Bostonians grumbled and complained when the Sumner Tunnel closed again in the Summer of 2024, demonstrating the significance of underwater connections to East Boston. The City of Boston annexed East Boston in 1836, but the harbor strained East Boston’s connection to the rest of the city. By the late nineteenth century, businessmen and political leaders supported a new underwater tunnel for streetcar service. The East Boston Tunnel opened in 1904 and paved the way for the Sumner Tunnel in the 1930s. Many historians understand infrastructure, including wharves, freight railroads, and passenger transportation, as facilitators for capital accumulation and consumption. Historians also emphasize that infrastructure changed, as David Nye argues, when people made cultural choices “within parameters set by the energy sources, technologies, and markets of any given time.” During the age of industrial capitalism, Bostonians reconfigured and bypassed the structures from the bygone era of maritime commerce and prioritized new infrastructure and connections.
Boston was initially colonized as a port, but by the late nineteenth century, the waterfront’s infrastructure struggled to support industrial capitalism. Throughout the eighteenth century, the center of Boston’s commercial life had grown at King Street because the Town House (now the Old State House) held the British Government. Merchants built Long Wharf as a 1,562 foot extension of King Street into the harbor in 1715. The Long Wharf to King Street thoroughfare emphasized that the Town House depended upon the physical connection to the waterfront. However, Boston’s maritime port infrastructure languished by the late nineteenth century. Boston relied on imports because New England did not have reliable and profitable exports, but fewer merchants in the age of industrial capitalism shipped freight through Boston’s waterfront, due to its geographic isolation and subsequently higher shipping cost compared to other ports. Between the 1850s and 1870s, Boston’s registered shipping tonnage declined by nearly half. In reaction, the municipal government replaced the downtown wharves with railroad tracks. Between 1868 and 1872, the city built Atlantic Avenue to facilitate rail connections for the Union Freight Railway along the waterfront. As Figure 1 illustrates, the city cut through the downtown wharves to construct Atlantic Avenue.