How much do you love your London Plane Trees?

Perhaps you might recognize them by their more common identity as Charles Eliot’s sycamore trees, as they have lined Memorial Drive in Cambridge since April of 1897. In any case, these trees and the streetscape at large were threatened by an insensitive road re-design in the early 1960s—a plan which sparked an outpouring of community resistance and demonstrations of dentritic attachment.

In 1962, the state legislature passed a bill allowing for significant changes to be made to the road design of Memorial Drive. The initiative from MDC outlined only the construction of three underpasses, which were planned for River Street, Western Avenue, and Boylston Street (JFK Street). However, community groups such as Cambridge Civic Association and Organization Ten, as well as individual community members, feared that eventually Memorial Drive would be widened to an inhospitable eyesore of an expressway, with lanes soaring over and above the existing road, constructed expensively and necessitating the removal of Charles Eliot’s trees. This prospect inspired the formation of a Citizens’ Emergency Committee to Save Memorial Drive, and the group became quite outspoken in 1964 once the actual construction plans for were revealed.

Besides calling for six million dollars of taxpayer money, the project threatened usurping recreation space, weakening the urban planning, and either chopping or transplanting up to 130 trees, including 35 sycamores. As an aside, the interest prompted investigation of the trees’ origin, and consensus was reached by experts from the Arnold Arboretum, the British Horticultural Society, and the Embassy of Thailand that Memorial Drive was in fact lined with Platanus x acerifolia—the London Plane tree—a hybrid of American and Eurasian Platanus trees.

Among the more high-profile protestors, Edward Bernays, appropriately enough in his role as the father of Public Relations and co-founder of the Citizens’ Emergency Committee, successfully garnered support for the Citizens’ Committee’s cause from key political figures, prominent citizens, and the national media.

A group of students were also spurred into action by the immediate threat to the trees posed by construction of a Memorial Drive underpass at Boylston Street. Close to a thousand Harvard and Radcliffe students formed a human roadblock, prompting The Harvard Crimson to report, “undergraduates joined the fun by staging a Save the Sycamore “protest” which held up Memorial Drive traffic for an hour and caused the MDC to bring on the canines” (Matthews, 05 May 1965). The Citizens’ Committee also formed a subgroup of members, affectionately called the Minutemen (a nod to the valor of the Concord Minutemen of 1775), to stand sentinel by the trees should MDC come by in the dawn hours to cut.

Eventually, the plan was postponed, reduced, and then finally revoked by the end of 1965.

Christina Antiporda, Charles River Conservancy

Reflections on a River (updated)

    The excitement of being on my own so far away from home, seeing Boston for the first time — that was how I felt when as a young woman many years ago, I arrived in the city, a senior from a small Kansas college pursuing career prospects in teaching.

         A high school friend met me in Park Square for a quick tour around the Common, and we stopped at Bailey’s for ice cream and my first “jimmies” (sprinkles). Then we took the Red Line from Park to Harvard Square. As the subway headed up out of the dark tunnel, I was amazed to see the jewel that was the Charles River basin, sparkling in the sunlight for one brief moment as the train rode over the Longfellow Bridge. I will never forget that first view in April when the sailboats were out on the water.

         Two years after that experience, I moved to Boston and continued my interest in the Charles: taking bicycle trips from Watertown to Boston, learning to sail at Community Boating, and filming a demonstration of a sailboat rigging for the first video I made on a reel-to-reel video recorder for an assignment at Boston University.  I still have somewhere in my attic a painting I had made of the Charles River basin at sunset, and somewhere there may be a slide tape of a river cleanup that my eighth-^h grade English class produced as we explored a stream in a section of Waltham near the Lyman Estate.

         Later, as a teacher in an elementary school across from the red brick Waltham Watch building, I escorted student groups along the Riverwalk to the public library. My son and I paddled a double kayak one Mother’s Day at the Newton Charles River kayak and canoe center, and my husband and I watched the Regatta from the shores in Cambridge and the Run of the River in Waltham, biking along the Upper Charles River Reservation from Watertown to Newton – always making new discoveries.

        

     So it was no surprise to my friends when I decided one summer to learn about the river firsthand from beginning to end after reading Max Hall’s book The People’s River. On a beautiful July day, I started in Hopkinton, and I have been exploring ever since. I have spent many hours looking at maps and print media then making watercolor paintings and writing about the various sites along the waterway, and every time I needed inspiration, I would go to some area of the river and be refreshed and recharged to go back to one of my projects.

     Taking part in river cleanups and reading literature about the health of the watershed contributed to an awareness of how to be a steward and led to my interest in stream surveys in my suburban town.  The river’s resiliency is quite amazing, having been used for industrial dumping, with dams slowing and stagnating the current, and all manner of construction close to the water’s edge. We are grateful for the far-sighted people in the 1960s who began to pay attention to the needs of the river.  Since then we have watched impressive new parks and plantings appear along the green corridor that borders the river.

. . .  and I will continue to go down to the river and celebrate its beauty and its promise, and I will always enjoy that moment when the train surfaces from the dark underground for that view of the basin from the Longellow Bridge.

by Kathleen Rowe