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Crossing the tracks Railroads and railways have long defined Northeastern. For most of the years since the YMCA moved to Huntington Avenue in 1913, the tracks now traveled by the E Line trolley have brought the city to the university's door, while the train tracks on the other side of the campus have formed a barrier. Two intercity passenger railroads-the Boston and Providence and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford-once ran along the southeastern edge of N.U., along with the freight lines that leased their tracks. And as this aerial photo from 1954 illustrates, the sites of several current university buildings were formerly occupied by sidings, freight sheds, and a roundhouse belonging to the railroads. Once Boston's Southwest Corridor redevelopment, completed in 1987, brought the Orange Line from its former route along Washington Street to the university's back door, N.U. began crossing the tracks that had hitherto sealed it off from lower Roxbury. Today, six-story Columbus Place (home to Northeastern University Magazine) is only one of several existing or planned structures physically knitting the school into new surroundings. Ruggles Station, a stop on the commuter rail as well as on the Orange Line, feeds directly into N.U.'s Centennial Common. Despite the twenty-foot-high concrete barriers flanking its now depressed tracks, the Orange Line has become what the Green Line has always been for Northeastern: a pathway instead of a boundary.