Look closely at this photograph, undated but taken after 1890. Two horses pull a streetcar past bare trees, and in the middle of it all stands a granite basin right where Sparks, Craigie, and Brattle Streets meet. Cambridge once called this five-way intersection Washtub Square.

Long before cars parked here, before Craigie rerouted away from Sparks, both Brattle and Craigie Streets had horse-drawn streetcars and inlaid metal tracks. The Cambridge Horse Railroad was one piece of a sprawling surface streetcar network, which lives on, diminished, in today’s buses and surface rail. “Abby May’s Bathtub” was removed around 1930 due to the hazard it posed to motor vehicles, but it lingered in local memory for decades. Letters to the Historical Commission eventually prompted research that uncovered its true origin: a memorial drinking fountain for Boston social reformer and suffragette Abigail Williams May.

Today a Bluebikes station sits beside the spot, and several thousand people have exchanged bikes there since it opened in December 2025. Bikes don’t drink from a trough, but I imagine the idle horse from that photograph every time I pass through.

Cambridge Open Archives

This all came to mind during Cambridge Open Archives 2026: Evolving Landscapes Sept. 12 in Joan Lorentz Park, where staff and volunteers set up tents with vintage maps, photos, and stories. I watched strangers crowd around an atlas reproduction showing the Holy Ghost Hospital for Incurables (now Spaulding Rehabilitation Outpatient Center) near Baldwin Street (now Roberts Road). We pointed at buildings and corners, reconciling the old names and unfamiliar buildings with the places we know now. This disorienting feeling, a proprioception of today merging with yesterday, feels like time travel to me. I’m a map person, and maybe seeing what we saw that day will make you one, too.

But it’s stories, not pictures, that bring the past to life. I ran into Councillor E. Denise Simmons, who told a story about her daughter organizing a group of Cambridge students to meet with Historical Commission staff to learn about Julia Child and the home she once occupied.

Together we noted that things have changed since Julia moved out: the Smithsonian took the entirety of Childs’s kitchen, and it is rumored that vegans moved in over the years. “Perhaps these changes shook the foundations,” Councillor Simmons told us, but the building still stands. Students helped craft a policy order to put up a historical marker commemorating her home.

Storytelling gives our two-dimensional artifacts a third and vital living dimension. Maps and photos lend themselves to static preservation and rediscovery, but oral histories are culturally indispensable, harder to find, and far more fragile. Perhaps Cambridge’s finest extant example of oral histories, “Lift Every Voice” from the volunteer-run Cambridge Black History Project, gives us the precious opportunity to listen to its over fifty interviews, on-demand.

I hope you will join me in listening to and finding more of the past in Cambridge’s physical archives throughout the year, or online around the clock.

Next time you pass through Brattle and Craigie, picture the bathtub. Maybe your own neighborhood has a story to tell about its own evolving landscape.

Michael Rogove is an alternate on the Cambridge Historical Commission

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