A involved resident information a 311 grievance a few small busted manhole cowl in entrance of 1 residence on Pembroke Road within the South Finish:
in entrance of 93 Pembroke St, there’s a damaged manhole cowl. It seems it is likely to be metropolis associated. The duvet blocks a boiler room so restore is required.
After all, grizzled UHub readers know that’s no manhole cowl, however as an alternative a coal-chute cowl, put in again within the Victorian period when Bostonians nonetheless principally heated their properties with coal – by way of deliveries they bought by way of chutes in entrance of their properties.
The glass prisms fed gentle into darkened basements and let householders see roughly how a lot coal that they had left.
Though among the chutes had been crammed in, and the covers changed, the sadder downward-looking residents of locations such because the Again Bay and the South Finish know from their fixed glances that lots of them covers stay. Additionally, they’re the accountability of householders, not the town.
On this specific case, a little bit of analysis in Google Books and the Globe archives reveals that D. Stanton of the lengthy gone 123 Essex St. was Daniel Stanton, blacksmith, who’s listed in each 1879 and 1882 metropolis directories.
And that is about all we might discover about him, apart from an 1886 anecdote from the Globe about how he bought taken by a 14-year-old rascal who had someway satisfied him he’d be a worthy worker – till the day Stanton gave the lad $3.10 to take over to the native Royal Arcanum to pay his annual dues and the rapscallion returned with a receipt that he had, in reality cast, which Stanton found when he bought a observe from the Royal Arcanum treasurer inquiring why he hadn’t paid his dues but. The child was hauled into court docket and whereas his mom pleaded for leniency, not less than till his father could possibly be summoned from someplace north of Boston, the decide ordered him held in lieu of $1,000 bail.
