Jim Vrabel is a much-credentialed man when the reference point is engagement with the city of Boston, its citizens, its government, and its history.
Over the years, he was among those who established the Back of the Hill Community Development Corporation on Mission Hill and the Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter School in Hyde Park; he worked in the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, with the Boston School Committee, and he was a senior research associate and editor at the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
While engaged in those pursuits, he was hoeing his own row as a historian with a fascination for what happened in Boston from the time of its founding by disaffected English Puritans in 1630 and a mission, as he put it, “to collect short, illustrated descriptions of almost everything that’s ever happened, been built, made, said, or done in Boston” and share them with “residents and visitors, teachers, students, and scholars – and journalists alike.”
Vrabel is the author of “A People’s History of the New Boston,” a fact-laden look at the important neighborhood stories and organizing issues during the1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s. He also published “When in Boston: A Time Line and Almanac.”
Now, after “many decades of tirelessly interviewing people, of trying to read every book ever published about Boston, and pouring through archives and morgues,” he has gone live with WhenandWhereinBoston.org, an interactive online compendium of some 50,000 graphically enhanced bits of municipal history that offers maps to show the location of events, as well as slideshows that show them.
The database is separated into categories – Arts and Culture, Business, Labor, & Economy, Fires & Other Disasters, Media, Municipal Services & Open Space Politics, Government & War, Religion, Sports & Recreation, to name a few – and it includes features like an Architect Directory, Bibliographical Directory, Building Directory, This Day in History, a Neighborhood Directory, a Street Directory, Quotations, and Views of Boston.
WhenandWhereinBoston.org is free and easy to use, but, Vrabel says, “it’s not meant to be a finished product – rather, it’s meant to be an ongoing public history project. It needs more people to submit more and different facts about Boston to fill in its gaps and correct any errors and people to use it to finding out about all of Boston history.”
As things stand, the site is being run by a small, all-volunteer non-profit group, but “if the project is to achieve its goal,” he says, “it is going to need more people to get involved, and to use it.”
He is hopeful that “an institution – whether city government, a historical organization, or a university will give it a home,” so it can be a place where all of Boston history can be collected, shared, and learned.
