Support for the Big Dig comes 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 at cure ALZ.org. The idea for the Big Dig began with an unlikely friendship.

During the highway debates in the early 70s, Fred Salvucci, one of the highway opponents, went to a ton of meetings.

And across the table at many of those meetings was a man named Bill Reynolds.

He was there to represent the road builders.

He's a likable guy, but obviously he wanted to build all the roads and I wanted to build none of the roads.

So we would meet every Thursday and almost always in disagreement on the substance

But you get to know each other you get to be pretty friendly

One day Reynolds tells Salvucci you I, we need to talk.

We ended up at Jacob Wirth, which was kind of a sawdust on the floor, old delicatessen.

He wanted to talk about a highway, of course, but not any of the roads you heard about in the last episode.

This was about a highway that had already been built, called the central artery.

And Rennel said, you know, I've been trying to figure out why you guys don't like highways.

Because highways are beautiful things. They've built America, they built the middle grass, and I've come to the conclusion that the reason you don't like highways is because the elevated Central Lottery is such a big, ugly dysfunctional thing. It's like a giant neon sign flashing saying,

highways are bad, highways are ugly, highways don't work.

The central artery was one of the first elevated highways built anywhere in the country, well before the anti-highway movement had gathered any real

strength in Boston.

If you recall the hub and spoke plan for the whole city, this was the north-south spoke, designed to bring traffic right into the heart of downtown.

In the 50s, when the artery was under construction, the Boston Globe hailed it as our highway in the skies and claimed that it would soon, quote,

smash the city's bottleneck.

Well, that mood changed pretty quickly. smash the city's bottleneck.

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