Standing before you is one of two of the last pieces of the Central Artery (officially the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway) and stands as an everlasting monument to an attempt and failure to tame Boston traffic. (the other smaller version is right outside Faneuil Hall)
Central Artery
Built in the 1950s, the elevated highway stretched from Dewey Square to North Station. For those Bostonians who remember driving on that dysfunctional road, the surviving piece brings back memories, but not necessarily good ones.
The old expressway was the first elevated highway built in Massachusetts. It was constructed before the U.S. Interstate Act that created our now-ubiquitous Interstate Highway system. This 40-foot -high wall of green steel and concrete also predated federal highway standards.
That made the expressway a challenge to drive on. Its problems included:
- No breakdown lanes
- Severe curves
- Too many on- and off-ramps
- No room to merge onto the highway or slow down to exit
The Big Dig
The Big Dig was a megaproject in Boston that rerouted the then elevated Central Artery of Interstate 93 that cut across Boston into the O'Neill Tunnel and built the Ted Williams Tunnel to extend Interstate 90 to Logan International Airport.
Those two projects were the origin of the official name, the Central Artery/Tunnel Project (CA/T Project). Additionally, the project constructed the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge over the Charles River, created the Rose Kennedy Greenway in the space vacated by the previous I-93 elevated roadway, and funded more than a dozen projects to improve the region's public transportation system.
Planning for the project began in 1982; the construction work was carried out between 1991 and 2006; and the project concluded on December 31, 2007.
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Found it logs without a picture will be deleted
Below are pictures taken before and after the big dig, showcasing the ribbon of parkland between the surface roads.
Congrats to KFLEM on his FTF
Virtual Rewards 4.0 - 2024-2025
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between January 17, 2024 and January 17, 2025. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 4.0 on the Geocaching Blog.