Boston's Bridge Too Far: A Logo of Lost Chances

By Jane Holtz Kay

What becomes an icon most? The soaring Brooklyn Bridge and Golden Gate, the glorious, gilded Chrysler Building, the monumental Washington Memorial, the structural elegance of the Eiffel Tower - all are the stuff of urban imagery, working symbols of city life.

And yet, for all its history, urbanity, and architecture, Boston has had no such logo. The curved bow of the swan boats won't do. Nor does George Washington astride his horse in the Public Garden make world-class copy. The golden dome of Bulfinch's State House is, well, a dome. As for cloud-reaching height in the Hub, neither the monolithic glass façades of the former John Hancock building (nameless since it went on the market last year) nor the ornate splendor of the 1913 Custom House Tower achieves truly commercial cliché.

Crisp forms meet messy underbelly at the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge. Photo courtesy of Frederica Matera

Now, however, Boston has an icon: a bridge of its own conceived by a great engineer, Christian Menn, the Swiss angel of bridgemaking (with HNTB of New York City engineer of record). It is, says historian David Billington, a "spectacular bridge" that turns an arduous span into a glorious spindle. A cable-stayed, prestressed concrete structure dazzling the sky above the Charles River and its environs, it connects the city's "Big Dig," the $15 billion tunnel that replaces the mid-twentieth-century Central Artery, as it stretches 1,400 feet from the Charles River Basin at North Station to points north.

In a city that eschews au courant architecture, the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world, at 183 feet, has become a singularly modern symbol. Boasting a lengthy moniker, the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge honors both a local civil rights activist and a historic locale. More than an incidental artifact of the Big Dig, it makes a picture-perfect, postcard-worthy twenty-first-century logo. And Boston would seem to have embraced Menn's first foray in this country. Illuminated in neon brilliance at night, the asymmetrical bridge with its towering obelisks and triangular stays, draws eyes and sighs from commuters crossing the Charles by rail or on elevated highways.

But closer inspection of what the bridge has wrought could change public opinion as time passes. Notwithstanding its soaring imagery, the 10-lane structure makes an awkward and ungainly presence on the ground of post-Big Dig Boston. Despite the bridge's sense of flight, its Piranesian collection of columns and cluttered underworld create a dark scenario, marring the Charles, blighting nearby neighborhoods, and sharply limiting pedestrian access, passage, and comfort on the 40 acres of river park land now being constructed around its base. Surrounded by looping highways, parking lots, vents, and odd-lot structures now and to come, the bridge shrouds the site, scars the soil, and undermines the landscape supposedly freed by the project. "Another place where they'll burn tires," one knowledgeable skeptic predicts.

The bridge as a phonebook logo.

In Inventing the Charles River (MIT, 2002), Karl Haglund explains just how and why this came to be, spelling out the long and ugly debate that left the city with another scar. For the Zakim Bridge is, in fact, the result of a long struggle to stop the creation of an earlier overpass plan, "Scheme Z." First proposed in 1989, the scheme's notorious 16-lane bridge would have loomed over the Charles River and Cambridge and Boston communities. Furious citizens and planning activists fought for a tunnel that would free the city from this Draconian mega-overpass and its countless cars, but politicians and transportation engineers stalled the tunnel, claiming high costs. The highway builders prevailed, undoing Boston's last chance to build a tunnel under the Charles and will a thriving park to the city.

Most slighting to citizens of America's "walking city," as Boston likes to describe itself, is the sad fact that their first true icon is not walkable. Unlike Rotterdam's new Erasmus Bridge - UN Studio's elegant artifact that boasts lanes for bikers, walkers, and streetcars, as well as automobiles - the Zakim Bridge is a car-only construction. No more bridge walks for Bostonians. No unobstructed parkland. In the end, after years of construction chaos--13 million cubic yards of fill removed, and billions spent--Boston's new emblem is more cosmetic than creditable.

This article appeared in Architecture Magazine, Protest column, February 2003.

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