LOWER FALLS - A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

               A WALK BACK IN TIME 

     Lower Falls is an interesting section of the city of Newton.  Growing up in the city I remember the complex of manufacturing Mills and the old houses, many of them have been converted and some of them have disappeared.

     I’ve continued with my project of walking back in time using the Newton Main Library collection of Historic Glass Plate Photographs as reference points.   As odd as it may seem, two unidentified photographs in the Library collection caught my attention because of the steep grade of the street as shown in the photographs.   I did some photographic comparison of buildings, referred to an 1886 Newton Atlas, and used the Charles River as a point of reference.  I’m confident that two unidentified photographs in the Library glass plate collection depicts the intersection of Washington and Concord Streets in Lower Falls over a hundred years ago.

     The photo that I marked “photo #1” looks East at the Concord and Washington Streets intersection, the house in the photograph, that I marked #1, has survived and is now an office building.  The second glass plate photograph, marked  “photo #2”, looks west on Washington St. across the bridge over the Charles River.  I numbered the buildings in the photo. Buildings 2, 3, and 4 have disappeared and all that remains are woods leading to the Eastern bank of the Charles River.  The site of Building #5 is a modern office building which occupies the west bank of the Charles River in Wellesley.  

   I attached copies of the two historic photos, a cropped section of the 1886 Newton Atlas and two Google map views of the area.  I numbered the buildings in the photographs to correspond to the cropped section of the 1886 Atlas.  You can decide for yourself if I got it right! 

   The more I look at the photographs in the Library Collection of Glass Plate photographs , the more I question who took them and why?  Looking closely at photo #2 it appears that building #3 shows the remains of a fire.  As I refer back to some of the other photographs in the Library collection it appears that many of the photographs in the collection may have been taken on behalf of the Newton Police or the Newton Fire Dept.      

  Bob Cerra