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Chelsea: City Of Opportunity |
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At the beginning of the 1900s, Chelsea, Massachusetts, was slowly transforming from an agricultural society to an urban and industrialized one. Industrialists needed people to work in their factories and that meant work for new immigrants like Samuel Gass. Rural Americans had left their farms to meet the demand but more labor was still needed. Immigrants, first from the British Isles, and then from southern and eastern Europe flooded Boston and other cities. Chelsea eventually became the haven for thousands of Jewish immigrants, who, like Samuel Gass, came to America to seek a new life.
In 1830, Chelsea was a mere 1.5 square mile peninsula housing four farms and thirty people. The tidal channels of the harbor, Chicken Creek and Mystic River, isolated Chelsea from Charlestown and East Boston. A creek and marshland separated it from Revere. Only with Everett did Chelsea share a dry land border. Though it was located only a mile across the harbor from Boston, Chelsea was hardly influenced by the changes that affected that metropolis because at that time no bridge connected the two locales and ferry service was nonexistent.
Then in 1831, ferry service was instituted. Boston's burgeoning, land-hungry population spilled across the harbor. By 1860, 12,000 people lived in Chelsea. The first new settlers were well-off Bostonians who built sizable homes. In 1910, almost 42% of Chelsea's residents were foreign born, however, and intense development created a plethora of small homes on tiny lots and tenements. By 1930, once tiny, rural Chelsea was home to 45,000 people.[1] It had become one of the most densely populated, industrialized cities in the United States.
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The Chelsea Street Bridge, a drawbridge constructed between 1936 and 1937, is one of three bridges that now connect Chelsea with Boston. Credit: Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number LC-HAER, MASS, 13-BOST,136-28] |
More than 100 manufacturers made Chelsea their base in 1915. Printing, leather, iron goods, food preparation, rubber hosing and belts, and a large-scale salvage industry provided a diverse economic base. Metals, old newspapers, corrugated cardboard, used clothing, wool and cotton goods, all were collected and baled into hundred-pound or fifty-pound blocks and sold to manufacturers for recycling.
The city was divided into districts, segregated by class. Broadway ran the full length of Chelsea from the harbor to its border with Everett, cutting the city in half. The waterfront area housed the industrial and commercial core of Chelsea. Near the waterfront, tenements and a mixture of industrial and institutional buildings bounded Broadway. In the midtown area, shops prevailed. Here and northeast of the industrialized area were the modest residences of many workers; beyond these were the houses of the more affluent. The most prestigious homes were located in Horn Hill, Mount Washington, and Mount Bellingham. Near Mill Creek and the Everett boundary, stately homes lined the street.
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Captains’ Row on Marginal Street in Chelsea Credit: Haskell, Arthur C., Historic American Buildings Survey, 1934. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction HABS, MASS, 13-CHEL,1-] |
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Cary-Bellingham Mansion, 34 Parker Street, Chelsea Credit: Branzetti, Frank O., Historic American Buildings Survey, 1941. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction HABS, MASS, 13-CHEL,4] |
[1] Of the approximately forty-five thousand people who lived in Chelsea in 1930, there were twenty-three to twenty-five thousand Jewish people. Cy Kassel found these statistics in the Library of Congress.
