COLONIAL CLOUDWAY
A visit to Boston’s Tobin Bridge
Emily Hiestand

Written in 1993; first published in Homage (Ebb Tide Editions, 2024)
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Content At-A-Glance

1993, Boston

The compact office building that houses the officials who oversee operations of Boston’s Tobin Bridge is suspended from the bridge deck itself, high above the Mystic River and directly under the eight lanes of traffic on the cantilever bridge.

To describe what it’s like to work in such an office, one of the administrators, Doreen Doddy, with whom I first talked by phone, began our telephone conversation by describing the physics of the bridge: "It is like two pencils," she says, "each balanced on one end of a desk and cantilevering off into space and, well, you see they have to vibrate in order not to fall down."  

As she continues, Doddy recounts that her desk and chair are also in something like constant motion and that for many weeks after she first began work in the offices hanging from the bridge deck, she went home feeling seasick. Now, however, as we’re talking — and after many years at this job — she merrily exclaims, "Oh here comes a big one! It's an eighteen-wheeler, it's like a mini-earthquake. My whole desk is shaking!"  

I also learn from Doddy that her boss, Mary Jane O’Meara, has one of the best job titles in the world, namely, Director of the Bridge. The only title I know that can touch this beauty is the one once held by an older gentleman at a fine typographic house in the pre-computer days. His business card read: Director of the Alphabet. 

Bridge Director is a career that I had never even heard of. Most people haven’t says Doddy, who further believes that the location, and even the existence, of the administrative office building for the Tobin Bridge, is one of the things few people ever hear about. Possibly, she believes, the obscurity of the offices is a security holdover from the era when toll monies were kept there. But today, Doddy says, the voluminous bags of quarters are whisked away by Brinks Trucks and the office elevator is open to the public. Would I care to visit?

A week later, as I step out of my car in the vacant parking lot adjacent to the Bridge Office elevator, I am engulfed in a great, vibrating, humming roar — a throaty, textured sound composed of vehicles ceaselessly rumbling over the bridge, and punctuated by an alarm ringing just next door in the Moran Terminal, as well as a siren from Charlestown's nearby streets, cries from circling seagulls, and shrill beeps from forklifts moving sheetrock panels across the apron of the next-door gypsum company. The orchestral sound is loud enough to cancel out the voices of large numbers of men loading trucks at the Terminal, and the army of small pickups zipping in and out of the chain link gate. A breeze comes off the river, mingling a salty smell with a medley of automotive and manufacturing fragrances. 

Near the unmarked entrance to the elevator, a half-empty coffee cup with a Lori-Anne Donut Shop label has been left on a metal post. To the right of the elevator, under the bridge and in its shadow, is a tall chain-link fence supporting a lush vine with berries in various stages of ripeness: hard green berries, yellow, orange, and red berries, and shriveled plum-brown berries. The vine emerges from cracks in the asphalt pavement, and lying on the ground, on the knuckles of its root, are some feathers and a large, rusting spring. Looming over these things, the parking lot, and two massive gantry cranes at the Terminal — is the double-decked Tobin Bridge, which the builders proudly described as "11,900 feet [running] from near City Square, Charlestown, to Fifth Street, Chelsea... more than two miles... a half-mile longer than the Golden Gate Bridge." Over the bridge itself, five white cumulus clouds are traveling north, silent as blimps. 

Inside the tiny elevator lobby, there is no ordinary directory but there is a Fire Annunciator with a schematic chart of the bridge decks, and a legend showing that lit-up silver dots mean "System Trouble."  (None is presently lit.)  The buttons inside the elevator are marked: Ground, Office, Chelsea, and Boston. I get off at "Office," and am met by the bridge Operations Manager, Gary Burgin, a trim man with a walky-talky and a wad of keys who takes one look at me and says, with relief,

"Oh, you are the lady who was looking at things in our parking lot." 

I realize that I, the would-be observer, have been under keen surveillance for some time. The parking lot, the bridge roadbeds, and toll booths are steadily surveyed by cameras whose images are constantly monitored by guards at multiple stations. I gather that the Duty Sargent alerted the Operations Manager to a lady examining things in the lot. I hoped that peering at a coffee cup, a berry vine, the feather and the sky hadn't given them a scare, but I sensed that it had, a little bit. I do understand that people who poke around and admire random things can unnerve more focused members of society, and must be considered at least potentially worrisome. But now Mr. Burgin's relief has glided into complete cordiality and his colleague Doreen Doddy bounds out to say hello from a desk surrounded by handsome glass block.

"We like visitors," she says, "and we don't get many. Call me Doreen. Most of the people who come down here are here because they are stranded. (Although we are suspended hundreds of feet up in the air, Doreen calls our location down here because the bridge is just above us, up there.) ”They have broken down on the bridge, or maybe there is a medical emergency. We bring them down here for a cup of coffee or a Coke, and let them wait in the lounge for Triple-A or for a friend or an ambulance to arrive. Did you see our lounge?" 

Doreen shows me the lounge, where six off-duty toll booth collectors are sitting at small tables, playing cards, smoking, talking, or snoozing on a couch, waiting to go back on duty. She explains that these men and women start as Toll Officers, and may rise through the union ranks to Sargent, then Lieutenant, and finally, Captain. They work in eight hour shifts, with three hours on, then an hour rest period, then another three hours on. 

"The Toll Collectors are a para-military style group," says Doreen, whispering. "They have uniforms with hats and wear badges. Like police officers," she adds. 

One of the men at rest in the lounge room is Captain Diamond, who has risen to Chief of the Collectors, and whose last day on the force is today. On the whiteboard in the conference room is a drawing of Captain Diamond wearing his blue hat, surrounded by a palm tree, a casino, and a hand of winning cards. 

"Don't these guys look like something out of Elliot Ness?" Doreen asks, now gesturing at the formal portraits of the Fathers of the Bridge, leaders of the 1950s-era Bridge Authority, which are arranged along one wall of the conference room. Here are the sepia-toned portraits of Earle R. Barnard, and Maurice J. Tobin, namesake of the bridge, and Ephraim A. Brest. All three gentlemen wear dark double-breasted suits, have slicked-back silvering hair, penetrating eyes, and faces airbrushed to a smooth sheen by the Boston-based Bachrach photography studio. As Doreen and I talk, the room is trembling from the passage of overhead vehicles, but Doreen claims to no longer notice this constant motion, except visually. "I can see that it is moving," she says, "because I can see the blinds moving, but I can't really feel it."  

Neither can Evelyn McElroy, the unofficial office historian, a middle-aged woman who first came to work on the bridge thirty one years ago, in 1963, when she was still in high school. She tells me that the office workers refer to themselves as “the bridge trolls,” that the bridge was originally named the Mystic River Bridge, and like Doreen, she mentions that the bridge office workers adapt to the shipboard sensation, and that they comment, as connoisseurs, only on the more dramatic effects from overhead. 

"I have been here longer than most of the toll operators," McElroy continues. "When I started here, I came wearing my parochial school outfit." McElroy, who admires bridges and makes a point of visiting them on her vacations, finds the cantilevered lines of the Tobin Bridge especially pleasing. "This is a remarkably handsome design," she says, and has ready anecdotes about the bridge, which she will tell to people like me to help us better appreciate the bridge and what she calls its “personality.” 

She tells me about the lady who, upon hearing the toll collector ask for a toll for two cars, realized for the first time that she had a car in tow, a car whose bumper, it seems, she had hooked while bashing her way out of a tight parking space in Back Bay, some five miles back. She tells about the toy poodle who wandered late one night onto the bridge, and was rescued by the "breakdown person," whose duty it is to drive slowly along the breakdown lane clearing it of any debris. By the next afternoon, after McElroy had alerted the press, the poodle had been claimed by scores of callers. Its true owner identified herself by knowing that the dog had chipping red nail polish on its nails. McElroy also feels that, to be honest, she must mention the suicides which begin on the bridge. I am surprised to learn the number. That, McElroy explains, is because the press cooperates in not publicizing "jumpers," because such reports can draw other desperate souls to the bridge. "It is always a very bad feeling for us here, a very bad feeling for all of us." 

She steps out of the room for moment and returns lugging first two oversized scrapbooks, each roughly the size of Audubon's elephant print portfolio of The Birds of America. The books have leather spines and corners and a mottled, black-and-white pattern on the covers — exactly like composition books from a long-ago grammar school, but as if made for giants. Inside, the scrapbook’s thick pages are yellowing, firmly bound with a strong white thread, and covered with newspaper clippings about the bridge during its planning and construction. 

The news stories, which trace the turbulent early career of the bridge, have headlines alerting readers to: the need for the bridge; preliminary studies for it; protests against it; men behind its development; political responses to the protests; court actions to halt construction; huge Hub tie-ups as the former bridge jammed (on the day after the filing of legal actions against the proposed new bridge); mass meetings to halt span building; the first contract awarded for the span building; authorities being arrogant in dealing with Chelsea residents; another mass invasion of the Boston State House in protest of the plan; engineers’ studies for alternate plans; bridge plans being "all set”; bridge plans being “far from set"; that one hundred families have been ordered to move from the path of the bridge; the "Giant Wishbone" the mechanical marvel whose arms slide along either side of a house, whose heavy steel staging is slipped under crossed timbers, and which lifts a house from its foundations "like an air-borne elephant," and takes it to a new site; that piles for the new bridge are being driven in the riverbed; that boys with bandaged heads are lying in hospital beds, walls having collapsed on them during the razing of houses for the bridge; that children are playing in dusty streets in dismal, newly-created neighborhoods; how children are "happy" anywhere; that Iroquois tribesmen from the Candinawaga Reservation near Montreal are performing steelwork on the bridge for $100 a week; that there are geological ambiguities at the base of the bridge; that enginners must gauge the solidity of the earth which would support "150,000 tons of bridge;" that pipe castings were driven into the strata where the bridge piers would stand; that the borings showed that the bedrock is Cambridge Slate; and how construction proceeded by boring 13.5 feet into the solid slate for the river piers. 

The last clipping to be pasted into the two massive scrapbooks was dated February 16, 1950.  It included a staged photograph headlined "Snow pattern on new Bridge," and shows five young boys from Chelsea running, hand in hand, across the snow-covered bridge.  The photo caption reads: "The boys seem to have the bridge all to themselves."

Ms. McElroy walks with me to the reception lobby, where Mary Jane O’Meara, the Director of the Bridge, greets me, saying: “Nobody knows what the name of our bridge is. On helicopter reports, the pilots say the Mystic River Bridge, or the Tobin-Mystic, or the Mystic-Tobin, or sometimes the Tobin. It was first named the Mystic River Bridge, and many people never stopped calling it that, and no one calls it the Maurice J. Tobin Memorial Bridge, which is now its full name."

The scrapbooks McElroy showed me record the many other names proposed by interested citizens in the winter and early spring of 1950, among them: the Paul Revere Bridge, the Colonial Cloudway (my favorite), Roosevelt Boulevard, Northern Skyway, and two possibilities from Albert B. Manski of Pinckney Street — the Bridge of Progress, and "Cast-A-Spell Bridge," the latter on account, Manski said, of the mysticism that flows beneath the bridge. 

Director O'Meara is a warm, down-to-earth person who heads up a100-person team that includes engineers, mechanics, toll collectors, electricians, maintenance specialists, and administrative staff. The ultimate responsibility for keeping the bridge running smoothly is hers, and as we walk down the corridor she says candidly: "I was a big shock, let me tell you, to a lot of people in the system. I am the first woman to be Director and some of them still aren't used to it." As she speaks, the vibration of an eighteen-wheeler rumbles down from overhead; the room shakes and O’Meara laughs. “Even though I had been the Operations Director for several years,” she observes, “some of them in the system weren't ready for me to be the Director. Let me tell you, the shock waves are still rippling through this system,” adding, “It’s like working in a shake and bake here.” I see by her grin that she’s referring to the metaphorical shock waves as well as the eighteen-wheeler overhead.

O’Meara points me toward the elevator to the bridge deck where Operations Manager Burgin gives me a tour of the newly installed state-of-the-art toll plaza, and is generous with praise for the Director. "Mary Jane is the new president of the IBTTA," he tells me. (That’s the International Bridge, Tunnel, and Turnpike Association.) “She goes to the association meetings to consider new ideas for bridges and tunnels, and she worked out this plan for our new toll plaza. The booths now are air-conditioned, and my maintenance systems are now housed in the overhead corridor, which is as high as a man, so my crews can walk right through it, and make repairs to any of the systems without shutting down traffic." 

As Mr. Burgin speaks, his conversation becomes a rich, technical stream-of-consciousness, punctuated with phrases like "fiber optics," and then he is opening the one presently unused booth on the plaza and inviting me to sit inside. Standing outside the cozy, sleek booth he shows me how its several layers of windows may be adjusted for winter and summer climates.  

At the toll booth, Burgin is revisiting his earliest position at the bridge. He started as a Toll Collector and then "made rank" — which he explains means to jump paths to the management side of operations. A momentary shyness in his tone suggests that it is a rare jump to make. In the Sargent's room located just off the toll plaza we admire a bank of new, streamlined, money-counting machines, the camera monitors that had earlier detected me in the parking lot, the compact weather station that allows Burgin to monitor wind gusts, and the news wire machine that send early warnings about weather or other conditions that might lead the Director to close the bridge. 

The operations chief is immersed in a craft which requires him to keep both a hundred details and the big picture at once in mind. We stand for a while on the toll plaza, and I see he is taking satisfaction in the streaming whoosh of automobiles proceeding smoothly through the collection booths. As he gazes around the happy scene, Mr. Burgin's eyes fall on the flagpole, and at once he notices that the leading edge of the American flag, flying above the smaller black and white P.O.W. flag, has grown very, very slightly tattered. He makes a note of it, and when we return to the offices below, pokes his head into the lounge and calls to Captain Diamond. 

"Lou," he says, "I have one last duty for you. I need you to put up a new American flag on the deck. How many guys does that take?"  

"One guy," says Captain Diamond, "with a ladder." 

Burgin and the Captain nod to one another. It is a minimalist nod of satisfaction between men who trust each other not to be effusive. As we walk back into the reception area, the chief begins to excuse himself politely, saying,

"So far, this is a quiet day, but anything can happen. In ten minutes I could have a traffic tie-up, or an accident, or some freak weather like that 65 mph wind gust last week. Did you feel that gust? I could get some emergency report from one of my crew and be here all night. I never know what is just about to happen."

Burgin describes this basic condition of his work in a tone of serene happiness, and I see that he, like everyone else I’ve met at the bridge, appears to relish the job of engaging daily with the world's many faces of order and disorder (winds, lost poodles, keys, ceaseless traffic, monitors) — while juggling, taming, possibly balancing these forces. Life's orders and disorders are intimately associated, and this fact is a source of adventure. 

As I’m driving away from the Tobin Bridge, I feel some of the gratitude I did upon learning that Tibetan monks are chanting in monasteries at every hour of every day, which they do to hold the Earth together, to keep it spinning. 

2024 Updates
Mary Jane O’Meara served as Director of the Tobin Bridge for 20 years, earning the deep respect of her entire team, becoming a legendary mentor to hundreds of colleagues as well as the first woman president of the International Bridge, Tunnel & Turnpike Association, and receiving numerous industry awards. In 2011, she took a new position at HNTB, a leading infrastructure design firm. In a 2016 article, Liz Levin, a former member of the board of the Massachusetts Dept. of Transportation, writes that O’Meara “set an unparalleled example in how to run the Tobin bridge with humor and affability” and quotes the following passage from O’Meara’s chapter in Boots on the Ground, Flats in the Boardroom: Transportation Women Tell Their Stories, which offers a glimpse of O’Meara’s leadership style:

“I fielded a lot of weather stuff by putting on my jacket, my safety vest, and grabbing my radio. And I would go up and stand in the tollbooth or the roadway to see how bad the weather was. If it was unsafe, like a blizzard, and I thought they were going to get hurt I would pull them out of the tollbooth. I had the authority to do that, and the bridge would go toll free. I would always go up onto the top deck and really check the situation out and then confer with the supervisors on duty to see how they felt because some of these guys had worked for 40 years. And I would listen very carefully. That’s how I earned their respect. I never made a decision that would change the way they worked without sitting down to give everyone an opportunity to debate it with me.”

Related
Boston's Maurice J. Tobin Memorial Bridge gets rehab for 50th Birthday
by John Gartner, in Roads & Bridges, March/April 2000, pp. 24-27. Gartner, president of John Gartner & Co., Technical Marketing Consultants, has a degree in engineering, loves bridges, and writes frequently about bridge rehabilitation.

Sole Woman in the Room Now Leads By Example
by Scott Van Voorhis

Mary Jane O'Meara: Avoiding Bridge Trolls by Earning Respect
By Liz Levin

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Content At-A-Glance