What if Boston was an island?

Originally, the area where the city of Boston was built was a peninsula, connected to the mainland by a narrow strip. What that narrow strip didn't exist (or was washed away, or something... I know geologic PODs early on have huge butterflies, and I'd rather not have any before the 1600s), and Boston was an island?

Would the city still be built in the same location? How would this affect the future growth of the city- would you see it eventually connected to the mainland via fill?
 
Dorchester-wank? Dorchester is a section of Boston south of the old penninsula, the first settlement in Boston in 1630... perhaps the city would have grown faster there. I think people still would have settled the island, just as they settled East Boston (which was an island OTL), but most of the growth would have occured in Dorchester. In the OTL, Boston annexes Dorchester in the 1800s; in this ATL Dorchester annexes it's smaller neighbor to the north, Boston. Now Boston is just another neighborhood of Dorchester.
 
What {if}... Boston was an island?

Would the city still be built in the same location? How would this affect the future growth of the city- would you see it eventually connected to the mainland via fill?

It's in a great location for fishing, of course, but much of it's logic as a major metropolis has to do with its central location on what was then a convex shaped chunk of land in the middle of Massachusetts Bay (because of land reclamation, today the Boston shore is concave shaped). If it was just an island--and presumably the land across the sound from Boston Island was a swamp as much of the nearby land was anyway--then I think the ATL Boston would have been built somewhere else, either upcoast around Gloucester or downcoast around the "shoulder" of Cape Cod (OTL's Barnstable).

The purpose of the city was as a rival to Plymouth Colony--for a long time they were rivals. If Boston did emerge as an island city, similar to Manhattan, I just don't think the Charles River provides the same quality of river highway feeding the city's trade the way the Hudson fed New York City. It was the city's position as a natural feed for local farmers that made it eventually the center of commerce and cosmopolitan thinking that made it the hub of revolutionary activity. Being an inferior port to Gloucester or Plymouth or Newport/Providence means the Boston area would be about as influential as OTL's Maine coast. Thus it's less of center of activity when the colonies decide to cast off British rule.

Paul Revere would have a different geography to ride around in 1775 and George Washington would have a different town to lay seige to until 1776. What changes butterfly from there is anybody's guess.
 

FDW

Banned
I would say that as long as there was still a decent harbor and ample resources, the area around boston might still b settled, but I would definitely see a very different pattern of settlement in the boston area due to this.
 
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