Can't get there from here
Two key bridges over the Charles aren't exactly falling down, but they're shaky enough to prompt the question: What if Boston lost its links to its brainy northern neighbor?
They're the pulsing arteries between two cities, connecting the Boston Brahmin with the Cambridge liberal, the button-down number crunchers with the big-think biotech lab rats, the thousands of students from Boston University with those at MIT and Harvard.
But after a century of service, the Longfellow Bridge and its sibling up the Charles River, the Boston University Bridge, are crumbling; so much so that the MBTA has ordered Red Line trains to a 10-mile-per-hour crawl across the Longfellow, and walkers and bicyclists on the BU Bridge have seen their sidewalks reduced from two to one. Cars and trucks face restrictions as well.
With conditions increasingly precarious, we can't help but wonder: What would happen if we couldn't get from there to here?
Pondering that question in the Kendall/MIT T station, commuter Kim Tsui devised a plan.
"I would probably just swim across the river," the 27-year-old said, waiting for a train to take her from Kendall Square, where she works at the biotech firm
The city on the hill has long been linked to its neighbor to the northwest, Cambridge, first by a ferry in about 1630 and later by a wooden bridge built in the 1700s. After a replacement wooden bridge collapsed, the Longfellow was built in its place in 1905, constructed of the sturdier granite and steel that still stands today. The cost was $2.6 million, or about $137 million in today's dollars, according to a 2007 study by the Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank. With its famed salt and pepper towers decorated with sculptures of Viking ships, the bridge boasts a design inspired by the 1893 Columbian exposition in Chicago, the institute says, and was modeled after the great European bridges.
Twenty years after the span was built, local historians proposed to rename it for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had memorialized an earlier incarnation in his 1845 poem, "The Bridge," which even then had passages that speak of the romance, and heavy use, of the bridge:
Yet whenever I cross the river
On its bridge with wooden piers,
Like the odor of brine from the ocean
Comes the thought of other years.
And I think how many thousands
Of care-encumbered men,
Each bearing his burden of sorrow,
Have crossed the bridge since then.
I see the long procession
Still passing to and fro,
The young heart hot and restless,
And the old subdued and slow!
And forever and forever,
As long as the river flows,
As long as the heart has passions,
As long as life has woes;
The moon and its broken reflection
And its shadows shall appear,
As the symbol of love in heaven,
And its wavering image here.
A century after its construction, the Longfellow carries roughly 87,000 weekday passengers on the Red Line, plus 49,500 vehicles and an undetermined number of pedestrians and bicyclists. But ongoing repairs threaten Boston and Cambridge's easy connection for commuters, walkers, bicyclists and truck drivers.
Even as the cities developed distinct personalities, the idea that they could exist without each other is, in the words of local historian Robert J. Allison, unthinkable. "There is a longstanding symbiotic relationship between the two," said Allison. "It comes with inconveniences, but neither could thrive without the other."
Gradually increasing limitations have been placed on the Longfellow, including the 30-mile-per-hour speed decrease mandated for the Red Line, closing off the sidewalk on one side, banning trucks weighing more than 20 tons, and closing the traffic lanes closest to the T tracks.
So, what will it cost to put Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's bridge back together? The latest projection is $250 million, up from an estimated $70 million in 2003.
The timeline for repairs has also changed considerably. Though one state Highway Department website still shows 2006 as the scheduled date for completion of the overhaul's preliminary design, Commissioner Rick Sullivan of the Department of Conservation and Recreation, which owns the bridge, says the firm hired to draw up plans for the rehabilitation project is only now working on the design. Sullivan is not sure when the work will be completed, but said the DCR is hoping for a 2011 start date for the overhaul.
The Longfellow "is the queen of the DCR, the most expensive and the most iconic," said Sullivan. He said the team is dedicated to preserving the bridge because of its historical significance to the Commonwealth.
Upstream, the 80-year-old BU Bridge, like the Longfellow, is considered structurally deficient. Repair has already begun on the bridge's sidewalks, which are heavily used by pedestrians. One traffic lane on the Boston-bound side is closed, as is the adjacent sidewalk. During rush hour, traffic slows to a crawl as vehicles approach the bridge from Cambridge.
According to Sullivan, the DCR plans to replace the bridge's deck next year, meaning that the BU work might not be finished before the current restrictions on the Longfellow are lifted.
During rush hour on a recent Monday evening, trains pulled into the Kendall/MIT station slowly, some sitting at the edge of the bridge for a few moments before pulling completely into the station and discharging passengers. With the new restrictions, the average travel time between the Charles/MGH and Kendall T stops is now about four and a half minutes.
Red Line riders interviewed expressed mostly mild annoyance at the situation. Aaron Kerner says he takes the train over the Longfellow from his home in the Back Bay to his job in Inman Square every weekday. "It's a mess," he said. "I plan extra time now, though my bosses are pretty laid back." Kerner, 27, said he has, in the past, sat at the end of the bridge for 15 minutes inside an unmoving train with no explanation offered.
"I have no idea why it's occurring or why they do it," he said of such unexplained delays.
The Globe reported last month that the federal government recommended the slowdown to the DCR, because the feds were concerned that the concrete below the Red Line could buckle or crack, causing a train derailment.
Andrew Fletcher, general manager of Brattle Square-based Academic Movers, said that when the company has customers on Beacon Hill, he takes the Mass. Ave. or Boston University bridges because he fears his larger trucks will be over the weight limits imposed on the Longfellow and enforced by the State Police.
"We don't add the extra time" to the customer's bill, he said. "It adds 10 minutes and we'll absorb that, because it wouldn't make for good customer service."
Sullivan said that while he doesn't anticipate closing the Longfellow completely to traffic when the rehabilitation project begins, the BU Bridge and the Mass. Ave. Bridge, which received an overhaul in the 1980s that made it structurally sound, could handle the traffic overflow if necessary. (There are also four smaller bridges - the Western Ave., the Eliot, the Anderson Memorial, and the River St. - all originating west of BU, connecting Allston/Brighton and Cambridge and carrying both cars and pedestrians.) The bridges are an important symbol of connection between two cities, according to Steve Poftak, a coauthor of "Our Legacy of Neglect," the Pioneer Institute paper on the condition of the Longfellow released last year.
"Massachusetts has no natural resources, but a richly skilled workforce, and we use that bridge to commute out to business," he said. He said without that connection the exchange of economy and culture would be severely limited.
The infrastructure challenges have already begun affecting citywide traditions. Due to the weight limitations imposed on the Longfellow, the bridge was closed this Fourth of July to approximately 10,000 to 40,000 firework-gazing spectators for the first time ever.
"Bridges serve a certain purpose and, by their nature, have to be replaced," Allison said. "We can't bind ourselves to live as people did in the 1830s. We are still capable of good things and 100 years from now, people will look back and say [the change] is a good thing."
Kimberly Sanfeliz can be reached at ksanfeliz@globe.com. 