Harvard Bridge

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View from the Boston side of the Harvard Bridge, looking towards MIT.
View from the Boston side of the Harvard Bridge, looking towards MIT.


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. Its coordinates are: 42.354326° N 71.09166° W

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 by carrying or dragging the shortest pledge that year; Oliver Smoot purportedly end over end[1]. (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 170 cm tall, measuring the bridge from the zero smoot mark yields a bridge length of about 619 m. Other sources give the length of the bridge as approximately 660 m.


Panoramic view from Harvard Bridge in the winter
Panoramic view from Harvard Bridge in the winter


[edit] Other trivia

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 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.[2] 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.

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

[edit] References

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