Boston Braves the ‘Big Dig’

Contrary to earlier fears, Boston hasn’t closed. Motorists somehow navigate around barricaded streets to get within a block or two of their destinations. Office workers still manage to trudge through construction sites and show up for their jobs on time. Tourists are arriving by the planeload.

And slowly, to a chorus of round-the-clock jackhammering, this winsome old city is being patched back together again. At a cost of $10 billion and enough aggravation and inconvenience to drive everyone crazy, the mistakes of the past are being rectified.

Welcome to what Bostonians call the Big Dig: It is the most ambitious, expensive urban highway project in U.S. history, a 20-year scheme in which 9,000 workers are digging up the city and constructing the world’s costliest highway--at $1 billion a mile--several stories down, replacing an elevated highway that is one of the eyesores of the East Coast.

Building a superhighway in a tunnel underneath a big city is expensive enough. And adding 50% to the cost was the decision to provide what is euphemistically called “mitigation” for everyone and every thing that could claim even the slightest inconvenience from the project.

The city says these expenses are intended to smooth over the rough spots caused by the construction. Critics regard them as bribes to win the support of those who otherwise would oppose the project.

In either event, “mitigation” covers a multitude of sins--1,270 of them, by last count. Expenses range from $450 million to provide temporary streets in business districts, to $1 million to triple-glaze the windows of the Harbor Towers high-rise and protect the condos from dust and noise.

The Big Dig will complete the last link of the interstate highway system, which crisscrosses the nation with 45,000 miles of superhighways. The system was begun in the 1950s, when America’s romance with the car knew no limits and gas was 19 cents a gallon.

When the eight-lane, 7.5-mile underground highway with 14 on-ramps and off-ramps is finished in 2004 it will replace an elevated artery that slices through the city’s heart and divides neighborhoods. Interstate 90 will then reach from Seattle to Boston’s Logan Airport and I-93 from Vermont to Boston’s southern suburbs.

The first phase of the project, the 1.6-mile Ted Williams Tunnel under Boston Harbor, from downtown to the airport, was completed in December and eventually will be linked to the Massachusetts Turnpike. At the end, the despised Central Artery will come down.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena calls the Big Dig “a wonder of the world” and “a reflection of American ingenuity, American workmanship.” In cost and magnitude, engineers say, the project surpasses the Hoover Dam and the Brooklyn Bridge.

To which Jean Loewenberg, who lives smack dab in the noisy heart of the construction area, says: “All I can see ahead is 10 more years of aggravation. Let it be over.”

Loewenberg moved into the derelict Leather District in 1979. Over the next decade, other professionals took up residence in nearby abandoned brick buildings that once housed fabric manufacturers and wholesalers.

Soon the rats and winos were gone and Beach Street was sprouting spiffy condos and trendy shops. It was the best of city living--until the Big Dig came, with its dust and torn-up neighborhood streets and steel roadway plates that reverberated like artillery under the wheels of trucks. Meanwhile, throughout the day and into sleepless nights construction vehicles emitted high-pitched beeps as unnerving as fingernails scraped down a blackboard.

Some nights Loewenberg raged into the streets, a raincoat over her nightgown, telling construction crews: “All right, knock it off. You’re not allowed to dig after 10 o’clock.” She has fitted her bedroom windows with custom-made insulated gym mats that block out noise--and, sadly, sunlight.

“We fought like hell to create this neighborhood,” she says, “and we’re not going to be driven out by anyone, but I’ve got to admit there’re times I thought about leaving Boston.”

Around the corner, Lorenzo Savona, co-owner of Boston’s hot new French restaurant, Les Zygomates, sends maps to his regular customers to let them know what streets are open. He got the city to put up an electronic sign at the intersection declaring that, appearances to the contrary, South Street was not closed. Having lost on-street parking places, he pays a parking lot $300 a month to stay open Saturday nights.

“In November and December we lost $60,000 in projected revenues,” he said. “We almost had to close. They talk about how much money the project will bring into Boston, but the construction guys, they don’t come here to eat and it’s tough attracting new customers when it’s a hassle to get here.

“The project guys tell you this is the biggest project in the U.S.A. It’s like building the Panama Canal, they say--American know-how is going to just bully through the impossible. That’s fine. But I’m here six and a half days a week and my partner and I have cut our salaries in half, so we take home $550 every two weeks. What I resent is that I can’t support my wife on that.”

How the Big Dig came to be speaks volumes about the decline of Eastern cities and America’s relationship with the automobile. Ironically the project comes at a time when other cities are emphasizing not more highways but alternate forms of transportation, such as the subway system in Los Angeles. The Big Dig may well be the nation’s last urban mega-project for cars.

When the elevated highway that the Big Dig is replacing was built in the early 1950s, Boston was perceived as a dying city, its population and tax base drained by a flight to suburbia, its economic vitality sapped by cutbacks at the Charlestown and Quincy Navy yards.

The city, said the Boston Globe, was a “hopeless backwater, a tumbled-down has-been among cities.” Fortune magazine dismissed it as a “sick city,” and U.S. News & World Report headlined a piece on Boston with the words, “Dying on the Vine.”

To bring people back into the inner city, Boston sold its residents on a plan: It would build an elevated expressway over downtown, with lots of on-ramps and off-ramps, and paint it green so that it would “blend” with the trees.

The Central Artery, which cost $110 million in state funds, was designed to handle 75,000 cars a day. When the ribbon was cut in 1959, the Globe rhapsodized that the expressway “will enable motorists by the tens of thousands to reach the central city in scant trouble-free minutes.”

But the Central Artery created more problems than it solved, not the least of which was scarring the face of a beautiful city. Hundreds of homes and businesses were bulldozed to make room for the artery. It cut a swath through the North End, an old Italian neighborhood, and separated the financial district from the waterfront.

Traffic poured off the ramps and clogged the narrow, twisting streets that had been cow paths in the 1600s. Year after year, more and more cars used the artery--190,000 a day by 1996--until eight-hour traffic jams became common.

“In retrospect it was a pretty horrible decision to build the Central Artery,” said Fred Salvucci, Massachusetts’ former transportation secretary. “It was incredibly ugly and all kinds of homes had to be knocked down to make room for it. Once people saw it in three dimensions, they said, ‘Oh my God, is that what they’re doing?’ ”

After the artery’s completion, Salvucci, an MIT-educated engineer whose grandmother’s house had been bulldozed to make way for the Massachusetts Turnpike, helped lead a citizens’ rebellion against further highway construction. Their goal: to save Boston’s neighborhoods by derailing plans to build an outer beltway and expand Logan Airport.

Bostonians protested in the streets and mothers blocked the path of bulldozers. Finally, in 1971, Gov. Francis Sargeant agreed to halt the federal highway projects that threatened to turn Boston into one huge causeway.

The Big Dig represents a remarkable change in urban thinking from the knock-down-the-houses, make-way-for-the-cars philosophy reflected in the elevated artery. The result of 20 years of social, political and engineering planning, it is designed to raze not a single home and to displace not a single person.

Neighborhood activists have had nearly as much to say about the final shape of the project as structural engineers. Twelve liaison officers cultivate a channel of communication between the neighborhoods and the project’s 2,000-person bureaucracy.

“There is a lot of suspicion in communities like Charlestown when a state agency comes and says it’s going to do a big project,” said one liaison officer, architect Peter Smith. “And the residents have every right to be distrustful because there have been some real disasters in the past.”

The Big Dig was no easy sell, either in the neighborhoods or in Congress. Salvucci, who now teaches transportation studies at MIT, spent years going home to home to preach the project’s merits.

He also listened. He redrew interchanges and ramps and parks in response to citizen complaints, and eventually he won the people’s trust and sewed together the political coalition needed to get the Big Dig started.

In Washington, President Reagan in 1987 vetoed the transportation bill containing funds for the project--85% of the Big Dig’s funds are federal--but Boston’s Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, then the House speaker, and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) led the successful campaign to override the veto.

The project’s price tag was placed at $4 billion. Costs--which a U.S. Transportation Department report called out of control in 1994--have escalated in part because the state has had to buy off (legally) special-interest groups to avoid years of delays and courtroom battles.

Everyone from politicians to environmentalists got in line when they discovered they could get their favorite causes financed by switching from opponents to supporters of the Big Dig. “We had to throw in everything but the kitchen sink as incentives to obtain approval,” said project director Peter Zuk.

The Big Dig’s managers set aside $450 million for temporary streets and $1 million for the Harbor Towers high-rise. They allocated $80 million to the Metropolitan District Commission to build a park along the Charles River, $150 million to the city of Cambridge; $60 million for police overtime under a provision of the traffic management plan, and $5 million to protect wetlands in Revere.

Not since the Boston Tea Party has this city been so galvanized by a single topic of conversation. In the North End recently, Diane Modica, the local city-council representative, was checking the mammoth construction site near Cross Street. No one who stopped to talk brought up the traditional subjects of conversation in Boston--the failure of the Red Sox, the humid summer weather.

“Hey, how ya doing, Jimmy?” she said to one man, and Jimmy replied, “Councillor, this is asinine. My wife’s got these, like little antiques on the mantle, and at 4:30 that drilling equipment starts up. Boom, boom, boom! These little antiques just start bouncing along the mantle like they’re walking. The whole building is vibrating.”

“Now, let me ask you, Jimmy, why didn’t you call my office on something like that?” Modica responded. “You got a problem, you call. We’re in touch with the project and they’re pretty sensitive when the neighborhood’s complaining.”

To lessen the nuisance, project administrators and the managing consultant--Bechtel Corp. of San Francisco--devised mufflers for jackhammers and put operators inside noise-retardant tents. They set up a 24-hour hotline for complaints and limited construction hours in some areas. Trucks are washed daily and streets watered three times a day to reduce dust.

Even the fish in Boston Harbor get consideration: Underground sound waves are used to warn them away from blast sites. During the next few years, 12 million cubic tons of soil--enough to fill Fenway Park 14 times--will be excavated. Much of it is landfill used in the 1800s to reclaim parts of the harbor for an expanding Boston.

Among the boulders, railroad ties, wooden water pipes, sand and clay are relics from the distant past that are being catalogued and stored for future study. They include colonial-era toys, clothing, glassware and a family journal that survived in an air-tight pit.

A sealed refuse pile that contains cherry pits may yield clues to the colonialists’ diet. And archeologists say it is possible the excavation may uncover remnants of the Grapes of Leaves Tavern, where the Boston Tea Party was planned.

Whether it is with mats over the windows or earplugs for sleeping, Bostonians are coping as the Big Dig changes the face of their city. Said Mayor Thomas Menino: “When this thing started, everyone said, ‘The world’s coming to an end.’ Well, it didn’t. You can tell everyone that Boston is still open.”