311 complaint of the day: Oh, chute!

A concerned resident files a 311 complaint about a small busted manhole cover in front of one residence on Pembroke Street in the South End:

in front of 93 Pembroke St, there is a broken manhole cover. It appears it might be city related. The cover blocks a boiler room so repair is needed.

Of course, grizzled UHub readers know that is no manhole cover, but instead a coal-chute cover, installed back in the Victorian era when Bostonians still mostly heated their homes with coal - via deliveries they got through chutes in front of their homes.

The glass prisms fed light into darkened basements and let homeowners see roughly how much coal they had left.

Although some of the chutes were filled in, and the covers replaced, the sadder downward-looking residents of places such as the Back Bay and the South End know from their constant glances that many of them covers remain. Also, they are the responsibility of homeowners, not the city.

In this particular case, a bit of research in Google Books and the Globe archives reveals that D. Stanton of the long gone 123 Essex St. was Daniel Stanton, blacksmith, who is listed in both 1879 and 1882 city directories.

And that's about all we could find about him, except for an 1886 anecdote from the Globe about how he got taken by a 14-year-old rascal who had somehow convinced him he'd be a worthy employee - until the day Stanton gave the lad $3.10 to take over to the local Royal Arcanum to pay his annual dues and the rapscallion returned with a receipt that he had, in fact forged, which Stanton discovered when he got a note from the Royal Arcanum treasurer inquiring why he hadn't paid his dues yet. The kid was hauled into court and while his mother pleaded for leniency, at least until his father could be summoned from somewhere north of Boston, the judge ordered him held in lieu of $1,000 bail.