See it larger (1886 proposal; source).

What if Storrow Drive had never been built? Imagine if it were just removed?

After posting about a Cambridge debate over keeping Memorial Drive shut to traffic on Saturdays, some folks on Twitter argued it shouldn't have been a highway to begin with.

One could make the same argument across the river, where, in fact, the banks of what we now call the Charles River Basin were originally a tree-lined promenade right up to the houses and buildings along Bay State Road, at least until the state built Storrow Drive in the 1950s, forcing pedestrians to use one of several pedestrian bridges to get to the river - and then further cemented the auto-primacy of the area by building the Bowker Overpass over Charlesgate in the 1960s.

The idea for a Charles River Embankment - today's Storrow Drive and Esplanade - dates to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the state constructed a dam across the mouth of the Charles, turning what had been an estuary into more of a large lake (in large part to keep smelly sewage pouring out of Stony Brook and the Muddy River covered by water, which kept the odors from wafting into the tony Back Bay). The result would be a "water park" with an esplanade along the river, backing up to the homes of the Back Bay.

The dam was completed in 1905. Charles River Embankment as seen from the Harvard Bridge in 1910 (source):

Swimming near the old Charles Street jail, sometime in the 1930s or 1940s (source):

The Hotel Sheraton, 91 Bay State Rd., used to be right at the water - compare to today (building is now a BU dorm, source):

Storrow Drive was built in 1950 and 1951. In the postcard, note how peaceful and uncrowded it looks - and how it doesn't have a complex overpass system at Charlesgate (source):

The state built the Bowker Overpass atop Charlesgate in 1965 and 1966 (source):

Photos posted under this Creative Commons license.

know that all cars must be banned. either they will be banned, as well as the naive culture which spawned them, or humanity will be extinct.

no one cares if you have a nice car. lame. bring back public space.

Sorry your prius only has 100hp and sounds like a hairdryer.

You do realize that transportation only accounts for 14% of all global greenhouse gas production. Whereas electricity and heat account for 25%.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

You have to drive an electric car or take an electric trolley/bus OR half of us don't get to heat our home this winter or turn on a computer.

Sorry your home doesn't have triple paned windows but I don't think you need to roll coal any longer. It doesn't matter what the biggest gorilla is...it matters what the easiest one to tackle is. America's car culture needs a diet.

You don’t know what that means, do you? Just sounded cool so your threw it in there.

My new house is energy star rated. How about yours?

tons of things are "energy star rated", doesn't mean much.

You must be the same commenter from an older thread that thought my house wasn’t custom.

I witnessed what they did first hand to get the rating and it absolutely means something. Keep blowing your energy out your leaky windows and walls though.

A discussion about possibly changing how the Charles River roads are used is not a personal attack on you.

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and a significant source of harmful air pollution. And it is the largest source of emissions in Massachusetts. You are killing the planet and other people.

Have fun paying for gas, sweetie.

Transportation is *barely* the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US.

Filling my tank for $80 doesn’t even make me think twice. $80 is nothing to me, but I’m glad you like to rub gas prices in other peoples faces that are barely making it by and have no choice but to drive.

Filling my tank for $80 doesn’t even make me think twice.

"Barely" at 27%, followed by electricity generation at 25%. Both are huge, and electricity is shrinking as a greenhouse source as renewables take over from coal and oil. Further, even with electricity as big a source as it is, electric vehicles are far less polluting than fossil-fueled ones. Gasoline is over. It only remains to be seem whether its use will end soon enough to stop heating the planet.

You're part of the problem.

Ya, because Lithium Ion batteries are about as environmentally unfriendly as possible to both produce and dispose of.

I drive an average of 7,500 miles a year since I’m a remote worker. What about yourself? When was your house built and what does the insulation look like? Your furnace and water heater? Are they both high efficiency. Do you own a car? If so what model and how many miles do you drive a year? You assume I’m part of the problem, but I’d bet a large sum of money that my greenhouse gas production is way under what you produce. Keep telling yourself whatever you need to to sleep at night though.

Lithium batteries are recyclable, duh. Or are you pretending that the manufacture of your gas car had no carbon footprint? I hope not, that would be stupid.

As for my house and car, it's not relevant. I'm not the one proudly proclaiming my happiness at buying tanksful of gasoline. Not that it's any of your business, but my 2005 house has 5.5 kW of solar panels on the roof, meaning I don't buy any grid power. My 30mpg car sits at home almost every day, because I do, too. In short, you lose. You are still part of the problem.

Li-Ion are really not recyclable right now. So you’re wrong.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220105-lithium-batteries-big-unansw...

We have a solar grid on our new house too with two 240v 50A drops in our three car garage for when we transition to EV. I’m looking at you Porsche Taycan Turbo S!

Li-Ion are really not recyclable right now.

Tell it to these guys:

Things are evolving. Try to keep up.

You’ve never dealt with high voltages have you? And I’m not talking about 120V or even 240V house electricity. Li-Ion in vehicles is not something you just pull out and send. Even if you could, you’d need to send your 1000 lb battery via freight and pay to recycle it.

You pointed to one company that has 25 employees and $5M in revenue. That’s peanuts, but I’m glad that someone is attempting to make a business out of recycling Li-Ion.

Your lack of knowledge in this domain is showing.

You're miffed that I only linked to one place that recycles Lithium batteries in response to your claim that they are "really not recyclable right now?" OK, this report has three more, along with a USDoE project and an international collaboration of organizations, both working on recycling solutions.

If EV battery packs are "not something you just pull out and send," then why did Tesla promote a program to swap out the batteries in their cars for charged ones "in less time than it takes to fill a gas tank?"

SOMEBODY's lack of knowledge is showing, all right.

I said Lithium Ion batteries are really not recycle-able right now in my earlier post. You even quoted it! That’s correct and you’re even supporting my argument with your links and text that companies are working on if. You know what right now means, right?

Tesla scrapped the battery swap a year ago because it’s riddled with problems.

I have no idea what you do for a living, but it’s certainly not engineering. You keep digging yourself deeper with your ignorance and lack of knowledge. Time to move along.

CO2 is a single measure of environmental impact. Single occupancy vehicle exhaust is the single leading cause of local pollution causing a vast array of horrible and utterly preventable disease: https://www.epa.gov/mobile-source-pollution/research-health-effects-expo...

Industrial polluters will always clobber individual’s contribution to climate change. That’s why they invented the anti-litter campaign. But your choice to drive a car proudly with your $80 tank of gas is directly harming your neighbors. That’s on you and you’re being an ass about it on top of it all.

Pretty sure global warming is a, hence the name, a global problem. Saying I’m being obtuse because local CO2 production is led by single occupant vehicles is like saying water is wet. I posted the facts from the EPA. Read them how you want in your fantasy world.

What would you like me to do? $80 in gas is 15 gallons at the current price. That’s a small tank on average. Take the T from Dorchester to Somerville? It’s a mile walk to and from the red line each way. So a two mile walk or 40 minute walk then a hour long train ride each way!

I assume you never fly for work or vacations because that’s far greater impact on ‘your neighbors’ than my car with 4 catalytic converters.

I earned what I have. Nothing was ever given to me. You’re damn right I’m proud of where I’m at.

Was not delivered by fairies running on pixie dust. Neither was your couch, or the groceries you got from Whole Foods, or anything else for that matter,

Remove the Charles River Dam and restore the river to a tidal basin! Nature wins!

Probably would need to remove most of Back Bay and South End to restore the marshes. The smell at low tide after all the filling in was one of the main reasons for the dam. MIT would lose their land too, but I assume they've already prepared Jetsons-style stilt legs for all the buildings.

Bring back the Shawmut peninsula!!!

You people do realize that Boston is the heartbeat of an economy of about 4 million people.

Somehow the Camberville /JP mafia’s ego doesn’t get that. There’s more to the life of this area than you.

I've always felt the way to fix all of this is to revert Storrow Drive to be a fully at-grade two-lane in each direction street. Double yellow line, no median. Three-way intersections would connect to the Comm Ave/Beacon side streets. At-grade crossing for all pedestrians at all intersections, no need for the ped bridges. Traffic lights timed so that the flow of rush hour (inbound in the am, outbound in the pm) gets green after green if you drive the 25 mph speed limit.

This would take up significantly less land, and would free up the bottled up land between the highway directions, the overpasses, etc. It would cost significantly less to maintain because it would be at-grade and have significantly less material. It would eliminate Storrowing, because there'd be no flyovers [be careful with engineering at Longfellow, etc]. You could certainly have parallel parking on the 'Charles Side' of the outbound direction for people to park near their now-expanded recreation area.

This would free up 100s of acres of park land, save many many millions of dollars of reconstruction and maintenance, and eliminate Storrowing.

I agree in principle however I must point out that this town generates very little excitement outside of a sports team win, Go Celtics!, so the removal of The Storrowing would kill off one of the truly unique cultural traditions we have.

Also, since it's a state road, there will be huge opposition by those seeking to bypass the city entirely and make it to and from Fenway Park without having to deal with the realities a city bring with it.

I was a gondolier on the Charles for almost twelve years and heard lots of stories about the planning and history of the area. One of them was that James J Storrow himself never wanted there to be a road along the embankment, so it must have been a double slap-in-the-face to have it named after him. (I am less certain about the veracity of this claim).

What I do know for sure, though, is that I was shown some early 20th century prints for proposed construction and project planning along the lagoon, which included gondolas. Later when Arthur Shurcliff developed this area, he included bridges that would fit a gondola (I was just tall enough where I didn't have to duck whilst rowing). And those stairs going into the water? That's straight from Venice too, concrete steps facilitated the boarding of watercraft.

Boston's Gondola di Venezia went out of business a couple years ago...I sure miss it! And the stories.

I think you are right about James Storrow.

James Storrow had been instrumental in earlier projects along the Charles River, in particular the Charles River Dam. Additions to the Charles River Esplanade had been made during the 1930s only by omitting an important part of the project, a proposed highway from the Longfellow Bridge to the Cottage Farm (Boston University) Bridge, which had provoked tremendous protest.[13] After Helen Storrow, the wife of the now deceased James Storrow, supported a group opposed to the highway, it was dropped;[13] part of the funding was to have come from a million-dollar gift from her.[14] Soon after Helen Storrow's death in 1944, a new proposal for the construction of the highway was pushed through the Massachusetts Legislature. In spite of still strong opposition, and through some dubious parliamentary procedures, the bill approving construction of the highway and naming it after James Storrow was passed in 1949.[15]

Source: Wikipedia (which links to City of Boston page about Storrow Drive's history)

So yeah it was a slap in the face that they named the roadway after him. tbh I see this more like sh*t on his grave, because Storrow wanted green space and betterment of the basin. A roadway..... is not green space or betterment.

And in typical mid-century Massachusetts fashion..... "f*ck whoever, let's build ROADS" and built it anyways. Like I constantly say.. I think MA road planners were on LSD. They just didnt care about anything else except building roads... even if they were un-safe or went against people's wishes.

And if they hated horses and buggies.

The horses might actually be aware enough to stop for pedestrians, even if the buggy driver was too busy glancing at his daguerrotype camera and telegraphing his friends to pay attention to the path

Let's consider the case of former US Senator John Conness, who, after getting booted out by the California legislature, retired to the life of a gentleman farmer on River Street in Mattapan.

This story is mostly about his feud with Boston officials over the perilous state of River Street at the time (today's potholes have nothing on 19th-century River Street), but scroll down far enough and you'll read about his 1886 beef with the city over speeding sleighs:

The petition was introduced by Councilman Andreas Blume who, while acknowledging he had never been to River Street, said it was wrong to allow a heavily traveled street full of children be used as a race track by "fast men, and possibly fast women" - and not just "rich gentlemen from Dorchester," but from Weymouth, Dedham, Milton and Hyde Park (then still an independent town).

"It means that a rabble of respectable and every other kind of people will go there from every part of Boston and the surrounding towns and trot their horses," he predicted. He said he supposed if the supporters of a River Street with no speed limits were to live there, "they would sing a different tune."

I’ll say it first. Let’s bring it back to the native habitat!

Storrow is going to be pretty hard to excuse/defend when the floods get higher and higher.

Tidal basins were tidal buffers. Naturalizing them may ultimately be one of the few ways to create space for the flooding to come.

Tear Down the Seaport and all construction from Fort Point Channel to the Reserved Channel.

The people saying that reducing or eliminating lanes on storrow or memorial drive act as though there isn't an 8 lane highway right next to it. Sure you have to pay a toll (less than a subway ride) but it seems ridiculous that we act like people will only have local surface roads east-west if storrow was reduced or eliminated.

This seems like a good time to plug Karl Haglund's excellent 2002 book, Inventing the Charles River, from MIT Press. He documents the invention of The Charles in Boston, via dams and bridges and embankments and all the rest. He pays particular attention to the development of roads and bridges, as these are fundamental to how the Charles River Basin has been developed by white settlers, especially since the Industrial Revolution.

As we know, James and Helen Storrow were vehemently opposed to the building of a roadway along the embankment. After James's death, Helen continued to try to block construction. Their son, James Storrow III, served as executive secretary of the Storrow Memorial Embankment Protective Association, formed in 1948 to oppose the roadway. Here is Haglund describing the legislative process that led to the construction of what came to be called, in a bitter irony, Storrow Drive:

On April 12, [1948], the Storrow Drive bill was defeated by eight Democrats. But the defeat was short-lived. Two weeks later, the doors of the house chamber were locked. Then the House provided for the required three readings of the bill by adjourning twice and then reconvening. The roadway was passed by one vote. Efforts to require a referendum and to make the road a separate bond issue failed.

I believe we will live to see a day when this roadway is un-built, and converted to parkland with plenty of wetland buffer and bioswales to accommodate the frequent flooding of the Charles River basin. Until then, it's extremely useful to study the history of how this monstrosity came to sully our beautiful riverfront parkland.

Although I'd trade them back to get rid of the highway, we should remember that the islands were built in order to compensate for park land lost to the road.

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