The Great Molasses Flood of 1919: What Really Happened on Commercial Street
On a mild January day in 1919, a giant tank of molasses burst in the North End. Here is how the disaster unfolded and what it changed.
Every January, Bostonians retell one of the strangest disasters in American history. On January 15, 1919, a huge steel storage tank on Commercial Street in the North End split open and released roughly two million gallons of molasses into the streets. It sounds like a tall tale. It was not, and the story still matters more than a century later.
A tank built in a hurry
The tank belonged to the Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of United States Industrial Alcohol. Molasses arrived by ship from the Caribbean and was stored on the waterfront before being sent on to be distilled into industrial alcohol, a product in high demand during the First World War.
The tank stood about fifty feet tall and was put up quickly a few years earlier. Neighbors had long noticed that it leaked, and children reportedly collected the drips. Rather than fix the seams, the company had the tank painted brown, which made the leaks harder to see.
The day the wave came
The weather that January day was unusually warm for the season. Shortly after noon, people nearby heard a deep rumble and a sound like gunfire as rivets popped from the tank. Then the walls gave way.
A wave of molasses, by most accounts many feet high, swept across the neighborhood. It knocked buildings off their foundations, buckled a steel support of the elevated railway, and trapped people and horses in a thick, sticky mass. As the air cooled toward evening, the molasses grew even harder to move through.
- Twenty-one people were killed, including children and city workers.
- Around 150 people were injured.
- Rescue workers, sailors and neighbors spent days searching the wreckage.
Cleanup and the long court case
Cleanup took weeks. Crews used salt water from fireboats to wash the molasses away, and the harbor was said to run brown for months. For years afterward, longtime residents claimed they could still smell it on hot summer days.
Survivors and families sued. The company argued that the tank had been sabotaged, but after a lengthy hearing a court-appointed auditor found the company responsible, concluding the tank was poorly built and never properly tested. The settlements that followed were significant for their time.
Why it still matters
The disaster is often credited with helping push Massachusetts and other places toward stronger rules for engineering work, including requirements that plans be reviewed and signed by qualified professionals. It became a cautionary tale about cutting corners on public safety.
It also tells us something about the North End of that era: a crowded, working-class neighborhood of immigrant families, many of them Italian, living alongside heavy industry on the waterfront. The people hurt that day were ordinary Bostonians going about a normal lunch hour.
Visiting the site today
The tank stood near what is now Langone Park and Puopolo Park along Commercial Street, where ballfields and a waterfront path have replaced the industrial yard. A small plaque marks the spot. It is an easy stop on a winter walk through the North End, and a quiet reminder that some of Boston’s most important history happened on ordinary streets, not just at famous monuments.
