NORTH END --Even 100 years later, the calamity still sounds like a dark joke for it is unimaginable: On Jan. 15, 1919, at around 12:30 p.m. , a wave of molasses, 2.3 million gallons, moving at 35 miles per hour, 25 feet high and 160 feet wide, rushed through the crowded and densely populated North End. The sweet molasses caused 21 people to die, and injured 150.
“I was in bed on the third floor of my house when I heard a deep rumble. … I awoke in several feet of molasses,” Martin Cloughtery told the Boston Globe in 1919. “A pile of wreckage was holding me down, and a little way from me I saw my sister. I struggled out from under the wreckage and pulled my sister toward me and helped her on to a raft. I then began to look for my mother.”
On the 100th anniversary of the disaster, Boston Globe posted a short video explaining what had happened.
To remember the sweet disaster, Boston people put up a plaque on the place where the giant tank filled with molasses exploded. The investigator shows the explosion of the tank that caused the flood was due to a cylinder stress failure.
As the video from the Boston Globe shows, the flood did not spread all across the neighborhood. The most affected place is actually the residence area directly across the molasses tank. People who lived in the area had no early warning before the molasses swept their homes. According to the Vita Brevis, Clougherty's mother who lived in this area died in the flood, while Clougherty himself grabbed onto his bed frame and finally survived.
The neighborhood nowadays is still densely populated. Cannolis, Italian restaurants, and pastries here are what the neighborhood is famous for now.
There is also a debate between people, arguing about Mike's Pastry's or Modern Pastry's cannolis are better.
Even so, the Boston people still remember the great disaster that happened to their ancestors. The neighborhood is not only the place of Cannolis, Lasagna, or Margherita, but also the place of Bostons local culture and essential history.