Before the Big Dig: Boston’s Central Artery as a Construct of Mid–Century Modernity

Abstract

AMY D. FINSTEIN Before the Big Dig: Boston's Central Artery as a Construct ofMid-Century Modernity AMY D. FINSTEIN 0 n July 1, 1959, Boston's politicians, business leaders, and city planners gathered to celebrate the opening of the Central Artery, a six-lane elevated highway running through the heart of downtown (Fig. 1). This celebration marked the culmination of dreams and schemes of a high-speed, crosstown road that leaders had toyed with for decades. But more than simply easing traffic congestion, the Central Artery represented a conscious effort by city leaders to re-invent Boston as a "modern" city in the northeast corridor. This commitment to "modernity" encompassed maintaining and attracting new commercial interests to the city and updating Boston's characteristically nineteenth-century urban landscape. Planners viewed the Central Artery as a way to achieve both these goals. With its green steel girders soaring 40 feet into the air and a concrete roadbed spanning 100 feet across, the Artery announced the arrival of a new scale, style, and attitude about architecture, automobiles, and progress in Boston. Boston's Central Artery represented an ongoing dialogue about what it meant to be socially and aesthetically modern between 1920 and 1950. In his seminal commentary on modern life, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman explored the contradictions and ambiguities that industrialization brought to society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Berman's construct of modernity as an ongoing dialectic between technology and people's responses to it applies to the Central Artery as a specific representation of, and reaction to, conditions of change in Boston. The Central Artery posits two specific approachestomodernitythatconformtoBerman's construct. From a public policy and economic standpoint, the Central Artery demonstrated leaders'determination to embrace the automobile and to make the city's businesses accessible and attractive to an increasingly mobile public. From an architectural standpoint, the Central Artery's route and bare machined forms manifested these policy concerns, reflecting popular urban planningphilosophies and celebrating modernity in the simplicity of its engineered steel parts. In planning the Artery, Boston's leaders fit into Berman's framework, becoming "subjects as well as objects ofmodernization," trying "to get a grip on the modern world and to make themselves at home in it."1 Though constructed in the 1950s, the Central Artery actually reflected planning and transportation challenges identified three decades earlier. Proposals for the Central Artery developed largely in response to contradictions between Boston's lingering nineteenthcentury landscape, the growing presence of the automobile in the early twentieth century, and the implications of both of these factors on the health of Boston's economy. Leaders first discussed a major crosstown highway as early as 1911 and completed full plans for an elevated road in the late 1920s. Even though the Great Depression and then World War II postponed implementation ofthe elevated highway scheme until mid-century, the Central Artery remained a product of the 1920s-a solution responding to the burgeoning appeal of the automobile and its disconnect with Boston's nineteenth-century urban fabric. ARRIS Volume Sixteen 69 AMY D. FINSTEIN Fig. 1. A 1962 view of Central Artery snaking along Boston's waterfront , stretching from South Station, atfar left, through the North End, at right. (Massachusetts State Archives) Nineteenth-Century Transportation Infrastructure The landscape that early twentieth-century Bostonians sought to modernize was one full of nineteenth-century contradictions about technology and architecture. On the one hand, city planners had eagerly embraced new technology to develop the city's infrastructure. Bostonians spent much of the 1840s and 1850s expanding the city's originally small footprint by using steam shovels to fill in the shoreline around its peninsula.2 The growth of the city's public transportation network in the 1870s and 1880s demonstrated a similar enthusiasm for new construction techniques. Starting with horse-drawn street railways, then evolving to include electric trolleys and the nation's first subway system, Boston made a substantial commitmentto enabling streamlined movement within the city.3 The increasing scale of this transit system offered residents the modern option of living farther from the downtown business district and commuting easily to and from the city center...