Harvard Bridge

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Harvard Bridge
Carries	Route 2A
Crosses	Charles River
Locale	Boston, Massachusetts to Cambridge, Massachusetts
Design	Girder bridge
Total length	364.4 smoots and one ear (620 m) (sidewalk) 2164.8 ft (659.82 m)^[1] (roadway)
Width	21.13 m
Beginning date of construction	1887
Completion date	1891
Opening date	1891, 1989
Coordinates	42.354326° N 71.09166° W

The Harvard Bridge (also known locally as the "M.I.T. bridge" or the "Mass. Ave. bridge") carries Massachusetts Avenue (Route 2A) from Back Bay, Boston to Cambridge. It is the longest bridge over the Charles River.

History

Bridge length measurement

The campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) is on the Cambridge side, and many M.I.T. fraternities are in Boston. Crossing pedestrians are reminded by length markers painted at 10-smoot intervals by MIT fraternity brothers that the bridge is 364.4 smoots and one ear long. In 1958, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity measured the bridge's eastern sidewalk by carrying or dragging the shortest pledge that year, Oliver Smoot, purportedly end over end.^[2] (Oliver should not be confused with his cousin, fellow M.I.T. alumnus and Nobel laureate George Smoot.) The marks are repainted twice each year by members of the fraternity.[1] Given that Mr. Smoot is five feet seven inches (~170.2 cm) tall, measuring the bridge from the zero smoot mark yields a bridge length of about 620 m. Other sources give the length of the bridge as approximately 660 m, but that appears to pertain to the roadway rather than sidewalk on which the marks are inscribed.

Reconstruction

After the failure of the Mianus River Bridge in 1983, the Harvard Bridge was shut down for inspection due to being of similar construction. Redesign and bidding kept the bridge closed and apparently inactive for two years, after which reconstruction began. Half the bridge opened around 1987 with the remaining half opening in 1989.

Trivia

Harry Houdini performed one of his "well known escapes" from this bridge on May 1, 1908, according to a marker at the south-east end of the bridge.

Naming legend

According to M.I.T. legend, the bridge is so named, despite the fact that it is nearer to M.I.T. than to Harvard, because when it was originally constructed the state offered to name it after the Cambridge school that was most deserving. Harvard argued that their contribution to education was well-known, and thus they deserved the name. M.I.T. concurred, having analyzed the bridge and found it structurally unsound (and thus more deserving of the Harvard name than the M.I.T. name). Subsequently the bridge collapsed after five years of construction and was rebuilt, confirming the M.I.T. engineers' fears.

The Harvard Bridge is littered with serious and comical statements of art.

The story is apocryphal. In fact, Harvard Bridge was first constructed between 1887 and 1890, whereas MIT only moved to its current location in 1916. It never collapsed. The bridge deck was rebuilt on the existing supports between 1988 and 1990 to repair structural deterioration and address issues raised by the 1983 collapse of the similarly-designed Mianus River Bridge in Greenwich, Connecticut.^[3] Not only were the smoot markings repainted on the new deck, but the sidewalk was divided into smoot-length slabs rather than the standard six foot slabs.

Panoramic view from Harvard Bridge in the winter

References

^ Harvard Bridge in the Structurae database
^ This Month in M.I.T. History, "The Tech", volume 119, number 49
^ Keane, Tom. "It's the Engineering, Stupid", Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Globe, 2006-09-10. Retrieved on 2006-09-11. (English)