Boston: Where Ninety-Five Meets Ninety-Three

Boston is not on Interstate Ninety-Five. That is the first thing to understand. Interstate Ninety-Five bypasses the city to the west, following a beltway route through the suburbs.

Interstate Ninety-Three, the Central Artery, runs through the city itself. The two highways share miles at either end of the city, but the city itself is served by Ninety-Three, and if you want to go to downtown Boston on the interstate, you leave Ninety-Five for Ninety-Three north of the city and rejoin it south. This geographic arrangement is the legacy of the Big Dig and the older highway debates of the nineteen sixties and seventies, when Boston's neighborhoods fought successfully against the Inner Belt highway that would have cut through Cambridge and Roxbury.

The highway that was not built is one reason Cambridge and Roxbury retained their neighborhood fabric. Boston is the terminus of the colonial road network of New England, the road to Plymouth, the road to Providence, the road to New York all began here. The Massachusett people lived around Boston Harbor, while the Wampanoag to the south, under their leader Massasoit, were the people who negotiated with the Plymouth colonists in sixteen twenty-one and helped keep them from starvation.

Their descendants are still here. The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah holds federal recognition on Martha's Vineyard. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe holds federal recognition and land in Mashpee on Cape Cod.

Boston itself was founded on a peninsula that is now completely surrounded by filled land, the shoreline of seventeen hundred was dramatically different from the current one.