Support for the Big Dig comes from Bunker Hill Community College, now registering for online winter session, a three week session starting January 2, designed to help students catch up on classes and get ahead. Bhcc.edu winter. And also from Cure Alzheimer's Fund, which supports foundational scientific research into the causes of Alzheimer's disease, because research is the only path to a cure. Learn more@curalz.org. It's July of 2023, the hottest month humans have ever recorded on planet Earth. But at 08:00 A.m., the heat is still more or less tolerable how's it going? So that is when I meet up with Fred Salvucci one last time. You want to take a little walk?

Yeah, sure.

And he takes me on a tour of the project he set in motion, tearing down the elevated central artery and restoring downtown Boston, this horrible garage who.

Was trying to block putting the Central Artery underground because he was afraid for Salvucci.

This whole area is dense with memories of long ago battles and small victories.

We figured out a different way to do it, but they were doing their best to mess it up.

I try to imagine what it must be like to walk these blocks and know them like they were a giant chessboard on which you'd spent the better part of 20 years arranging and rearranging the same pieces, seeking that one path forward. You went to lunch in the north end. Is this your walk?

Yeah, this was my walk, except I'd have to divert over to Salem Street because Hanover was blocked.

We trace the walk he used to take under the elevated structure back when a lunch of macaroni and beans cost half a buck. We pass Fanuel Hall, where activists from Eastie fiercely debated the fate of the Harbor Tunnel. Savucci even points out the spot where he proposed to his wife. Odly, enough underneath an off ramp for the old artery, because very Unfred.

Savucci I just picked her up and we were driving and, oh, here's a place to park.

Just couldn't wait. Now, as he likes to say, the sun can shine on the exact spot where they got engaged.

So that's the spot.

Part of the reason I wanted to make this series was to try and reconcile my own memories of the Big Dig, everything I heard about it when I was growing up. With what I see of the results.

Today, that's a good sized tree.

It's amazing how much these trees have grown. I mean, that can't be more than 20 years old.

It's amazing.

The elevated central artery has been gone now for most of my life, and it's been replaced by 17 acres of parks and open space winding through the heart of the city. There are benches, murals, memorials, an old timey carousel, a beer garden, flowers for the bees, fountains for the kids. Companies and jobs have flowed into the land around the project. An old building that once had a solid brick wall has added windows and balconies because its inhabitants now want to look outside. So how is it that all those battles, all the fury and controversy could lead to this? And what does that say about the way we build things? I sometimes wonder when I'm down here, how many of these people have any idea that there was once an elevated highway where we're standing?

I think people, fortunately, have forgotten.

From GBH News. This is the big Dig a study in American infrastructure. I'm Ian Coss. This is part nine, hearts and Minds. The word boondoggle was coined by a Boy Scout troop in Rochester, New York, in the late 1920s. Boondoggling referred to a common handicraft, the kind where you weave together strips of different colored leather to make bracelets, keychains, or in this case, little ornaments for your Boy Scout uniform. But the word boondoggle gained a new meaning in 1935. That's when it appeared on the front page of The New York Times. In all caps, the paper declared that $3 million of federal relief money was being spent teaching arts and crafts to the unemployed. Right below that headline was the ominous phrase boondoggles made. The article went on to describe how this same program paid for lessons in Eurythmic dancing and elementary Latin. But the image that stuck was, of course, the boondoggle. The word became a symbol of waste, an excess, a warning that says, don't even bother trying. In a speech, Franklin Roosevelt optimistically imagined the day when the boondoggle would come to represent the exact opposite, that in the future, it would be a symbol of all the good that government can do, a symbol of ingenuity, accomplishment, compassion.

That never happened. The Big Dig, though, got its shot at redemption.

Hello?

Ian yes. Yes, it's Ian.

How are you doing?

Good. Is this Randy?

Yes, it is.

Ian but even now, the redemption of the Big Dig is complicated. So just to start, could you introduce yourself? Tell me who you are and where you're from.

Oh, my name is Randy Toe. I'm originally from Boston Chinatown.

In the 1950s and 60s, when Boston was building its downtown highways, one of the neighborhoods in their path was Chinatown. Do you have memories of Chinatown as a kid?

Oh, sure, I grew up there. And see, Chinatown is very unique. It's not the biggest Chinatown in the US. But it's a very close knit community. Nobody ever locked the doors or anything. Everybody knew each other by their first name because most of the people knew each other way back from China.

Oh, really?

Yeah. So most of the people that came over at that time were all from the same villages in China.

Toe remembers how when he'd meet people on the street, they would simply ask what village you were from, because everyone, including his family, came from that same region in the south of China.

It was romanized to Canton, China. Now it's called Guangdong.

They even had a local volleyball league, cantonese style.

We played nightmen volleyball.

Every few years on labor day, there would be a grand tournament with teams from DC, new York, sometimes even Toronto or Chicago. Toe says that other than lunar new year, this was the biggest event on the local calendar. The neighborhood would rope off the streets and turn them into volleyball courts. Cantonese speakers from around the country would flood into town. New York was always the team to beat. They had the biggest community to draw from. Sometimes they even had ex pro players straight from China. But once, just once in his 80 years of life, when Randy Toe was captain of the Boston squad, they pulled out a win.

To this day, I don't know how we did it, but we did. That was the one only championship often ever won in all these years. I ever, including now.

Wow.

Again. It's such a close knit community that every time we get together, we were talking about that because we were all part of it, and we'll see each other all the time. We would just hang around Boston Chinatown. So he said, you can never replace that. Nowadays, that doesn't exist anymore.

To remembers the notices going out in the early 1960s. You need to vacate your home to make way for the highway. The whole block was being taken his home, his grandparents home, his grandparents shop.

So it really destroyed our community as such as we knew it.

This was before the anti highway movement had started over in Cambridge. And also this was not Cambridge, it was Chinatown. The family waited as long as possible, hoping something might change. Then they took the buyout and left the neighborhood for good.

Seriously, my mother never got over that after all these years. When we visited my mother, we would never mention this, because if we do, she would get all upset. And here we go.

Know Toh wound up living on a street filled with strangers. His father started sleeping on a cot in the attic of the Chinese restaurant where he worked, because he had no way to get back home after a late shift. Things that were once a walk down the street, his grandparents volleyball practice, were now a trek across town. All those fine strands that make up a community had been stretched, rerouted, or simply severed.

All my friends that I grew up with are living in the suburbs outside of Boston, actually. So now the Chinatown neighborhood is no longer what it was. Everybody is gone.

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the ribbon cutting of 66 Hudson at one greenway. A rebirth of this stretch of as.

The big dig wrapped up in the early two thousand s. It raised the possibility that some of that land taken from Chinatown could now be restored, including a parcel on the very street that Toe grew up on. The on ramp to the highway would still be there. But now homes could be there, too. At neighborhood meetings, activists talked about repatriating the exiles, even rebuilding the old row houses where Tow and his family had once lived.

Second phase of one greenway, which will create 51 affordable condominiums next to the park, will begin construction at the end of this year.

And while the row houses were not rebuilt, the parcel was developed into affordable housing. There was even a chance for original residents of the street to get spots in the building. But Toe didn't bother trying. His mother was in her 90s. His kids were grown. His community wasn't there anymore.

It was a good gesture. It was something better than not having anything. But you can never really place your neighborhood, nor is anybody asking you to do it, which is impossible.

When you do visit Chinatown today, do you ever walk by that building?

I don't go up that far, but I drive by it a lot. I go up that ramp. When I go right up on that ramp, I'm going over my right.

Right to get back on the highway.

Yeah. Decided you're going up. It was exactly over my house.

So it's still every time you drive through there, those memories come back to you.

Oh, sure.

The interstate era did more than just break neighborhoods and communities. It also broke trust, public trust that when it came to infrastructure, the state knew what it was doing. But the past is not easily undone, and trust is like a neighborhood fast to break, very slow to rebuild. When Fred Salvucci set out to build the big dig, there were really two parallel missions as I see it. One was to restore the city physically, and that undeniably happened. The other was to restore the public trust, restore our faith that the government can build with compassion and vision, to inspire us to invest further, dream bigger. And that proved to be the far more difficult task. Somehow, the big dig delivered on its promises. And yet, if anything, it left the public even more cynical about our capacity to build. Which brings me to a second story, one that's more forward looking.

Looks like it'll be possibly a 50 minutes ride instead of normally 35.

But you're going to take us through the big dig?

Take you through the big dig.

All right, let's do it. I've been meaning to share a driver's perspective on all this, because that is what we spent all those billions of dollars on a road, a way to get around. So how's that working out?

And I have faith that they're going to take care of the mess.

Laura bears has always had a pretty rough commute. She lives on the north side of Boston, but she works about 20 miles away on the south side of Boston. That means driving through the city on the central artery at rush hour. In full disclosure, Laura is also family. She's my wife's aunt. But for now she is. Our sample size of one survey of Boston commuters commute used to look very different in the early 1990s. Before the Big Dig, she didn't own a car. That meant taking a bus to a train, to another train, to another bus. How long did that whole ride take?

In the mornings? It could take an hour and a.

Half, an hour and a half one way.

But it was it was long, very long, and actually had to stop that because when I was pregnant with my first child, I couldn't ride all the way home without having to stop to go to the ladies room. So I would stop at Downtown Crossing and go into filing's Basement or Macy's to use the ladies room because that was the only just like you're pregnant, when you're very pregnant, that's the way you go. At that point I was like, I think I need a car now.

Laura got a used Ford Contour, one of those 90s sedans with a kind of soft, bubbly look. Then, just as the Big Dig was beginning, laura and her Contour joined the ranks of Boston traffic.

Every day, five days a week after.

Her son was born, he went to daycare down near her work so the two of them would commute together along the elevated central artery, one of the nearly 200,000 cars weaving through its narrow lanes and constant on and off ramps. But no matter how bad things got up there, she didn't dare get off the artery.

I have no internal GPS. I literally have no internal GPS.

The maze of streets below was totally unfamiliar. She'd never really driven in Boston before. And with her infant son in the backseat, no cell phone, no GPS, the idea of getting lost down there became paralyzing.

And I remember about a year and a half after my son was born, I was driving home, sitting in traffic like normal, just like sitting in traffic, a lot of traffic, inching along, inching along. And I felt a very funny feeling, like at the bottom of my feet. And it traveled. This energy traveled up my body kind of slowly, but I'm measuring it as it's coming, as it's moving, and boom, it went out of my head. A car in front of me had its blinker going on right to turn right, and I was like, Jeez, look at this. This traffic is just terrible. I'm following that guy. I don't care where he's going, I'm following him. And I got to get home another way because sitting in this traffic is just ludicrous.

She later figured that it must have been some kind of postpartum anxiety that was holding her back. But whatever it was, it left her that day.

And from then on, I didn't sit in the big jig traffic anymore.

She would cut through the seaport, through the North End, the west end, anything that got her off the artery and away from the construction. Every commute was a puzzle to be solved by Laura and the contour and her infant son bouncing along in the backseat. And it went on that way for ten long years, all through the Big Dig, until the Tip O'Neill Tunnel finally opened and Laura got to enjoy the payoff. Can you sort of describe where we are and what's going on?

So we're on the Zachan Bridge, and we're just about to enter the tunnel.

As we cross the peak of that once controversial bridge over the Charles River, the road dives down before us at a pretty steep grade. We can see a row of buildings rushing forward as if the highway is a big dead end street. But just below those buildings is our passageway. White tile walls, fluorescent lights. I wouldn't say it's gleaming, but it's inviting. We are now underground.

Underground.

How fast are we moving?

60.

I'm over the speed limit. Don't report me. It's 45, I think, in here.

646 in the morning, weekday, headed right through downtown. 60 miles an hour.

This is pretty standard for here for me at this hour.

In the new artery lanes are added and taken away with each exit, so cars aren't scrambling to merge all the time. And if you're going over to the airport, the new Harbor Tunnel makes that way easier. So we continue at a good clip under the north end where I met Salvucci. Then the tunnel rises up to get over the Blue Line, dips again to cross under the Red Line, a right turn, a left turn, and then we.

See the light, literal light, at the end of the tunnel.

So how long did that take us? About two minutes. To do the whole tunnel?

I don't know. I wasn't paying attention. Maybe. Yeah.

Worth $15 billion.

Yes. For all these people who drive daily on both sides, I think. Yes.

For Laura Bears and I'm sure many others, the Big Dig has improved her quality of life. Measurably, the traffic is better and people above ground don't have to look at it, but it's still traffic, still people like us in personal buckets of steel, burning gas, pumping AC and getting an accident. Fred Salvucci always knew that investing in more road capacity would only get us so far. That the real solution required making similar investments in mass transit, creating a bus and train system that someone like Laura Bears would actually want to ride to work every day. So where's the train from here?

I am going to drive you there.

Is that okay? Okay.

Yeah, let me get but I have.

To put it in.

After our brisk 40 minutes drive, laura drops me at the last station on the Red Line, where I get to experience that alternate commuting option, the one we didn't spend $15 billion on.

Please use all the available doors.

If I'm not mistaken, I caught a ride on one of the older trains in the whole fleet from about 1970, meaning it was built before the Big Dig was a glimmer. In Fred Savucci's eye, the whole transit system here, what we call the T, is currently riddled with slow zones after decades of underinvestment and more recently, a series of derailments and safety incidents. It's so slow. I'm pretty sure that in some places I could have jogged alongside that train and kept up the whole trip home. Took almost 2 hours. I've been thinking about why, after making this historic investment in our road system, we could then allow our transit system to languish so badly, and wondering, too, if maybe it has something to do with the Big Dig, not because of the cost or the debt, but because of that sour taste it left in our mouths. Are former Secretaries of transportation officially allowed to jaywalk?

It's an inherent right of Boston born people to jaywalk.

So that day of our walk, I asked Salvucci about this notion. I had mentioned that the Big Dig had restored our city, but not our faith, and maybe that's why those other investments never came.

Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's a tragedy.

In typical Savucci fashion, he offered up a historical survey of the transit commitments that had been promised and how they were ignored by Democrats and Republicans alike. But then he told me this story that I keep thinking about. It's a story he heard once about the Italian mystic St. Francis, who, like Savucci, got his start as a bricklayer of sorts.

God came to him in a dream and said, francis, you have to build a church. So Francis woke up the next day and said, oh, instructions from the big guy. I have to build a church. So he began gathering stones, piling them up, digging a foundation.

Francis worked and worked, building the church all on his own. And when it was finally done, he laid down to rest. That night, there was a terrible thunderstorm. The church was struck by lightning and destroyed. But Francis once again saw God in his dream.

What's this weird joke? I do what you tell me. I work in the hot sun. I build your church, and you destroy it with an electric storm. Like all these months of work.

Poof.

It's all gone. And God sends to Francis.

No.

No.

The church that you have to build is not a church of stones. You have to build a church in the hearts and the minds of the people. That's the only church that matters and will last.

So maybe that's the real question here at the end, not what the Big Dig built in stone, but what it built in our hearts and minds. Because when it comes to the future of infrastructure in this country, that is what really counts. I wish I could say the story of the Big Dig is dated, obsolete, that we learned the lessons already and got better at building infrastructure. The sad. Truth is, I don't think we have. So at some point I started asking people, what lessons do you think we should take from the Baked Dig? What are the lessons we should take away from all this? Are there any big lessons? Lessons you draw? What do you think of the lesson? What's the lesson there? When we look at the big projects of our own time, what are the lessons big? Takeaways big lessons. At the bipartisan infrastructure bill, at the push for renewable energy, at climate mitigation. If there's one paramount lesson learned, what can we learn from the Big Dig? Who knows? As you can imagine, there's quite a range. I don't know if the word shit show means anything to you. There were definitely people who held this project up as a cautionary tale, an example of what not to do.

I don't think it's a model. It was poorly managed, gross buffoonery. People who told me that the project was riddled with waste and fraud come up from the top down. That it was too big for its own good.

It was unmanageable.

And at the end of the day, it cost way more than it should have. I mean, it's an embarrassment how much it cost, but there were also people, sometimes the same people, who told me, just look at the results. It was completely transformative.

Transformative.

They told me that clearly this project was misunderstood all along.

Mis portrayed in some ways, when in.

Fact it was well managed. It wasn't corruption and it wasn't theft. It was just really hard.

It was tough. It was tough.

For a project its size. The Big Dig had an excellent safety record. It was built by all union labor. It was nominated for engineering awards. We just didn't want to see it. It's not like this was a secret, but maybe this was a success story.

Not everything's peaches and cream, but you stick together and you get her done.

And more than that, I was told it was a bargain for what we got. The price was right. Guess what?

It's expensive.

Get over it, is my view. There were people who told me that the big takeaway was we just needed more oversight so that the public could see and trust that their money was being well spent. You better watch it like a hawk that what we needed was more transparency. Transparency, transparency. And then on the other hand, all the oversight in the world isn't going to change what you do day to day. Maybe there was too much oversight. Too many people looking over too many shoulders, all trying to play Gotcha and score cheap political points. The process stinks. I heard that the media was too aggressive, that it fed those negative narratives, perhaps overly cynical, and that the media should have been more aggressive. Be the watchdog. Bring truth to power. That there was too much citizen input, or maybe not enough. Too much environmental mitigation. Or maybe not enough. You really can learn whatever lesson you want from the Big Dig, but here's where I'll come down. I do think the Big Dig can be a point of inspiration for the necessary and ambitious projects ahead. The fact that our leaders did pass this idea along for all those decades, kept it alive and got it done, is inspiring.

We will need that kind of perseverance. But we have to pay attention to what got lost along the way the vision, the story. Because perception matters. The narrative matters. If every major investment in our built environment leaves us feeling exhausted, burned, betrayed, even, then we will never make the investments we need to transform our energy system, to improve our transportation system, to protect our homes and shorelines from the effects of climate change. Trust, belief, purpose, idealism. The church of hearts and minds they have to be part of the mix. The rest, the technical stuff that we can get better at. And I do think this story can offer some ideas there, too. We can get better at accurately estimating costs and anticipating the risks so there are fewer surprises. We can get better at funding projects in a predictable way so that the planning and construction process are not constantly warped by politics. We can get better at doing environmental permitting quickly and fairly better at structuring contracts with private companies so their incentives are properly aligned, better at structuring management so that we have competent leadership and accountability. We can get all that right.

But if we can't tell the story of what we're doing, if the public doesn't feel part of it, then the best plans and contracts won't be worth the paper they're written on. One morning last December, I set my alarm to 04:30 A.m.. It was 24 degrees outside. The sky didn't have even a hint of light, and the sidewalk was crusted with half an inch of snow. But as I walked through my neighborhood and up a hill, I started hearing signs of life. People crowded around the entrance of a brand new train station.

It.

Was opening day for the long awaited Green Line extension, about 4 miles of new light rail that fills in a big void in our transit system. If you want to be technical about it, this project is part of the Big Dig. It's one of those transit improvements that was promised over 30 years ago as part of the Environmental Impact Statement. Now, the first train was pulling into the station right on schedule. Sure, it was decades late and way more expensive than the original estimates, and, yes, the tea was coming off a terrible year in which a train had caught fire on a bridge, forcing one passenger to jump out the window into the river. But, hey, no one seemed to be sweating the details. Now, there was a marching band playing at one station, and the little grocery shop there had a sale on all green vegetables. Oh. What you got here? An employee from the Tea was on the train passing out commemorative buttons. Nothing official, just something they had taken upon themselves to do because they believed in this project.

It's like you wake up at 04:00 a.m. And so many years in the.

Making, the buttons were gone in minutes.

Yeah. Would you mind? Yeah, please. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

And I have to say, it felt good to be on this cramped train with a bunch of giddy passengers. Maybe more than that. It felt good to feel good about a big project that our city had accomplished, to put the cynicism away for a day and just enjoy the ride. So how would you rate your faith today in America's capacity to build infrastructure? Beatrix, the Tea employee was feeling hopeful, cautiously hopeful that this project will be the one that inspires us to invest in the next project and the one after that.

But I don't know if that's going to pan out that way. That's just my hopes.

So here's to hoping. And, hey, for those of us who did squeeze onto that first train, drowsy and bleary eyed, at least the ride was free. I think I'm going to get off here. All right. Thanks again for the button.

Sorry.

My name is Ian. Ian Cost. Is it okay if I use this recording in my podcast?

Yeah, by all means.

Yeah.

Thank you. All right.

Have a good ride today.

Excuse me. Yeah. Thank you very

sand. All day I stayed away from the angel all day I watch it bring it down I stay away let.

The show is produced by Isabel Hibbert and myself, Ian Koss. It's. Edited by Lacey Roberts The editorial supervisor is Stephanie Leiden, with support this episode from Jeb Sharp. May Lay is the project manager and the executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. I want to thank just a few of the many people who advised and supported me in the making of this series. Noam hassenfeld avery Truffleman, kelsey Tasowski and Julie Shapiro. I also want to acknowledge, even though I can't possibly name them, all, the incredible teams of people at GBH and PRX who believed in this project and helped make sure people would actually listen. Archival Audio this episode is courtesy of Boston City TV. The artwork is by Matt Welch. Our closing song is ETA by Damon and Naomi. The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX.