Fort Hill begins to be cut down.

The city first cuts today’s Oliver Street through the 80-foot-high hill (subsequently building a footbridge to allow children who live on the south side of the hill to attend the local school on the north side). Then the city cuts down the entire hill in the area bounded by today’s Milk Street, Broad Street, Atlantic Avenue, and Pearl Street. The project is both one of development and of slum clearance of the largely Irish neighborhood. In the 1840s, a committee had studied the area and declared, “Here is a density of population surpassed, probably, in few places in the civilized world.” Historian William Marchione later calls it “the first major urban renewal project undertaken in Boston.” The project is completed in July 1872, and the fill from the project is used to create Atlantic Avenue in 1869-70.*