Harvard - Allston Campus

Saw a couple of small earth movers at the corner of the science site next to the police building, but I figured they were being used for snow removal. Great news that they have started.
The update page has Turner Construction being responsible for the old Charlesview. Once its demolished, my guess it will be used for construction staging for the science complex and the Samuels project. Harvard also intends to tear down the red brick Boston book depository building on the north side of Western Ave., near the Charlesview.
 
Excellent, thanks! I don't know why the BRA doesn't list that on the project's main page. Guess I still have some things to learn with their new website.
 
Excellent, thanks! I don't know why the BRA doesn't list that on the project's main page. Guess I still have some things to learn with their new website.

You have to click the all documents link, and then navigate through two pages of memos in addition to the good stuff. Why it doesn't let you sort by "document type" is beyond comprehension.
 
Demolition on old Charlesview apartments should commence by late summer. Environmental testing in the area until then.
 
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Beeline, where is this exactly? Is this to the west of the Samuels project at Barry's Corner, and east of Smith Field?
 
^ This is east of Barrys Corner across the street from the iH building. Gate into the sit is on Windom St. I shot the photo from the NE corner on Western Ave. Hope that helps. A sign on the fence states it's 100 Western Ave.
 
^ This is east of Barrys Corner across the street from the iH building. Gate into the sit is on Windom St. I shot the photo from the NE corner on Western Ave. Hope that helps. A sign on the fence states it's 100 Western Ave.
Beeline, thanks. That's just to the west of the site on Western Ave which is to be the location of a hotel/conference center.

The only thing I can think of is vent pipes to help remediate contaminated soil.
 
Yes, west of the hotel site. Same side of the street. Nothing going on there.
At the 100 Western site they were pouring cement on the SW corner that day. In the photo you can see they are poking up though a very large and growing slab of cement. (Capping the site??).
 
Looks like a bunch of turkeys wandered onto a construction site
 
harvard.jpg



Harvard’s planned enterprise research campus, on 36 acres off Western Avenue, would seek to attract life sciences, Internet and Big Data startups, and nonprofits.

The site will be surrounded by Harvard’s engineering and applied science building, its business school, and Genzyme’s biotech drug manufacturing plant.

Globe article on Harvard turning this part of its Allston land-holdings into non-institutional buildings and activities.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business...al-research/Mg6tM9KHDzXKSUrIalQZwJ/story.html
 

100 Western Ave
Not sure what's going on, but it's either very impressive or very scary. One thing for sure it's got to be very expensive.


https://www.flickr.com/photos/beelinebos/16093195477/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/beelinebos/15656633724/


Freezing the ground

This was used for the ground under the tracks behind South Station to allow the Big Dig to excavate the old loose fill and then jack a pre-constructed concrete box section of the I-90 Fort Point tunnel






Public Roads
July/Aug 2001
Vol. 65 · No. 1


Learning From the Big Dig
by Daniel C. Wood

Tunnel Jacking

Problem: Construct an underground roadway without disrupting traffic on nine active railroad tracks - including commuter tracks that carry 150,000 people into and out of Boston every workday - right above the roadway.

Solution: Construct the tunnel adjacent to where you want it to go and shove it into place using a technique known as tunnel jacking....

To carry out the tunnel-jacking operation, three concrete jacking pits were dug alongside I-90 just east of I-93. Tunnel boxes 24 meters (80 feet) wide and 12 meters (40 feet) high were built inside the pits. The plan was to break the head ends of the concrete pits and push the tunnel boxes into place with massive hydraulic jacks.

But the Big Dig tunnel-jacking operation, the largest such operation ever attempted, faced a special problem - the poor quality of the soil. Pushing the tunnel boxes into place without stabilizing the soil could cause the railroad tracks to settle, threatening train service. The solution was to freeze the soil ahead of the tunnel boxes, using hundreds of steel pipes that were driven into the ground between the tracks. A brine mixture that stayed liquid below 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) was pumped into plastic pipes within the steel pipes by a freezing plant located near the railroad tracks. The brine was circulated back to the freezing plant and returned to the pipes again; the circulated brine over a period of several weeks froze the ground outward from the pipes.

The freezing allowed the ground to be excavated without settling. (It also caused the ground to expand, but allowances had already been made for this movement, and the track operations were unaffected.) The frozen soil ahead of the tunnel box was excavated by a machine called a road header. The soil was chewed up by the machine's rotating grinder, removed out of the back of the tunnel box, and carried to the surface by a crane. The tunnel boxes were then pushed into place by two sets of hydraulic jacks.
 

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