The Big Dig

From the beginning I was a big fan of the Big Dig. I did not grow up in Boston, but both sets of my grandparents lived in the area, so I visited frequently. In 1959, when I was fifteen and just beginning to imagine driving a car, the elevated highway that would serve for the next forty-plus years as the city's central artery for automobile traffic was completed. Even as a passenger I could see that the Southeast Expressway was ugly and noisy. When I started driving I learned that it was also crowded and dangerous. I thought of it as the Berlin Wall of Boston, an ugly barrier between downtown and the waterfront, dividing an otherwise inviting city.

The expressway seemed part of an inevitable and inexorable process. In the 1960s, six lanes and two off ramps of the Massachusetts Turnpike tore apart Newton Corner, where my grandparents lived. The village has never recovered. But as it turned out, the Mass Pike extension into Boston was one of the last big road-building projects of the postwar boom. After the late 1960s, that kind of urban destruction was rarely politically possible.

When my husband and I moved to the Boston area in 1975, we bought a house in Newton Corner. We still live there, on a leafy residential street that was truncated by the Mass Pike extension. In the 1980s a sound barrier was constructed at the end of the street. It helped us forget how close the turnpike was, and we enjoyed the convenience of being able to get into Cambridge and Boston so quickly.

Also in the 1980s we began to read about plans to demolish the Southeast Expressway, relocate the central traffic artery underground, and build a new tunnel to Logan Airport that would relieve congestion in the grimy Callahan and Sumner tunnels, with their ominously missing tiles and frequent traffic jams. I liked the thought of whizzing directly from the Pike to the airport, but the really appealing idea was the demolition—the prospect of taking down the elevated roadway and reuniting the city. Tom Hughes has called the Big Dig a triumph of postmodern engineering over modernist hubris. To me it seemed like reverse engineering in the best sense: correcting a grievous error. Maybe Newton Corner was gone forever, but downtown Boston could be rescued.

My children grew up along with Boston's new downtown road system. By the time construction became a prominent fact of daily life, in the mid-1990s, my husband and I had a daughter in high school, a son in middle school, and another son in elementary school. As we drove to the museums in South Boston we passed through the construction zone for the tunnel that would extend from Logan Airport under the waters of Boston harbor to the mainland. We began to make the drive into Boston on the Mass Pike to the airport more regularly in 1994, when our daughter left home to attend college in California. The tunnel to the airport, now named the Ted Williams Tunnel, opened at the end of 1995, but it did us no good: there was no way to get to it from the Pike because the connector tunnel was not yet completed, so we still took the Pike to the Southeast Expressway to the Callahan Tunnel to the airport. We allowed a half hour in light traffic and at least double that around rush hour.

Our daughter's departure for college marked the beginning of eight years of airport runs—four for her and four for our middle child, who went to the University of Wisconsin. These were the years when the road tunnel beneath Boston was being built, the Southeast Expressway was being prepared for demolition, and the connector tunnel was being constructed. Each time I made one of these airport runs it was a new adventure. Between an arrival one week and a departure the next, the route might change completely. New lanes would appear overnight, complete with new markings and signage. You had to be vigilant, but if you paid attention you could get where...