Summer St. Bridge, Boston

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The southernmost of the four Fort Point Channel bridges we're covering is the Summer St. Bridge, built circa 1899. It's not terribly photogenic, but it's considered historic anyway due to its unusual design. Instead of a drawbridge that raises, or a swing span that pivots, the Summer St. bridge is a "retractile draw", which opens by sliding diagonally back and off to one side. Or both sides in this case, since it's a "double retractile" design. (Strictly speaking it doesn't open at all now, since it's unreachable by large vessels due to the fixed-span Moakley Bridge north of here.)

The Library of Congress collection of vintage photos of it; unfortunately none of them show the bridge in an open position, but an aerial photo makes it somewhat easier to visualize. Their info page about the bridge has a brief description, at least:

Significance: The Summer St. bridge is a rare movable type of bridge known as a retractile draw, in which the moving span is pulled diagonally away from the navigable channel on several sets of rails. Only four of these have been identified in the country, two of which are on Summer St. in Boston. The form is thought to have been invented by T. Willis Pratt in the 1860's. This bridge is a double retractile: parallel spans pull away from the center in opposite directions. Despite its deteriorating condition, the bridge is the center element of the rich Fort Point Channel Bridge District. / The Summer Street Retractile Bridge is the only known surviving electrically-operated, paired-leaf oblique retractile drawbridge. Despite its poor condition and loss of much of its operating equipment and auxiliary structures (gates, Tender's House, and pedestrian waiting shelters), several of the early components (superstructure, retractile rails, wheels, and operating machinery on the south side) remain. The Summer Street Retractile Bridge is one of five surviving movable bridges located in the proposed Fort Point Channel Historic District. It is one of eight known remaining nineteenth-century movable bridges in the Massachusetts Highway Department Historic Bridge Survey.

This bridge was the site of a 1916 streetcar disaster, in which a streetcar plunged off the open drawbridge into the channel, killing 47 people. Which is more or less what happened in Cleveland's Central Viaduct streetcar disaster two decades earlier. The accident here was blamed on operator error, compounded by poor signage & signals that were supposed to indicate when the bridge was open, but failed to get the driver's attention.

Congress St. Bridge, Boston

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Here's a slideshow of Boston's Congress St. Bridge, which crosses the Fort Point Channel next to downtown. This lift-span bridge opened in 1930, replacing an earlier swing-span bridge. The bridge underwent a $19M renovation completed in 2008, several million over budget because it was in worse shape than they thought. Although it's also possible the money just sort of "vanished", this being Boston and all.

The bridge's most distinctive feature is the Boston Tea Party museum attached to the bridge, in the center of the channel, with a couple of sailing ships docked to it. The building used to be the bridge tender's house, but the bridge no longer opens, so the house was repurposed as a tourist attraction, basically. Historians disagree as to the exact location of the original tea party, but few claim it was at this exact spot, and furthermore the ships are 20th Century replicas. Still, it has positive Yelp reviews from a lot of tourists who loved the historical reenactors and audience participation stuff. So if you're stuck in Boston with your wingnut Tea Party uncle, this might be a way to keep him occupied for a few hours. Though I don't know whether this would calm him down for a while or wind him up further. There are probably EPA rules against dumping actual tea in the bay these days, so he'll have something to be outraged about.

"Congress Street" is not an unusual street name, so I kept bumping into a couple of other bridges while looking for trivia about this one. The "Congress St. Bridge" Wikipedia article is about a different bridge in Troy, NY. And there's the famous Congress Ave. bridge in Austin, TX, home to a ginormous bat colony.

Evelyn Moakley Bridge, Boston

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The next Fort Point Channel bridge on our mini-tour is the new-ish Evelyn Moakley Bridge, which sits just south of the Northern Avenue Bridge that it effectively replaced. It's named for the wife of Congressman Joe Moakley, who represented South Boston for nearly half a century. A Boston Globe columnist recently mentioned this bridge in a laundry list of things named after politicians, a practice he was none too happy about.

Unlike the older bridges along the channel, this is a fixed-span bridge (i.e. it doesn't open), which meant that the bridges south if it (including the Congress St. & Summer St. bridges) no longer needed to open either. In addition to the obvious cost savings from doing this, a page at EngineerYourFuture mentions that the Moakley bridge was also designed to carry various utilities across the channel. That probably drove the bridge design too, since you can't really have a water main or electrical supply that cuts out whenever a bridge opens. Nobody would stand for that.

The bridge is the main gateway to a redeveloped former port area the city insists on calling the "Innovation District". A recent Boston Globe article said "The Innovation District has all the charm of an office park in a suburb of Dallas", and grumbled about the ugly cookie-cutter buildings and vast parking lots. A 2013 Chowhound article wasn't too impressed with the local restaurants either.

Northern Avenue Bridge, Boston

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When I was in Boston a couple of years ago, I spent a couple of days wandering around the central city after I was done with meetings out in the 'burbs. At one point ended up in the Fort Point Channel area, after getting off the Silver Line at South Station and heading toward the nearest body of water. The channel is sort of a narrow arm of Boston Harbor just east of downtown, crossed by a number of bridges, and the surrounding area is a former industrial district that's been thoroughly gentrified in recent years. I've been known to devote blog posts to bridges now and then, so I took a few photos of the four bridges along the north end of the channel. I haven't posted them until now because honestly none of them are really all that remarkable to look at, and probably none of them appear on anyone's list of top 100 Boston-area tourist attractions. Still, I did manage to dig up a few semi-interesting facts and bits of trivia about each of them, so I figure I have enough material to support a brief post about each of the four. And thus, a new mini-tour is born.

So the first stop on our mini-tour is the Northern Ave. Bridge, the northernmost bridge over the channel. It's a swing span bridge built in 1908, about the same vintage as the two remaining swing-span bridges in Portland. It's also the only one of the historic channel bridges that still opens, since the channel now only serves as a harbor for small boats. It's been a pedestrian-only bridge since the adjacent Evelyn Moakley bridge opened next door. Unfortunately only a portion of the bridge is open to pedestrians since it's in a general state of disrepair, and plans to do something about it stalled out, without any consensus on whether to renovate or just demolish it.

The Library of Congress has a set of historic photos of the bridge along with a short description:

The Northern Avenue Swing Bridge, built in 1908, is one of only three surviving swing bridges built by the city of Boston in the late 19th and early 20th century. Today, still operated infrequently on its original compressed-air system, it is the only operable bridge in Boston of its type. The bridge is 80 feet in width, encompassing between four sets of pin connected trusses, two sidewalks, two roadways and a center lane reserved for a double-track freight railroad. The swing span is 283 feet in length. The rim bearing swing span is carried by a 40 foot diameter drum, in turn supported by 56 steel wheels running on a track along the rim of the granite island pier.