Guerrilla Engineering: The Headwaters of the Muddy River

The holidays are always a tough time for the Guerrilla Engineer; the cold and the darkness seem to take hold of me. A foul mood sets in and I could give the Grinch a good run for his money. December of 2011 was, however, remarkably good in the grand scheme of the Guerrilla Engineering Movement (GEM). Ambitiously, I had wanted to complete a post a week. Alas, after the December 16^th post, other endeavors impeded my progress. Yet, I am reminded that quality trumps quantity, so I am able to find some comfort.

The pump station as it looked in 1888

I suppose that this old adage strikes at the heart of my troubles with the holidays. I find that the span from Thanksgiving to the New Year is primarily a season of quantity. Fortunately, the events of the past several weeks were not entirely without merit and some were even mildly lucrative.

As mentioned in the December 16^th post, I have been substitute teaching at the Community Charter School of Cambridge (CCSC). As faculty fell ill or needed extra time for last minute shopping I was able to work a few days and help keep the GEM from slipping entirely into the red. I even engineered a couple of holiday parties, filling in as the door man for a local caterer, Ariadne Clifton.

The pump station as is looks today

Others pursuits were not necessarily a monetary gain, but a gain nonetheless. I am now a trained Tour Facilitator at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, located in the old pump house by the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Cleveland Circle. In fact, I will be guiding tours every Friday this month, so stop by between 1:30 and 4:00 in the afternoon for a glimpse of the Guerrilla Engineer in action.

Additionally, Opus Films produced their first film starring the Guerrilla Engineer “walking” up the now culverted Goldsmith Brook. As of right now, due to the length of the film I am not sure how to post it, but stay tuned…

I have decided to dedicate this post to the early days of the Movement. Between testing samples taken from the Muddy River in school, and the good fortune of dwelling in proximity to where the river first emerges, a culvert running beneath Perkins Street at the northern end of Jamaica Pond, this is where I started my work.

In early October of 2011, I visited the headwaters of the Muddy, as I had many times before, and found them choked with leaves, branches, and garbage. I walked into town, purchased a garden rake at Yumont Hardware on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain and went to work. I visited the site over the course of several days taking notes and measurements. I did not have a camera in the early days and so the scribblings in my notebook are the only documentation of my efforts (the photos posted here were taken with an old digital point and shoot which I had borrowed from my sister).

I set off, walking downstream in an attempt to document the condition of the river and the immediate watershed, Boston’s Emerald Necklace. By the time I had reached the foot of Leverett Pond and the glorious culvert which brings the Muddy River beneath Route 9 (Huntington Avenue), the Guerrilla Engineering Movement had been born.

(A number of photo collections were posted on Facebook, so please forgive me if you have been following the GEM since then and this is all redundant.)

After a number of long walks and bike rides along the Muddy River, and many hours crawling through the woods between the Jamaicaway in Boston and Pond Street in Brookline, I returned to the Perkins Street culvert to find all of my work undone.

Back in October, after I first cleared the detritus from the waterway, I had taken many of the longer more substantial branches and wove a sort of fence between the trees along the steep banks in hopes that many of the leaves, smaller sticks and trash would be caught before it entered the water. Many of these very same branches had been dis-assembled and used to create a new series of dams. Whoever decided this would be a good thing to do must have spent a great deal of time out there and the dams which they built would make any beaver blush with envy.

On the 29^th of November, I returned to what I have begun to refer to as “my culvert” and began clearing the flow again…

Notice how wide the flow is and the stagnant water pooling to the right of the bridge.

Again, notice how dispersed the flow is and the water level behind the large dam at the manhole.

A closer look.

There is a broken clay pipe hiding in the upper left corner. This pipe discharges stormwater directly from a catch basin at the corner of of Perkins and Pond Streets and has resulted in the massive erosion. Due to the stick dam the Muddy has filled the hole and is flowing on both sides of the manhole.