![]() ![]() Prejudice against Italians played a major part in this story. ![]() All the deceased were from poor or working-class families, Irish and Italian, who lived in the neighborhood. Weapons manufacturing continued even after the war ended, and since USIA anticipated Prohibition on the horizon, they wanted to distill as much alcohol as possible before the hammer came down.Įighteen men, one woman, and two ten-year-old children. Trains would then transport the molasses from the harbor to a distillery in East Cambridge. In 1915, Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of United States Industrial Alcohol, built the tank to hold molasses brought by ship from the Caribbean. Molasses played a large role in the wartime economy it was distilled into industrial alcohol, which was in turn used to make munitions for World War I. Why was there a huge tank of molasses on Boston’s waterfront anyway? Homes were destroyed, people drowned or were crushed by debris, and horses flailed in vain to escape. Learn more about the Great Boston Molasses Flood, 100 years later.On January 15, 1919, a 50-foot-high tank of molasses burst, spilling 2.3 million gallons of the viscous stuff over an entire neighborhood. Meanwhile, another flood-inspired band called Hot Molasses is performing Tuesday night at Aeronaut, as part of a fundraiser for the immigrant advocacy nonprofit Cosecha, and Allston’s Model Cafe is hosting “a night of comedy, music, poetry, photography, and molasses filled baked goods.” They also have a Kickstarter going, if you want to show some support. “It’s a really important part of Boston history and it’s relevant in terms of big business overstepping, and populations of immigrants being negatively effected.”Īs part of the live concert, band members plan to read from Dark Tide, a history of the flood. “We realized when we named the band after a tragedy, with a 100th anniversary coming up, we needed to do something to honor this and promote this part of history,” says Dan Cloutier, a songwriter who plays guitar and banjo in the band. The quartet of local singer songwriters will perform eight songs about the flood, including one called “21,” an homage to the nearly two dozen people killed in the disaster, and “The Sticky, Sticky Mess,” a tale told through the eyes of North End firefighters trapped by molasses. A Boston-based folk band, appropriately called The Great Molasses Flood, says it plans to record a live album dedicated to the flood during the anniversary on Tuesday, January 15, at Cambridge’s Club Passim-100 years to the date after the the North End was swamped with goo. But one group of musicians in particular is really going out of its way for the occasion. Poke around online and you can find plenty of music referencing the disaster-from countless Americana ballads to, for some reason, a track from the EDM jam band Lotus. So it made sense that science journalist Forrest Jabr would give a talk on the science of the flood at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre a few years back, ahead of a screening of The Blob (as part of the venue’s cheeky yet informative Science on Screen series). … It is a monster of appetite: an absolute consumer, voracious, growing. The Criterion Collection describes the monster, which still lingers in the popular imagination, as a villain that “absorbs people” and “can flow under or around any obstacle. We can’t say for certain the movie was directly inspired by the disaster, as there’s no solid evidence to support the theory. A more likely explanation is that, like others of its time period, it explored anxieties about a Communist threat lurking in communities Still, the similarities are uncanny. Sound familiar? It’s both the very real fate of North Enders in 1919, and the plot of the 1958 cult classic The Blob. A globular, mysterious force cascades through streets, bursting into buildings, and swallowing innocent townspeople whole. ![]()
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