Charles River Dam is completed.

Architect: Lowell, Guy. Chief Engineer: Miller, Hiram A. Championed by James Jackson Storrow, it is built on the site of the former Craigie Bridge. The dam transforms the mouth of the Charles River from a tidal estuary to a freshwater basin, alleviates the sanitation problems at low tide, transforms the water behind it from brackish to fresh, and enables construction of the Esplanade in 1936.* But according to Karl Haglund, “For a number of Bostonians, the water park was a great disappointment,” and architect Robert Bellows complained it presented a view of “an extremely wide and uninteresting body of water.” It is replaced in 1978.*