From home of an innovative canal to home of the NHL champs

Starts & Stops

June 19, 2011|By Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff

Out covering fan reaction, I spent Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals around TD Garden, watching mostly at North Station, where Bruins fans shut out of the bars nearby found a TV above an ice cream stand on the concourse, their cheers drowning out the boarding announcements. Afterward, I fanned out along the heavily barricaded Causeway and Canal streets, taking notes amid the elbow-to-elbow jubilation, squeezed between riot police and fans chanting “USA! USA!’’ and “Tim-my! Thomas!’’ until they were hoarse.

Surely few in the crowd were contemplating the origins of the names Canal and Causeway — if transportation came up at all, it was about how to get home as the celebration roared up against the witching hour for the T — but the street names hint at the rich transportation history of the area, once the terminus for the nation’s first great canal.

That history precedes the origins of rail and transit at North Station, and it is on exhibit at the West End Museum, a gallery at 150 Staniford St. primarily devoted to preserving the stories of the immigrant-rich neighborhood razed in the mid-20th century in the name of urban renewal.

The Middlesex, a hand-dug, 27-mile waterway completed in 1803, was “Boston’s First Big Dig,’’ as organizers from the Middlesex Canal Association and the museum call it.

The canal linked Boston to the Merrimack River and what is now Lowell, opening the seaport to inland trade and facilitating the Industrial Revolution; its success encouraged the start of the Erie Canal. It also helped build Boston, ferrying the granite used to construct the first Massachusetts General Hospital building and other landmarks.

The canal was financed by a corporation formed in 1793 by James Sullivan, the future governor for whom Sullivan Square is named. It was enabled by an act of the Legislature and completed under Loammi Baldwin, the Revolutionary War colonel regarded as the father of American civil engineering.

The canal initially ended near what is now Bunker Hill Community College, where the Charles River met Boston Harbor. Baldwin concocted a cable tow to pull less-than-seaworthy canal barges across the open water. On the other side, the area around today’s Garden was flooded, except for a narrow berm topped by a causeway (now Causeway Street) separating the open water from what was known as Mill Pond.

In 1804, Charles Bulfinch laid out a plan to fill Mill Pond with a grid of streets inside a triangle; Causeway and the new Merrimack and Charlestown (now North Washington) streets provided the three bordering legs. A smaller, secondary canal was dug through the middle of the newly filled area to connect the Middlesex Canal to Boston Harbor’s wharves.