How Do We Love Thee, River Charles? Let Us Count the Ways...
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slice.mit.edu
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Being a school on a shoreline, MIT’s celebration of Earth any day is also, quite often, a celebration of the water, and in particular, the Charles River.
Like so many civilizations before us, MIT’s has been built upon a river.How does this river sustain our work? Ocean engineering majors can tell you; they surveyed the muddy Charles’s depths in 2007. Civil engineers plumb its depths annually: check out this 2012 project to destratify it with turbulent jets. Art, Culture,and Technology Associate Professor Gediminas Urbonas designed last winter’s IAP “Learning from the River” around it. CSAIL’s lecture series bears its name.
There was Proteus the penguin boat and the pre-Columbian raft. We’ve done sonar tests, problem sets with fictional “Charles River” companies, studied ice patterns, and silt formation.
And the Charles is our playground, too, as any runner, rower or sailor will attest. Maybe you played the MUVE game “Charles River City” a few years back, or watched the 4th of July fireworks from any available rooftop.
Always moving and yet always still, the Charles is a muse for photographers, romantics, barflys, philanthropists, and soul-searchers. Remember how Ernie Knight ’28, for his 70th reunion, took a single scull out for one more row?
Seems logical to trek out there once a year—at least, to work on keeping the Charles clean.
In a unique sense of the word, the Charles River is also an MIT invention. Karl Haglund’s 2002 book, Inventing the Charles River, is a great exploration into how engineers (MIT alums included) shaped Boston and Cambridge’s shorelines over the years into a “Back Bay” with stabilized riverfronts. How would one’s MIT experience be different, do you think, if we looked out at mud flats and salt marshes every day?
