The green dotted line painted on the sidewalk is a sign of things to come for Rebecca Dwyer, who lives in a century-old brick printing plant that years ago was converted into studios and living space for 40 artists and their families in South Boston.
Just beyond that line is a wall, and from her sixth-story window she can peer out over it at a giant hole in the earth. There, cement makers, cranes, front-end loaders and welders busily–and loudly–prepare massive concrete and steel tubes that will be fused together to create a tunnel under the waterway separating South Boston from downtown.
Once the tubes are complete, the huge pit will be flooded, and the tubes will be floated into the waterway to create the tunnel. Then the pit will be drained and the hole will be enlarged, coming up to that green line and within three feet of the building, becoming an underground superhighway.
This gash in the earth is part of the Big Dig, a 7.5-mile complex of highways that will run through and under Boston.
Its promoters and detractors like to call it the biggest public works project since the Great Pyramids of Egypt. And its $11 billion price tag makes it the most expensive, at least when measured on a per-mile basis.
How big is the Big Dig? It has used enough steel to wrap a one-inch bar around the Earth’s equator, displaced enough dirt to fill Fenway Park to the rim 14 times, and used enough concrete to build a sidewalk 3 feet wide and 4 inches thick from Boston to San Francisco three times.
Conceived almost 20 years ago to solve Boston’s chronic traffic jams, and given federal approval in the 1980s, when Massachusetts had plenty of clout in Congress, the Big Dig will transform Boston.
When completed in 2004, Interstate Highway 93, also known as the Central Artery–an old, congested, elevated expressway that now cuts through several neighborhoods–will be torn down. In its place will be 27 acres of open space for parks, pedestrian walkways and commercial centers.
Meanwhile, an eight-lane highway will run underneath the city. And a gleaming new bridge spanning the Charles River, suspended by radiating cables and bathed in white and blue light, will give the city an elegant landmark similar to San Francisco’s Golden Gate or New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, project officials say.
“We will remake the face of Boston,” project director Peter Zuk said. “The new Boston will be greener, more user-friendly. It’s an amazing vision.”
What is perhaps most amazing about the project is that, as it carves its way from South Boston to East Boston, through Chinatown and the Italian North End, up into the historic area of Charlestown, life pretty much goes on.
“It’s a little like performing heart surgery while the patient is still walking around, going to work, playing tennis,” Zuk said.
Part of the reason for this is that some $3 billion has been used to pay for what Zuk calls “mitigation”: expenses to keep dislocation of residents and businesses to a minimum.
Dwyer and her neighbors, for example, got $1.525 million to outfit their building with high-strength insulating windows to muffle construction noise, and a high-power air conditioning system will allow artists to continue working while keeping their windows shut.
Other mitigation expenses include $5 million for planned rat extermination, which arose out of fears–unwarranted, it turned out–that rodents would scurry above ground by the thousands as tunneling began.
Another $1 million went to pay for a system of sound waves that would startle fish, sending them away from the site of underwater blasting while the Ted Williams Tunnel, a third harbor crossing to the airport, was being built.
More than $60 million was paid for police overtime to guard construction equipment. The project spent $235,000 for a new fireboat, $500,000 for an exhibit about the Big Dig, another $500,000 for a Holocaust memorial, and $265,000 for a Harvard University study of the project’s history.
One of the biggest chunks of money, some $400 million, has been spent to upgrade Boston’s old infrastructure, replacing Civil War-era water mains of hollowed-out tree trunks with new cement and steel pipe, installing 200,000 miles of copper telephone wire and 5,000 miles of fiber-optic cable. In most cases, the changes have been done in early-morning hours without knocking out telephone and electric service to residents and businesses.
Making such quality-of-life decisions a priority has been almost an obsession for Zuk, who has demanded construction equipment be backed into place in the early evening so noisy back-up alarms don’t go off when residents are trying to sleep. Project supervisors roam the city at those times, monitoring work to ensure noise is kept to a minimum.
“Every city that has to make a major change in its infrastructure is going to have to spend this kind of money to address the needs of the various communities affected by construction,” Zuk said.
It wasn’t always this way. The six-lane Central Artery, elevated on pale-green stilts of steel, was built in 1954 to accommodate 75,000 vehicles a day; it now accommodates 190,000.
Bostonians call it the Other Green Monster. But unlike the real Green Monster, Fenway Park’s towering left-field fence, which is a source of hometown pride, the Central Artery is considered a true monstrosity.
When it was built as a north-south highway, engineers simply plotted its course through the heart of city. In the process, officials gave the go-ahead to tear down 20,000 homes in its path, destroying neighborhoods, dislocating lives, and dividing such old Boston sites as Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market from the waterfront.
For Boston, it became such a powerful symbol of government power run amok that, when another expressway was planned in 1973, neighborhood coalitions got it canceled.
