21 | Harvard Bridge — Counting Smoots Toward a Double Life

Ben Campbell crosses this bridge on a bicycle, still an ordinary MIT senior with a tuition problem and a folder of Robinson Scholarship hopes. Massachusetts Avenue lifts off Back Bay, runs 2,164 feet over the Charles, and lands in Cambridge at the doorstep of the school the film could never actually enter — MIT refused the production access to its campus, so the bridge and the river became the closest thing to the real place on screen.

Walk it and you find the joke that MIT students have maintained since 1958. The sidewalk is marked off in smoots, a unit equal to the height of fraternity pledge Oliver Smoot, who was rolled end over end across the span one October night. The bridge measures 364.4 smoots plus one ear. The paint gets refreshed every year by a new class; police reportedly like the markings because they make it easy to report an incident's location.

Come at dusk, when the sailboats are being pulled in and the Boston skyline switches on behind you. Stand at the 70-smoot mark, look east toward the dome, and the film's central bargain — a good student deciding what his brain is worth in cash — feels exactly as close and as far as that opposite bank.