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		BB: BB Introduction Artist Sarah Anne Rockwell created four dioramas that tell the story of the historical development of the Back Bay. They are now displayed in the lobby of The New England at 501 Boylston Street. Beginning as an art student in the 1940s, Rockwell studied diorama construction under Theodore Pitman and continued after his death in 1956. The New England dioramas took months of research. Each element in the dioramas is in perfect scale. A human figure took her two weeks to complete and a horse, four weeks. The replica of the Museum of Natural History see BB2 took her seven months to construct. She worked from the original blueprints and maintained the scale, beginning with each brick and brownstone.
		BB1: Women’s Educational and Industrial Union 356 Boylston Street The Women's Educational and Industrial Union has served Boston women continuously for nearly 125 years. It was organized in response to the problems for women and their families generated by Boston's rapid urbanization and increased immigration. The WEIU's first program was a shop selling women's crafts and food, but it rapidly moved into job training, placement, and protection of women workers. In recent years it instituted training for licensed home day care providers and created a transitional housing program for single mothers. Dr. Harriet Clisby (1831-1931), an early woman doctor and women's rights activist from Australia, founded the WEIU in 1877 after calling together a group of prominent Bostonians including Julia Ward Howe (see B2), Louisa May Alcott (see B6), and Abby Morton Diaz (1821-1904). Diaz became president when Clisby left after three years to found a similar union in Geneva. Diaz saw the WEIU as a sisterhood for "both working girls in the cities and women of means," she said, because they shared a "universality of needs [which] places all on a kind of equality." "... now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done - and occasionally what men have not done - thereby establishing themselves as persons and encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action." --Amelia Earhart The union gives an annual Amelia Earhart Award to honor an outstanding Boston woman. Before Earhart became famous as an aviator, the WEIU's career services department found her a position as a social worker at Denison House (see C9). Bertha Mahoney Miller (1882-1969) ran the Bookshop for Boys and Girls at the union from 1916 to 1936, developing story hours and a traveling Book Caravan. Together with Elinor Whitney, she founded The Horn Book Magazine in 1924, the first journal devoted exclusively to children's literature. A swan identifies the WEIU's present building because it was organized in 1877, the same year that the swan boats first sailed in the Public Garden.