The Great Molasses Flood

The Boston waterfront is so hot these days – with insane corporate, residential, restaurant, and everything else growth throughout the harbor area – it’s sometimes hard to remember that this same waterfront was, in recent memory, pretty dumpy.

When I first came to Boston, fifty years ago, the waterfront was fish piers, rickety buildings, ratty warehouses and factories. There were a couple of “good” restaurants – Jimmy’s and Anthony’s – and a fun, actually good one, No Name, a hole in the wall on one of the fish piers. No Name is the only one of these three that’s still standing. I haven’t been there in decades, but it has swanked up a bit.  

As, of course, has the entire waterfront.

But even further back in time, the waterfront was even more industrial, and part of that industrial landscape was the Purity Distilling Company’s 50 foot tank on Commercial Street. Commercial is one of the main drags of the waterfront. The street wraps around the North End, then – as now – an Italian neighborhood. (The North End hasn’t changed as radically as has the waterfront during my tenure in Boston. While it has yuppified in recent years, it still has some decent Italian restaurants, some very entertaining nominally religious street festivals each summer, and a handful of excellent cafes where you can get espresso and cannoli, play Dean Martin on the jukebox, and rub shoulders not just with tourists and suburbanites but with authentic Italian immigrants as well.)

The Purity tank, just there on the edge of the North End, was built in 1915, in plenty of time to be used in munitions production for World War I. Molasses was in demand “because it could be converted to industrial alcohol, a critical ingredient in the manufacture of munitions.”

…in [Purity’s] haste to construct the tank — in a precinct populated, not coincidentally, by poor Italian immigrants powerless to prevent such a thing  from being shoehorned into their neighborhood — the company’s profit-hungry bosses dispensed with tests that would have revealed the structure’s lethal flaws. (Source: Boston Globe)

From the get go, it was apparent that the tank leaked. The kids of those poor Italian immigrants scraped molasses gunk off the sides of the suppurating tank to make themselves a treat.

Purity knew about the leaks, but rather than inspect and correct the faulty tank, they painted the tank brown so that the leaks would be less apparent.

And then, on January 15, 1919, the:

…towering steel tank containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses suddenly ruptured, releasing a torrent of syrup that strangled and destroyed everything in its path in a matter of minutes

A 15-foot wave of molasses raced — yes, raced — through Boston’s North End. But what sounds like a B movie directed by Roger Corman is no joke: Twenty-one people died and dozens more were badly injured. Unsuspecting men, women, and children were smothered — asphyxiated, really — by a tsunami of viscous brown syrup, and when the bodies were finally recovered, the Suffolk County medical examiner said they looked “as though covered in heavy oil skins . . . eyes and ears, mouths and noses filled.”

The recovery was hindered when the temperature plummeted – this was, after all, January - and:

…the dead became entombed in the hardened sugar, forcing frantic workers to use saws and chisels to clear wreckage and retrieve bodies.

Inevitably, Purity Distilling’s owner, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, was sued. Predictably, the company attempted:

…to blame Italian anarchists for the disaster, claiming that radicals had bombed the tank. But the judge wasn’t buying it. The accident, he ruled, was the result of shoddy design and construction — the same type of brittle steel had been used on the Titanic, which sank seven years before the flood — and USIA was ordered to pay about $630,000 in settlements.

Pretty paltry, those payouts. $630K in 1919 translates into roughly $9.5M in 2019. Not exactly a lot of money, given the number of victims.

In the aftermath of the flood, Boston enacted new building standards. Thus progress is forged…

But for all the changes in Boston’s waterfront over the last 100 years, the story of the exploding molasses tank has so many elements that are, alas, timeless: companies ignoring safety standards to save money, especially when those impacted by catastrophic failures are nothing but poor immigrants; undervaluing the lives of those poor immigrant; and blaming immigrant radicals for something that was a company’s own doing.

How do you say plus ca change in Italian?