Black Friday is only three weeks away. You might on this date decide to saunter on down to the Back Bay, to Newbury Street to take in the hoards, assuming there will be hoards, as there are often hoards on Black Friday in places where retail happens. Maybe you will buy something while you are there - let’s say, a fine piece of haberdashery for your romantic interest. But, did you know that before all the retail and the fancy brownstones, the Back Bay used to be a marshy tidal flat? It was filled in beginning in 1857 with material from Needham - here look, a timeline.  Now, let’s consider this for a moment. Let’s consider it with fiction.

William Dean Howells took on the Back Bay in 1885 with his novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, in which the eponymous hero desires to build for his family a fancy house in the fashionable new neighborhood.  Of it we learn,

“The neighborhood smelt like the hold of a ship after a three years’ voyage. People who had cast their fortunes with the New Land went by professing not to notice it; people who still ‘hung on to the [Beacon] Hill’ put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and told each other the terrible stories of the material used in filling up the Back Bay.”

It’s a fun book about Boston society in the 19th century - I highly recommend it. But, while Silas Lapham addresses the social implications of life in the Back Bay, which are mostly having to do with the vulgarity of the noveau riche, Howells says nothing of its ecological ramifications. Well, I’ve got two words for you, William Dean Howells: habitat destruction. Loss of wetlands means the displacement of waterfowl and other fauna, a subject that Robert McCloskey picked up (well, sort of) in 1941 with the beloved children’s classic Make Way For Ducklings, a study of the perilous journey undertaken by a family of mallards in their quest to find a new home. Mrs. Mallard is very picky and objects to a number of possible nesting grounds because, “There were sure to be foxes in the woods and turtles in the water, and she was not going to raise a family where there were foxes or turtles.” If only there had been a marshy wetland available to her! But, alas, it had been filled in eighty-four years earlier so that Silas Lapham could move in.

The Mallard family has been rendered in bronze and awaits you at the Boston Public Garden, or for the truly adventurous, someone has mapped the route taken by the ducks, so consider that for a walk on a fine day. Or just go to the Back Bay and gaze smugly upon the brownstones, because, as we’ve learned from William Dean Howells, they were built by rubes. Well, some of them. Probably.

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