“The Sudden Birth of Sticky Institutions, 1890–1915”

Consider Brookline. As the Boston Globe wrote in 1906, the town “has triumphantly repelled all the attempts that have been made to annex it to the great metropolis that virtually enfolds it.” Indeed, as historians agree, Brookline’s repeated refusals in the late nineteenth century to consolidate with Boston represented the first signal that cities would now face stout opposition to their continued growth by annexation. With Brookline in the late nineteenth century, the independent suburb was born.