Bad Ends · STOP 01 · North End
The company painted the molasses tank brown, the city's archivists say, so the leaks wouldn't show.
On January 15, 1919, a fifty-foot tank on Commercial Street split open and put about 2.3 million gallons of molasses into the North End. The company had painted the tank brown so the leaks wouldn't show, and its first explanation was anarchists. A court's auditor blamed the owners. The site is a ball field now, and a small plaque on the low wall keeps the count.
This is stop 1 of Bad Ends. Walk it - any two stops are free.
The plate
The Tank Burst
Collected on site
Commercial Street, just east of Charter Street (park entrance side), North End
Directions
1
The first rescuers on the scene, by the state's account, were 116 Navy cadets from the training ship USS Nantucket.
More footnotes on the story card, in the app.
Sources (7)
- Boston Molasses Flood (marker)HMdb.org, marker 40677; marker erected by The Bostonian Society · marker undated; page accessed 2026-10-10
- 100 years ago today: molasses crashes through Boston's North EndCity of Boston, City Archives · 2019-01-15
- Great Molasses Flood of 1919: Why This Deluge of Goo Was So DeadlyLive Science, reporting Sharp, Kennedy and Rubinstein (Harvard), American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting, Portland OR · 2016-11
- Great Molasses FloodWikipedia (lead only; cites Puleo, Dark Tide; The Guardian; Smithsonian) · accessed 2026-10-10
- Did You Know: Molasses FloodSecretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State House Tours · n.d.
- Results of Geophysical Survey at Langone ParkJohn M. Steinberg and Grace E. Bello, Fiske Center for Archaeological Research, UMass Boston (requested by City Archaeologist Joe Bagley) · 2019-01-14
- Panorama of the Molasses Disaster siteGlobe Newspaper Co.; Boston Public Library, Print Department · 1919-01-15