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 you wanted to go without taking a wrong turn. I felt a little of the elation of the successful tracker when I returned successfully from navigating the urban jungle.

The worst times, in terms of traffic jams, were the night hours, especially after 11 p.m. Then the construction workers would shut down all but one lane of the Southeast Expressway, or even shut it down entirely. During the day Boston would seem normal enough, but at night strange things went on. Brilliant arrays of intense lights illuminated downtown with an unreal glow, as nocturnal figures welded and dug and propped and drilled. At times it seemed the enchanting imagery of the technological sublime. At other times it reminded me more of H. G. Wells’s two-tier world in The Time Machine, where the underground machine-tending Morlocks came out at night to prey on the nonproductive Eloi.

In the late 1990s Boston newspapers reported that cost estimates, initially in the low single digits—single billions of dollars, that is—were now over $10 billion. The project chief had to resign for failing to report major cost overruns in a timely way. This did not seriously disturb my civic boosterism. After all, you can’t expect to do a massive project cheaply, and the cost/benefit ratio still seemed distinctly in favor of the benefits of efficiency, safety, and civic enjoyment. And isn’t this the kind of thing that governments should spend tax dollars on? That so much money was going to automobile roadways was a sticking point, but the overall project plans called for significant new investment in mass transit, soothing my conscience.

Photo by Owen Williams.

By then the facts on the ground, and under the ground, were beginning to overpower financial and environmental concerns. In late August 2002—just as I was ending airport runs for my older son—my younger son (who thankfully would attend college locally) heard about an “open house” for the new tunnel that would replace the elevated expressway as the central artery of Boston. The boys and I took the subway downtown to join a stream of well-orchestrated pedestrian traffic winding through the still-active construction site. It reminded me vaguely of going to a baseball game, except that instead of emerging into the green haven of Fenway Park we descended from the heat and dust of the surface world into the cool, clean, well-lit, vaulted sanctuary of the Big Dig. There were even stations of the cross, sort of: as we walked a quarter of a mile into the tunnel we passed small, fetchingly cheesy exhibits telling about some detail of the tunnel or the bridge at its north end. Workers were posted along the walk to guide us and answer our questions. They obviously enjoyed the scene, radiating pride in their work as we visitors bathed in the reflected glow of their achievement. It was beyond sublime: it was grandeur. I told the boys, “Forget about technology, kids. This is engineering.”

Photo by Owen Williams.

Not that many months later, in January 2003, the connector tunnel linking the Mass Pike with the Ted Williams Tunnel was finally opened. We heard that there would be no grand ceremony, that it would simply be a matter of taking down the barricade blocking the exit ramp from the Pike into the tunnel and letting the cars go through. The day it happened, the boys (our daughter had married and moved to Vermont) and my husband and I piled in the car and drove in on the Pike for our personal maiden voyage. Once again it was dreamlike: the journey through the cold night into the well-lighted tunnel, which carried us effortlessly to the airport ramp in fifteen minutes—no traffic, no fuss, no missing tiles, so orderly and efficient.

Photo by Owen Williams.

When the Zakim-Bunker Hill Bridge opened a few months later it happened to be spring vacation, and again my husband and the two boys and I took an inaugural drive, this time northward on the now underground central artery to its northern end. There the tunnel abruptly, gloriously ends, and you rise from the underworld into the light of day or, at night, into blue floodlights illuminating the slender interlacing cable stays. In one breathtaking moment you go from being below the world to being above it, as if you had soared aloft in an airplane. The experience was so extraordinary that we drove back around to repeat it.

On New Year’s Day 2004 the four of us drove into Boston for one last family ritual involving the Big Dig. The demolition of the Southeast Expressway, Boston’s Berlin Wall, was beginning with the new year. This was the moment I had been waiting for, the moment of Boston’s redemption. The streets around Quincy Market were almost empty in the wan winter light, and cut-off girders hung in uncertain arrangements. Demolition does not produce the excitement of construction. We took some photos and I told my sons, “You will remember the Southeast Expressway, you will remember this day, you will tell your grandchildren about this.” But before long we went inside Quincy Market to warm up and to get a snack.

Photo by Owen Williams.

The next summer the Democratic National Convention was held in the Fleet Center, a cavernous hall that replaced the smaller and more attractively named Boston Garden. The Fleet Center is right next to the north end of the Big Dig, so delegates had a superb view of the cable-stay bridge. A good chunk of the old elevated highway was still there, and below part of it convention organizers had marked off a “free speech zone” so demonstrators could express themselves without getting inconveniently close to the delegates. A few weary protestors, far outnumbered by security officers, kicked up dust beneath a remnant of an expressway erected in more confident days. The whole scene seemed a sad comment on the waning of the modern age.

Photo by Owen Williams.

That September, a massive leak poured water into the central artery tunnel. The immediate consequence was badly snarled traffic. The longer-term result was a series of inspections that identified a more pervasive, though apparently not dangerous, problem of tunnel leaks. In May 2005 defective panels were found in other parts of the tunnel. A year later six men working for the concrete supplier were charged with falsifying records to hide the delivery of inferior concrete. All this took the glow off my delight in the Big Dig, but I remained convinced that the benefits outweighed the costs. Complex projects are bound to have problems, I repeated yet again. Besides, gardens were appearing on land reclaimed from the expressway, while the noise and smells and disruption of the traffic had been shoved below ground, out of sight.

Then in early July this year a Boston woman, on an airport run with her husband to pick up a relative, was crushed to death in her car when a ceiling panel fell in the connector tunnel. We happened to be having some construction done on our house at the time, and the workers spent the week talking about it—reviewing the failure rates from previous inspections, going over design details of screws and rods and epoxy. They reminded me of Red Sox fans, whose conversations so often end with unanswerable questions: how could he have left the pitcher in so long, how could Manny have dropped that ball, why don’t they fire the manager? But this time someone died, and this time the traffic snarls are going to be a long and serious threat to the local economy.

For Boston this is a Challenger moment, a Katrina event. Engineering failed, government failed, and you cannot say where one starts and the other ends. Bostonians I talk with seem to have come to an anti-progress conclusion: Americans used to be able to do big projects well, but no more. For me, I can no longer dismiss the cost overruns and the shoddy construction as inconveniences to put up with. I thought I had gotten beyond the modernist progress narrative, but now I realize that was self-deception. I am a modernist after all, wanting to believe that human beings can use engineering to accomplish great things for the civic good.

Now I have to develop a new family narrative. For thirty years I have raised my children to appreciate the city of Boston and the wonders of honest engineering. If they were younger, I would feel the need to sit down with them and have a heart-to-heart talk about this betrayal of core family beliefs. But they are old enough to have done that thinking-through for themselves. My daughter in Vermont studies forestry, knits, gardens, cans, fills the tank with biodiesel, has no interest in living in a city. She emails me that she loves Massachusetts but “For me the charm was already off the project, what with all the corruption and overruns already exposed . . . the good news is that nature seems to be very resilient, and that much of the world is beginning to make changes and innovations that will some day be required.” My older son is also trying to reduce his dependence on cars and petroleum but has taken the opposite approach. He lives in metropolitan Boston and gets around nimbly by bicycle and public transportation. It would be easier if the subway system were extended to his part of Somerville, as planned—but the expense of fixing the auto tunnels means that that will probably not happen for many years to come.

My younger son, just out of college, will be going to California this fall for graduate school. Whatever his attitude about the Big Dig, he faces the practical problem of getting to the airport next week to catch a plane so he can look for a place to live there. I have told him I am through with the airport runs: he should plan to get to the airport using public transportation and should leave lots of extra time. I will need a lot more extra time to rewrite my story of the Big Dig so I can let go of my misplaced technological enthusiasm without also letting go of some happy family memories.