History Flows On, Part III

From Dave Brigham:

This is the final installment in a three-part series providing some history of Greater Boston water works. See November 11, 2011, "History Flows On, Part I," and November 20, 2011, "History Flows On, Part II."

In the second part of this series, I wrote about a long hike I took in Cutler Park. The photos below were taken in another section of the park, hard by the Charles River and close to major retailers and business parks in both Newton and Needham, Mass. Here is a pump house similar to the one I featured in part two of the series.



Cutler Park was for a time used by the city of Newton, MA, as water storage before the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts was built in the 1930s. As such, pump houses like this one were surely more common sights in the Greater Boston area.

As I mentioned above, this area of Cutler Park is close to major thoroughfares. There is a bridge that carries abandoned train tracks across the Charles River from Newton into Needham. This is the underside of that bridge:



And here are the tracks, looking from Needham into Newton:



The tracks used to go all the way into the Needham Industrial Park (now known as the New England Business Center), a massive spread of buildings built in the 1950s. The tracks now end just behind a new housing complex on the fringe of the park:



I'm not sure if a resident of that complex dumped this side table, or if a hobo passing through couldn't fit it on his wagon:



OK, so this post wasn't really about Greater Boston water works, but it shows how you can find abandoned bits of history just about anywhere you look. And in a hundred years, the pump house might be gone, and the railroad tracks might have been torn up, but there will always be something else for curious Backsiders to tromp around and see.