Learn more about the Great Boston Molasses Flood, 100 years later. Meanwhile, another flood-inspired band called Hot Molasses is performing Tuesday night at Aeronaut, as part of a fundraiser for the immigrant advocacy nonprofit Cosecha, and Allston’s Model Cafe is hosting “a night of comedy, music, poetry, photography, and molasses filled baked goods.” They also have a Kickstarter going, if you want to show some support. “It’s a really important part of Boston history and it’s relevant in terms of big business overstepping, and populations of immigrants being negatively effected.”Īs part of the live concert, band members plan to read from Dark Tide, a history of the flood. “We realized when we named the band after a tragedy, with a 100th anniversary coming up, we needed to do something to honor this and promote this part of history,” says Dan Cloutier, a songwriter who plays guitar and banjo in the band. The quartet of local singer songwriters will perform eight songs about the flood, including one called “21,” an homage to the nearly two dozen people killed in the disaster, and “The Sticky, Sticky Mess,” a tale told through the eyes of North End firefighters trapped by molasses. Filled with more than 2.3 million gallons of the sticky substance, the seaside container burst, unleashing a 15-foot-high tidal wave of gooey destruction, killing 21 people, and. In 1919, a squat steel tank of molasses sitting low on the Boston Harbor waterfront exploded. A Boston-based folk band, appropriately called The Great Molasses Flood, says it plans to record a live album dedicated to the flood during the anniversary on Tuesday, January 15, at Cambridge’s Club Passim-100 years to the date after the the North End was swamped with goo. The tale of the Great Boston Molasses Flood sounds like an urban legend. But one group of musicians in particular is really going out of its way for the occasion. Poke around online and you can find plenty of music referencing the disaster-from countless Americana ballads to, for some reason, a track from the EDM jam band Lotus. So it made sense that science journalist Forrest Jabr would give a talk on the science of the flood at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre a few years back, ahead of a screening of The Blob (as part of the venue’s cheeky yet informative Science on Screen series). … It is a monster of appetite: an absolute consumer, voracious, growing. The Criterion Collection describes the monster, which still lingers in the popular imagination, as a villain that “absorbs people” and “can flow under or around any obstacle. We can’t say for certain the movie was directly inspired by the disaster, as there’s no solid evidence to support the theory. A more likely explanation is that, like others of its time period, it explored anxieties about a Communist threat lurking in communities Still, the similarities are uncanny. Sound familiar? It’s both the very real fate of North Enders in 1919, and the plot of the 1958 cult classic The Blob. The few workers in the building’s cellar had no chance as the liquid poured down and overwhelmed them.A globular, mysterious force cascades through streets, bursting into buildings, and swallowing innocent townspeople whole. An eight-foot-high wave of molasses swept away the freight cars and caved in the building’s doors and windows. Suddenly, the bolts holding the bottom of the tank exploded, shooting out like bullets, and the hot molasses rushed out. Next to the workers was a 58-foot-high tank filled with 2.5 million gallons of crude molasses. It was close to lunch time on January 15 and Boston was experiencing some unseasonably warm weather as workers were loading freight-train cars within the large building. The United States Industrial Alcohol building was located on Commercial Street near North End Park in Boston. Listen to HISTORY This Week Podcast: The Great Boston Molasses Flood The molasses burst from a huge tank at the United States Industrial Alcohol Company building in the heart of the city. Fiery hot molasses floods the streets of Boston on January 15, 1919, killing 21 people and injuring scores of others.
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