Dan's Papers - January 11, 2008 - The Big Dig And The Harvard Design Project

The City of Boston announced last week that "The Big Dig," a series of underground automobile tunnels, has been finished. This construction disrupted the city for six years. But now, you can emerge from beneath Boston into one neighborhood or another within minutes of leaving somewhere else and without snarling up the traffic on the roads above.

The cost of "The Big Dig" was originally budgeted at $3.4 billion. It was to be the most expensive civic works project in history. In the end it cost $22 billion. But that's Boston.

The big circular route that the tunnel takes very closely approximates the circular route that an elevated highway opened in 1958 took to take people around. With that highway now torn down, the people of Boston have come out of the shadows to find unobstructed views everywhere in town from the Charles River to Back Bay. Boston, which was once one of America's most beautiful cities, is beautiful again.

This whole episode reminds me of the first assignment I received from my professors as I began a three and a half year program leading to a degree in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

As I am sure you know, I have spent my career as a journalist, not as an architect. This first assignment at GSD and the results that I handed in might explain why I never went into architecture after completing my studies.

The assignment, and this was in September of 1961, was this. Go out into Boston or Cambridge and find something - a public building, an abandoned park or a group of broken down tenements - sketch it on a big sketchpad, then on another page, sketch the same scene, as you envision it improved five years from now, as if the authorities had done what you had asked.

It was a nice assignment, particularly because I was new in town. I was 22 years old and had never been to Boston before, or at least had never been there to imagine it different from how I found it. So that morning at 9 a.m., carrying my sketchpad and pencils and pens, I went out to do what I was told.

At 3 p.m. I posted the two drawings I had made on the long bulletin board that had been set up along the inside wall of our classroom building in Harvard Yard. Everyone else's drawings were there too. There were about 50 first-year grad students.

My first drawing was of a series of residential brownstones all in a row in Back Bay, sitting in the shadow of this great elevated ring road overhead. The elevated was shabby looking, there was trash on the ground all around beneath it, and people were walking by below with their hands in their pockets hunched over and depressed.

My second drawing was exactly the same as the first, but with no elevated overhead. The buildings were in sunshine. The people were happy.

All the other students were sitting around in this room at this time as the professor, bearing a pointer, would come over and critique the entries. Students were free to respond to him, even interrupt.

He looked at my two drawings.

"You would remove the overhead?" he asked.

"I didn't know that. I'm from Long Island. Well, it's terrible."

"Why do you say it's terrible? It's the wonder of the age. Now everybody can get around."

"It twists and turns, it's dangerous to drive up the ramps to get on it, it depresses everybody and it's awful."

"It twists and turns because this is Boston," the professor said. "It had to get through to be put in the budget to get built. And so the most powerful politicians agreed to it only if when it got to their house it detoured around."

"I give you a D-," the professor said. "You deserve an F, but this is just your first assignment. Don't let this sort of thing continue."