Journey to the East is a catalogue of a pioneering modernist’s first encounter with so-called vernacular architecture, which shaped many of his future buildings – none more than his curving, concrete cathedral at Ronchamp. Which isn’t to say that it reflects the mosques of Istanbul but rather the spiritual power that the young Le Corbusier felt “upon the hilltops of Stamboul [where] the shining white ‘Great Mosques’ swell up and spread themselves out amid spacious courtyards surrounded by neat tombs in lively cemeteries.”

Famous writer are often cast as travel companions – say, Henry James – but architects are rarely the authors of old novels or diaries that can function as modern guidebooks. Le Corbusier wrote with authority (in modern architectural tomes like Toward an Architecture), which is why the musing of this uncertain, astonished twenty-four year old are so compelling.

“From our vantage point we could see the Golden Horn beyond the cascading cypresses,” Le Corbusier wrote from the balcony of his hotel overlooking the city that is split by Europe and Asia. “Below, Stamboul sits above a broad band of shadow, outlining the silhouettes of its great mosques against the darkened sky. When there is moonlight – we had it twice – the sea, visible beyond it, ties the minarets together with a shimmering thread along the gloomy ridge.”

He loved the abundance of trees in the city – “tier upon close tier of endless wooden houses submerged in greenery.” And he learned the local histories of its mosques, including the monumental Sultan Ahmet or Blue Mosque, designed by a pupil of the architect Sinan, preeminent builder and engineer of the Ottoman era and a contemporary of Michelangelo.

“The Sultan Ahmet, by building six minarets for his mosque, aroused the religious wrath of the people, for only the Kaaba at Mecca has that number,” Le Corbusier explained. “He cleverly evaded this difficulty by erecting, at his own expense, a seventh minaret at Kaaba.”

The young Swiss-Frenchman sketched minimal black and white perspective of the Bosporus with the low skyline pierced by minarets. His notebook includes cloudy views of the city in the fog where only domes and towers are visible, as well as precise details of the major public buildings of the Ottoman seat of power – along with the Parthenon. Le Corbusier traveled through Greece and eastern and central Europe on his journey to and from Istanbul.

His trip wasn’t the Grand Tour made famous by wealthy literati like Lord Byron, who traveled with trunks, servants, valets and, as Zaknic notes, “several beds, camping equipment, and English saddles and brides.” Le Corbusier, “with his backpack and one companion, rides second class on ships and packed trains, on top of mules and donkeys, and most often on foot,” he wrote. “His companions are bedbugs,” not countesses.

In other ways, though, Le Corbusier wrote of an “Oriental” city like other European travelers of his day – with crass, cultural generalizations.

“The Bazaar!” he wrote of the city’s sprawling, covered market. “The worst horrors are to be found in there… The most disconcerting ingeniousness is to be found there. Everything, of course, is antique, very old, or prehistoric.”

Some of his descriptions, usefully, also include architectural details: “The life of the Turk passes from the mosque to the cemetery by way of the cafe where he smokes in silence,” he wrote. “It is a stroke of good fortune for these proper cafes… to enclose within their own courtyards, on a mound surrounded by an iron grill, the sepulcher of some saint.”

There is wonder in Le Corbusier’s Istanbul diary, especially when contrasted with his future work. Here is the architect behind the (hardly) utopian idea of concrete public housing projects describing Istanbul’s architectural poles:

“Stamboul is a closely knit agglomeration; every mortal’s dwelling is of wood, every dwelling of Allah is of stone… it hangs against the side of this great hill like a suspended carpet of violet wool blended with tints of emeralds; the mosques on the crests are its prestigious fasteners. Here are the only two types of architecture: the big flattened roofs covered with worn tiles and the bulbs of the mosques with minarets shooting up. They are linked to each other by cemeteries.”

Le Corbusier witnessed a fire that devastated part of the city – which wasn’t, apparently, unusual in crowded Istanbul in the early 20th century. It caused him to predict of the demise of the city – “The reason is that she is always burning and being rebuilt.”

In fact the Ottoman Empire was over by the end of the First World War. It had allied with Germany, and its Middle Eastern domains were carved up and taken by the victors, Britain and France. Le Corbusier writes rudely, if presciently, about the prospects for Istanbul three years before that war began. A neighborhood that had been ravaged by a separate fire a few years prior was being by a Germany company. “Weigh the significance of these words for Stamboul!” he wrote, with emphasis on German company. “After what I’ve tried to tell you about the streets of Stamboul, shaded by the foliage between the salmon-colored walls, you should tremble at the association of these two words!”

And yet Istanbul survived, even if the capital of modern Turkey that emerged in 1923 relocated east to Ankara. Istanbul has now expanded well beyond “its tremendous Byzantine walls,” and so no longer “crams itself into spaces that are too confined,” in Le Corbusier’s words. Whether he would approve or not, “Stamboul” is now one of the world’s most populated cities.

Photos via Flickr Creative Commons. Top: Ronchamp by Flickr user senhormario; Middle: Photo print “Mosque of Sultan Ahmet I” (1890-1900) from the Library of Congress; Bottom: Photo print “View from the bridge, Constantinople” (1890-1900) from the Library of Congress.

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“If you try to imagine the world that existed before 1830, before the first railway line in England, between Manchester and Liverpool, it’s quite literally unimaginable.”

In an interview in the newest issue of The Nation, historian Tony Judt talks about his new book, Ill Fares the Land, which grew out of a lecture at NYU and subsequent article for the New York Review of Books “on the fate of Western social democracy.” In the interview he also talks about trains.

Judt, who is terminally ill with ALS, has been writing furiously about a lot of other things, from his fight with Lou Gehrig’s disease to the future of the liberal state. But it’s his reverence for early rail travel that I want to highlight here. It’s not a history lesson on industrial, Victorian England, but a reminder of the importance and image of trains as a means of travel and an organizer of modern life.

From Christine Smallwood’s interview:

You’ve been working on a study of the modern railway. What are you learning?

I’ve for many years fantasized about writing a study of the place of the railway in the modern world, economically, topographically, in town planning, in the creation of space and the idea of time, in movies and literature and so on. I knew some of this stuff in the abstract, but I’ve learned much more concretely about the astonishing degree to which the railway–literally the railroad, trains, the whole economy it created–changed our world in ways that planes, cars, the Internet, even electricity maybe didn’t quite match. The very notion of society existing in terms of classes, in terms of collective life, public and private space, cities and the relationship between city and country; the idea of time, of time as something that organizes us rather than we organizing it–these were all railway creations. If you try to imagine the world that existed before 1830, before the first railway line in England, between Manchester and Liverpool, it’s quite literally unimaginable. It takes an effort of will to realize that in Roman times the sense of distance was about the same as it was in 1780, let’s say. For most of human history, people never came into contact, or did very rarely, with either someone who was not born where they lived or some artifact that was not made either by them or by someone they knew or in the town in which they were born. But within one generation they are living in a world that makes today’s globalization look like nothing in terms of the transformation. That’s the work of the railway, much more than anything else in the world, and that’s what I want to try to capture in the book.

I hope Judt finishes the book. It would travel well with a recent history book, Christian Wolmar’s Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World, which London’s Telegraph summarized ably:

“Did you know that early trains in Australia were pulled by convicts, or that elephants were until recently used to shunt freight wagons in India, or that the world’s most magnificent railway station – the Chhatrapati Shivaji terminus in Mumbai – took 10 years to build? The longest possible continuous railway journey in the world is the 10,600 miles between Algeciras in Spain and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. And the idea that Mussolini made the trains run on time is apparently a myth.”

Photo via Flickr user State Records NSW.

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A question in light of jets grounded across Europe because of volcanic ash particles: could a balloon fly through that? The era of airships is bygone and fast trains are far likelier to replace downed planes. But balloons, dirigibles and Zeppelins may still have their uses, perhaps beyond carnivals and aerial shots of baseball games.

In the first part of a new series on the early development of how people traveled, Historical Travel reports on the foundations of the airship industry.

A Frenchman and an American physician made the first successful flight over the English Channel in early January 1785. Their hot-air balloon flew from the cliffs of Dover to Calais, which can see England’s white cliffs across the Channel on a clear day. Jean Pierre Blanchard and Dr. John Jeffries, a physician, didn’t have to fly far and they didn’t rest afterwards. Blanchard, according to the Library of Congress, “gave the first successful demonstration of a parachute” later that year “when a basket containing a small animal was dropped from a balloon and parachuted to earth.” No word on what that animal was — comments please.

Blanchard then made a sea-crossing to the new United States of America, where he was the first in North America to ever take to the skies in a balloon in 1793. He kept of journal of his record ascensions in which he described his test flights in Olympian terms and praised France, “a nation who places her chief glory in cherishing and protecting the sciences and the fine arts.” Again, the Library of Congress:

That day, he ascended from the Washington Prison Yard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and landed in Gloucester County, New Jersey. Carrying the first airmail letter, this flight was observed by President George Washington. After that flight, Blanchard returned to Europe and, with his wife, Marie, who had also learned to fly balloons, performed many other exhibitions. In addition to his balloon flights in France and the United States, Blanchard is also credited with the first balloon flights in Germany, Belgium, Poland, and the Netherlands.

Never mind that Blanchard later fell out of his balloon fifty feet above The Hague after he had a heart attack mid-flight. The proof of air travel was there, along with a convincing case for parachutes.

Blanchard may not have designed the first flying balloons – that was credited to another Frenchman, Lieutenant Jean Baptiste Marie Meusnier, a few years before Blanchard’s maiden voyage. Blanchard axed Meusnier’s idea of airscrew propellers and a rudder that steered the balloon like a flying sailboat, opting instead for a hand-powered propeller. Though in that early Channel flight, his balloon flew with flapping wings; Blanchard  steered it with a bird-like tail. So much for jet engines.

Image of Blanchard and Jeffries’ English Channel crossing courtesy of Flickr user amphalon.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times called it “a bland glass cube clad in an overly elaborate, quiltlike scrim.” Steven Walt at Foreign Policy though it “a fancy building isolated from its surroundings and keeping the world at arm’s length.” “A giant glass box on stilts rising from a Princess Diana-style memorial park,” wrote Jonathan Glancey in the Guardian “complete with a lake and what appears to be a ha-ha.” Glancey’s was actually a fairly positive review, that last ambiguity aside.

Still, the critical world had reached a consensus: a high-profile design competition for one of the most visible American embassies was bungled, the government picking the third-best proposal in part because of the sorry chokehold of security concerns. Among the four finalists, both contemporary heavyweights Richard Meier and Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects submitted better plans than little-known KieranTimberlake, which won (a view offered by Ouroussoff and others).

According to the Guardian, the only two British judges on the design panel, architect Richard Rogers and developer and art collector Peter Palumbo, “thought the design was boring and ‘not good enough to represent one of the great nations in London’… By contrast, they considered Mayne’s design to be ‘touched by genius’.”

Eero Saarinen’s U.S. chancery in London, which opened in 1960, may be brutal and something of a behemoth, recently reinforced with security barriers. But while it waits for its diplomats to leave for new digs in south London, it harkens back to the day when American Embassies weren’t unsightly fortresses. What’s more, when the U.S. abandons the Saarinen building, it will remain in Grosvenor Square. Qatar bought it for a half-billion dollars and plans to convert the landmark building into a hotel and apartments, with a promise not to touch the bulbous, limestone façade that takes up a whole side of the square. It’s easy to forget in an age of embassy bombings that these places used be open, breezy stand-ins for American optimism and culture.

“Saarinen’s Brutalist limestone intrusion, topped off with a garish gold sculpture of a screaming eagle,” according to architectural critic Martin Filler, might have spoken “revealingly of America’s postwar hegemony” in 1960. But the place also held art exhibitions and faced a public park. That changed with the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in 1983, followed by the east Africa bombings in 1998. By that point embassy design had been set on a new course away from high architecture, however garish. The postwar heyday of modernist stalwarts like Walter Gropius and Edward Durell Stone designing daring projections of American power abroad were long gone. The German-born Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, opened his American embassy in Athens in 1961, six years after Stone designed the embassy in New Delhi, which landed him on the cover of Time.

In their place came government ordained Standard Embassy Design, which operates under the State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations. A bland stipulation in the security age, the program is exactly what it sounds like: “a cost-saving initiative that standardizes the design for chanceries and consulates” that hews to the demand to be far away and imposing at the same time. Of course there are exceptions, namely the rebuilt and expanded palaces of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad that will be America’s embassy in Iraq. So many people have written about it already, but Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books offered the best summary:

The most recent addition to the empire is perhaps the most arresting. The new US embassy in Baghdad is, despite its name, a base. It is set inside a 104-acre compound, making it “six times larger than the UN, as big as Vatican City, and costing $592 million to build.” It will be defended by blast walls and ground-to-air missiles, and have its own apartment buildings, along with its own electricity, water supply, and sewage system… Life will continue here as it already goes on in the US-enforced Green Zone, complete with its swimming pools, dry-cleaning outlets, and around-the-clock availability of pork in the mess canteen, as cosseted and disconnected from the surrounding reality as Happy Valley was from the rest of Kenya.

All of which makes me wistful for the old days, when Morocco, after being the first country to recognize the new-found United States of America in 1777, gave the U.S. its first proper embassy abroad — a villa in the midst of old Tangier, America’s mission in Morocco from 1821 to 1956. Morocco’s American Legation is the oldest American diplomatic property in the world, and, as the Web site of the U.S. embassy in Morocco (since removed to Rabat) proudly explains, “the only building on foreign soil that is listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.”

Perhaps one day Edward Durell Stone‘s embassy in New Delhi will join its ranks. What’s certain is that none of the current crop of diplomatic strongholds ever will.

Image credits from top: KieranTimberlake’s winning design for the US Embassy in London, image courtesy KieranTimberlake. Richard Meier and Partners’ design for the new US Embassy in London, image courtesy Richard Meier and Partners. Morphosis Architects’ design for the new US Embassy in London, image courtesy Morphosis Architects. Undated photograph of Edward Durell Stone’s US Embassy in New Delhi, via DesignInquiry Journal.

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“Why do you ride steam machine on weekend holiday?” the Syrian government tour guide asked in broken English as we took our seats on wooden slats.

Three of us had been picked up at the defunct Hejaz Station in central Damascus by a government bus, which drove us to a section of open track by the side of a road where we and all the Swiss boarded the train.

Our guide told us that he lived at a railway museum near the station, “the steam machine museum.” He parroted the alternate name “steam machine” throughout our two and half hour train ride north up the Barada River Gorge in the dry mountains that border Lebanon.

The old narrow-gauge steam engine that pulls the Zabadani Flyer, as its known in the tourist books, was built in Switzerland in the 1890s. It’s part of the hundred year-old Ottoman railway that once linked Damascus with Medina, the target of so much bombing by T.E. Lawrence during World War I.

Today the train betrays its name, as it doesn’t go all the way to the mountain resort town of Zabadani, some 50 kilometers outside the city. Instead it stops sooner at Ain El Fijeh, the source of the Barada River and long Damascus’s lifeline.

The English travel writer Colin Thubron wrote of Damascus in the late 1960s that the city, like Cairo’s pyramids or Shiraz’s roses, “conjures running water, a river running out of Lebanon which carries down calcareous soil and smears it over the desert for a hundred and seventy miles, giving birth to a miracle of trees.”

Today that miracle is drying up as the city swells in cheap concrete, a sad shift from the stone and woodwork and hidden courtyards of the UNESCO-protected Old City.

And yet the Barada still sustains Damascus; the springs at Ain El Fijeh supply the city’s vaunted water supply.

The tap water is safe to drink there — it shuts off around midday since it is scarce and the desert is eating Syria — and Damascenes are rightly proud of their potable public water, an exception in the region.

A service taxi can get you to Zabadani or Ain El Fijeh in under an hour. The relic train takes nearly three hours as it chugs along tramway tracks through suburban Damascus, moving slowly enough for families in the street to stand and wave, say hello, and ask how you are.

The train then runs along the banks of the Barada River, a strip of green through caked and yellow hills, passing through quiet picnic towns.

“Damascenes come here to cheat the summer sirocco,” Thubron wrote forty years ago “but in autumn it is deserted.” Little has changed.

We passed piles of old rolling stock and stopped so the conductor could pump more water into his steam tank. It slowed the trip even more, but this was consistent with the journey: a leisurely ride every Friday (except in winter), departing officially at 7 or 8am — we left around 9:30 — and returning to Damascus by 5pm. Families and tourists are the target audience, and between the Swiss tour group, the Syrian television crew, and the clapping and singing consortium of teenage Syrians, the ride was as advertised.

The arrival in Ain El Fijeh was underwhelming. Thubron went there expecting a scene described by a 19th travel writer, of “the river gushing from a cave beneath the ruins of two temples.”

Instead he found the town more or less as it exists today:

“I saw a huge restaurant, equipped with every seaside offence: vermilion railings, mock-brick walls, canopied swing-chairs. Rows of jet fountains, mercifully extinct, had been piped round the stream and a chimney-stack of stones waver above it: the swan-song of a Roman temple… For a while I leant over the wall and wondered if there was another Fijeh.”

On my visit last year there was no mystery, but everything was closed. It was after all Friday, the Muslim day of rest and gathering.

“Come back on Sunday,” a man behind the gates of a water pumping plant recommended. But the appeal of Ain El Fijeh is the ride there, and the train only goes on Friday.

I ate peanuts and battled a few hours of sleep for the first hour of the ride, sitting on a wooden seat, my arm out the window, occasionally my head, the morning sun and the exhaust of the steam machine better than the usual Damascene morning of thick coffee and heavy traffic. Other language students were sharing our car, alongside a television crew from the main state channel that made the train feel even more like a set piece.

The passenger cars are as old as the engine, and the ride is not only a charming impression of the past, but a reminder of the burden of early travel. The train is part of the city’s and the region’s history, that bygone Ottoman-era before colonial mapping and mandated states. But it also conjures up something else: blazing through the desert in 1910 on a pilgrimage from Damascus to Medina, praying the steam machine might not overheat.

Top photograph by the author. Bottom via MidEastImage.com with the caption “Third Class Carriage, Sultan’s Railway, Syria 1908.”

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First Obama named the first ambassador to Damascus in five years. Then the State Department lifted its travel warning for Syria — though not the 30-year State Sponsor of Terrorism tag. In a week of overdue warming, some observers might look to business next, even if Obama renewed economic sanctions last year.

Syria’s economy is ripe after years of being closed. As Josh Landis recently wrote, “Syria has been hosting one delegation of American and European businessmen after another as Western banks scramble to get in on the bottom floor of the Syrian economy.” Tourism is a quickly developed and expanding market already, even if it’s Middle Eastern and European investments pouring in and not American dollars.

Almost monthly for the past year or so, a travel section somewhere chalks up Damascus as the next Marrakesh, promotes Aleppo as a historic crossroads once again welcoming Westerners, or sings about Palmyra, Zenobia’s desert city on the silk road near Iraq. Americans visit, though in far fewer numbers than the French or Belgian, though the end of the State Department travel warning for Syria might change things. Or not… mind the reasoning of State:

“The current series of travel warnings were enacted in September 2006 following an attack against the Embassy, and were not based upon Syria being designated as a State Sponsor of Terror. Being a State Sponsor of Terrorism is not a basis for a travel warning.”

Syria has other designations, though, like history, something I wrote about at length in The Faster Times back in December. Travel dispatches from there can reference so many things, though they almost always hinge on the same: anecdotes of the old and exotic East, quite Orientalist pictures of ancient markets and mosques.

Syria has those, sure. It has a lot of other things, outside the cities, beyond the Crusader castles that represent more than a “reminder that conflict between Islam and the West stretches back centuries.”

A somewhat shorter historical view – the 19th century – presents a more immediate bit of Syrian travel and history in light of the news that an American envoy will return to a state for decades at odds with the US. The Embassy has been without its head since 2005, when the US withdrew Margaret Scobey to protest suspected Syrian involvement in the car-bomb death of Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri.

It’s a story about a Christian notable from Lebanon who became America’s first consul in Damascus in 1859. He witnessed a massacre of Christians in Damascus in 1860, a sordid event in the city’s long history.

Most travel passages today suggest visitors wander the alleyways of the Old City of Damascus, ducking into idyllic courtyards and seeing the church where Paul supposedly recovered from his conversion. Somewhere in that wandering is the street where Mikhayil Mishaqa was cornered by a mob.

Sectarian conflict over the hills in Mount Lebanon between Christian and Druze was about to spill into Damascus. Mishaqa, advisor to a prominent Lebanese amir, had moved to Damascus, where, as Eugene Rogan tells it, “he secured an appointment as the vice consul of a relatively minor power at the time, the United States of America.” Though Christian, he didn’t look fondly on newfound assertiveness among Christians of the region, who had recently been granted greater political rights under the Ottoman Empire.

“As the Empire began to implement reforms and equality among its subjects regardless of their religious affiliation,” Mishaqa wrote (quoted in Rogans’s excellent new history, The Arabs) “the ignorant Christians went too far in their interpretation of equality and thought that the small did not have to submit to the great, and the low did not have to respect the high. Indeed they thought that humble Christians were on a par with exalted Muslims.”

Needless to say, the US Embassy in Damascus’s website ignores this quote of Mishaqa in telling “The Evolution of U.S. – Syrian Diplomatic Relations.” The Feds keep it simple: “In January 1859, Doctor Michael Meshaka was appointed U.S. vice consul in Damascus. He served until April 22, 1870, and was succeeded by his son, Nasif, who served until February 10, 1914.”

News of religious violence in the area of what is now Lebanon reached the Muslim population in Damascus. After the town of Zahleh, a Christian stronghold, fell to the Druze, Mishaqa wrote of Damascenes’ reactions: “There was such rejoicing and celebration… you would have though the Empire had conquered Russia.” Christian refugees fled into the Old City as villages in the hinterland came under Druze attack.

The Ottoman governor of Damascus, “no friend to the city’s Christian community,” stoked fears by “posting cannons to ‘protect’ mosques from Christian attack.” Then he orchestrated a procession of Muslim prisoners “jailed for crimes against Christians” through the streets – sure enough before long, a mob was incited. They broke the captors free and turned on the Christian quarter.

The mob broke into Mishaqa’s house. He fled out a backdoor with his children, “hoping to take refuge in the house of a Muslim neighbor,” as Rogan writes. “At each turn, their path was blocked by rioters. To divert them, Mishaqa threw handfuls of coins and fled with his children while the crowd scrambled after his money.” Then they were cornered.

“I had nowhere to run. They surrounded me to strip and kill me. My son and daughter were screaming, ‘Kill us instead of our father!’ One of these wretches struck my daughter on the head with an ax, and he will answer for her blood. Another fired at me from a distance of six paces and missed, but I was wounded on my right temple by a blow with an ax, and my right side, face and arm were crushed by a blow with a cudgel. There were so many crowding around me that it was impossible to fire without hitting others.”

Somehow Mishaqa and his whole family survived the massacre; they were given sanctuary by a Muslim neighbor. Other Muslims helped Christians, most famously the Algerian resistance hero Abd al-Qadir, who had been living in exile in Damascus.

But the Christian quarter was leveled, and Mishaqa reported to the American consul in Beirut “that no less than 5,000 Christians had been killed… one-quarter of a community that numbered 20,000.” Damascus had never seen such sectarian violence.

Obama’s nominee Robert Ford will have very different circumstances to contend with, and likely no mob will chase him through the streets. Though Ryan Crocker, the US envoy in the late 1990s, still holds a grudge against the Syrians, after a mob was allowed to riot in Damascus’s upscale Rawda neighborhood, home to the American embassy and residence. Clinton was bombing Baghdad at the time. Protesters scaled the walls of the compound, smashed the ambassador’s car and rampaged through the ground floor of the residence. His wife was alone inside and took refuge in the upstairs panic room.

Photo via MidEastImage.com: “Original 1859 Photograph of the American Vice Consul to Damascus Michael Mishaka holding a bible.”

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Molasses, the sweetener of the day and a prime ingredient for rum and industrial alcohol, was stored in a massive but shoddily made tank on the waterfront of one of the Boston’s most crowded and impoverished immigrant neighborhoods. Built by the Purity Distilling Company, it apparently leaked so much that its owners painted it brown to mask the drip of molasses, which local residents collected and used in their tenements.

Poor neighborhoods are often slighted, but seeping molasses tanks in Boston’s Little Italy — a historic neighborhood that is also home to Paul Revere’s house and the Old North Church — must have rattled denizens, but not as much as the explosion and flood that devastated their neighborhood.

Today the site of the exploded tank is a waterfront park that includes a Little League field and a Bocci court. The 90th anniversary of the molasses disaster passed last winter, led by Stephen Puleo, who wrote a book with the thick title “Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919,” that makes him not only the city but the country’s resident molasses disaster expert.

All this is curious history on its own, with Puleo’s book as eager guide. In its review of Dark Tide, the New Yorker wrote: “narrated with gusto (and sometimes too much gusto)… but his enthusiasm for a little-known catastrophe is infectious.”

Example: “He lay sobbing in the darkness, tears streaming down his face, mixing with the molasses that stained his cheeks and threatened to drown him.”

Consider the molasses disaster in light of some fluffy pieces in the New York Times last month on Boston’s waterfront as an emerging weekend destination for the well-heeled, people who might go to a store in the Fort Point Channel area that offers “a selection of lighting made from plant materials like twigs and branches” where “a 20-inch-high ‘Thicket’ sconce is $295.”

Who wants tree lights when you can trace the history of a molasses explosion?

Similarly a visitor to London might bypass Notting Hill for the neighborhood near Tottenham Court Road that was flooded with beer in 1814 and imagine a creaking rookery devastated by an unnatural disaster. A court ruled the beer flood an “Act of God,” thus absolving the brewery of any responsibility, even though nine people drowned when a beer vat blew and triggered a chain reaction. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of “strong beer,” as the London Times reported at the time, knocked over two tenement houses and the brick wall of a pub.

Last month the New York Times compelled readers to fly to Boston and take a water taxi to a choice new boutique hotel on the edge of the North End. From that perch, you’d be able to see the waterfront park that was once industrial docks home to an ominous molasses tank.

The story included tidbits of popular history about Boston, even though the Times had to print a correction later, both about the age of Revere’s house and the date of his ride (1775, no ’76).

But we all know about Paul Revere. How many know that his neighborhood was power-washed with salt water to try and dissolve the crust of molasses in the aftermath of the explosion? Or that old-timers claim that in the humidity of a Boston summer, the area can still smell of molasses, competing with wafts of Cannoli?

Boston has no tenement museum like New York. All that the city offers is a little green plaque on Commercial Street, installed by the Bostonian Society at the entrance of a park on the waterfront. Ninety years ago, a steel tank of molasses was leaking nearby.

Photo by the Boston Herald photographer Leslie Jones, January 15, 1919. This photo is in the public domain in the US and taken from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BostonMolassesDisaster.jpg

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