din. When I photographed residents trying to hang on, in the early 1970s, it was already too late. The powers that be had made decisions that literally kept hammering away. As an example, there was the morning that residents of Neptune Road awakened to even more construction noise. This time the other end of their street, now pointing directly at a runway, was fenced off. Logan Airport expanded right into the neighborhood, buying up houses and scattering the residents. A warm and friendly village was no more. On revisiting Neptune Road in 2010 and again in 2013, I found little evidence of the life that had once flourished here: street signs, some lampposts, a fire hydrant, trees, and not much more. It was a poignant scene. And yet those photographs from 1973 might have some purpose today. They appeared too late to save the Neptune Road neighborhood. But they still carry a message. The philosopher George Santayana once 
observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Perhaps, in these more awakened times, any civic group threatened by an overreaching metropolis might think to access this book and the Documerica files of my images. These photographs could bolster a case of how tragic it would be if their own local treasures were abolished. Perhaps the power of photography might serve to dramatize how worthy is the quality of life. Read more