CAMBRIDGE — For a decade, the underside of the Longfellow Bridge on this end of the Charles River has been home to one of the city’s strangest, and most beloved, DIY landmarks.
In this otherwise drab concrete overhang along Memorial Drive, passersby could find scores of gleaming trophies, topped with tiny statuettes of soccer players, bowlers, ice skaters, and countless other athletes, some of them many decades old. A row of medals tied up side by side — 5k pendants, academic decathlon medallions, you name it — jingled in the breeze like wind chimes.
Joggers doing laps, or MIT lecturers out for a stroll, were intrigued by the oddball sight as they stumbled across the display. Others, lured by listings on Google Maps, and write-ups in Atlas Obscura (as well as in this newspaper) made pilgrimages. Some even opted to part with their own childhood trophies by anonymously adding them to the collection.
Now, suddenly, they’re just about all gone.
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At some point this spring, they vanished without warning. And no one seems to know where they went.
“It was pretty much licked clean,” said the man who originally put them there, a Cambridge lawyer in his 50s who goes by Trophy Guy on Instagram and wants to remain anonymous. The collection included “some that had to be a good 15 feet up that were [difficult] to get up there.”
That means the person, or people, who moved nearly every last scrap of the art project must have been really motivated to see it disappear.
Who would do such a thing? That’s what he wants to know.
This isn’t the first time the trophies have been removed from their perch: State officials removed the first batch of them in 2016, during the massive rehabilitation of the bridge. The Trophy Guy started replacing them a few years later, and the collection had been growing ever since.
But a MassDOT spokesperson said the agency did not move them this time, and has not been doing any maintenance on the bridge in recent weeks that would require moving them.
The Department of Conservation and Recreation, which maintains the property along the riverfront, said it didn’t remove them either, but did offer an approximate timeline for the disappearance: A spokesperson said its operations team noticed the trophies were missing about a month ago.
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Other might-be trophy-swipers said: Not us!
A spokesperson for the city of Cambridge asked various department heads — including Cambridge Police and the Department of Public Works. All denied responsibility.
Maybe the MBTA had something to do with it? The T has been on a tear doing upgrades and track work this year, and Red Line trains rattle across the bridge every few minutes. But a T spokesperson said it wasn’t the agency’s handiwork, either.
The same goes for the Transit Police, whose officers patrol T properties. The state police, which has jurisdiction over Memorial Drive, said it wasn’t them, either.
There were no leads at MIT, where a spokesperson said no one had heard anything about scores of medals being removed steps from their campus.
The Charles River Watershed Association, a nonprofit that advocates for the river and works to rid it of nuisances like litter, was also puzzled.
It’s a true whodunnit.
It’s also kind of a bummer, said the display’s anonymous creator. He prefers to keep his identity secret to add to the mystique of the project and avoid any trouble.
Still, the lawyer said he’s thrilled his offbeat effort had such staying power and has been appreciated by so many.
“I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did, frankly,” he said.
In the years since his project was a smash hit, he has taken it around the world, setting up trophy displays in China, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and many other locales while traveling for work.
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In that time, the original collection under the bridge in Cambridge expanded with help from strangers.
The trophy collection was never exactly permanent, nor immune from theft. Many have gone missing over the years, but have usually been replaced promptly with new ones, once people came by to contribute replacements. By this spring, he said, only a third of the trophies were ones he’d personally placed there.
The trophies had a habit of falling off their perches due to all the vibrations from passing traffic, and many had been badly damaged when they plummeted to the ground. As part of his curation of the site, he has lovingly collected and repaired much of the “trophy carnage” he finds there, sometimes replacing the statuettes that sit atop the pedestals with items like Mr. Potato Head toys and plastic dinosaurs.
There are still plenty more: He said he has boxes upon boxes of trophies in storage at his house, just waiting for a new home.
In the meantime, the Trophy Room is already growing again, if very slowly. On a visit last week, just a handful of trophies could be found squirreled away in nooks and crannies under the bridge. It wasn’t clear if those had been left behind in the mysterious purge weeks earlier, or whether they were new additions. But by this week, new ones had appeared, including a pair of road-race medals swinging in the breeze, one of which had a large colorful medallion reading “CURE.” (Trophy Guy says he hasn’t added anything himself in months.)
If, for whatever reason, the Trophy Room is simply no longer welcome in its original spot under this particular bridge, he said, he may move the project to a new location, and has already scoped out some potential areas.
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Or if a museum is interested in putting them on display, he said, he would consider parting with his collection entirely.
But no matter what happens, there are still the nagging questions: Why would someone do this?
And where did they go?
Have any leads on where the famed Trophy Room trophies might have gone? Readers of the Camberville & Beyond newsletter have a decent track record of cracking mysteries like these. If you have a tip, or if you pilfered the trophies and want to come clean, or if your roommate is suddenly displaying lots of awards you’re sure they did not earn, please drop us a line: [email protected].
Spencer Buell can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @SpencerBuell.