Twenty years in the making and clocking in at a 944 pages, �Building Old Cambridge,� co-written by two prominent members of the Historical Commission, covers the evolution of Cambridge development since its foundation in 1630.

Using the city�s first settlement near Harvard Square � later referred to as �Old Cambridge� � as the jumping off point, the book explores how the city�s changing population affected its architectural style � from West Indian planters, who built summer estates in the 1750s, to suburbanites in the 1850s and Harvard College�s annual flood of professors and students.

This complete history of development and architecture in Cambridge was meant to expand on the Historical Commission�s previous five volumes, called a "Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge," released from 1964 to 1977. The survey focused purely on the architecture of each neighborhood in Cambridge.�

But this new book � co-authored by Charlie Sullivan, a city planner and the executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, and Susan Maycock, an architectural historian and the survey director for the commission � does much more.�"Building Old Cambridge" includes research on the city's architecture in the context of social and economic histories. In other words,�the authors don't just focus on the raw data; they delve into stories about the neighborhoods and the people who lived in them.

�The more we studied, the more we learned and the more there was to know about Cambridge and so this [book] is the result,� Sullivan told the Chronicle.

Such a large compilation could make for dense reading, but the book is organized and packaged beautifully, thanks in large part to publisher, MIT Press, Sullivan said.�

The Chronicle recently sat down with co-author Charlie Sullivan to discuss how the book came to be.

How did you approach such a large undertaking?

We had to start in the beginning, in 1630, in the original village of Newtowne, which would later become Cambridge in 1638. So we started by trying to understand the development of the original village. Luckily we had a very talented historian on staff for many years, who had done much of that research, but we had to compile and make sense of it.

Then we worked out from there: Tory estates along Brattle Street and worked in a counter-clockwise direction around Harvard Square: Brattle, Coolidge Hill, West Cambridge, Avon Hill, Agassiz and so on. Those are the residential neighborhoods, but we also did a lot of work later on the commercial development in Harvard Square, then industry and transportation and churches and civic buildings.

Why take on this project?

One of the incentives in doing this is that Cambridge has such a high turnover; there are fewer and fewer people around who know the history of Cambridge. People arrive with no knowledge of Cambridge or its history or neighborhoods. We want people to understand when they�re making a decision about the future of their homes, for example, how the homes got that way and the significance. In 2010, only 35 percent of people in Cambridge had lived here more than 5 years.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered in your research?

Some of the communities we discovered that we hadn�t been aware of. One was a village called Lewisville. It was an African-American community off Garden Street that was founded by freed slaves in the late 18th, early 19th Century. They developed a little cemetery, the Lewis Tomb. We had no idea.

How did you discover Lewisville existed?�

We were looking at a map of Cambridge in the 1870s and we noticed this note that said "Tomb" near Walker Street. We thought, 'This is really strange. Who would have a tomb on their property?' So we pulled that thread a little bit and did some title research and kept pulling the thread and come up with this whole story about this African-American settlement that dispersed before the Civil War, where many members went to Africa in the African immigration movement. But it really disappeared in the 1880s.

Is there anything left, any tombstones?

There�s nothing left. We�ve been in the backyard of the house. The area was redeveloped in the 1870s. Apparently, in the Chronicle, it was reported the remains were dug up and put in Cambridge Cemetery in unmarked graves and the land was subdivided and new houses were built. So none of the houses survived. We had no idea this community existed, that there was this separate little village of African Americans near Radcliffe Quad. So that was probably one of the biggest surprises.

Working on a book for 20 years with someone must have been fairly difficult. Did you get in fights?

All the time, all the time, you have no idea (laughing).

You must feel pretty good about finally completing this. What are you most proud of?

I�m proudest of discovering so many images of Cambridge that have never been published and of compiling so many maps from raw data. And that the MIT press put them together so beautifully. They did a fabulous job with this. They gave us a lot of color, put in a lot of time, making sure it looked great. And so, yeah, we�re really thrilled.

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�Building Old Cambridge� is now available at the Historical Commission office, 831 Massachusetts Ave., in bookstores, and online. The cover price is $49.95.