Creative History

  The Horseshoe Brewery, owned by the business conglomerate Meux & Company was located at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street in London’s west end, a part of the parish of St. Giles, one of 19th century London’s most notorious slum neighborhoods. Today, what was once the site of the Horseshoe Brewery is home to the fashionable Dominion Theatre, and is now surrounded by upscale hotels and restaurants.  But back in 1814 the area, then known as St. Giles rookery, was a dense collection of closely packed tenement dwellings and slum cottages.  It was one of nineteenth century London’s poorest neighborhoods, home to thousands of destitute Irish immigrants who lived underground in densely packed dank cellars, or in large families crammed into small one room apartments with little ventilation and few accessible outdoor exits. On the afternoon of October 17, 1814 a seven hundred pound iron rung slipped from an enormous wooden vat containing approximately 1...

  By sundown a crowd of over 10,000 people had gathered in Boston’s Scollay Square.  As the sun dropped below the horizon and the day’s light faded into darkness the looting and rioting began. Within moments, on the night of September 9, 1919, the professors and undergraduate students from nearby Harvard University that had been hastily sworn in and pressed into service as temporary police officers by Boston’s Mayor Andrew James Peters were completely overwhelmed. Scollay Square, then the main city square in Boston and home to the city’s vibrant commercial downtown in 1919, and today the site of Boston’s City Hall Plaza, quickly became the epicenter of rioting and looting in the wake of the Boston Police Department Strike of 1919. That night, September 9, 1919, and on into the next night, rowdy young people threw rocks through shop windows, looted storefronts, overturned streetcars and smashed vendor stalls in an orgy of destruction.  Without a professional police...