BOSTON -- It's named after a famous 19th century poet, its style is reminiscent of any well-known European structure and it's on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Bridge Showing Its Age

Nearly 100 years after completion, it's now ready for some much-needed repairs.

Gov. Mitt Romney announced that the Longfellow Bridge, spanning the Charles River from Boston to Cambridge, would be getting $70 million worth of repairs. The bridge, which carries about 50,000 vehicles per day and the MBTA's Red Line trains, has been suffering from disrepair, including deteriorating steel beams, crumbling sidewalks and railings, and cracking in its decorative towers.

The bridge was first commissioned in 1898 as a replacement for the West End Bridge, according to the Boston Preservation Alliance. The 2,100-foot bridge was designed by Edmund March Wheelwright who emulated the finest European architecture, such as London's Southwark Bridge and bridges featured at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Wheelwright also designed buildings such as the Brighton Police Station, Taft Middle School in Brighton and Boston's Fire Department Headquarters, now the Pine Street Inn, on Bristol Street. In 1909, Wheelwright, with funding from William Randolph Hearst, founded Harvard's humor magazine, Lampoon, and later went on to design the Castle, which housed the Lampoon's offices.

In 1907, the bridge was completed for a cost of $2.5 million and in 1927 was renamed for the poet Longfellow, who had walked across the bridge daily from Cambridge to Beacon Hill.

Romney said the Longfellow Bridge project will allow it to remain open during construction and would be overseen by the state highway department and the Metropolitan District Commission, which would be eliminated under Romney's budget proposal and replaced by the Division of Conservation and Recreation.

A 1988 study of the bridge estimated restoration costs at $25 million, a figure that did not include the estimated $10 million necessary to complete other analyses and improvements.