Riding Dead Cows Down The Charles River (A True Story)

In the mid-1980's, I lived in a section of Cambridge, Massachusetts known as Cambridgeport.  I was paying around $350 a month for a one-bedroom apartment within walking distance of Harvard Square and Central Square.  My apartment was near Magazine Street, whose southern terminus was Magazine Beach Park.

At one time, Magazine Beach had been an actual beach, with sand, swimming, water sports and other aquatic activities.  But in 1949, the state of Massachusetts enacted a prohibition on swimming in that part of the Charles River because of concerns over pollution.  So by the time I lived there, Magazine Beach was a park with trees, grass, picnic tables and softball fields.  The dominant structure at Magazine Beach is the Magazine, a low brick building that had been built in 1818 as a storage facility for gunpowder and ammunition.  In 1899, it was converted to a bath house.

In the early years of the Republic, there was apparently a fear that some foreign army (perhaps those pesky Hessians) may try to invade the new country by sailing inland along its rivers, marauding and plundering in their figurative and literal wake.  So magazines filled with ammunition would allow musketeers to readily defend against such enemies from strategic vantage points.  Communal magazines to store gunpowder were also in the best interest of public safety.  By mandating that townspeople keep their gunpowder in communal structures, it reduced the risk that they would accidentally blow themselves up in their homes by cooking food or lighting a pipe too close to their personal supply of gunpowder.

Magazine Beach sat on land originally known as Captain's Island, a spot of high land that became an island at high tide.  A historical timeline of the Magazine, Magazine Beach and the surrounding area can be found at the Magazine Beach website.  That website includes a link to a Historic Structure Report about the Magazine (or access the report directly here) with lots of interesting old photos and drawings.  And there is a fascinating in-depth history of Magazine Beach called "History on the Charles: The Story of Captain's Island and its Powder Magazine" by Nina S. Cohen and Marilyn Wellons.  Read it here.  (The late-19th century redesign of Magazine Beach--including renovations turning the Magazine into a bath house--were based on plans created by the Olmsted brothers, sons of noted architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose voluminous body of landscape design work included New York's Central Park.)

Anyway, in the mid-1980's, I was working at a department store in nearby Watertown.  My store was located in the Arsenal Mall, which (before being converted to a mall) had its own rich history as an arsenal going back to 1816.  One of the women I worked with at the time had actually worked at the Watertown Arsenal during World War II.  Another of my co-workers was a guy named Bill, a part-time maintenance man at the store.  Bill's full-time job was as a custodian for the Boston Public School System, and he was fond of telling people that he had the fourth highest seniority out of all the BPS custodians.  Presumably that meant something in terms of salary, vacation and other benefits.  One day I was chatting with Bill in our store's break room, and when I told him I lived in Cambridge near Magazine Beach, he told me that when he was a kid (which I guessed to be in the late 1930's or early 1940's), he and his friends would spend their summers hanging out at Magazine Beach.  I guess it was a pretty cool place to hang out, even though the Ramones never wrote a song about it ("It's not hard, not far to reach/We can hitch a ride to Magazine Beach.").  In those days, Bill told me, both sides of the Charles River were still dotted with stockyards and slaughterhouses, a one-time burgeoning industry in the area.  And every now and then, he said, a cow carcass would slip into the river from one of the stockyards and get carried downstream by the current.  On more than one occasion, a dead cow would come floating by Magazine Beach while Bill and his friends were there.  And when they saw a cow carcass drifting by, Bill and his friends would swim out to it, grab onto one of its hooves, hoist themselves onto its body and try to stay atop it for as long as possible.  Riding dead cows down the Charles River, he called it.

I haven't seen Bill in close to 30 years, and if he's still with us (and I certainly hope he is) he would probably be in his late 80's, or perhaps even his 90's.  But as long as I live, I'll never forget Bill's story about riding dead cows down the Charles River.