Alewife
4:51 am May 25th, 2008When I first moved to Boston I decided that before I move away I want to visit every train station on the T — my rules are that I have to get on or off the T at the station as well as explore the immediate surrounding area.
This week I made my first deliberate visit to a T stop I hadn’t been to, though in a somewhat anticlimactic way — Alewife is one of the closest T stops to my apartment, just in terms of distance, but I’d never taken the T there because there’s no bus from my house to there and biking to Harvard (which is close to the same distance) is usually a lot faster overall given the extra time I’d spend on the T.
On Friday, I decided to get to Harvard by biking to Alewife and taking the T from there. Alewife is the last stop on the red line and boasts a large parking garage where commuters from the northwest suburbs leave their cars while taking the train into the city; I was pleasantly surprised to note that they also have huge bike racks, which were totally full in the middle of the day. I took the T back around rush hour, and watched a lot of people get out to go to their cars and bikes — the people in cars probably live in places like Arlington or Lexington, but since Alewife is kind of in the middle of nowhere I’m curious where all those bikers come from.
6 Comments to “Alewife”
Mr Punch says:
May 25th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Alewife appears to be in the middle of nowhere because it’s surrounded by highways, but it’s actually very close to a heavily populated are of North Cambridge.
ataralas says:
May 25th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Also, the Minuteman bike path heads out of Alewife to Arlington and Lexington, and LOTS of people come in from there on bikes.
limeduck says:
May 25th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Good for you, Clara. I think this is a very worthwhile project and look forward to future posts. Good luck!
Clara says:
May 26th, 2008 at 1:59 am
Interesting! I rarely think about those areas, even though they’re so close to where I live.
Matt says:
May 27th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I work in Cambridge but live on the North Shore and sometimes I drive to Alewife and then take the Red Line in (When the Orange and Blue lines are under construction, which is almost always lol) and I see all sorts of people on bikes riding down rt.16 in that general direction.
For the rest of your stops I would avoid the Blue line in Revere/East Boston at the moment as there is alot of construction at Maverick and some of the other stations right now. If you save that part of the subway system for last maybe they will have patched everything up by then.
Bree says:
June 2nd, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I did this when I first moved to boston, and now I know the city better than most long time residents. I started taking bus lines after that … this come in handy when the Red or Green line breaks down and shuttle services are rat packed.
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