Waterways of East Cambridge

I'm not going to lie: my obsession with geography means I also have a big interest in waterways of various kinds. Here are some pictures from two afternoon walks on Wednesday. Consider it your walking tour:The Zakim Bridge from outside my office. Looking through a chain-link fence and over the superb North Point Park, complete with playground, skating park, open green space, and beds of different species of flowers that have been combined so that their combined blooms have lasted over three months now. This being Boston, local bureaucracies are fighting over the park's liability and it remains closed to the public.

Broad Canal, looking towards Kendall Square

America will never fail to amaze at the number of times its people have completely reinvented their society and economy, despite their short history. True, Cambridge has always had Harvard. But 200 years ago it was also a bustling seaport, as canals such as Broad Canal stretched through the salt marshes up towards Central Square, and wharves lined the waterfront laden with agricultural goods. Broad Canal is still there, although nowadays it does not quite reach Kendall Square. The wharves have been replaced with M.I.T. properties and such biotech firms as Siemens and Genzyme.

Cambridge Athenaeum

The deity herself watches over Memorial Drive.

A relic of the industrial age.

View towards Boston down the Lechmere Canal.

This piece of canal waterfront is now home to condos, sightseeing boats, lunching workers and that center of modern American society - the mall (Cambridgeside Galleria, to be precise).

Millers River

Once this river flowed from Union Square in Somerville into Boston Harbor, and divided Charlestown from Cambridge. Now, it has been mostly filled in. What remains survives (with the last vestiges of Boston's precolonial saltmarshes) underneath the Zakim Bridge's US Interstate 93. I guess Boston is a bit like Tokyo. The numbers, by the way, mark the harbor depth at those spots when surveyed in 1801.

Little slivers of East Cambridge's past survive amongst great development: new biotech firms and their properties seem to be sprouting up all over the place. Harvard Square is so passe: what do those people ever do for anyone, except spend other people's money? This part of Cambridge seems to be the Biotech Silicon Valley of the East Coast. Some "money" shots:

Genzyme

North American HQ of my Dear Employer
(note the Condos sign - so much for affordable housing!)

And last but not least:

A monument - to potatoes?