Beneath your feet lies gravel hauled by train from the hills of Needham, starting in 1857. Back Bay was a tidal flat and mudflat west of the original Shawmut Peninsula, used as a dump and rail yard, that the city filled in beginning in 1857 in one of the most ambitious urban engineering projects in American history. Over thirty years, trains running on a continuous schedule brought gravel from the hills of Needham and dumped it into the bay, creating 450 acres of new land that was developed on a grid of parallel streets named alphabetically for English cities: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford — the mnemonic A Boston City Downtown Exists For Good Hiking was invented by Harvard students to remember the order.
The resulting neighborhood, developed from the 1860s through the 1890s, is one of the finest Victorian streetscapes in America: four-story brownstone row houses with bay windows and stoops, interrupted by churches, the Boston Public Library, and copley Square. Newbury Street, the shopping and gallery corridor that runs the length of the neighborhood, contains some of the finest nineteenth-century row house facades in the city. Walk from Arlington Street toward Massachusetts Avenue and the street-level commercial activity gradually gives way to residential brownstones.