the Pervert Bridge

At my college Reunion, it doesn’t matter which one,  we were reminiscing about 100 Beacon Street, which was ours, and the main dorm at Emerson College in Boston.  It was a colorful place to live – with a great view of the Charles River.  There were two pay phones – which we all had to use to receive and make phone calls – (obviously there were no cell phones), and none of us had enough money to make long distance calls home. That is until we learned to hot wire the phones. This enabled us to call home and spend about two minutes to fill our parents in on whatever we had done.  

It was a very different time.  Parents did not need to be in touch with their children every minute of every day.  In fact, when we called home for just a few brief minutes, our parents did not need any updating, they were simply happy to know we were alive.   And they pretty much assumed we’d make it another week till we called again.

In addition to making a few phone calls, we received endless calls from perverts. Perverts provided us with endless hours of entertainment.  When they called the dorm, we played a game called “get the pervert to hang up first.” You can only imagine a bevy of 18 and 19 year old girls, on the phone in the hall, grossing out the pervert of the day.  We had many laughs figuring out what would gross out a pervert. (I will not get into detail about what was said, but when I think about it now, I can’t do so without blushing.)

Back to the college Reunion.  We stayed in a hotel that had a big map of Back Bay in the lower lobby. And at some point we started to talk about things that happened at the dorm. One of the things we loved was when the house mother (Agnes) would get on the intercom and say,  “Under no circumstances should anyone in the dorm, (which was all girls), go to the back of the dorm and look out the windows.”  Of course, everyone in the dorm would immediately race to the back rooms to see what we knew didn’t want us to see – the.... 

Pervert on the bridge over the esplanade, with his fly open and his shlong hanging out. 

So, there we were in front of the lower level map and I realized that there was nothing on the map about what we called, the Pervert Bridge.  With Pen in hand, I remedied the absence of that important location. Afterall, some people thought about the location as where the Boston Pops played, and the local residents could think of nothing other than the perverts.

Here it is years later. 100 Beacon Street is an upscale condo, and there is no one who lives in that historic building who will remember the college lore about the bridge. Nothing remains the same. A close friend of mine, who lives in Omaha, has an uncle who lives in the top two floors of 100 Beacon, and they didn’t even know it had once been a college dormitory.  So, mostly, only the memories of just a few former college students remain. But, if you want to visit the Pervert Bridge, go to the rear of 100 Beacon Street, facing the Charles. And if you’re still not sure, visit the former Hyatt on Washington Street, and look at the map.  We’re just sayin’... Iris