Bridging the Charles

By the turn of the country, Harvard football games already attracted large crowds so large, in fact, that the narrow foot bridge connecting Soldiers Field with Cambridge nearly collapsed every time the mob poured over it. This severe congestion inspired The Lampoon to parody Longfellow's "The Bridge Over the Charles" with a poem beginning:

"I stood on the bridge at midnight,

I had left the field at five."

Nobody doubted it: Harvard needed a new bridge. The Boston Post suggested in 1911 that "somebody with a good, plump bank account might well devote some of its surplus age to the building of a safe and artistic Harvard bridge. That ramshackle old contraption is a peril and disgrace to the two cities that appear to be waiting for it to fall into the Charles, which it will probably do some fine day. Where is the millionaire who will immortalize himself and serve posterity by building a new bridge?"

The millionaire was closer, at this crucial point, than anyone realized. He generously donated $300,000 for the construction of a new span across the Charles as a memorial to his father. The Philanthropist was Colonel Larz Anderson '88, Ambassador to Japan, a world traveller who first thought of giving the bridge when vacationing in Rome. A friend wrote later, "I well remember the day he and I stood on the old Bridge of the Quattro Capi, built in memory of some old Roman worthy, and agreed that it was the best of all memorials."

Commuting over the Charles had been difficult since 1635, when a small and inefficient ferry began operating. The town council, as ruthlessly swift as its modern counterpart, spent twenty-seven years arguing over construction of a bridge. Finally, in 1662, the city fathers erected a wooden bridge, the first to span the Charles, and the first of any importance in America.

Soon after the Revolutionary War, the town council received an application for damages from John Ridgway, because "of the accident he sustained in passing the bridge, by his horse slumping through." Aware that horses never slump through sturdy bridges, a committee of private citizens decided to incorporate to build a new toll bridge across the Charles. When the bridge was completed in 1793, the Boston newspapers, with their customary conservatism, reported that "the elegance of the workmanship, and the magnitude of the undertaking, are perhaps unequalled in the history of human enterprises."

But Cambridge's citizens, evidently unimpressed by this magnificence, objected to paying toll. The court battle, a famous case which essentially modified the doctrine of "vested rights," went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although Daniel Webster represented the bridge owners, he lost his case, and tolls were discontinued in 1836. The city then took over the bridge, keeping it in good repair until crowds going to Soldiers Field nearly crashed through it. Hearing that a philanthropist might donate funds for a memorial bridge, the City Council waited, however, until Anderson gave the money.

In honor of his soldier father, Colonel Anderson thought it appropriate to decorate the bridge with symbols of war and peace. But sculptors of the period seldom let art stand in the way of such a grand theme, and the resulting decorations reminded a modern critic of illustrations from an old edition of Bulfinch's Mythology. With all the subtle reserve of Victorian design, one medallion contains a Roman corselet, a sword and a helmet, shields, sprays of laurel leaves, Roman faces, spear heads, part of a fortress, and, topping all, an American eagle bearing a thunderbolt.

But Anderson had not planned on such ostentation. He only demanded that the bridge bear the following inscription: "May this bridge, built in memory of a scholar and soldier, connecting the college yard and playing fields of Harvard, bean ever-present reminder to students passing over it of loyalty to country and Alma Mater, and a lasting suggestion that they should devote their manhood, developed by study and play on the banks of this river, to the nation and its needs."