Braves Field/Nickerson Field

285 Babcock Street, Allston

Nickerson Field, September 2015. Photo by Joseph Nevins.

The former site of the Allston Golf Club, Braves Field, the home of the National League’s Boston Braves was the largest baseball stadium in the country when it opened in August 1915. Prior to then, the Braves had played, since the team’s founding in 1871, at the South End Grounds

While the neighboring American League Boston Red Sox—the last team in baseball to field a Black player—were long marked by racism, the Braves, by comparison, were a progressive team. One year after the Brooklyn Dodgers became the first major league team to field a Black player (Jackie Robinson), the Braves became the fifth one to do so when they debuted Sam “Jet” Jethroe in 1950. By 1952, the Braves’ last year in the city (they moved to Milwaukee), Boston’s National League team had three Black players on its roster. (Today, the team is located in Atlanta, where it maintains its racially offensive name, one first adopted in 1912.)

Boston Braves players (left to right) Luis Marquez and Sam Jethroe at Braves Field, April 1951. Photo by Leslie Jones. Source: Leslie Jones Collections, Arts Department, Boston Public Library, via Digital Commonwealth.

Boston University (BU) purchased Braves Field for $430,000 in 1953. Today it is the site of a university stadium called Nickerson Field, where BU’s men’s and women’s lacrosse and soccer teams play. The offices of the BU police department are in the original building that housed the Braves’ administrative offices. In the entry area (close to Braves Field Way), in back of the stadium, a small monument marks the site of what was Braves Field.

Photo by Baseball Panoramic, June 14, 2014. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Getting there:

Green Line, B Branch to the Babcock Street stop. 0.4 mile (four-minute) walk.

To learn more:

Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.

Niquel Terry Ellis. “‘Dehumanizing’ and ‘racist.’ Native leaders decry Braves’ ‘Tomahawk chop’ ahead of World Series game in Atlanta,” CNN, October 28, 2021.

Patrick L. Kennedy, “Remembering the Wigwam” (Parts 1 & 2), BU Today, April 12 & 13, 2012.

Sharon Brody and Lynn Jolicoeur, “‘The Roots of Boston Baseball’: Former Braves Field Marks 100 Years,” WBUR.org, August 21, 2015.

Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory and Ohiri Field (Harvard University)

13 Frisbie Place, Cambridge, and 95 North Harvard Street, Allston

Beginning in 1941, research on incendiary weapons development took place in the Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge. The third-floor lab—”a glass-walled room-within-a-room” in the words of historian Robert Neer—was under the direction of Dr. Louis Fieser, a professor of organic chemistry. An official, top-secret project of the U.S. Department of War, Fieser’s work was listed as “Anonymous Research No. 4” in Harvard’s records.

Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory, 1929-1931. Credit: HUV 2329 (BP 51), Harvard University Archives.

The research was the offspring of what was a marriage of sorts between academia, the U.S. military, and weapons manufacturers brought about by the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940, the NDRC sought to enhance research on, and development of, military weaponry by building linkages between civilian researchers, the Pentagon, and industry. It was the brainchild of Vannever Bush, one of the founders of Raytheon (today Raytheon Technologies headquartered in Waltham*) and an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bush designated James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, as the head of “Division B,” which was responsible for bombs, fuels, gases, and chemical problems.

Soon after the NDRC’s founding, Harvard assigned Fieser two rooms in the basement of the Converse Chemistry Laboratory (at 12 Oxford Street) to conduct research on explosives. As the research of Fieser and his team progressed, it shifted from poison gas to incendiary gels, requiring a move to the nearby Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory.

On July 4, 1942, Fieser and his fellow researchers brought the fruits of their labor to the Harvard soccer field, near the university tennis courts and the Harvard Business School, across the Charles River in the Boston neighborhood of Allston. University workers had prepared the field, digging a circle 60 feet in diameter, which firefighters from the City of Cambridge proceeded to fill with water. Fieser and others then carefully placed a 70-pound bomb containing white phosphorous and 45 pounds of jellied gasoline on a metal stand in the middle of the shallow pond. After Fieser flipped a switch, “a spectacular, billowing, 2,100-degree-Fahrenheit cloud arose over the field,” writes Neer. “Napalm bombs had arrived in the world.”  

July 4, 1942, Harvard soccer field. The first outdoor test of napalm. Source: Harvard Magazine.

The success of the test reflected how Fieser and his team had invented not only napalm, but a way to scatter the gruesome substance over a wide area, while igniting it. Liquid and gel incendiary weapons have a long, even ancient, history. What makes napalm an especially effective (and terrifying) weapon is that it is sticky and it burns at an extremely high temperature.

Louis Fieser, April 1965, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Source: Public Domain.

The U.S. military used napalm to horrific effect in Japan during World War II and in the U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam. The Pentagon also used the weapon during its invasion of Iraq in 2003. For such reasons, napalm is symbolic for many of the horrors of war and of U.S. military power in particular.

The Wolcott Gibbs Laboratory was constructed in 1911-1912. A couple of weeks before it opened, The Harvard Crimson described the building as “the most perfectly planned and equipped physical-chemical laboratory in the world.” Harvard demolished the facility in 1999 to allow for the construction of the Bauer Life Sciences Building, which now stands on the site.

As for the Harvard soccer field, it was renovated and named Ohiri Field in 1983. (It is unclear if Ohiri Field sits on the exact same site as the old soccer field, but, most likely, at the very least, it overlaps with it.) Until 2010, Ohiri Field served as the primary home field for the Harvard men’s and women’s soccer teams. Since the opening of a new stadium called Jordan Field, Ohiri Field has served as the secondary home for the two teams.

Ohiri Field (undated) with Harvard Stadium, which sits on the other side of North Harvard Street, in the background. Source: Harvard Athletics.

Getting there:

Red Line to Harvard station. Enter Frisbie Place (a walkway that is diagonally across from where Quincy Street intersects Kirkland ) at Kirkland Street. The part of Frisbie Place where Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory once stood is a now a combination of a courtyard and, at its northern end, the Bauer Life Sciences Building (0.4 miles, about an 8-minute walk.) From there, Ohiri Field is a one-mile (approximately 20-minute) walk. MBTA buses from Harvard Square also pass in front of Ohiri Field.

To learn more:

Anonymous, “Gibbs Laboratory Ready,” The Harvard Crimson, December 20, 1912.

Louis F. Fieser, The Scientific Method: A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and in Peace, New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1964.

Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

*Regarding Raytheon, see the site entry in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

Acknowledgment:

Thanks to the Harvard University Archives and to Baker Library Special Collections (Harvard Business School) for their assistance.

Chestnut Hill Reservoir & the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum

2450 Beacon Street, Brighton

Pumping station of the Boston Water Works, Chestnut Hill Reservoir, circa late 1800s. Source: Arts Department, Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth.

The Chestnut Hill Reservoir, located at the western end of the city along the border with Brookline, opened in 1870 to help meet Boston’s water needs. Work on it began soon after the Civil War. With a capacity of 550,600,000 gallons, the reservoir greatly helped to relieve the pressure on Boston’s water system—at least for a while, particularly during a time of rapid population growth.

The reservoir was also noteworthy for the beauty of its grounds, constructed to allow for ambling in “nature” and, later, for its built infrastructure—particularly an 80-foot carriage road and greenway around the water body, a grand entrance arch connecting it to Beacon Street, and the pumping station (constructed in 1897). What the bucolic setting obscured was the arduous labor that went into constructing it.

Postcard of Chestnut Hill Reservoir pumping station and grounds, 1908. Source: Brookline Historical Society.

Built on the site was housing to accommodate for more than 400 workers, many of whom were Irish and Canadian immigrants or Civil War veterans While the Cotichuate Water Board, which oversaw the project, claimed that its policy was to “pay our employés fair wages for their services, and have them well treated,” the workers perceived the wages as inadequate. On March 2, 1867, 225 workers, who were receiving $1.50 for their 12-to-14 hour-workdays, went on strike for higher pay. According to the Water Board, the workers “virtually proposed to supersede those in authority, and to fix their own wages…”  The Board promptly fired all the striking workers, the majority of whom they said had been misled by “a few restless, rambling men [who] were the leaders in the affair,” and quickly found replacement workers, whose wages were raised to $1.75 a day. That the Water Board was able to behave as it did suggests the weak bargaining position of workers at the time, a result of low levels of organization among many laborers and the presence of many in need of wage work.

The reservoir was taken offline in 1978, but it still serves as a backup water source in case of emergency. The architecturally grand pumping station on the reservoir’s edge is today home to the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. The museum, entrance into which is free, interprets the history of Greater Boston’s water systems.

Getting there:

Green Line to Reservoir Station (D Line), or to Cleveland Circle Station (C Line). (0.4 miles, 8-minute walk.)

To learn more:

Boston Landmark Commission, Report of the Boston Landmark Commission on the Potential Designation of the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and Pumping Stations as a Landmark, City of Boston: Environment Department, Boston Landmark Commission, 1989.

William P. Marchione, “Water for Greater Boston,” Brighton Allston Historical Society, circa 1998-2001. (See also historical images of reservoir here.)

Report of the Cotichuate Water Board to the City Council of Boston for the Year 1866-67, City Document No. 88, Boston, 1867.