Albany to Boston: The Turnpike's Last Miles

The Massachusetts Turnpike, which carries Interstate Ninety from the New York border to Boston, was built in the nineteen fifties and is among the older toll highways in the country. The road climbs through the Berkshire Hills, a modest range of folded Appalachian rock that constitutes the only significant topography between Albany and Boston, and then descends through the Connecticut River valley and the Worcester Plateau before the terrain flattens into the Boston Basin. The Mohegan, Pocumtuck, Nipmuc, and Massachusett peoples all had territory along this route.

The Nipmuc Nation, whose territory was the central Massachusetts uplands, has state recognition in Massachusetts but not federal recognition, the same legal distinction that affects land rights and resources in concrete ways. The Boston that Interstate Ninety reaches is not the colonial city. The highway dives underground in its last miles, through the Big Dig, the most expensive highway project in United States history per mile when it was finished in two thousand seven.

The Big Dig relocated Interstate Ninety and Interstate Ninety-Three from elevated expressways through downtown Boston into tunnels beneath the city, replacing the infrastructure with parks and surface streets above. The project was over budget by roughly twelve billion dollars and took about nine years longer than planned. The tunnels work.

The rose Kennedy Greenway, the park that replaced the elevated highway, is pleasant. The drive through the tunnel does not give you a view of the city. You surface near the harbor.