Meanwhile, a half-mile west, cranes loom at Fenway Center, a Pike-spanning project being built by Meredith Management and lab developer IQHQ. With its deck nearly complete, its next phase of construction, two towers of lab and office space, a parking garage, retail space, and a broad public plaza, is expected to begin next year.
Both are feats of engineering, so-called air rights projects that create new ground on top of roaring highways. With projects like these, Boston is slowly putting itself back together, patching past wounds and restoring the downtown core to human scale. It’s part of a nationwide movement, with cities from Philadelphia to El Paso re-knitting the fissures the freeways scored into the urban fabric.
But the past won’t go quietly. It lives on in the churn of I-90 as it twists into I-93, slicing Boston’s Chinatown and South End in two. Along the grim span of Shawmut Avenue over the Pike, a chain link fence is all that stands between you and a gaping chasm of traffic and fumes below.
Inhuman corridors like this one exist all over the country, imposed in the middle of the last century as cities bowed to the priorities of burgeoning suburbanism. Undoing the damage has finally become a priority, federal and local.
In February 2023, the Biden administration announced $185 million in grants through the Department of Transportation to study projects at 45 sites across the United States that would “reconnect communities that are cut off from opportunity and burdened by past transportation infrastructure decisions.” Covering that chasm of I-90 south of Chinatown with greenspace is one of the DOT’s pilot projects. Like the private ventures at Mass. Ave. and in the Fenway, the Chinatown park would help stitch back together an old wound.
Boston has had a blueprint for a series of air rights parcels for at least two decades. But only recently, with land values in Boston soaring and building lots scarce, have high-cost projects like these started to make sense.
It’s no small irony that land values also drove the destruction that came with urban renewal. Boston in the 1960s was a flailing urban disaster, wrote Alex Krieger, a professor emeritus of urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in a recent editorial for the Globe. Plowing freeways through its heart was seen as necessary bypass surgery to bring the city back to life.
“You have to try to put yourself in the position of people at the time,” Krieger told me. “The slogan from the government made it very clear: ‘Good roads everywhere.’ Gas was plentiful, cars were getting cheaper all the time. So there was broad support for highway building, except in those neighborhoods that were actually being demolished.”
When the bulldozers came, Black communities and dense neighborhoods of immigrants bore the brunt. The Housing Act of 1949 was the first to use the term “urban renewal” — in retrospect, a thick irony. It funded hyperdense public housing projects, but it also gave cities the power to designate neighborhoods as prime for demolition. “And they didn’t mince words about it, either — ‘slum’ was the term they used,” Krieger said. Properties could be assessed at minimum value, making them cheap for cities to expropriate.
Post World War II, another agenda propelled highway projects. “President (Dwight) Eisenhower felt that highways were an important tool to defend the country if it was invaded,” architect and urban designer Larry Chan said. Highways, that is, could not only connect urban commercial centers, but also, in war, facilitate the movement of forces and evacuation of endangered citizens.
Chan is the principal designer of a proposal for the Chinatown parcels by Stoss Landscape Urbanism. He’s frank about what such projects can achieve, and what they can’t.
“Reclaiming space over a highway in order to create this connection — that’s one way of trying to repair a past,” Chan said. “But there are other things that are much harder to repair — loss of community, of culture, as well as land. Those harms can never really be undone.”
Under the guise of urban renewal, close-knit neighborhoods were destroyed, their communities displaced; the promised new public housing was slow to materialize. In 1956, Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, giving cities the means to flatten acres of inner-city neighborhoods to build freeways that jetted motorists to and from the expanding suburbs. In Boston, the Pike was built along an existing rail corridor, massively broadening its path while destroying adjacent neighborhoods. But it wasn’t just freeways that took priority. To make way for new development, some 12,000 people were forced out of their homes in the working-class neighborhood of the West End in 1958; by 1970, the old neighborhood, flattened to the ground, had just six apartment towers with about 2,000 residents.
In New York, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway plowed through hundreds of city blocks, displacing thousands, mostly poor people and immigrants. In New Orleans, I-10 devastated Claiborne Avenue, at the heart of the city’s bustling Black business community. In Boston, The Village, a historically Black district in Newton, was among the Pike’s early victims. Downtown, the stretch of I-90 that slips beneath Tremont Street and Harrison Avenue was part of Chinatown. According to the US Department of Transportation, one-fifth of the homes in that neighborhood were destroyed.
“It was 60 years ago, but you never really forget,” said Cynthia Yee, a longtime Chinatown community organizer. On Hudson Street, where Yee grew up, a two-story concrete wall now barricades a small stretch of Chinatown’s original rowhouses from the roaring nexus of I-90 and I-93. She walked me over to a tiny wedge of long grass nestled up against the concrete barrier, which was her neighbor’s garden. “They decided we didn’t matter.”
In 2000, Mayor Thomas Menino released “A Civic Vision for the Turnpike Air Rights in Boston,” an earnest plan to make things right. The report was published while the Big Dig, one of the most ambitious urban infrastructure projects in American history, crept towards completion. Finally finished in 2006 after a decade and a half of disruption and delay, the project sunk six lanes of elevated expressway 90 feet below what’s now the Rose Kennedy Greenway, reconnecting downtown to the harbor.
The Greenway has its issues — it’s awkward in spots and underused, in part because the Big Dig’s legendary cost overruns swallowed up funding for more public-friendly amenities. (The cost ballooned to $14.8 billion from an initial estimate of $2.6 billion.) But there’s no rational argument that its winding swath of greenery is anything but a radical improvement. The Big Dig might also be the country’s most extravagant refutation of the destructive thinking that sacrificed communities and public space to the almighty car.
A view of the Big Dig/Central Artery under construction in 2002.
(David L. Ryan/Globe Staff)
The Rose Kennedy Greenway, as seen in 2012, occupies land created by the Big Dig.(David L. RYan/Globe Staff)
It didn’t take long to understand the damage urban renewal had done. “By the ‘60s, planners had begun to realize the car-driven policies of creating highways through cities was a mistake,” said Prataap Patrose, a senior adviser at the Boston Planning & Development Agency.
“At that time, the freedom that automobiles gave us was what people valued,” he said. “It was easy to overlook what was being destroyed.”
The Prudential Center, Boston’s first air rights project, was built in 1959, just as the Pike extension slashed through the South End. It only came to be thanks to significant subsidies from the city and state — suggesting they may have recognized a catastrophic error in progress.
More than 20 years would pass before the city’s next major freeway-capping project, Copley Place, in the 1980s. It, too, required major public funding.
What did the public get from those investments? Not as much as it should have. Neither mall, with double doors punched into blank, towering facades, helps to create a human scale streetscape. The intersection of Ring Road and Huntington Avenue, where a pedestrian overpass connects the two buildings, is stark and broad. But under this concrete hillock, eight lanes of turnpike thunder. Anything is better than that.
While air rights projects over highways aren’t new — Seattle’s downtown convention center was built over Interstate 5 in 1988 — costs and logistic challenges have made them rare. But their ability to create new ground in densely built cities like Boston helps make construction viable at a time when, as the Globe recently reported in a series on the region’s housing crisis, its costs are sky-high.
John Rosenthal, whose Beverly-based Meredith Management is a co-developer on the Fenway Center project, told me the payoff is worth it. “It’s nearly impossible to assemble two and a half acres of land in a built city like Boston,” he said. “With this project, we’ve got two and a half acres in one of the best locations in the whole country.”
Complex as air rights projects are, DOT has learned by doing. In recent years, it has been more open to negotiating with developers to help projects get done. “A couple of projects have shown how you go about making it happen,” Patrose said. “The proof of concept is there.”
Development approvals are still active on two failed air rights projects, the massive 10-acre Columbus Center project over several blocks of I-90, abandoned in 2010, and a proposed block-long retail plaza west of the Hynes Convention Center on Boylston. The latter, approved in 2018 but derailed by feuding between developers, would have sealed off a chasm of the Pike, countered the Hynes’s street-deadening presence, and created an urbane streetfront of shops and restaurants, with a shimmering 33-story condo tower above.
Right now, walking west on Boylston near Mass. Ave. is a misery. A wedge on the north side of Boylston just west of Dalton Street opens up to the Pike’s westbound lanes underneath — urban renewal at its most ferociously bleak.
Rendering of a proposed air rights project for Parcels 14 and 15 at 1000 Boylston Street, which had received its development approvals but was derailed by a lawsuit between partners in 2019.
(BPDA Archive)
Rendering of a pending air rights project for affordable housing and lab space, proposed by New York-based Peebles Corporation. (BPDA Archive)
The good news is that an air rights project that would mend that gap is creeping towards approval at the BPDA. The project, from New York-based Peebles Corporation, would cap that wedge with a 10-story affordable apartment tower and a 12-story office building. Imagine a restored Boylston Street connected to a promenade lined with shops, cafes, benches, and greenery, and you can see the vision the Menino administration proposed more than 20 years ago: a streetscape reclaimed from the open-pit transit corridors of urban renewal and rescaled for people.
Turn north onto Mass Ave from Boylston, and you don’t have to imagine. On the west side of Mass Ave, those two towers have been rising above the expressway since 2020. Even hemmed in by construction fences for the past many months, the invitation of a 1.5-acre public plaza served as tantalizing evidence that mistakes can be fixed, and bad remade good.
The plaza leads to an outdoor mezzanine at its western edge that connects the two buildings with a row of young trees stretching skyward. The trees crown a visual barrier that scrims the view of the expressway from street level, but remains open by design: Neighbors lamented losing the sunset view over the Mass. Ave. bridge, said David Manfredi, a principal at Elkus Manfredi, the architectural firm on the project, so he designed the mezzanine as a viewing deck.
“Go up the stairs, watch the sunset — don’t buy anything, no transaction required,” said Manfredi. “That was all the result of the community engagement process, and it really did transform the project.”
But maybe the project’s most dramatic impact is a few steps away from it. For decades, Newbury Street, the city’s most urbane stroll, has almost literally fallen off a cliff at Mass. Ave., abruptly terminating in a Mass. Pike on-ramp.
If you stand at that intersection today, the transformation is profound. Samuels, the project’s developer, rebuilt the ramp to slip down a narrow alleyway framed between buildings that hides the Expressway from sight. Say what you will about the buildings themselves, an office tower and a hotel — their expressive swoop isn’t much in line with the prim red brick of Back Bay — but the sense is of a lost puzzle piece clicked into place.
A newly reknit urban fabric does nothing to compensate the thousands of people pushed aside by urban renewal. Notably, most of these new developments are geared towards the top end of the market, whether residential or commercial, in a city desperately lacking affordable space of any kind.
But a Boston more in tune with people, not cars, is no small thing. That’s the city slowly starting to swallow the Pike, parcel by parcel, and reclaim the life it took away.
An earlier version of this story had an incorrect name for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It also incorrectly identified a garden that belonged to Cynthia Yee’s neighbor.
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.