Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider. IP Address: 3.145.119.199 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
CTOWNB_190810_30.JPG: Acrophobia [extreme or irrational fear of heights] friendly zone
Wikipedia Description: Charlestown Bridge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Charlestown Bridge, officially named the North Washington Street Bridge, is located in Boston and spans the Charles River. As the river's easternmost crossing, the bridge connects the neighborhoods of Charlestown and the North End. Completed in 1900 and given its current official name in 1910, the bridge carries a portion of the Freedom Trail linking to the USS Constitution and Bunker Hill. To the north of the bridge, Route 99 begins and the street becomes New Rutherford Avenue.
Replacement of the bridge started in fall 2018 and is expected to be completed in 2023.
History
The first government-sanctioned ferry crossing of the Charles was chartered at this location in the 1630s. It was operated by various individuals until it was given to Harvard College "in perpetuity" in 1640, to support the college financially. In 1640, the Massachusetts General Court granted Harvard College the revenue from the Boston-Charlestown ferry to help support the institution. The Harvard Corporation in its capacity managed the Charlestown ferry from the 1640s until 1785, and after the completion of the Charles River Bridge in 1785.
The first bridge on this site was known as the Charles River Bridge, chartered in 1785 and opened on June 17, 1786. As a condition of chartering the bridge, a sum of £200 was paid annually to Harvard College to compensate for the lost ferry income. The bridge was privately built and operated, with tolls producing profits for the investors during the charter period, after the initial expense was paid off. In 1792, the West Boston Bridge was chartered, connecting West Boston to Cambridge. In compensation, the legislature extended the charter period of the Charles River Bridge by 30 years, but the unpopular double tolls on Sundays were eliminated. Traffic to the bridge was facilitated by the laying out of the Medford Turnpike in 1803.
When the Warren Bridge was chartered in 1828 in a location extremely close to the Charles River Bridge, the investors filed a lawsuit which eventually reached the United States Supreme Court as Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge.
The current bridge was built in 1900 under chief engineer William Jackson, and was designed to carry the Charlestown Elevated railway in addition to vehicle traffic. However, the railway was demolished in 1975 to make way for its replacement, the MBTA Orange Line's Haymarket North Extension. The new line was rerouted to avoid having to pass directly through the densely populated Charlestown neighborhood. The Haymarket Tunnel, emerging from under both North Station and the Charles River just south of the new Orange Line Community College station, was inaugurated in 1975 as the designated tunnel for Orange Line trains. Because the bridge was originally designed to accommodate an elevated railroad in addition to automobiles, the bridge spans six lanes.
The bridge formerly carried the southernmost stretch of Massachusetts Route 99 to its terminus at the river, but following completion of the Big Dig in the late 2000s, the route's designation was changed to relocate the terminus to Chelsea Street in Charlestown.
Replacement
The bridge has been considered structurally deficient since 2003, when the center two lanes were permanently closed. Construction work on a replacement bridge began in the fall of 2018. The design for the new bridge, by architect Miguel Rosales in collaboration with Alfred Benesch & Co., is intended to complement the nearby Zakim Bridge (with which Rosales was also involved). The new bridge is slated to have two vehicular lanes in each direction, a dedicated southbound bus lane, and a protected bicycle lane and sidewalk on each side. During construction, a temporary bridge is planned to be installed to carry pedestrians and three lanes of vehicular traffic.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!