North End

This guide to Boston's North End centers on January 15, 1919, when a five-story steel tank swelled in a sudden thaw and let go over the neighborhood in a wave of molasses. Witness Robert Burnett watched it roll rather than rush, dark and slow, blotting out the light as it tore through these streets. Afterward, the tank's owner, United States Industrial Alcohol, blamed anarchists rather than its own engineering, and a hundred nineteen North End families took the company to court in one of the earliest class actions in American history.