Cutting the Ribon, Closing the Loop

In 1954, when the first section of the original Central Artery, from Causeway to High Street, was completed, Bostonians faced some depressing facts about their much-touted, futuristic, “highway in the sky.”  For one thing, it was an ugly mile-long swath of steel and concrete whose design was utterly bereft of any aesthetic effort.  It had also created a one hundred foot-wide barrier between the city and the waterfront, with the shadowy land beneath it good only for parking lots and muggings.  Ripping through the North End its construction had taken hundreds of homes and businesses, with more slated for demolition before emerging from the city south of Kneeland Street.  It was, as former Mayor Kevin White described it, as though someone had driven a stake through the heart of the city.

The highway was inadequate almost from the day it opened.  Designed for 75,000 vehicles a day it was, due to limited state funds, built without a breakdown lane.  What were the odds that, at least once a day, one of those 75,000 vehicles was going to breakdown?  Commuters quickly found out the answer was often.  Furthermore, since the road’s purpose was to bring shoppers to the downtown, it had 27 on- and off-ramps that, due to weaving between entering and exiting vehicles, created serious backups.  And in the ensuing decades things got even worse as even more vehicles inched their way along a now deteriorating and dangerous eyesore.

Like many people who lived or worked in the city, Fred Salvucci had to live with the artery’s aesthetic, environmental, safety, and capacity deficiencies.  But Fred… well, Fred was different.  He had a wild idea, one that would simultaneously fix all the artery’s problems.  And so, as a member Kevin White’s staff in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Salvucci began assessing the landscape – both political and physical – for an bold plan to put the Central Artery underground.

Back then, even members of his own party found the concept – and the cost – hard to swallow.  Barney Frank, a state representative at the time, questioned the $300 million cost of the original proposal (which was to sink the artery between Summer and Causeway streets into what the engineers call a “boat” section - basically a depressed roadway without a roof, like the current Massachusetts Turnpike extension in Boston) by asking “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to raise the city?”

By 1975, when he was appointed as newly-elected governor Mike Dukakis’s Secretary of Transportation, Salvucci’s idea had grown even more audacious.  The new artery would be an eight- to ten-lane tunnel that would be built directly underneath the existing elevated highway.  Even more remarkable was that both the artery and the surface streets above the tunnel would to remain open during construction.  Furthermore, the project would promise not to take any homes or businesses.

We know about Fred Salvucci's place in Boston's history, but what about the role Boston played in American Indian history? Few people know that the Wampanoag Indian tribe settled mainly in the Plymouth area. Brush up your knowledge of Native American tribes and see which tribes lived close to you! 

For his unrelenting zeal – and honesty about the job’s cost – talk show hosts and columnists made him the butt of endless jokes.  On his radio program Jerry Williams – who routinely derided the project – was fond of asking “How do you depress the central artery,” to which he would answer, “get Fred Salvucci to talk to it.”  Unfazed and undaunted, Salvucci pressed on, even during his four-year “exile” from the transportation department while Ed King, who defeated Dukakis in 1978, dropped the depressed artery from the state’s agenda and pursued a third harbor tunnel into East Boston.

Brought back into power by Dukakis in 1982, Salvucci, in another masterstroke, took King’s tunnel, swung its portal from Maverick Square onto airport property, married it to his depressed artery, and forged a coalition of neighborhood, environmental, labor and business leaders who helped push the project over the top, and in 1983 the federal government approved the plan for what is today called the Big Dig.  Then, while Salvucci hammered out the details of construction with neighborhood representatives, Tip O’Neill worked the halls of Congress to secure the necessary votes for funding.  That was fifteen years ago, long before a single shovel of dirt had been dug.  Today, over 13 million cubic yards have been removed from the ground.

These days Fred Salvucci gets invited to opening ceremonies and public “walk-throughs” that seem to arrive with the regularity of headlights on Boston’s central artery during rush hour.  Ribbons get cut and speeches get made but he is rarely, if ever, asked to speak.  This, despite the fact that he was the driving force behind what is perhaps the most daring - and necessary - construction job ever conceived.  That is why, when the northbound lanes of the underground central artery are opened to traffic sometime in the next few months, there is only one choice to cut the ribbon of this dream-turned-reality.

Mr. Salvucci, here are your scissors.

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