A mammoth and extremely rare map of Greater Boston at the turn of the 20^th century, overprinted to show bathing and other recreational facilities available to city residents.

Measuring over six feet high, this exceptionally large map depicts the Boston metropolitan area west to Newton, north to Melrose, and south to Milton. City and town boundaries are shown, as are seemingly every road, rail and trolley line; each aqueduct, reservoir, river and stream of any significance; and even walking trails in Frederick Law Olmsted’s “Emerald Necklace” and the Blue Hills Reservation. This example has been overprinted in red to indicate the locations of recreational facilities inside Boston city limits, with different symbols for “floating baths,” beaches, gymnasiums, pools, and “shower baths.” The symbols are solid for “old” facilities and in outline for “new” ones.

The map is extremely rare: I find but one confirmed institutional holding—at the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library, and I have found no record of its having appeared on the antiquarian market.  In light of its great size and specialized purpose, it is likely that very few were produced, and that even fewer survived.

Bathing, recreation, and urban reform in Boston
This special-purpose map should be understood against the background of Boston’s late-19th-century public-bath and recreation movement, which aimed to bring bathing, exercise, and supervised outdoor leisure within reach of residents in crowded urban neighborhoods. Boston had maintained seasonal public baths since the 1860s—principally floating baths and beach baths—and by 1897 reportedly operated fourteen such facilities. These were not resorts by any stretch of the imagination, but municipal interventions in the problems of urban density, summer heat, and limited domestic bathing facilities. The map thus records a city in the process of expanding and rationalizing this emerging recreational infrastructure. The timing is especially suggestive: in October 1898 Boston opened the Dover Street Bath in the South End, indicated on the map by a hollow red star. Built at a cost of $75,000, with an additional $15,000 for the site, it contained fifty bathing compartments and was administered by the city’s Department of Baths, which had charge of Boston’s public baths and gymnasiums.

The gymnasium symbols belong to the same reform context. At Charlesbank, along the Charles River, Boston had already created an influential open-air gymnasium within a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, with facilities for running, climbing, jumping, vaulting, and other forms of supervised exercise. The National Park Service describes it as the first open-air gymnasium and exercise facility of its kind in a public park. Oddly, it is not shown on this map, though it had opened in 1889, nearly a decade earlier. The map does, however, show the gymnasium at Commonwealth Park in South Boston, opened in 1896.

George H. Walker & Co.
According to Pierce and Slautterback, lithographer George H. Walker entered the publishing business in or around 1879, and his firm continued in operation until 1927.

“George H. Walker & Co. was the last important lithographic firm to be established in Boston in the nineteenth century….  Walker maintained a consistently high quality of workman-like draftsmanship by employing experienced artists.  Joseph L. Jones, C.E. Jorgensen, Richard P. Mallory, F. Pond, and Albert F. Poole drew for the firm.  The company is represented in the Boston Athenaeum collection by numerous portraits, sheet music covers, book illustrations, bird’s-eye views, maps, plans for cemeteries and housing developments, and views of residences and factories.”  (Boston Lithography, p. 159)

The map offered here is one of several large-scale maps of the Boston metropolitan area issued by Walker in the 1890s. One example, titled “New Historical Map of Metropolitan Boston”, is overprinted in red to show the city’s historical features, including the original shoreline prior to Boston’s extensive process of landmaking.

In all, a rare and monumental map of Boston documenting an important municipal effort to improve public health, recreation, and everyday life in the modern city.

References
Boston Engineering Dept., Maps of Boston Published between 1600 and 1903, p. 238, lists a “Map of Boston and vicinity showing locations of baths and swimming places”, but gives the dimensions as 65 1/8”h x 56 ¼”w, rather smaller than the map offered here. OCLC #1037458494 records a Walker map with this date and title, held only at the Leventhal Map Center at Boston Public Library, but the size is not given, and there is no mention of the overprinting.

Background from Robert W. DeForest, The Tenement House Problem (New York: Macmillan, 1903), vol. II, pp. 37-38; “Charlesbank”, on the website of the National Park Service; and “The Public Bath Movement in Boston”, on the website of The West End Museum. All accessed June 2026.