State Police report a woman heading from a ramp at Charlesgate onto Storrow Drive inbound "failed to slow and struck the barrier on the ramp" around 3:45 p.m.
The driver of the 2001 Corolla, 60, was rushed to Mass. General, where she was pronounced dead.
A DCR worker discovered a man's body in the Muddy River in the area of the Bowker overpass around 10 a.m. today, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.
On Friday, Ed Hatfield photographed the Muddy River under the Bowker Overpass at Charlesgate:
That basketball has been there for at least 5 years, the soccer ball about eight and I think the baseball was a Babe Ruth homerun knocked out of Fenway Park. This is part of the reason the Charles River is getting cleaner. I think every thing that ends up in the water from JP down stream ends up here and it is blocked so it doesn't go into the Charles River basin.
Yesterday, for the second time in three months, a body was recovered from the Muddy River, just upstream from this location.
Photo copyright Ed Hatfield. Posted in the Universal Hub pool on Flickr.
Updated, 1:45 p.m.
Boston and State Police shut Charlesgate East at Commonwealth Avenue and the Bowker Overpass after somebody found a pressure cooker just lying there.
State Police report:
The device was a pressure cooker, appeared to be discarded. Does not appear to have been a explosive device. Under investigation.
Rick reports the bomb squad detonated the pressure cooker around 12:45 p.m.
The scene. Photograph by Cory Gardner.
Updated with MIT info.
Kanako Miura, 36, a visiting scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, died this afternoon when she was struck by a dump truck, MIT and Stanley Staco report.
Boston Police report the victim was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after the 3:30 p.m. incident.
A mangled silver and black bicycle, believed to be hers, was found several blocks away on Bay State Road at Silber Way, Brian D'Amico reports.
Proper Bostonian reports on the wild turtle (tortoise?) she spotted ambling down Beacon Street near Charlesgate, all by himself:
Plans probably don't include restoring Charlesgate to its early 20th-century state.
State officials hold a meeting tonight to discuss options for the turnpike through the Back Bay and the Bowker Overpass - the decaying hulk that now speeds cars across the fetid remains of the Muddy River between Fenway and Storrow Drive.
At the session, which begins at 6 p.m. in the mezzanine conference room at the BPL in Copley Square, state transportation officials will discuss various options for improving the Back Bay for people encased in metal shells, including extending the overpass to the turnpike for people heading to the airport or just tearing it down altogether and replacing it with a simple surface road. Another possibility is a new offramp to Brookline Avenue.
State officials recently announced plans to tear down the equally decrepit Casey Overpass in Jamaica Plain and replace it with surface roads and parkland.
Nowadays, Charlesgate mostly brings to mind the crumbling ramp system connecting Storrow Drive and the roads of the Fenway - its underside a transient homeless camp next to a mucky "pond."
But once it was a bucolic connection between the Muddy and the Charles rivers, part of Olmsted's creative plan for both creating a key part of the Emerald Necklace and flushing out the Muddy.
Compare the above photo, from the Library of Congress's collection, and taken sometime between 1890 and 1901, to this Google Street View. The only thing the two have in common is the still standing residential building.
Some people want to tear down the Bowker overpass, built in 1967, and restore Charlesgate to its Olmstedian ideal.
BostonZest discusses efforts by state and city arborists and local volunteers to protect elm trees on the Commonwealth Avenue mall and along the Esplanade and Charlesgate from the dreaded Dutch Elm Disease:
... When we have a few days of hot weather, the elm bark beetle will come out of hiding and begin spreading the disease. That's when volunteers look to the treetops for signs of distress. "We call it flagging, which is the yellowing of the leaves on a certain section," said Greg Mosman, Boston's city arborist. ...
Many years ago, I had just dropped my girlfriend off at church for Easter services and was heading back to Brighton when some jerk from New Hampshire plowed through a red light at Charlesgate and ran right into the front of my beloved Chevy Nova.
Mats Tolander seems to be making a hobby of photographing the aftermath of accidents at Char
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