William Dawes’s horse is rolling over in its horse-grave

About two hundred yards up the street from the construction quagmire I mentioned last week (which was miraculously completed the day after I posted about it; hmm…) is a short sidewalk span that acts mostly as a traffic island and bus stop. If you look closely there are brass horseshoes set into the concrete, along with a plaque identifying it as the spot where William Dawes began his midnight ride in 1775 to warn the colonists of the encroaching Regulars.

(Never mind that he was caught, and so was Paul Revere. You know who of the three midnight riders wasn't caught? Dr. Samuel Prescott. Christ, the spot where Dawes and Revere were captured is conspicuously marked in Lexington, so it should be common knowledge that they didn't make it. Now I'm not saying those two aren't great patriots, I'm just wondering: where's Prescott's song? He deserves the shaft simply because Revere's name better completes the couplet "Listen my children and you shall hear/of the midnight ride of…"? Where is the love? Can I play a race card?)

Sorry about that. Anyway, a few months back the People's Republic decided to re-pave the roads that surround the park. This meant all the sidewalk ramps would have to be ripped out, with temporary ones put into place until the roads were finished. Fine. Well, it'd be fine if it were anywhere other than Cambridge. These are some serious bastards we're talking about.

A couple months later everything is finished. Everything except for the Dawes spot, that is. It can't be more than fifty paces long, and it's nestled very nicely into one of the more dangerous (for pedestrians) intersections in the area—and that's saying a lot because Harvard Square is a major, major clusterfuck. So it's still got these two temporary ramps at each end. I'm not too inconvenienced by this other than the ugly factor, but every day I see people struggling up and down these steep, narrow chutes with strollers and suitcases. God forbid someone is in a wheelchair—I honestly don't think it'd even be navigable.

I mention Dawes because I think his horseshoes are holding everything up. One morning a month or so ago a couple of construction guys were cutting around the brass, so I realized "Hey, I get it! They're going to redo the whole sidewalk and re-set them in the new concrete. That actually makes sense! I have faith in municipal government!" There are like two dozen horseshoes altogether (plus the plaque) and they were in the process of cutting out number four, so I'm thinking "They might actually finish this before lunch!"

Someone must have snuck some strong hash into my morning tea, because in retrospect those were totally unreasonable expectations. Coming home later in the day I saw that the horseshoes were still there. All of them. Not only that, but they must have taken a break while cutting out the fifth one and didn't come back—it's been cut halfway around and no more. The last bunch were never touched. It's like the foreman called an audible: "Stop what you're doing, we need you in Central Square painting more bicycle lanes, stat!"

Just another amazing/typical example of the city's lunatic inefficiency. I'm sure this post interests no one but it feels good to get it down, so I can objectively read it and confirm that I am not crazy. By the way, I like the Pats over the Steelers tomorrow, 27–13.