A fed-up populace and an awakened government stopped a scythe of highways from slicing through much of Boston, but it was too late for the elevated Central Artery, built from 1951 to 1959. It took another few decades, but some of the same visionaries who turned away from the madness of urban highways — inspired by Jane Jacobs and her defeat of Robert Moses’ Lower Manhattan Expressway — also pioneered the logical next step: reinventing and dismantling the disruptive downtown highways that were built.
The $16 billion Big Dig carries all kinds of baggage these days, from cost overruns to design flaws and the continuing need to replace key components, such as lighting. The project’s heart was in the right place, however. The Rose F. Kennedy Greenway now graces the corridor. Some in current generations have no idea the other Green Monster was ever there.
It was an audacious vision from the start, but prescient: the rest of the nation is only now catching up. Tearing down urban freeways has become a standard part of the urban planning playbook for American cities, from Milwaukee (Park West) to New Orleans (Claiborne Expressway), and from New York City (Sheridan Expressway) to Seattle (Alaskan Way Viaduct).
In most locations, the Big Dig model is far too expensive. New York City tried something similar with Westway — and, indeed, Boston effectively grabbed some federal funding for that project once New York gave up on submerging its highway. So in recent years, cities have been engaged in a sort of Big Dig without the Big Dig: converting elevated freeways and long off-ramps and connectors to multimodal, pedestrian- and bike-friendly urban boulevards.
The honor of the very first execution of such a project goes to Portland, Oregon, where Governor Tom McCall turned Harbor Drive into Waterfront Park beginning in 1974. The 1989 earthquake in San Francisco precipitated the glorious Embarcadero. Seattle has been immersed in a long and arduous debate about the looming and similarly earthquake-prone Alaskan Way Viaduct. Yet the idea of getting rid of an urban-renewal-era freeway and replacing it with a boulevard is no longer outrageous.
It is almost with some pity, like the older brother who has already been through high school, that Bostonians read news that Philadelphia is just now probing a similar transformation of I-95 along that city’s waterfront. Been there, done that — and we’re sorry, sort of, that we took all the money. What can we say: We were early adopters in correcting the mistakes of the past.
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