A postcard view of the Esplanade c. 1920

Until the 1890s, the Charles was treated as an industrial resource rather than a natural heritage. The degradation of the river began with the construction of a mill dam, built in 1821 along the line of today’s Beacon Street. Causeways for the Worcester and Providence railroads further impeded the sluggish, increasingly fouled streams that flowed into the bay. In 1857 the Commonwealth reclaimed title to the polluted tidelands and filled the bay with gravel, brought by trains running round the clock from Needham to Boston for more than 25 years.

Downstream of the Back Bay, the Boston & Lowell Railroad also built trestles over the tidal flats and open water to reach the Boston peninsula. Other industries continued to expand in East Cambridge and Charlestown, largely unregulated by the state. But as the city’s population swelled, the escalating pollution of the region’s rivers and bays alarmed the state’s new board of public health. Along the Charles were two prisons, three coal-burning power plants, several gas works, and many other industrial sites. Two large slaughterhouses, one on the Millers River and the other upstream of the Brighton marshes, dumped offal into the river.

Another view of the early Esplanade

In 1893 the newly-established Boston Metropolitan Park Commission published its first report, written by Sylvester Baxter and Charles Eliot. They proposed a parks system that would preserve the natural features of the region and establish a framework for planned urban development. In spite of the foul condition of the Charles River Basin, Eliot was certain that the river would become the most celebrated “water park” in the entire country.

Six years later James Storrow led a campaign for a dam half a mile upstream from the harbor, with the purpose of creating a fresh water river basin and river front park in Boston. The tides were excluded above the dam, and the now-stable water level covered the mud flats forever. The newly landscaped banks of the river became known as the Charles River Esplanade.

The Esplanade was widened and lengthened in 1928; the first lagoon was built, as well as the Music Oval, where a temporary bandshell was placed. The summer of 1929 was the first year Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops performed on the Esplanade. In 1941, the construction of the Hatch Memorial Shell gave the Pops, and a wide range of other artists and performers, a first class stage for popular summer events.

North Point Park in the New Charles River Basin

Another major change to the Esplanade began in 1949, with the construction of Storrow Drive. To make up for park land lost to the new road, additional islands were built along the the Esplanade. In the 1960's, the Esplanade was linked to Herter Park in Brighton, and other upstream parks, with the construction of the Dr. Paul Dudley White Bike path. This 18-mile loop travels along the entire basin on both the North and South sides of the river.

New park lands were acquired by the Commonwealth as part of the construction of a new dam, completed in 1978, and in the late 1980s another twenty acres in Cambridge, Charlestown, and Boston. They are now Paul Revere Park, North Point Park, and Nashua Street Park, forming part of the New Charles River Basin.