Harvard Bridge
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Image:Harvard-bridge-mit.jpg 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: Template:Coor d
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 it 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, end over end. The marks are repainted twice each year by members of the fraternity, usually during heavy traffic so that police cannot interfere. This is confirmed by Mr. Smoot himself. 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.
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 was rebuilt, confirming the M.I.T. engineers' fears.
The story is apocryphal. In fact, Harvard Bridge was first constructed in 1891, whereas MIT only moved to its current location in 1916. The bridge deck was rebuilt on the existing supports in the late 1980s to repair structural deterioration and address issues raised by the 1983 collapse of the similarly-designed Mianus River Bridge in Greenwich, Connecticut. The smoot markings were repainted on the new deck.