What the History of Boston’s Harbor Can Teach Us about Its Uncertain Future

The Great Molasses Flood is one of history’s unlikeliest disasters. On Wednesday, January 15, 1919, a giant wave of sticky, sweet syrup ripped through the streets of Boston at 35 mph, destroying buildings, throwing vehicles, drowning animals, and killing 21 people and injuring 150.

The wave started on the edge of Boston Harbor, when a massive molasses storage tank—58 feet tall and 98 feet in diameter—burst.

“It’s sometimes regarded like a joke or punchline, or a one-off tragedy,” says Boston University historian Genna Kane.

But she views the flood as more than a gooey quirk in the history books. A PhD candidate in BU’s American & New England Studies Program, Kane (GRS’27) is researching the history of the waterfront for her dissertation and has come to see the tragedy as an important moment in Boston Harbor’s past, emblematic of its shift from a shipping hub to a base for industry. And, she says, its aftermath symbolizes the waterfront’s resiliency and ability to rebuild and adapt—traits the city may need to draw on again to take on future climate change–fueled disasters, like the rising tides that threaten to inundate coastal neighborhoods.

“Even though the explosion was not a ‘natural’ disaster in the way we would think of hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., it caused horrific and unexpected damage to the North End’s infrastructure and built environment,” says Kane. “And the immediate recovery involved reconstruction in ways similar to other environmental disasters.”

In spring 2025, she’ll teach a course on the environmental history of Boston from the 19th century to the present day—and she will lead with the story of the Great Molasses Flood. “I’m using it in the course as an entry point to illustrate the environmental changes—in terms of the waterfront’s landscape, buildings, and overall use—that caused this disaster to happen, but also how the city recovered from that,” she says. 

Kane’s research traces the journey of Boston’s waterfront from its early days as a busy mercantile harbor, through its decades as an industrial center, to its present as a magnet for tourists, high-end housing, and biotech firms. She’s also surveying how the city made itself so vulnerable to sea level changes. Kane’s work was given a boost this spring when she won an Alice Ross Carey Fellowship, which comes with funding and access to the University of California, Berkeley’s Environmental Design Archives.

“I love Boston and, like many residents, I’m very worried about what’s going to happen as climate change continues to impact us—I want to know the roots of this,” says Kane. “I like to think of history as looking to the past for explanation for why we are the way we are. And that can help us better understand what we’re dealing with.”

How Paul Revere Sparked a Revolution—and a Dissertation

Kane grew up deep in rural New Hampshire, but she became fascinated by Boston Harbor’s starring role in the city’s history thanks to one man: Paul Revere.

In 1770, Revere moved his growing family into a two-story wooden house at the heart of Boston’s North End neighborhood. In just five years, the silversmith (and sometime dentist) would gallop from the home and into the history books: his midnight ride to warn his fellow patriots that the British were coming made him an icon of the American Revolution.

Today, Revere’s former home is a National Historic Landmark, with lively museum interpreters spinning historical tales to tourists eager to touch the past. Before starting graduate school, Kane was one of those guides, and she would often find herself answering the same questions: Why did Revere choose to live in the North End? Why was he picked to make that famous ride?

“I found that pretty much every question I was answering led back to the waterfront,” says Kane, who recently won a BU Center for the Humanities internship award that she’ll use to advise a Concord Museum exhibition on the revolution. “Paul Revere had a lot of different businesses and his silversmithing shop was located on Clark’s Wharf [at the tip of the North End]. That’s because the engine of Boston’s growth was the waterfront—anytime someone wanted to sell something, transport it, import any good, the waterfront is the way they would do it.” Even Revere’s dash to Concord relied on access to the water: the former artillery lieutenant rushed from his home “to the North part of the Town, Where I had kept a Boat,” so he could cross the Charles River.

Kane’s time as a museum guide—she also had stints at the Old North Church and John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site—inspired her to learn even more about Boston’s past. “Those jobs were really why I wanted to pursue graduate education and history,” she says. And all those questions that led back to the waterfront—plus her own interest in environmental issues—helped inspire her dissertation’s focus. “The waterfront is a very clear way to see what drove Boston’s economic and political growth, but also what Boston has struggled with. The harbor is what defines Boston in a lot of ways.”

From Industry to Tourism to Biotech

Kane’s doctoral research starts with a period about 80 years after Revere moved—and when Boston’s position as a maritime power was foundering and its city leaders were scrambling for new ways to spark growth.

“They were worried the infrastructure in Boston would not provide economic opportunities,” says Kane. “So, they built Atlantic Avenue to facilitate railroad access. All of a sudden, there was this massive road that segmented the waterfront from the rest of the city.” It still does: anyone wanting to make it from downtown to the water today needs to cross four lanes of Atlantic Avenue traffic.

Over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rail links attracted disparate industries—cold storage facilities, power plants, a molasses distiller—to the newly dislocated waterfront. But almost all of them had one thing in common: they required coal. And that became a lynchpin in Boston’s economy, says Kane.

“When Boston was struggling to find a productive export and bring in a lot of maritime traffic, one thing that was very prolific and profitable was coal,” she says. “I’m arguing that the waterfront is a major part of our current dependence on fossil fuels. If we look at the spaces that are now most threatened by climate change, they were once the major infrastructure for facilitating fossil economies, which ultimately results in the current situation we have with global warming and climate change.”

As those industries faded after World War II, Boston’s waterfront became a mixture of crumbling warehouses and sprawling parking lots. In the 1960s and ’70s, Boston’s leaders made another play at reinvention, turning their focus to the tourist industry—revamping Quincy Market, building the New England Aquarium. Today, hospitality is a major part of the city’s economy, but the waterfront is also going through another renewal, too, with neglected buildings and railroad lots being transformed into sleek offices for tech and biotech companies.

It’s a history Kane is compiling through archives and architectural plans, as well as by talking to city planners and other experts about how Boston and its people have shaped their waterfront—and how it has shaped them.

“Other folks have either looked at different parts of the harbor or certain areas—the made land or certain architectural projects—but very few have tried to look at the entire waterfront as a whole,” says Kane, who will spend part of the summer as a Charles River Watershed Association development intern, where she’ll help with climate resiliency education and outreach. “The waterfront answers many questions about what makes Boston tick.” She hopes her research shines a particular light on the Bostonians impacted by generations of changes to the waterfront—the laborers toiling in industry, the working-class residents affected by pollution.

Rising Tides

The water lapping serenely at Boston’s harbor walls shaped the city’s past—but could swamp its future.

According to figures shared by the state, by 2030 Massachusetts could face a sea level rise of up to 1.1 feet over 2000 levels; by 2070, the rise could be as high as 4.2 feet. At that point, a kayak rather than a car will be needed to negotiate Boston’s waterfront neighborhoods, particularly the burgeoning Seaport District, built on former industrial land.

“In the early 2000s, the Seaport District was mostly parking lots, and Boston was looking for a new industry, a new driving source of economic growth—and that was the tech industry, especially biotech by the 2010s,” says Kane. “If you needed to build in downtown Boston, wouldn’t you want to build in an area with relatively little development? It made sense at the time.”

It may make less sense in 2070, but if the future looks uncertain for Boston’s waterfront, perhaps the past can bring some hope. After all, says Kane, the infamous dirty water of the industrial-era harbor is mostly swimmable today. “The cleanup of the harbor in the 1980s and ’90s is a massive environmental success story,” she says.

Reinvention after reinvention, Boston’s waterfront persists. And though she’s in the early stages of her dissertation, Kane says her findings already highlight the tenacious spirit of Boston and its residents.

“The past doesn’t necessarily dictate the future,” she says, “but it’s a way to say, ‘We’ve done this before, we can do it again.’”