Gourlay, Robert F. General Plan for Enlarging and Improving the City of Boston.

Created by a visiting insomniac Scotsman, who claims to have slept only two hours in the last five years, it is subsequently described as “The first great plan for Boston.” It contains both grandiose and prescient proposals that call for creation of islands in the Charles River, a man-made lake in the middle of the new Back Bay, underground “sub-urban railways,” and correctly predicts that the city’s population will reach half a million within 50 years. The original plan is today owned by the Boston Athenaeum.