When William Gibson Bell first explored the markets of Boston, he would have encountered a welter of sights and sounds. The epicenter of merchant activity, and especially the grocery trade, was the Quincy Market complex. Then, as today, it consisted of three parallel structures of brick and stone. Each is approximately 535 feet in lenth and 75 feet wide. The roofs are center peaked. The Quincy Market building, which occupies the center position, strikes a grand posture in Greek revival style, with four massive Doric pillars at its east and west ends and a soaring copper-based dome. Built in 1825, it is made mostly of New England granite.
Today the Quincy Market is a major tourist attraction and hosts eclectic retail offerings from Coach, Godiva and Victoria’s Secret to Harley-Davidson and the Museum of Fine Arts. Year-round, it pulses with a sprawling diversity of energy and commerce. In that respect, it remains unchanged – in most other ways, the Quincy Market of William’s era was a different world.
In the 1820s, Boston’s population began to swell, as the city absorbed the first wave of European immigration. From around 40,000 souls in 1820, the population exploded to over four times that number, 170,000, by 1860, a year before the William G. Bell Co. was established. In this era, Irish immigrants were the most abundant – as many as 35,000 had clambered ashore by 1850. By the waning years of the 19th century, as the family business approached its 40th anniversary, the city’s burgeoning population has surged past half a million. By then, its crammed neighborhoods – North, West, and South ends – reverberated with the faces, language, food, clothing and religions of Irish, Germans, Lebanese, Syrians, French Canadians, Poles and Russians, many of whom sought work and opportunity on the docks and in the markets.
The Quincy Market of 1857, the year William arrived in the service of Seth Burt, proprietor, was a cacophony of sensory stimulation. Imagine the racket of barking vendors, wagon wheels on cobbled stones, livestock. Or the odor of fish, meat, and manure mingled with the aroma of fresh bread, fruits and spices. Or the sight of coal fires and steam in the cold, ships masts, and the motley blending of vest-suited business men, stevedores, and butchers.
Two-hundred year-old cobble stones were blanketed in an accretion of hay, dirt, discarded produce, and the ubiquitous pigeon droppings. Vendors opened stalls in the dull twilight between dark and gaslamp. Rough-hewn stalls spilled open to display every kind of durable and non-durable goods that could be purchased, grown, or caught around the world and hauled off the docks a stones throw east. Cats, dogs, chickens, goats, mice, and pigeons, everywhere pigeons.
The markets formed a robust ballast for the splaying arms of docks that stretched east into Boston Harbor. The grandest of them, Long Wharf, not 100 feet from the eastern-most stalls, reached a quarter mile toward the sea and beckoned seafaring vessels to bring their goods to port.
The strip of cobblestones between dock and market formed the foot of Commercial Street, which curved to the northeast, hugged the harbor shoreline and formed a broad shoulder that supported the wharfs above Long Wharf – Commercial, Lewis, Union, Lincoln, Battery and more. Commercial Street continued on, as it does to this day, to enclose the top of the North End at the base of the colonial graveyard and Snow Hill. It hemmed in a neighborhood of narrow streets, ancient clapboard houses, including Paul Revere’s, the Old North Church, and cramped, red brick tenements that spilled their occupants to the very edge of the market district.
This geography would form the daily world of William from his arrival in the employ of Mr. Burt in 1857 until the week of his death in 1915.
