The story is among the striking selections in Shaun O’Connell’s new anthology, “Boston: Voices and Visions,’’ a compendium of works by notable preachers, politicians, poets, novelists, and others.
In his introduction to the story, O’Connell explains that Corbett “cannot survive being viewed in Boston light.”
From the 17th century to the present day, writes O’Connell, Boston writers “[invoked] the high purposes for which the city was founded, sometimes in praise of the city, but often in works which called attention to the city’s failures to fulfill its promises.” On this point, he cites Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” that “both honors the city’s noble past and illustrates its ignoble present.”
Readers will find among the 56 selections that O’Connell, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, presents many that will be familiar. But it will be the very rare reader who won’t find one strikingly unfamiliar.
Stephen Puleo begins his exploration of the half-century of achievement that made Boston, as his title puts it, “A City So Grand’’ by taking the T to Park Street station.
The first link in Boston’s subway system opened on Sept. 1, 1897, with as many as 200,000 people paying a nickel for an inaugural ride. And by 6:30 that morning, barely a half-hour after the first car pulled into Park Street through a tunnel from the Public Garden entrance, the day’s Boston Globe sighed, “[T]he novelty of entering the subway was [already] showing signs of age.”
While it wasn’t “The First Car Off the Earth,” as a boosterish Globe proclaimed (London, Glasgow, and Budapest already had subway systems), it was America’s first, fostering the image of Boston as a center of innovation.
There were engineering problems aplenty, and opposition from short-sighted downtown merchants. And there was shock when workers broke into a half-forgotten burial ground on the Common. After the excavation and reburial of some 910 bodies, one report noted, “the contractors have been touched with a sense of decency.”
