CIRCLING THE SQUARE

Look out of the windows on the left hand side of the subway train crossing the Charles St. bridge the next time you're going in town and you'll see, sticking up between the Bunker Hill monument and the Navy Yard cranes, the great red truss of Boston's first big bridge. Stretching somewhat over two miles from City Square, Charlestown to Chelsea Square, the huge double decker is 3000 feet longer than the Golden Gate Bridge and rises 135 feet above the high water level of the Mystic River--the same clearance as the Brooklyn Bridge has over the East River. Carrying one-way traffic on each, the two decks are 36 feet wide all the way except through the toll plaza near the middle of the bridge. The actual length of the main span over the Mystic River is 800 feet.

As might be expected, the construction of the bridge is a very expensive undertaking--so expensive that neither the cities of Boston and Chelsea nor the State of Massachusetts could stand the necessary tax burden. Thus, the financing of the 27 million dollar project is being handled by a group of private investors who will operate the toll system on the bridge until the capital plus interest is paid off. By 1978, the toll profits should exceed the original cost and the bridge, as per previous agreement, will became public property.

The big bridge is Boston's first step toward the solution of the city's two foremost civic problems--the unsnarling of traffic and the improvement of port facilities. The old artery from Charlestown to Chelsea had two drawbridges on route, one of which was opened 7000 times last year for an average of ten minutes each time. That drawbridge was in such poor condition that the War Department had come very near requesting the two cities involved to build a new one at their own expense. And even with such time hazards, 11 million vehicles passed over that road last year.

With such speedy access to the city as the new span provides, the engineers estimate that nearly two million more vehicles will come into the city in 1950 and that, within 25 years, the figure will go over the 18 million mark. When the old drawbridge is torn out, the Mystic River channel can be widened and any seagoing vessel whose superstructure doesn't stand over 135 feet can go up the river to Everett and Chelsea.

Naturally, a structure of such proportions was a spectacular job of engineering. Fifty thousand tons of steel rest on 50,000 cubic yards of concrete. The mammoth concrete piers on which the main truss rests go down some 83 feet below the water line--making these huge abutments the largest of their kind in the country. Dozens of homes were transported intact away from the 60 foot strip that the bridge's approaches carve through Chelsea and Charlestown. In many respects the engineering was equally as remarkable as in the construction of the John Hancock building. And for all the danger that operating at such heights meant, only one worker was killed during the entire job.

But, to the average Bostonian, the bridge, like a tower or a skyscraper, will be something big that he can point out to newcomers something with dimensions a little larger than anything else the newcomer has seen.