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The road to hell crosses the Charles River
By adamg on Fri, 06/12/2015 - 5:22pm
Nikki and Noelle noticed the marker pointing the way to MIT today. How much is that in Smoots?
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Comments
This marker has always been there
at least if you define "always" as "since Lambda Chi Alpha first started painting smoot markers". I saw this way back in the late 1970s.
The answer to your question, of course, is 182.2 smoots plus 1/2 ear.
Peoples' Republic of Cambridge
has always been that direction. MIT used to be in back bay.
Back In The Day...
!973... I came upon this while crossing that bridge by foot for the first time (a 16-year-old Dorchester boy didn't often need or want to get to Cambridge.) At the time, I saw no indication of which way Hell was supposed to be - Boston or Cambridge. I thought it was genius to let folks wonder.
Suldog
http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com
Plus OR MINUS one ear. It has
Plus OR MINUS one ear. It has never been faithfully reproduced on the bridge.
The smoots
Are getting sloppy. It looks like preschoolers played with Tempra paint.
MIT should pressure wash off all the duplicate smoots and make the fratties who paint them do it neatly.
Painted?
Walked the bridge last week and most of the Smoot markers had faded away....
1958
It was 1958 when the freshman pledges to Lambda Chi Alpha first laid out young Mr. Smoot 364.4 times along the length of the bridge, and created the measurement unit.
For a brief while around 1970, a rival fraternity measured the opposite (upstream) sidewalk in Pierces. I distinctly remember seeing the Pierce markings, but no one else seems to recall them.
In the 1980s the bridge was completely rebuilt, with the sidewalk fully replaced on both sides. I believe that the length of the sidewalk (from Storrow Drive offramp curb to Memorial Drive curb) became slightly longer, but the 364.4 Smoots +/- 1 ear measurement was left unchanged when the markings were repainted on the new sidewalk.
The Lambda Zeta chapter of Lambda Chi Alpha is currently banned for five years (until 2019) after a drunken partygoer fell out of a window last August:
http://www.universalhub.com/2014/mit-bans-frat-where-drunk-woman-fell-ou...
This may explain the sloppy maintenance of the Smoot markings at this time.