Linking cities and eras

Jul 25, 2010 — The Boston Globe

By Eric Moskowitz

Jul. 25, 2010 (The Boston Globe delivered by Newstex) -- The Longfellow Bridge spans the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge with a mix of grace and heft. Below its heavily trafficked deck, a dozen granite piers alternate with 11 sets of steel arches that bound across the water like a skipped stone. Above, the bridge is adorned with four neoclassical towers that resemble salt and pepper shakers.
And then there is the view, a panorama that is a mainstay of postcards: the rooftops of Back Bay, the slope of Beacon Hill, and the gleam of downtown skyscrapers rising beyond the deep blue of the Charles and the greenery of the Esplanade.
Up close, though, the century-old bridge is in terrible shape. Its steel ribs are rusting and weakened, its masonry crumbling and cracked.
Now the state is beginning a six-year, $300 million rehabilitation intended to shore up the bridge for generations. It is the most high-profile, the most expen sive, and potentially the most disruptive project in the state's 300-bridge, $3 billion Accelerated Bridge Program, a vast initiative aimed at reversing decades of deferred bridge investment and demonstrating to a leery public, post-Big Dig, that infrastructure projects can be completed safely, swiftly, and on budget.
But the rebuilding of the Longfellow is about more than saving it from collapse. It comes at a time when key policy makers, from Boston's mayor to the Obama administration, have pledged to rethink transportation and pull back from decades of favoring drivers and cars over bicycles and walkers.
As a result, the Longfellow has emerged as a touchstone and test case in the debate over urban transportation, with officials, highway engineers, civic leaders, and community advocates grappling over whether to reclaim some of the pavement used by automobiles to make more room for everybody else. It is a thorny issue that remains unresolved even as construction begins on a bridge that is both a treasure to preservationists and a lifeline for thousands who traverse it each day by subway, car, bicycle, and foot.
``You can't underestimate the significance,'' said Jeffrey B. Mullan, the state's transportation secretary. "It's the symbol of our system.''

When the Longfellow opened to traffic in 1906, the roadway was a free-for-all cobblestone surface shared by horse-drawn carriages, automobiles, and trolleys, with overhead wires and rails embedded in the cobblestones to serve the streetcars. The middle was a cavity; the Red Line did not yet exist, but planners left space to encourage its arrival.
Half a century later, engineers replaced the cobblestones with asphalt, narrowed the sidewalk, and striped the wider, paved roadway to make the bridge more inviting for the automobile.
Today, the Longfellow means different things to different people. To riders on the Red Line, it breaks up the underground monotony with a spectacular view and a few moments of cellphone service. To motorists, it is a 2,100-foot stretch of highway-straight travel between crowded cities, inviting speeds well above the posted 30 miles per hour.
To bikers and pedestrians, it is at once exhilarating, frightening, and inconvenient, offering narrow and sometimes interrupted walkways and bike lanes in close proximity to traffic. On the upstream side, the sidewalk is scarcely wide enough for two adults to stand side by side.
The bridge connects Boston's Cambridge Street with Cambridge's Main Street. It carries two lanes of automobiles in each direction but widens to three on the Boston approach, where it lands at Charles Circle, merging into a harrowing rotary where cars and people converge from Storrow Drive, Massachusetts General Hospital, Beacon Hill, and Government Center.
On a recent walking tour, a group of pedestrian, bicycle, and environmental advocates paused on the Longfellow's upstream side, fanning out along the cramped sidewalk to admire the view. It was a sunny afternoon, and sailboats crisscrossed the Charles.
``This should be a fabulous tourist destination,'' said Wendy Landman, executive director of the nonprofit WalkBoston. "It's the most beautiful view of Boston in Boston, and we have this opportunity to create something wonderful.''
Landman envisions a Longfellow very different from that of today, with just one vehicle lane in each direction, widening to two at Charles Circle. The reclaimed space would hold pedestrian promenades with inviting benches and broad bike lanes with breathing room from the traffic.
Advocates say such a plan would honor a raft of recent policy changes and public pronouncements from leading officials. On his blog in March, US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared "the end of favoring motorized transportation.'' Mayor Thomas M. Menino, at a bicycle summit, announced to cheers that "the car is no longer king.''
The advocates note that car traffic on the Longfellow has been steadily declining for a decade, coinciding largely with the opening of the nearby Zakim Bridge. And they point out that traffic adjusted when the Longfellow Bridge's travel lanes were temporarily closed for safety reasons. Now they see an ideal, highly visible opportunity for permanently taking some of that pavement to encourage more bikers and walkers.
``What we are asking for isn't particularly radical,'' said Rafael Mares, a staff attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation, part of a coalition coordinated by the LivableStreets Alliance. "It is not radical, wanting a sidewalk on a bridge and wanting a bicycle lane on a bridge that is sufficiently large to allow people to get over comfortably.''

The Longfellow is named for a pedestrian: poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who regularly walked the earlier West Boston Bridge over the Charles during his long and turbulent courtship of the daughter of a Beacon Hill industrialist. In 1845 he published a poem inspired by those crossings, "The Bridge.''
The replacement for the West Boston Bridge - originally dubbed the New Cambridge Bridge, and renamed for Longfellow later - was planned and built between 1898 and 1906 at a cost of less than $2.7 million. The designer was Edmund March Wheelwright, a leading architect of the day and a proponent of stone construction. He acquiesced to the need for steel on the Longfellow, and would later lose his mind while trying to design the world's last massive, monumental stone-arch bridge, over the Connecticut River. (OTCBB:CRCA)
Civic leaders scheduled the Longfellow's ceremonial opening for the summer of 1907 as the marquee event in Boston's Old Home Week. Several hundred thousand celebrants packed the banks and spilled across the bridge. Scores more floated below in boats.
Politicians, including Mayor John F. "Honey Fitz'' Fitzgerald of Boston, addressed a ticketed grandstand. A band played from an illuminated barge, and competing fireworks firms lighted the night sky. Amid the excitement, two West End children drowned, and the nearby Craigie Bridge caught fire from a carelessly tossed cigarette. But the event, like the new bridge, was considered a smashing success, a "fraternal hand'' extended between two storied cities.

As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney in 2003 declared that the long-neglected Longfellow would be restored as part of his "fix it first'' agenda, with the work starting as early as 2006. That did not happen, but the Department of Conservation and Recreation - which owned the bridge - and the Highway Department began collaborating on renovation drawings.
The project assumed new urgency after a steel-arch bridge collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007, killing 13 people. Romney's successor, Deval Patrick, pushed for statewide bridge repairs, with the Longfellow as the signature project. Meanwhile, engineers reexamined the Longfellow and found that it was in need of fixes that could not wait, so the state imposed a series of temporary speed and travel restrictions and pumped more than $12 million into immediate repairs.
Plans for a long-term overhaul of the Longfellow were then split into two phases. The first, which is less expensive and less complicated, went out to bid earlier this year, and construction crews started to mobilize last month. That work includes relocating utilities running under the bridge, cleaning and repointing the piers, and performing preliminary tests and repairs to the steel beams below the deck to determine whether they can be rehabilitated or must be replaced in the second phase. Disruption to travelers is expected to be minimal.
It is the second phase - the restoration and reconstruction of the bridge support structure and deck - that is generating controversy.
The plan being developed since the Romney era would keep the same number of vehicle lanes but shave a few inches from each to create slightly bigger bike lanes and sidewalks wide enough for wheelchairs. But several advocacy groups coalesced against that plan, arguing that it fell short of the new state and federal policies aimed at reducing motor vehicle travel to cut carbon emissions and help address an obesity epidemic.
LivableStreets, a Cambridge-based group, began collecting scores of postcards in a "Better Bridges'' campaign, with locals writing messages to the state such as "I want Better Bridges because . . . getting across the Charles River should not be an extreme sport,'' "I walk, I ride a bike, I like the view, I'm human, I vote, I pay taxes,'' and "I can't swim.''
In May, officials took an unusual step. Luisa Paiewonsky, the state's highway administrator, wrote to the Federal Highway Administration - which state officials hope will cover 80 percent of the cost of the Longfellow overhaul - and asked to withdraw the draft of a key document known as the Environmental Assessment. That draft had not yet been made public, but advocates feared it would shut the door on their plan.
Paiewonsky also convened a task force to bring together state, federal, and city officials; environmental leaders; bike, pedestrian, and transit advocates; business and neighborhood associations; historic conservation and preservation groups; Mass. General and Mass. Eye and Ear, and others.
The task force, which will meet for the third time Tuesday, is charged with considering a range of possibilities for future travel over the bridge and at its ends. The group will also weigh options for how to stage and schedule the project to balance disruption to travelers with efficient construction. The work could require closing the bridge to Cambridge-bound motorists for months or years.
Advocates for change are cautiously optimistic about the outcome. Bob Sloane, WalkBoston's senior planner, said the Longfellow could be not just a test case of new policy but a showcase.
``It's more beautiful than any other bridge, and it's got all the status of being an icon, so why shouldn't we do it here?'' Sloane said.
Others are warier about anything that might disrupt automobile traffic. "Conceptually it's a wonderful thing to do, but obviously we need to understand what the consequences of traffic flow are,'' said John Messervy, director of capital and facility planning for Partners HealthCare, which includes Mass. General, by the base of the bridge.
Boston's transportation commissioner, Thomas J. Tinlin, said the bridge project presents an opportunity to do something creative and dramatic to promote greener travel - but the result must not cause more problems than it solves.
``It sounds so intriguing and exciting to talk about, but at the same time these jobs in the transportation world are all about balance,'' Tinlin added. "We can't tip the scale to where we're inadvertently creating gridlock somewhere.''
Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.
BRIDGING PAST, FUTURE
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