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The road to hell crosses the Charles River

Halfway to hell on the Harvard Bridge

Nikki and Noelle noticed the marker pointing the way to MIT today. How much is that in Smoots?

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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.

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has always been that direction. MIT used to be in back bay.

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!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

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Plus OR MINUS one ear. It has never been faithfully reproduced on the bridge.

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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.

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Walked the bridge last week and most of the Smoot markers had faded away....

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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.

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