From the Boston Globe Magazine's Cityscapes column, Sunday February
23, 1992
                              CITYSCAPES

               By Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker

 MEIGS ELEVATED RAILWAY

 CHANGING TRACKS

 
If it is ever built, Scheme Z - the great swirl of ramps and bridges
that is to carry the new Central Artery across the Charles River --
will be, according to federal highway officials, the world's largest
traffic interchange.

     Even if Scheme Z is cut back, as is now likely, it will still be
a tangle of concrete spaghetti more than 100 feet high. At its western
end the spaghetti will be ladled out onto a triangle of land framed by
Somerville, Cambridge and Charlestown. And herein lies a story.  Once
upon a time, that same chunk of land was the site of a very Different
kind of experiment in transportation,

     The year is 1886 in the old photo, and we're looking at the Meigs
Elevated Railway.  Josiah Vincent Meigs was a Tennessee inventor.  He
came to Lowell in 1866 to work for a legendary pol named Gen. Ben
Butler (in those days, to "Butlerize" was to make off with everything
in sight).  With Butler's patronage, Meigs spent virtually the rest of
his life perfecting one of the world's first monorails.  In 1886 he
built this 227-foot demonstration line in Cambridge, crossing Bridge
Street (today's McGrath Highway) near Fourth (today's Sciarappa) at
the Somerville line.

     The Meigs Railway was amazingly sophisticated.  The track
consisted of two rails, one above the other, supported by a single
line of posts.  Wheels were angled at 45 degrees, gripping the lower
track like a clenched fist.  Instead of a rigid cowcatcher, the
locomotive was protected by an air-spring buffer, Cars were rounded
for streamlining, and their seats revolved and folded up.  Speed was
an impressive 20 miles per hour.  The state Board of Railroad
Commissioners examined the Meigs system and found it practical and
safe.

     But competition was vicious.  Arson and vandalism hampered Meigs,
as did his insistence on old-fashioned steam power instead of
electricity.  Nothing besides the Cambridge test line was ever built. 
The Meigs monorail made its last run in 1894.  Conventional elevated
trains, modeled on those of Manhattan and far more massive than
Meigs', soon darkened Boston's streets.

     The new photo shows the site today, with a view toward Boston and
Charlestown.  The McGrath highway is just out of sight on the right. 
Only a few semiderelict sidings occupy what is essentially a
wasteland.  By the end of this decade, the view will have changed
radically.   A dramatic Babel of steel and concrete, perhaps
resembling a great sports stadium, will rise like a gray mountain in
the middle distance at the left of the photo.  The introverted
automobile will have won its long battle for supremacy over the
sociable train.

 ___________________________________________

 Robert Campbell is a practicing architect in Cambridge and the
architecture critic of the Globe.  Peter Vanderwarker, an
architectural photographer and writer, is the author of _Boston Then
and Now_.