Harvard Bridge (Boston, Massachusetts)

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Sometimes referred to as the "Mass. Ave Bridge".
Famous bridge between Cambridge and Boston over the Charles River.
Length measured in "Smoots", one smoot being the length of a fellow named "Smoot" who was rolled over and over along the length of the bridge, as a fraternity hazing exercise. It is 364.4 smoots plus or minus one ear long. Very ugly and thus not named for MIT.

The traditional tale at MIT is that the city of Cambridge had a sort of competition between MIT and Harvard for the name of the bridge, where each school was supposed to present a speech in favor of a name for the bridge, and the winner was expected to contribute to funding the bridge. Harvard went ahead with this idea, but at MIT, an engineer studied the bridge's design and determined it was unsound. Consequently, MIT let Harvard have its bridge. In the 1980s, the bridge was finally determined by the city to be unsound, and the entire superstructure had to be replaced at great cost to the city.

Alas, in truth, the bridge was built before MIT had moved to Cambridge. Nonetheless, MIT students have fought to rename it the Technology Bridge for years (as is evidenced by articles in the Tech from the '20s through the '80s), but the City of Cambridge refused despite a number of interesting hacks in MIT's favor, and despite Harvard's willingness (a 1921 Harvard Crimson article says that "Harvard heartily approves, and cedes its name-claim with good will").