The Boston waterfront's missing letter

No, not R, but T. T Wharf used to extend out from what is now Christopher Columbus Park, as an extension to Long Wharf (which itself used to be a half mile long).

Over the centuries - it was built in the early 1700s, as a "T" connection to Long Wharf - T Wharf slowly changed purpose - from a general dock for all the ships at sea, to a home for the city's new generations of Italian fishermen, to, finally, a home for beatniks and other non-traditionalists, who didn't much mind when the wharf flooded and they'd have to row to their apartments, rather than walk down to them.

But by the late1950s, the wharf's owner, Quincy Market Cold Storage & Warehouse Company, concluded the wooden structure was too rickety and decayed to save, evicted everybody, then tore it down in the early 1960s - although a small portion remains as the ferry dock. The company's warehouse was itself torn down and made make way for Christopher Columbus Park, which opened in 1976.

The wharf did not go down without a fight, led in part by Marie Gray Kimball, who had lived there for 26 years, and by other residents and Bostonians, who saw yet another bit of Boston history being ripped away in an age when vast swaths of the city were being bulldozed in the name of urban renewal. The Committee for T Wharf, fighting under the banner of the wharf resident's flag - a large, yellow T and a wharf rat on a red background - took out ads in the Globe that said Boston didn't need just one more plaque:

We have more than enough of cold bronze plaques all over the city - "Here once stood the ..." If we are willing to let go all of old Boston and picturesque Boston, then let us put up just one big plaque: "Here Once Stood Old and Interesting Boston."

The Globe's pseudonymous Uncle Dudley concluded:

The point is, in rebuilding Boston, shall we throw away its picturesqueness, London of Dickens plus the flavor of New England and the sea? Shall we do something brilliant and original, or spoil it all by being merely careless, plumb stupid, or just plain dumb?

But two years later, Herbert Kenney, also writing in the Globe, said it was past time to sweep the past away. He pictured a thriving Boston, its waterfront and Harbor islands lined with skyscrapers and hydrofoils and helicopters quickly and elegantly ferrying around, its shipping channels filled with the biggest and best ships from around the world:

T Wharf remains on photographic plates and in men's memories, but the future, too, will be treasured, and, in time, itself immemorial.

The cold-storage warehouse, photo by Edmund L. Mitchell:

More:

1. Boston wharf photos by Edmund L. Mitchell
2. Boston wharf photos by Warren Favor
3. T Wharf as fine art
4. On the Waterfront - Article about the last days of T Wharf as a place to live, 1961

Photos from the BPL's Edmund L. Mitchell collection.