Minute Man Monument, Concord MA

When I was in Boston back in 2012, I spent most of the week at a conference hotel out in the 'burbs. The hotel turned out to be a few miles down the road from Concord, MA, the site of a famous Schoolhouse Rock video, and the related historical events of 1775. One day after a long day of death by PowerPoint, I drove over and visited the historic Old North Bridge, which turns out to not be very old at all. In addition to the bridge itself, both ends of the bridge feature modestly-sized memorial columns, which were added in the 1800s. (If the Revolution had begun in what's now DC, or anywhere in the South, there would be a giant bombastic ultra-patriotic memorial here, and you'd have to go through a TSA checkpoint to visit it. But this being New England they've managed to keep it modest and low key and reasonably authentic, right down to the simple wood replica bridge.)

The column on the south side of the bridge dates to 1875, the centennial of the battle here, and it's topped by a statue of a local minute man. This statue is by famed sculptor Daniel Chester French, who was renowned for his historical and allegorical works. It seems this was the work that first established his reputation. He later went on to create the Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial, among other things. I haven't covered any other work by French here, but he did create a famous memorial to Martin Millmore, who was the sculptor behind the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Boston Common. Curiously, French also created a small sculpture of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the poor creature blamed for starting the great Chicago Fire.

There's a similar monument a few miles east at the Battle Green in Lexington, and apparently the two statues are often confused. A 1998 Concord Magazine article helpfully explains the differences: The Concord Minute Man is wearing a hat, and holds a plow in one hand and a musket in the other. They didn't actually plow and shoot at the same time in real life; this is just an 1875 way of pointing out the Minute Men were farmers. The 19th Century art world loved that sort of thing. Anyway, the Lexington statue is not wearing a hat, and not engaging in agriculture, and the base once featured a trough for horses, and technically the guys fighting in Lexington were the local militia and not Minute Men at all, strictly speaking. So now you know.

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.

Winthrop Square, Charlestown, Boston

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When I was in Boston a while back, I spent a few days wandering around the city taking in the standard tourist sites. At one point I crossed a bridge over to the Charlestown neighborhood, first to see the historic USS Constitution, and then the Bunker Hill Monument. On the way uphill to the monument, I ran across a small, shady city park with a statue in the middle. So I took a couple of quick photos before continuing on. This park is called either "Winthrop Square" or "The Training Field". The name situation is a little confusing here. Wikipedia isn't helpful in this case; its measly Winthrop Square article is a short disambiguation page, pointing at three different parks in the Boston area, none of which are the one here. So in addition to this place, there's a Winthrop Square in the downtown Financial District, and others in Cambridge and Brookline. And none of these parks have their own Wikipedia articles. The city's recent "Cultural Landscape Plan" for the park splits the difference and calls it "Training Field / Winthrop Square". As far as I know this is the only Winthrop Square within the Charlestown neighborhood, though, so hopefully the title of this post points at one place and one place only.

If my past record with Boston posts holds up, I'll get at least one irate commenter here pointing out that I've gotten it all wrong. Inevitably it will turn out that both "Training Field" and "Winthrop Square" are official legal names that nobody ever uses, and the actual name in use is something else entirely, something I could never figure out by googling the place since locals never utter it online where outsiders could see it. Or possibly there are multiple unofficial names, and the one you use indicates what part of town you're from, or which pilgrim ship your great-great-etc.-grandparents came over on, or your side in a centuries-old blood feud dating back to the old country, or something like that. Or possibly it really is called "Winthrop Square" and the irate commenter is just here to heap random abuse on a random outsider purely for the lulz, which I understand is a traditional and beloved Boston pastime. Which is kind of weird since everyone I encountered in Boston was actually really nice in person, at least really nice by Portland standards. I don't claim to understand this phenomenon; I just hope I got the name right this time.

The next surprising thing about the park is that last year marked the very first ever archeological dig here. One would think that in a city full of universities and history nuts, at some point someone would have wondered what might be underground here. Apparently nobody ever got around to looking until now, though. The article mentions the city thinks the park might be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, seeing as it's been a city park since the 1850s, and served on and off as a militia training ground for over two centuries before that. I'm no historian, but I think they have a fair shot at landing that historic designation, if they play their cards just right.

Third mildly odd thing: The park's named for Gov. John Winthrop, who governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s and 1640s. The statue here is not of him, though. It's a Civil War memorial called either the Soldiers Monument or Soldiers and Sailors Monument, depending on who you ask. Which is not to be confused with the much larger Solders and Sailors Monument in Boston Common. Meanwhile, it turns out that the Winthrop Square in the Financial District also features a statue, and it's not of Gov. Winthrop either, but rather of Scottish poet Robert Burns. Burns was Plan B after the square's developers tried and failed to obtain a historic Winthrop statue owned by a historic Unitarian church in the Back Bay. I think I've located it in Google Street View here; if it's the right statue, it seems to be a bit on the small side, and would probably look out of place in any sort of grand monument.

I mean, this is all assuming the park in Charlestown is named after this one particular Winthrop. At this point I'm not willing to assume that as an undisputed fact. It could just as easily be named after Jezebekiah Winthrop, a mad industrialist and warlock of the early 19th Century, uniquely feared for both his work with electricity and his knowledge of arcane manuscripts, and the heavy monument actually exists to seal an interdimensional portal he created, and there's a very, very good reason everyone's avoided disturbing the soil here until now. I'm not saying I know this to be the case, obviously. I'm just saying that if an army of steampunk golems emerges from beneath Charlestown to spread havoc and mayhem, well... I'm just saying there were certain potential warning signs.

Boston Common

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A couple of summers ago, I spent a week in Boston on a business trip, and managed to find a little time here and there to take some tourist photos. Actually a lot of tourist photos, such that I'm still slowly sorting through them and putting together new blog posts every so often. I walked through Boston Common a couple of times; it's a sprawling park in the middle of the city, across the street from the state capitol building, and I always seemed to end up back there after wandering around the city's mazelike streets. Which I suppose is better than running into the municipal minotaur or something.

Long story short, I was there and took a few photos. A few have showed up here previously, in posts about the Brewer Fountain near the eastern edge of the park, and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on a high point toward the park's center, as well as the Boston Public Garden next door. I still had a bunch of photos from here and there around the park, so I figured another slideshow was in order. Et voilà.

Commonwealth Avenue, Boston

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Next up, a photoset of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall, which extends west from the Public Garden through the Back Bay neighborhood. I wandered along the central mall for a while, taking photos of the over-the-top houses and churches on either side. I'm not sure what we're looking at here; I found a page documenting every building along the avenue, but I haven't gone through to figure out which ones I have photos of. That part is left as an exercise for the reader (he said lazily/hopefully).

It was a very hot day, and eventually I wandered off to find a Starbucks for an iced coffee like a good West Coast tourist, and fortunately there was one a couple of blocks south(ish) on swanky Newbury Street, and ended up walking along over there instead. I feel compelled to explain that I normally avoid Starbucks, but I wasn't sure whether there was iced coffee at Dunkin Donuts (which is essentially the competing coffee behemoth in New England), and I needed a cold but very caffeinated beverage right then thanks to jet lag.

I had a theory -- and I think I mentioned it in a previous Boston post -- that perhaps Commonwealth Avenue was an inspiration for Portland's Park Blocks, since Portland was founded by a bunch of New Englanders, and the city itself would have been named "Boston" if a coin flip had gone the other way. The dates don't bear this theory out though. The South Park Blocks were dedicated in 1852, while Commonwealth Avenue was designed in 1856, and long tree-lined parks like this were simply the vogue at the time, popular among major cities as well as muddy little pioneer towns with big dreams. An architecture guide to the city calls it the "French Boulevard style". 1856 seems like a surprisingly recent date for central Boston, until you remember that the whole Back Bay area was an actual bay until it was filled in during the 1850s. As a West Coast tourist, knowing that makes me worry the ground here will basically liquefy if there's ever an earthquake, like what happened to SF's Marina District back in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. Apparently Boston doesn't get earthquakes, though. At least as far as they know.

Brewer Fountain, Boston Common

Couple of photos of the Brewer Fountain in Boston Common, an ornate 19th century concoction that was recently restored to working order. There was a little stand next to it encouraging people to slow down and sit and read one of the free books, and more than a few people had taken them up on the offer. I'm not sure that would work in Portland. Maybe if you stocked it with graphic novels, so long as they're the cool kind, whatever that is.

Wikipedia says there are at least sixteen other copies of this fountain around the world, including ones in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. I occasionally go on about doing a project around visiting every copy of something or other. The Fremiet Joan of Arc would involve a lot of traveling around France, plus trips to Philadelphia and New Orleans, which would be ok. The itinerary for The Ideal Scout would spend an unreasonable amount of time wandering around rural Pennsylvania, which is less of a welcome prospect. Visiting the Brewer Fountain's siblings would be one of the better trips; a page about another copy in Tacna, Peru lists additional known copies in Australia, Chile, Quebec City, Liverpool, four around France, two in Lisbon, and others in Geneva and Valencia. So that sounds like it would be ok, so far as silly projects go.

This fountain dates back to a time when all fountains were expected to come encrusted with mythological characters; cherubs, naiads, mermen, and whatnot. I was going to propose a glib theory that this was because running water was a rare and precious novelty back then, and fountains got the mythology treatment because they were a very big deal. I'm not sure this checks out though. The fountain went live in 1868, and Boston's first waterworks dates all the way back to 1652, over two centuries earlier, so I'm not sure the chronology lines up on this idea. It's also possible this mythological stuff was simply the fashion for a while, and eventually people tired of it and went on to do something else instead.

Soldiers & Sailors Monument, Boston Common

A few photos of Boston's Soldiers and Sailors Monument, atop a low hill in the middle of Boston Common. It's a big allegorical Civil War memorial, like the later and more ornate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Cleveland's Public Square. A page at Celebrate Boston describes the monument's allegorical odds and ends and what they all represent. CT Monuments laments graffiti and vandalism at the monument, and points out a nearby World War I monument made from a converted sea mine, which I'm quite sorry I didn't notice when I was there. Historical Digression talks about the monument a bit and moves on to Martin Milmore, its sculptor. Milmore died young at age 38, and was memorialized by Daniel Chester French's famous Death and the Sculptor, which may actually be better known than Milmore himself these days. French is best known for his Abraham Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial, and he also created the Minute Man statue at the Old North Bridge in Concord, MA.

Public Art Boston's info page for the monument notes that "In honoring ordinary soldiers and sailors, rather than military leaders, this work set an important precedent adopted by the designers of subsequent memorials." and points out that it's available for "adoption" in the city's Adopt-a-Statue program.

On the point about this memorial defining a style for future ones, I came across a paper in the Spring 1988 Journal of American Culture, "Martin Millmore's Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on the Boston Common: Formulating Conventionalism in Design and Symbolism". It looks interesting but unfortunately it's paywalled, and I'm not a Real Historian who can get it through a university library, and JSTOR does't have it, so -- peon that I am -- I can only see the first page. So this is the part where I put in a plug for Open Access publishing. Here's the first paragraph, in the spirit of fair use, since that hasn't been abolished yet:

The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument on the Boston Common, designed by Martin Millmore and erected 1870-1877, is one of several types of memorials elevated after the Civil War. The characteristics of this monument, its configuration and iconography, were influenced by popular ideas and eclectic stylistic trends in post-Civil War America. The shaping of this type of monument was especially influenced by the popular tastes of the period. An analysis of the style, sources, and imagery of the design offers insight into the ideologies, the formulating conventions of the age, and the role of the artist in satisfying the prevalent demand for military monuments as art within the public domain.

Without really intending to, I've ended up with a handful of posts here about Civil War memorials. Beyond this one and the one in Cleveland, I've also got Southern contributions to the genre in Edgefield, SC and Tupelo, MS, as well as Portland's own very humble contribution, a couple of puny surplus cannons in Lownsdale Square. So I figured I'd go ahead and add a "civil war" post tag, so it's one stop shopping for visitors who just can't get enough of the Civil War for whatever reason. I don't get that, personally, but I like to feel I'm providing a valuable service here, even when I find it inexplicable.

Untitled Landscape

When I was wandering around Boston a while ago, I ran across Untitled Landscape by David von Schlegell, at the Harbor Towers condo complex on a swanky part of the city's waterfront, previously a district of very old docks and warehouses. The street address, "85 East India Row" conjures images of clipper ships full of tea and spices and whatnot. Concrete high rise towers and a stainless steel abstract sculpture are not what you'd expect to find at such an address.

Untitled Landscape has been catalogued twice in the Smithsonian public art database, and is described variously as "Four rectangular units of steel bent to form obtuse angles." and "Four pieces of metal in the shape of obtuse angles, set in a square facing each other."

The sculpture dates to 1972 when the towers were built; supposedly it's often mistaken for an array of solar panels, I suppose by people who have no idea what a real solar panel looks like. Instead, I see it as showing what it's like being a mouse lost in Starbucks, dwarfed by rows of enormous shiny MacBooks. Yet it was created in 1972, the year Steve Jobs graduated high school. So how could Mr. von Schlegell have created these? Was he helped by aliens, like in all those Von Daniken books? Or could he have known (or been) a time traveller from the early 21st century? And if that's the case, why MacBooks, specifically, and not iPads or something a little more futuristic? What was he trying to tell us? But wait, I'm writing about them on a MacBook right now... what could it all mean? I'm so confused...

Logan Airport 9/11 Memorial

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When I was in Boston a while back, I spent a couple of nights at a hotel right at Logan Airport, a short skybridge trek from the main terminal. It turned out that the airport's 9/11 memorial was across the street, so I made a brief visit to it. Both of the planes that hit the World Trade Center towers took off from Logan Airport, and many of the passengers and crew aboard the planes were from Boston, so a memorial of some sort was obviously needed. But dealing with such a sensitive topic wouldn't be easy, and the local authorities didn't rush it. The memorial didn't open until 2008, and it's striking for how delicately, even gingerly, the memorial design treats its subject. I'm not sure I would have found it at all if my hotel hadn't been next to it. It's not in a place where airport visitors will stumble across it unexpectedly while going about their business. It has to be sought out deliberately. If you persevere and locate it, you'll see a landscaped plot with several paths, and a small glass cube set well back from the street. There's a small plaque indicating this is the memorial, and an inscription on the sidewalk refers obliquely to "the events of September 11th, 2001". The long winding paths aren't in any hurry to get you to the cube, and meander around the landscaped area. When you get to the cube, nothing about its exterior says "memorial" at all. Only once you're inside do you see the lists of names of those on the two flights. As you might imagine, the memorial's lightly visited. In the few days I was there, I didn't see a single person (other than myself) visit it.

Of course not everyone's a fan. It made a conspiracy site's list of the "Top 5 Worst 9/11 Memorials", which points out that this memorial strongly resembles an Apple store. I will allow that this is true. It's actually a decent list, and a couple of the others on the list are genuinely terrible. Although from the site's standpoint anything that doesn't say "false flag" probably counts as a bad memorial.

I started out thinking this was a strange memorial myself, and considered writing a snarky post complaining about it. Then I started thinking, ok, what would I have done differently, if somehow I'd gotten the job to design it? Would it be a better memorial if it didn't tiptoe around the subject quite so much? Maybe if it was somewhere in the airport where travelers -- who might be afraid of flying anyway -- could stumble across it and be surprised? If it was anything at all like the hideous 9/11 memorial in Portland that I griped about a few years ago? Well, no, none of the above. I get that it's a sensitive topic. This post sat around in Drafts for about a year, while I tried to figure out the right tone and the right timing. I didn't want to post it near 9/11 (since I've already said everything I ever want to about that day), or too close to any of our many military-themed holidays, and then I put it on extended hold after the Boston Marathon bombing so as not to seem exploitative. So like the actual designers, I'm pretty sure I would have erred on the side of endless trigger warnings and chances to back out, and the most understated and least graphic treatment I could pull off without seeming to downplay the "events". And I probably would have said "events".

Battle Green, Lexington

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It's time for another set of Boston photos, this time from the town common in Lexington, MA, commonly known as the Battle Green due to the Revolutionary War battle that happened here on April 19th, 1775. I lost track of how many monuments, statues and plaques there were in the common itself and the surrounding neighborhood. This photoset includes many prominent examples, but I'm sure I missed a few. Beyond this historic district, though, Lexington comes across as an average suburb. That really shouldn't have surprised me, but it did somehow. As with the Old North Bridge a few miles west in Concord, the modest scale of everything is striking. For all its eventual historical importance, the number of people actively involved at any point in the entire war was quite small. I don't mean to go off on a history lesson here; if you're curious, and somehow missed the entire term of 8th grade history that covered the American Revolution, or you grew up outside the US, there are much better sources of information than some random internet blog. I just wander around taking photos and trying to describe what's in them. For more obscure topics, the describing part involves linking to "authoritative" sources, which can sometimes be hard to find. As for Lexington, though, perhaps half of all the historians in America have already written a book or two about the Revolutionary War, or so it seems. There's a vast range of facts and opinions out there, and you can google for it just as well as I can. But feel free to enjoy the photos while you're here though.

Boston Public Garden

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While I was in Boston a while back, I wandered into the city's Public Garden to look around for a bit. Formal landscaped gardens like this were very popular in the 19th Century, and into the early 20th. Looking around, I was immediately struck by the idea that Portland's Laurelhurst Park -- which is rather fancy by Portland park standards -- is a cheap imitation of Boston's Public Garden, or at least a cheap imitation of the general style. Boston has a lake, we have a smaller lake with water quality issues. Boston has meticulously tended lawns and flowers, we have grass and many rhododendron bushes. They have swans, we have lots of Canada geese and a couple of herons. They have famous Swan Boats, we... don't. They have a famous bridge over their pond, we... don't. They have statues and fountains scattered around the garden, we have this 1980 stainless steel whatzit. And so on.

Boston as a whole kept reminding me of Portland, in the sense that it felt like I was now seeing the original and realizing I lived in a low-budget, semi-skilled imitation. It wasn't like that all the time, mind you; there's nothing in Portland anything like the North End, for instance, and Portland seems to have quit with the imitating after 1950 or so. But I saw resemblances every so often, and it was disconcerting. I imagine this is what a trip to Paris is like when the only Eiffel Tower you've ever seen is the silly Las Vegas one. At least the beer's better here, and it snows a lot less. So there's that.

There's more to the park than what you see in this slideshow. I more or less made a beeline across the park, heading from Boston Common toward the Back Bay neighborhood, since I was actually trying to find some coffee at the time. Thus I didn't walk around the entire pond, or track down every last exotic plant or obscure Victorian statue hidden down a side path. I suppose I could have done that, but I think I captured the gist of the place. And to reiterate, I needed coffee. You know how it is.

Longfellow Bridge

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Here's a slideshow of Boston's ornate 1907 Longfellow Bridge, which connects downtown Boston (and the Beacon Hill neighborhood) with central Cambridge across the Charles River. I walked across on a sunny Friday afternoon back in July 2012; the bridge is now closed for an extended and much-needed $260 million renovation project. The rust and disrepair shown in many of the photos should be a big clue why this is happening. Media accounts claim this closure is the Traffic Apocalypse. Which is odd, because it's widely believed that every day in Boston is the Traffic Apocalypse. Everyone says so, even local residents, who presumably are the ones causing all the Apocalypse-ness.

The thing is, I can't actually corroborate this stereotype about the city. I had a rental car for most of the week I was there, but I was out in the 'burbs during that part, and driving in suburban Boston seemed just like driving in suburban anywhere else. It wasn't a problem. I suppose it's probably worse if you try driving in downtown Boston, which I didn't do. But I did walk all around the central city and nobody ran me down in a crosswalk, deliberately or otherwise, or tried to bean me with a beer can as they drove by. I walked across the bridge and survived to tell the tale, and nobody swerved to try to hit me on the sidewalk, or even pretended like they were going to. Not a single Bostonian, drunk or otherwise, tried to shove me in front of a bus just for the lulz, something a coworker tried to warn me about when he heard where I was going. There was about the level of honking you'd expect in any major East Coast city, and I never saw honking escalate into a road rage incident, not even mild fisticuffs. I never saw anyone deliberately ram anyone else, or aggressively tailgate anyone, NASCAR-style, which immediately puts Boston ahead of both Washington DC and Atlanta in my book, just going on things I've personally witnessed in those cities. Honestly, driving in Boston was fine.

The great thing about central Boston, though, was that I could get anywhere I needed to go on mass transit, generally on the 'T', the local subway, the Red Line of which crosses the river on the Longfellow Bridge. So driving in the allegedly worst city in America to drive in is completely unnecessary, as far as I can tell. And as with driving, I can't corroborate any horror stories about Boston's mass transit, such as the one in the Kingston Trio song "The M.T.A". Here's a free travel tip: If you stay at a hotel at Logan Airport, you can take the Silver Line to downtown Boston for free, or at least you could when I was there. The Silver Line, the city's only bus rapid transit line, is an odd hybrid: When you get on, it looks like you're just getting on a regular bus. It takes a freeway tunnel under the Charles River, makes a couple of bus-like stops, and then converts from diesel to electric power and drives the rest of the way to South Station in a dedicated subway-like tunnel.

A curious thing about the bridge is that it looks for all the world like it's a drawbridge, but it actually isn't. Its main piers, mid-river, give the impression that the span between them ought to open, and the turrets look like somewhere a bridge operator would sit, munching endless Dunkin Donuts and waiting for the occasional mega-yacht heading upriver toward Harvard. It's all a sham, though. Purely ornamental, for display purposes only. This is the sort of fakery that drove modernist architects batty back in the early 20th Century, and rightly so I think.

An even curiouser thing is that the main piers are designed to evoke the bows of Viking longships, in memory of Leif Erikson's visit to the Boston area circa 1000 AD. Wait, what? Don't remember that one from history class? There's a reason for that. This alleged visit was an eccentric pet theory of a Eben Horsford, a 19th Century Harvard chemistry professor, who today is best known for inventing the modern formula for baking powder. Horsford had little success in selling his idea to other scholars; annoying little details like the total absence of archeological evidence probably didn't help his cause. That didn't deter him from promoting the Vikings-in-Boston theory to the general public, aided by his considerable baking powder fortune, and he found a willing audience. It's been widely argued that the vogue for all things Leif Erikson in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had an ugly ethnic undercurrent to it. Columbus, you see, was one of those icky Italian Catholics, just like the poor immigrants then arriving in Boston by the boatload. Whereas Erikson was entirely noble and selfless and enterprising, as far as anyone knows, I mean, it just stands to reason, and of course his hair and eyes were the right color, and he probably never touched a clove of garlic in his entire life. So the Viking theory had its fans among the local Brahmin aristocracy, and funding and official approval were easy to obtain. Thus, today Boston has Horsford to thank for a Leif Erikson statue on Commonwealth Avenue, the bridge piers here, and a nature park in Newton, MA, formerly the site of a local amusement park, which in turn was named for a nearby legendary lost Viking city of untold riches that Horsford rediscovered, and which totally existed in real life. Supposedly.

Harvard Bridge

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Boston's Harvard Bridge crosses the Charles River between the Back Bay neighborhood and the MIT (not Harvard) campus. It's not really that photogenic of a bridge, and I only ended up with a handful of photos of it. I became distracted by other more interesting things and neglected to take any photos of it from the side until I was pretty far away. You can probably find better ones on the net somewhere if you're curious.

(Also, @Mile73 points out this is usually called the "Mass Ave Bridge", due to carrying Massachusetts Avenue over the river. That seems much better than naming it after a university it doesn't even go to.)

In the top photo, you might notice a green painted mark on the sidewalk, and (if you look closely) similar marks in various colors further away. These are "Smoot marks". Their story, as told by Wikipedia:

The Harvard Bridge is measured, locally, in smoots.

In 1958, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at MIT measured the bridge's eastern sidewalk by carrying or dragging the shortest pledge that year, Oliver Smoot (who later became president of the International Organization for Standardization), end over end.

Crossing pedestrians are informed by length markers painted at 10-smoot intervals that the bridge is 364.4 smoots long, "plus one ear". The qualifier "plus or minus" was originally intended to express measurement uncertainty, but over the years the words "or minus" have gone missing in many citations, including the markings on the bridge itself. The marks are repainted twice each year by members of the fraternity.

During the reconstruction in the 1980s, the smoot markings were repainted on the new deck, and the sidewalks were divided into smoot-length slabs rather than the standard six feet. The Cambridge police use the smoot marks as a coordinate system when reporting accidents on the bridge.

Given that Smoot was 5 feet 7 inches (1.702 m) tall in 1958, the given measurement in smoots of 364.4 yields a "bridge length" of about 620 meters (2,030 ft). Published sources give the length of the bridge as approximately 660 meters (2,170 ft). The difference in length between the sidewalk markings and the published figure represents a 40-meter (130 ft) discrepancy.

An article at the Cambridge Historical Society mentions the Smoot connection, and points out a plaque marking the spot where, in 1908, a shackled Harry Houdini jumped off the bridge and made one of his famous underwater escapes. That's way cooler than any fraternity prank, if you ask me.

Bunker HIll Monument

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Photos of, and from, the Bunker Hill Monument, in the historic Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, across the Charles River from downtown. I'd wandered across the river to see the USS Constitution, and decided I'd take in the Bunker Hill Monument while I was in the area. I was mostly interested in taking photos from an elevated location so I'd have some semi-panoramic shots of the city, and I'm surprised how few pics I took of the outside of the monument. It's your basic obelisk, along the lines of the Washington Monument, but it's a bit shorter and wider and projects a sense of extreme solidness. I don't know if that was intended to represent the spirit of the hill's doomed defenders, but it succeeds in doing that.

For those of you who slept through Revolutionary War trivia, this spot, the site of the famous battle, is actually Breed's Hill, not nearby Bunker Hill. The confusion started almost immediately and there's no disentangling it now. I just thought I'd pass this bit of trivia along because it's a favorite of annoying history pedants, and now you're either armed against such people, or armed to become one of them, whichever you prefer.

Honestly though, I'm more intrigued by the engineering aspects of the monument than about the battle it commemorates. It was completed in 1843, less than 70 years after the battle, which -- speaking as a West Coast native here -- makes it absurdly old for what it is. One of the nation's first railroads was constructed just to transport the monument's huge granite blocks. Inside, there's a 294 step spiral staircase to the top, which like the exterior gives a feeling of extreme solidness. In that respect the contrast with Oregon's Astoria Column couldn't be greater. I was embarrassingly tired once I reached the top. The windows aren't that great, but I got the photos I came for. Eventually I took the stairs back down, which was obviously a lot easier, and wandered off to find the nearest brewpub, which Boston has a few of. Mmmm... beer...

Old North Bridge

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Photos of the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, site of the opening battle of the Revolutionary War. Gentle Reader(s) of a certain age might recall the Schoolhouse Rock version:

That, along with all the time spent on the actual Revolutionary War in grade school history class, left me with certain expectations about the place. I'd read that it was a small bridge over a very small river, but somehow it was still smaller than I'd expected. It's an attractive location, though. Tranquil. Bucolic, even. Which is surprising considering that this is essentially part of suburban Boston. I was in the area for a technology conference back in July, and was staying a couple of miles north and east of Concord, and that area was just generic suburbia, with endless malls and fast food chains and subdivisions. Somehow the Concord area managed to avoid that sort of suburban sprawl.

You might have noticed that the bridge doesn't appear to be particularly old. And you would be correct. A Concord Magazine article explains: There were bridges here long before the Revolution, which washed out due to flooding every few years and had to be replaced periodically. The historic> Old North Bridge fell into disrepair and was demolished shortly after the Revolution, and after that there was no bridge here until a replica was built for the centennial of the battle in 1875. It's been replaced a few times since then, more than once due to flooding. The current bridge was built in 1956 and restored in 2005. Much of the wood looks new. You wouldn't know it was a historic site at all if the 19th century monuments at either end weren't there.

I suppose this counts as a blog post about a bridge, and over time I've developed a few conventions for those that are probably of no possible interest to anyone but myself. The first couple of posts had titles along the lines of "How to walk bridge X and not die", since several of them were and are scary for pedestrians. Since then I've taken to adding a "not dying" angle to a lot of bridge posts, except for the ones where I forgot or couldn't think of one. It's usually a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. I can think of a couple of boring possibilities here, but what I'd really like to warn you about today is the danger of randomly travelling back in time to exactly the wrong day, while wearing a red coat or other brightly colored apparel. Because, y'know, mistaken identity.

Bunker Hill Bridge

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A few photos of Boston's Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as either the "Zakim Bridge" or the "Bunker Hill Bridge". The name was apparently a source of bitter disagreement and despite the title of the post I really don't have a strong opinion either way on that argument. I just needed to pick one or the other to use as a title, so I did.

As I was walking around Boston, I wasn't primarily interested in bridges, but this one's rather prominent and kept popping up in photos, so I figured I had enough material for a post about it. It's a new-ish bridge, opened in 2003 as part of the Big Dig project, and carries Interstate 93 over the Charles River. No pedestrian access, though, which obviously limits the chances for photos from the bridge. Legally, I mean. I was in town for a conference back in July, and another attendee apparently drove into downtown Boston at night and came back with photos taken somewhere on the bridge. He wouldn't explain precisely where he'd been or how he'd gotten there, but they were really great photos. Certainly compared to these mostly chance shots. On the other hand I can post these here without any chance of being hunted down by the city's grumpiest Irish cops. Plus there was basically zero danger involved in taking these, which is always a plus.

Cable-stayed bridges are generally attractive, in an ultramodern but somewhat generic sort of way, and this is a fairly nice example of the genre. It's just strange to see a 21st century bridge adopted as a symbol of such an old city, which I've seen a few times. I suppose it's good to be reminded that Boston is a living, breathing city and not just a huge open-air historical museum where nothing ever changes.

friday sailboats, charles river

Photos from a late Friday afternoon in July, in Boston. It was warm with a bit of mild wind, and the Charles River was packed with sailboats. I haven't been on a sailboat in a long, long time, but I can see the appeal. At least when the weather's nice, and the other sailors aren't dangerously incompetent, and you aren't stuck in drydock pouring money into endless maintenance and repairs. In other words, I'd been at a stressful tech conference out in the suburbs all week, and watching other people sail under fairly ideal conditions was relaxing, and a nice way to decompress.