HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

It’s probably a familiar tale… Late at night, after the museum is closed, a man talks the guard into unlocking the door. Once inside, he pulls out a gun, and within seconds, the guard is tied up and blindfolded, while a gang roams through the museum, picking out rare masterpieces. By the time the guard gets himself free and calls the police, the gang has made off with millions of dollars in stolen artworks, in a case considered the largest art heist in US history. Yes, the tale may sound familiar, but we’re not talking about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum case, we’re talking about a different art heist, one that was carried out 17 years earlier and across the river in Cambridge. This is the story of the Fogg Museum coin heist.

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• An article published in Harvard Magazine in 2000 that gives a detailed overview of the Fogg Museum Heist.
• Initial coverage of the robbery from the Globe and Crimson.
• Value of the stolen coins, robbery valued at $5 million, the “largest in history.”
• Hunting a suspect (the wrong suspect) and the first arrests.
• False alarm about a “stolen” plane that could be used to reach Canada.
• Five arrests. Federal judge releases two for lack of evidence.
• Arrests in Canada, convictions in Canada.
• Boston perps convicted, sentenced.
• Coins recovered in Montreal and Rhode Island.
• Identifying recovered coins.
• More coins found in an undisclosed location on the South Shore.
• Coins recovered somewhere in Middlesex County are deemed the “final” missing pieces.
• Private detectives charged with assault and other felonies for beating, macing, and pistol whipping a witness in the case, leaving him permanently disabled.
• Victim sues the detectives and Harvard.
• Additional thefts of artifacts from the Fogg Museum earlier in 1973, in 1974, 1979, and 2004. (There are MORE out there, too!)

Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is… a puzzle! It’s called “The City of Boston History Over Time 4D Cityscape Time Puzzle.”

There are three elements to this puzzle. The first layer is a traditional jigsaw puzzle. The picture is an 1842 map of Boston, which focuses mostly on the Shawmut Peninsula and Boston Neck, with narrow strips of Charlestown and Cambridge across the Charles River. It’s reasonably challenging. There are big swaths of water in the Charles and the Harbor that are hard to distinguish, and the street grid is hard to figure out, until you really focus on the streets that are labelled.

Once you get 1842 put together, you aren’t done. There’s a whole second layer of puzzle waiting for you. The next layer isn’t like any puzzle I’ve done before. It’s a modern map of Boston printed on a thick foam rubber backing. As you put it together, it sits over the 1842 map, but there are cutouts for any areas that are water on both maps. This one seems hard at first, because there are so many tiny, unlabeled streets. But once you figure out that you have both regular border pieces to pull out and the interior borders along the waterways, things start to get a bit easier. When it’s all together, it slides on and off the 1842 map, for easy comparison.

The last piece of the puzzle (see what we did there?) is a set of plastic models of notable modern and historic buildings in Boston. There are precut holes in the modern map for the buildings to sit in, finally giving you that fourth dimension.

The folks over at the Boston Book Blog tipped us off to this cool puzzle, and we bought ours from I AM Books in the North End. They’re out of stock as of the release of this episode, but they should have more in stock soon. In the meantime, I guess you could get a copy from Amazon.

This week, we have a book talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society on April 17. Yale professor Mark Peterson will be discussing his new book The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865. Peterson specializes in the history of early North America and the Atlantic world. The book is an exploration of Boston’s unique identity as an autonomous town that functioned almost as a nation of its own, long before the creation of the United States of America, and also how that identity was lost.

Here’s how the MHS website describes the event:

In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, Mark Peterson highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a path-breaking and brilliant new history of early America.

The event begins at 6pm on Wednesday, April 17, with a reception at 5:30. Pre-registration is required, and there’s a $10 fee, unless you’re an MHS member or an EBT cardholder.