Building Route 128 in Wakefield and Reading
Before we get to the photos, wanted to alert you
to a new page
on the efforts to improve one of the worst highway
interchanges in America, the infamous Route
128/93 interchange.
According to the Reading Historical
Commission’s book on their town,
At Wood’s End, for twenty years beginning
in 1898 the Quannapowitt
Agricultural Association held a fair near
the Wakefield town line,
on a 19-acre site just off Salem
Street. One of the highlight’s of the
fair were the horse races, held on an oval
track that straddled
the neighboring towns of Reading and
Wakefield.
In the early 1920s, a developer
advertised a new housing
development that planned to create on the
site of the old
fairgrounds. Precisely over the
location of the oval race
track would be a road named, appropriately
enough,
Track Road. According to At Wood
End, ten years later
only a third of the 100 lots were sold,
and eventually
the Wakefield half the development (which
runs along
the center of Track Road) would be razed,
anyway, to
make way for Route 128 near the Route 129
interchange.
Lowell Street looking northwest from
Quannapowitt in the winter of 1950,
just before the construction of Route 128
through Wakefield. (Courtesy of the
Wakefield Item)
A view of the future site of Route 128 as
we look north on North Main
Street to Bay State Road in Wakefield,
just before construction began that
would change this view forever. (Courtesy
of the Wakefield Item)
Shortly after the completion of Route 128
in Wakefield in 1951,
this photo was taken looking up North
Avenue towards the highway
overpass. Quannaopowitt Road can be
seen merging from the right.
(Courtesy of the Wakefield Item)
"Dub" Englund drives his tractor on the
family's Reading farm, which would eventually be taken
for an interchange between Route 128 and Main Street
(Route 28) in Reading.
Across from the Englund farm was King's
Vegetable stand on Main Street
(Route 28). It would be taken, as
well, for the construction of Route 128.