Crooked and Narrow Streets: Photography and Urban Visual Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Boston

In The Crooked and Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston (1920), historian and social reformer Annie Haven Thwing documents the development of Boston’s streets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She illustrates her text with stock photographs depicting these ancient alleys lined with nineteenth-century tenement buildings. This juxtaposition of colonial and modern Boston through text and image privileges the city as a historical site, significantly doing so at a time when Bostonians were grappling with the concerns of twentieth-century urbanism, such as overcrowding, urban reform, and historic preservation.