Boston Harbor

[1] Since its discovery to Europeans by John Smith in 1614,[2] Boston Harbor has been an important port in American history.

[3] It was the site of the Boston Tea Party in 1773, as well as almost continuous building of wharves, piers, and new filled land into the harbor until the 19th century.

Fecal coliform bacteria levels forced frequent swimming prohibitions along the harbor beaches and the Charles River for many years.

That suit was followed by one by Conservation Law Foundation and finally by the United States government, resulting in the landmark[5] court-ordered[6] cleanup of Boston Harbor.

The slow progress of the cleanup became a key theme of the 1988 U.S. presidential election as George H. W. Bush defeated Dukakis partly through campaign speeches casting doubt on the governor's environmental record,[8] which Dukakis himself had claimed was better than that of Bush.

Today, Boston Harbor is safe for fishing and for swimming nearly every day, though there are still beach closings after even small rainstorms, caused by bacteria-laden storm water and the occasional combined sewer overflow.

[1] This led to an investigation that was conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it was suspected to have been related to a concluded Boston Harbor dredging project.

The harbor is sheltered from Massachusetts Bay and the open Atlantic Ocean by a combination of the Winthrop Peninsula and Deer Island to the north, the hooked Nantasket Peninsula and Point Allerton to the south, and the harbor islands in the middle.

Although the scientific understanding of hydraulics was still in its infancy and there were high degrees of uncertainty regarding the meeting of land and water, scientists and engineers began to describe the Boston Harbor as a series of channels created and maintained by the scouring force of water moving in and out of the harbor, river systems, and tidal reservoirs.

Chicago built into Lake Michigan, New York extended itself into the Hudson and East rivers, and San Francisco reclaimed sections of its bay.

The Harbor Islands have made up Boston's least populated electoral area, Ward 1, Precinct 15, since 1990, though the polling place is on the mainland at Columbia Point.

There were previously registered voters at a recovery center and a homeless shelter on Long Island, but few voted and they have closed.

[17][18] In 1996, the Boston Globe reported that Mayor Thomas Menino and MIT engineer Clifford Goudey were planning a program to use the great tanks on Moon Island as a fish farm or a temporary home for tuna or lobster in an attempt to implement a recirculating aquaculture system in Boston Harbor.