The First City

    Sit up and listen one and all, both serious and witty, for Boston men have planned to make our village the “first city”. How proud you’ll be to strut around, all other towns to pity, and feel that you’re “first citizen” of Boston the “first city”. However, do not feel alarm, don’t nervous grow and flitty, ‘twill be six years before they start to make it the “first city”; and then it may be fifty more before it’s really pretty, and you may be upon the shelf ere Boston’s the “first city”. But neighbors young and neighbors old, the point in this brief ditty is, don’t sit down and wait, but help to make it the “first city”

c. April 1, ‘09

      Seeds were sown for the modern City of Boston between 1909 and 1913 by a pioneering - if paternalistic - effort of a large group of Boston business leaders to transform the way Boston was governed, planned and developed
      Called the Boston 1915 Movement, it was largely the vision of Edward Filene, the moving force behind the Boston Dwelling House Company. Filene and five others formed an executive committee early in 1909 to address the needs of the new automobile age in Boston. These men were James Jackson Storrow, Louis D. Brandeis, Bernard Rothwell and George S. Smith. Filene, one of Boston's most important retail merchants, was concerned with housing for the working classes. Storrow was an attorney who specialized in corporate law and managed investment trusts (he later went on to save and restructure the General Motors Corporation); Brandeis was an attorney whom President Woodrow Wilson would nominate as the first Jewish judge on the Supreme Court; Rothwell was President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce; Smith was a wholesale clothing merchant and President of the Boston Merchants Association.
      Filene and his colleagues held a dinner for 230 of Boston's business, industrial, financial, educational, religious, and political leaders on March 30, 1909 at the Boston City Club. The dinner was the unveiling of the Boston Plan; a "far reaching plan," wrote the Boston Herald the next day," for making the Boston of 1915 the finest in the world."



http://www.jphs.org/20thcentury/woodbourne-and-the-boston-1915-movement.html