Stroll with us down to Boston's North End and take a deep breath: do you smell something sweet? In Episode 12, we go over the 1919 industrial accident that resulted in a tsunami of molasses - over 2 million gallons - pouring down the street at 30 miles per hour, killing 21 Bostonians and a number of horses. We'll discuss what exactly happened, what was responsible (anarchists? capitalism? Prohibition? bad luck?), and why there was a huge, poorly-designed, poorly built storage vat of molasses sitting around in the North End in the first place. We'll also tackle the critical question of how the molasses got cleaned up, and if a popular local legend - that a molasses smell lingers in downtown Boston on a hot afternoon - holds up 102 years later.
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Sources for this episode include:
"Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919" by S. Puleo, 2019
