This week Boston suffered through a series of terrible tragedies. With the city in the state that it was, it proved difficult to find a suitable time to perform a site visit. My original intention was to visit the Bulfinch Triangle on Marathon Monday since we had no classes and it was a pleasant day to walk around Boston. However, when I was on my way to the site, two explosions went off no more than a mile away from where I was standing. This caused a lot of commotion, and no one seemed to really know what was going on at the time. It was only when we saw the news at a nearby fast food restaurant that we realized the danger we were in. Since the police were reporting finding additional undetonated devices around the area, I decided it was best to head back to the safety of MIT and visit my site at a later time.
I was able to make my way to the Triangle after classes on Thursday. My goal was to revisit the traces and artifacts I noticed during my visit for Assignment 1, as well as find new traces with the knowledge I gained from Assignments 2 and 3. After walking through my site, I realized that I was mostly finding evidence of layers. This helped me formulate a topic for my paper. As I discussed in Assignment 3, the Bulfinch Triangle has always changed drastically in response to changes in transportation. It is my intention to determine whether or not the layers I found are a direct result of those changes. Ideally, these layers would reflect the different periods in the Triangle’s history when different modes of transportation were dominant.
Unfortunately, I was not able to immediately analyze the pictures I took since later that day, tragedy struck once more when an MIT police officer was shot and killed on campus by the marathon bombers. This sparked the large scale manhunt that has frozen the city of Boston for the past 24 hours. Due to these events, it has been very difficult to concentrate on work for the past few days. However, I am relieved to say that the suspect has finally been captured, and am hoping that life on campus can soon return to normal.