The Big Dig: A Highway Buried, a City Cracked

The elevated highway that ran through downtown Boston from nineteen fifty-four until the late nineteen nineties was not an accident. It was a decision. When the engineers and planners of the mid-twentieth century routed the Central Artery through the heart of the city, they chose a path that would cut the North End off from the waterfront it had faced for three hundred years and carve through the edge of Chinatown in ways that would suppress that neighborhood for decades. These were not unforeseen consequences. They were design choices made by people who understood that the communities in the way were not the communities whose interests the highway was built to serve.

The Central Artery / Tunnel Project, which eventually became known as the Big Dig, ran from nineteen ninety-one to two thousand and seven. It buried Interstate Ninety-Three through a tunnel beneath downtown Boston and replaced the old elevated highway with the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a linear park reclaiming seventeen acres of urban land. The project cost fifteen billion dollars, making it the most expensive highway project in American history. It was years behind schedule. It was plagued by cost overruns, contractor fraud, and persistent questions about construction quality.

In July of two thousand and six, a section of concrete ceiling panels in one of the new tunnels collapsed onto a car traveling on the connector. A woman in the passenger seat, Milena Del Valle, a thirty-nine-year-old Costa Rican immigrant and Jamaica Plain resident, was killed. The contractor and the state eventually reached legal settlements. The design flaw that caused the collapse was in the anchor bolt system.

The Greenway is a pleasant park. The North End has been reconnected to the waterfront. The tunnel works. The fifteen billion dollars bought a partial reversal of decisions made fifty years earlier by people who are no longer here to account for them.