The Big Dig

NARR: 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.

Fred Salvucci: 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.

NARR: One day, Reynolds tells Salvucci -- you and I, we need to talk.

Fred Salvucci: We ended up at Jacob Wirth’s, which was kind of a sawdust on the floor, old delicatessen.

NARR: 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.

Fred Salvucci: And Reynolds said, uh, you know, I've been trying to figure out why you guys don't like highways, cuz highways are beautiful things. They've built America, they've built a middle class. And I've come to the conclusion that the reason you don't like highways is because the elevated central artery 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.

NARR: 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 "smash the city's bottleneck." Well that mood changed pretty quickly when the road actually opened.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: What's it like to get in and out of Boston? Oh, it's a mess. Most time from six in the morning till nine o'clock any day. Solid traffic now right over here to the Charlestown. I see lots of congestion over there at the sumner tunnel too.

NARR: Because it was designed before the Interstate Highway System, the Central Artery didn't conform to all the rules of that system. The lanes were too narrow, the turns were too tight, and worst of all, the on-ramps and off-ramps were too close together.

Fred Salvucci: When they built it all the businesses wanted a ramp.

NARR: Businesses wanted their own dedicated off-ramp that lead right to their own dedicated parking garage. Which again, is not how an interstate highway is supposed to work.

Fred Salvucci: So it had way too many ramps

NARR: Thirty four ramps in the span of about four miles. Thirty four ramps in four miles! There was literally more ramp than highway.

Fred Salvucci: People getting on people, getting off, it just gridlocked.

NARR: Someone told me that if you want to understand the stereotype of the aggressive Boston driver, it all begins with the Central Artery. Because if you wanted to get on or off the thing, you had to be aggressive.

ARCHIVAL: The thing to do is just ignore all regulations and use your uh, imagination.

MUSIC: Post

NARR: On top of all that, the Artery cut the city off from its own waterfront. People called it the other ‘green monster' -- in reference to the towering outfield wall at Fenway Park. I remember as a kid walking under the Artery; it felt like going through a secret passageway to a whole other city. One side was all glass towers and the hulking concrete of city hall, the other side was the quaint Italian cafes of the North End. The walkway between them was surrounded with chain link fence and netting, which is good, because chunks of concrete had been known to fall from the underside of the structure.

Fred Salvucci: It was just a mess. So physically it was bad. Functionally it was bad and socially it divided the city.

NARR: People had been talking about how to fix the Artery since the time it opened. But after the state canceled construction of its other urban expressways – the ones we heard about in the last episode – the situation with the Artery became more pressing. It was really the only interstate carrying traffic through the heart of the city, and it was totally dysfunctional. Now, most solutions to that problem involved adding more lanes, or even adding a second level to the whole thing, making the monster wider and taller and louder. But that day at the bar with sawdust on the floor, Bill Reynolds, the road builder offered a new idea.

Fred Salvucci: So I've come to the conclusion that to get the root of the problem, we have to tear down the central artery and rebuild it underground.

NARR: Put the whole thing underground.

Fred Salvucci: And then the city will be beautiful, transportation work. And guys like you will stop opposing highways cuz you'll see they're great. And I, I said gee Bill, that's a wonderful image, but we're gonna have to put a sign up at the Charles's river: a city closed for alterations, come back in 10 years. How the hell are we gonna do this thing without shutting the city down?

NARR: Reynolds was not discouraged.

Fred Salvucci: Ah, you're being too narrow minded. There's always a way to do it.

MUSIC: Enter

NARR: So they went their separate ways, but Salvucci couldn't get the idea out of his head.

Fred Salvucci: I was walking under the central artery all the time. From city hall, I'd go across to the north end and, and those years you could get additional macaroni and beans for half a buck.

NARR: And on those lunchtime walks he started looking around, and realizing just how much space there was underneath the structure of the Artery. Maybe enough to actually dig a tunnel while you keep the elevated highway up and running. Meaning, traffic would never have to stop.

Fred Salvucci: So I, I said to bill, you know, I think maybe that thing could be built. He said, of course it could be built.

NARR: Burying the Central Artery was in itself, an ambitious and radical idea, but the project we now know as the Big Dig would be even more ambitious than what Reynolds and Salvucci batted around at the bar. Because the Central Artery would only be half of it.

MUSIC: Theme

NARR: From GBH News, this is The Big Dig: a study in American infrastructure. I'm Ian Coss.

There are a lot of great ideas that never ever get built. Because when it comes to infrastructure, those ideas have to compete – for money, political will, public support – and only the most powerful ideas survive.

Well from the moment of its conception, the idea of burying the Central Artery was locked in competition with another big idea – a bitter rival. The people behind these two projects were so philosophically opposed, that Salvucci compared their struggle to the Wars of the Roses, the bloody ongoing conflict that rocked England in the 15th century. The factions in that conflict famously displayed their loyalties with either a white rose, or a red rose. You wore one or the other, but not both.

That’s how it was in Boston in the 70’s with these two rival projects. Both happened to be tunnel projects, but where one tunnel promised to stitch the city back together, the other threatened to tear it apart further. And that left Fred Salvucci in a tough position: right in the middle.

This is Part Two: "Unholy Alliance."

PRE-ROLLNARR: The story of that other tunnel project takes place in a part of Boston that has not come up so far. And I'll just add that if you're listening on your phone and want to pull up a map, this might be a good episode to do that. If you zoom in, you’ll see Boston kind of wrapped around its harbor. Now most of the city – downtown, the Boston Common, Fenway Park, etc – that’s all on one side of that harbor. But over on the other side, you’ve got East Boston – or Eastie – all on its own. Eastie is easy to ignore and easy to forget, except that it’s home to something very important: the airport.

ARCHIVAL: Today there are 7,000 airports. Every major city has at least one.

NARR: Air travel exploded after World War II, so at the same time that America was busy building interstates, we were also busy building airports. Including in East Boston.

ARCHIVAL: The biggest investment is the land

NARR: Logan Airport expanded dramatically in these years, from less than 200 acres, to more than two thousand acres.

ARCHIVAL: … longer runways, future parking space and more hangers

NARR: Which meant expanding into East Boston.

ARCHIVAL: When you're on the telephone, you have to stop talking until a plane goes by, my windows are all rattling. The planes were flying over our house every second. We were ready to go out of our minds. I mean, we were all going mental.

NARR: So in the late 1960s, just as other neighborhoods were facing down the threat from highways, residents in East Boston were facing the threat of the airport. And this was truly an existential threat. The airport had already bought or seized hundreds of homes; not to mention an entire public park designed by the legendary landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmstead. The park was flattened, to extend a runway.

ARCHIVAL: It was beautiful. But now what they did to us, of they're gonna have to make up a hell of a lot to, to, to do justice by me.

NARR: East Boston was by all accounts a conservative, religious, authority-respecting community. This is not where you came for anti-war rallies, or Civil Rights marches.

ARCHIVAL: Tow to the planes. Away from neighborhood.

NARR: But for some in the neighborhood, the airport would turn them into activists.

ARCHIVAL: Mely, Mely, Mely, Mely. Our life would be so close.

NARR: One of those activists was a woman named Anna DeFronzo.

ARCHIVAL: Anna DeFronzo’s a fifth generation, east Bostonian, and on more committees than Dolly Madison.

NARR: In this footage DeFronzo stands in front of a wooden triple-decker house -- the kind that you see lined up in tidy rows all around Boston. She's in her early 60s, and can't be much more than five feet tall, with her hands stuffed in the pockets of a black and white houndstooth coat.

ARCHIVAL: It seems to have a sense of community that I don't know the people who have been here a long time, aren't they? Yes, they have. This is a very, very close community. I understand that you're a rabble rouser now. Well, I've been called a revolutionist, a rabble rouser and everything else. But when I believe I'm fighting for something that's right. I'll fight. I don't care what they call me.

NARR: For Anna DeFronzo, the breaking point came in 1968. The airport was trucking in loads of dirt to expand runways out into the harbor, and those trucks went right down her neighborhood’s main street -- appropriately named Maverick Street -- hundreds of trucks every day.

ARCHIVAL: So then we had a meeting, all the mothers of Maverick street and we figured we would get together. And this time we would fight.

NARR: Thirty women and children, some of them in baby carriages, parked themselves in the middle of Maverick Street and blocked the trucks. Mary Ellen Welch was one of the other local women who took to the street that day.

Mary Ellen Welch: When the first truck came, they were screaming and hollering at us. Get outta the way we'll run you over. They were tooting, you know, the horns, it was, it was scary,

ARCHIVAL: Protest sound

Mary Ellen Welch: But the women didn't move. We just stayed there. So they called the cops. When they came, they got very rough and they would like take it by the shoulders and shove you from the street into like the steps of somebody's house or the fence. Very rough because the women wouldn't leave.

NARR: In a twist of fate, Fred Salvucci, had a front row seat to this whole drama. He was working for the city at the time, and was stationed at a small City Hall outpost in East Boston, just down the street from where the protest was happening.

Fred Salvucci: I was urging them to not do it cuz I was afraid they were really gonna get hurt.

NARR: And even though Salvucci tried to stop the protest, he sympathized with the residents. He even encouraged the mayor -- his boss -- to take their side.

ARCHIVAL: Now I’m not here to grandstand the mic. I'm here as your mayor now.

NARR: The mayor did come out to meet with the protesters. And by the end that week, the Mothers of Maverick Street had won their first victory.

ARCHIVAL: The trucks won’t roll tomorrow!

NARR: But more importantly, DeFronzo and the other mothers had sparked a new movement.

NARR: John Vitagliano got involved with that movement a couple years later, in the early 1970s.

John Vitagliano: What I had heard about de Franzo. I had pitched this 300 pound, um, biker, you know tattoos in around and everything else, you know, smoking a cigar. I walked into the, into the room. And Anna's at the head of the table as the chair of them group this year is there's rather small, you know, grandmotherly type, and she sees me coming in the door, you know, John, come on in, come on in, sit down.

NARR: That day, Anna took John under her wing.

John Vitagliano: And I was so glad that she did, she was, she was amazingly, effective.

NARR: By this time, in the 70s, the battlefield was already starting to shift. Airport expansion was slowing down, but another issue was heating up: the so-called "Third Harbor Tunnel." Remember, to get from the rest of Boston, and really the rest of the state, to the airport, you have to cross the harbor. So for years, the business community and airport leadership had been pushing for a new tunnel.

John Vitagliano: To serve the transportation needs of Logan airport. And that was really rubbing salt in the wound.

NARR: This is the tunnel that would give Fred Salvucci such a headache, and ultimately figure into our story about the Big Dig. And For Vitagliano, the tunnel issue was personal. When the first tunnel to East Boston was built in the 1930s, it came right up under his grandparents’ house.

John Vitagliano: And it was taken by eminent domain and that whole area of east Boston. Absolutely just, uh demolished.

NARR: The new tunnel would come up right in Maverick Square, where Anna DeFronzo had organized that first protest. Not only would the tunnel take more homes, but it would effectively cut the whole area off from the rest of East Boston. Anna and her neighbors would be caught between the airport wall, the tunnel entrance, and the sea.

MUSIC: Enter

But once again, the neighborhood had an ally: Fred Salvucci – the man who, in the last episode, helped stop highway plans laid out for the whole region. And since Salvucci had an office in East Boston, Vitagliano decided to go see him.

John Vitagliano: What I thought was gonna be like a 20 minute hi how are ya kind of a thing turned into a three hour meeting. And I realized after 20 minutes I thought I was sitting in the presence of a very remarkable person.

NARR: Up to that point, Vitagliano had been thinking about small goals -- like maybe they could get the airport to plant some trees, or hold off on their construction plans for a bit.

John Vitagliano: That was kind of my thought, you know, you don't just stop these kinds of projects.

NARR: But Salvucci encouraged him to think bigger.

John Vitagliano: And Fred said, John, no, no, no. We have to think big terms about this.

NARR: You have to remember, Salvucci was in the midst of fighting to stop the Inner Belt and Southwest Expressway. He was already thinking in radical, transformational terms. So if those roads could be stopped, why couldn't the harbor tunnel be stopped too?

John Vitagliano: It was like a revelation. I mean, Moses must have felt like this when he got the word, you know, on Mount Sinai, he was mesmerizing.

MUSIC: Transition

NARR: So now we have our two rival projects: the underground Artery and the Third Harbor Tunnel. They represented opposite philosophies of transportation -- the red rose and the white rose if you will. One tunnel was all about serving car traffic – even if it destroyed some homes in the process – while the other tunnel was all about restoring the city’s fabric, and protecting residents from the impact of cars. Salvucci is deeply familiar with both of them, but he's not exactly responsible for either of them – not from his office in City Hall. But he was about to get a new office.

ARCHIVAL: From the WGBH Studios Compass Special: Race for Governor

NARR: In 1974, Michael Dukakis ran for governor, challenging a man you’ll remember from the last episode: Francis Sargent.

ARCHIVAL: The draw of the lot gives the first opening statement to Michael Dukakis. Next Tuesday, Massachusetts will choose a governor...

NARR: Dukakis attacked on many fronts, but transportation would become one of his signature issues. And for Dukakis, transportation did not mean highways. It meant mass transit, which he rode every day, and which he argued, the state had been neglecting for years.

ARCHIVAL: And I hope the governor one of these days takes a ride in the green line to see what we're going through. Those of us who suffer on that thing day after day.

NARR: It was all part of his appeal -- this young idealist with a mop of black hair, who rode the train to work like everyone else. A week after that debate, Dukakis easily defeated Sargent. He appointed Salvucci his Secretary of Transportation.

MUSIC: Enter

This was a big promotion for Fred Salvucci. He was no longer a rogue city planner pushing and lobbying from outside the room where decisions were made. Now, many of those decisions were his to make. But despite all that, the third harbor tunnel was not something he could just dismiss. The traffic out to the airport really was terrible, and for many people in the state, a few blocks of East Boston was a small price to pay for a faster trip to the airport. So as Secretary of Transportation, Salvucci was now in a tough spot.

Fred Salvucci: Yeah, I mean, the artery was something I really wanted to do. The tunnel was something I felt there was a lot of support for, and I had to deal with that politically, but I wasn't gonna be part of screwing East Boston again.

NARR: And if Salvucci was skeptical of the Harbor Tunnel, Michael Dukakis was downright hostile to the idea.

Fred Salvucci: Dukakis still felt it was a waste of money.

NARR: Dukakis remember was all about mass transit, and so his standard line was:

Fred Salvucci: We already have a third harbor tunnel. It's called the Blue Line.

NARR: Meaning:

Fred Salvucci: People should take public transportation to go to the airport.

NARR: No new tunnels, no new highways, period.

So all through that first term, Salvucci began laying the groundwork for the project he and Dukakis did agree on: getting rid of the elevated Artery. They steadily advanced the idea forward over those four years. But what Salvucci didn't realize was that the pendulum was about to swing the other way, led by a man who the activists in East Boston also knew very well.

ARCHIVAL: We are going to turn this state around and bring Massachusetts back to the leadership role it has enjoyed throughout American history.

NARR: The War of the Tunnels was just getting started.

MID-ROLLNARR: In February of 1978, the greatest winter storm Boston had ever recorded rolled over the city.

ARCHIVAL: The weather situation that now exists in the Commonwealth is probably one of the worst in our history, and for that reason, …

NARR: Snow fell at a rate of four inches per hour, wind gusts topped 80 miles an hour. Cars were trapped on the highway, barely visible under mounds of windswept snow, and even plow trucks could barely get around the streets.

ARCHIVAL: Truck Sound 

NARR: In the middle of that historic storm, a young journalist named Renee Loth moved across the harbor to East Boston.

MUSIC: Enter

Renee Loth: I moved over my, my cats and my stereo, um, and my bed. And, uh, I said, oh, well, it's, it's snowing. You know, we'll finish up tomorrow. And of course tomorrow never came. It was two weeks before I got to go back to my old apartment in Somerville and finish moving. And so I had nothing, truly, nothing. I didn't have a teapot, I didn't have a fork. Um, and the neighbors all chipped in and gave me, you know, the things that I needed to live for those two weeks.

NARR: Renee still has the plates and saucers one of her neighbors gave her.

Renee Loth: I lived in a triple decker row house very much like most of east Boston. It was a cold water flat, so called, there was no central heating. Um, so in order to heat the apartment, there was sort of a space heater element to, ... at the gas stove.

NARR: The apartment was cheap, just $85 a month for two rooms. Which was good, because she had just taken a job at the East Boston Community News, which did not have a big budget.

Renee Loth: I was the editor, the reporter, the photographer, um, layout person. I sold all of the ads.

NARR: The paper had been founded in 1970 by a pair of conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War. They were assigned to work for an anti-poverty organization in East Boston as their alternate service, and there they started a little newsletter. Since then it had grown into a weekly publication, mostly run by volunteers out of an apartment in Maverick Square.

Renee Loth: So the dark room was in the bathroom. We had the enlarger, um, set up over the bathtub and we used the sink there for making the photographs. Um, the kitchen that's where we had our sort of main office. And then there was a long skinny bedroom, uh, where we had a layout table.

NARR: WGBH filmed the community news office about a decade later, but in the footage it still looks like a pretty scrappy operation.

ARCHIVAL: We may have to go 16 pages rather than eight.

Renee Loth: We would type, set it on an IBM electric typewriter. And then we would just sort of cut the columns of type out and use a hot waxer to lay the pages out. And, you know, there were these marathon weekend production sessions – children, retirees and housewives and just neighborhood people would come and help, and then we'd all go to Santa Harpos and have pizza with extra garlic.

NARR: 1978 was also an election year for Massachusetts governor, and that year, a new challenger emerged: Ed King. The activists in Eastie knew Ed King well. Because he was the face of airport expansion… the man who wanted to pave over their neighborhood.

Renee Loth: He was really our bete noire; our relationship with him was not good.

NARR: King had run the Massachusetts Port Authority – or Massport – which operated the airport. And he ran it during those same years when the airport was swallowing up land, expanding runways, and sending dump trucks rumbling down Maverick Street. Before that he was a professional football player who spent three seasons with the Buffalo Bills and Baltimore Colts. And before that, interestingly, he was a kid from Eastie. He had grown up in the neighborhood.

Renee Loth: So there's a little bit of, you know, amateur psychology that somebody could do about how Ed King felt about his own roots that he wanted to basically destroy the neighborhood and, create this, vision he had of a transportation Mecca. He was going to blow it up and start all over again.

NARR: When it came to tunnels, it was no secret what color rose Ed King wore – his transportation Mecca did not include an underground Central Artery. But it definitely included the new Harbor Tunnel.

John Vitagliano: By the way, he actually lived, about three blocks away from where we are right now.

NARR: Back in the early 70s, years before King ran for Governor, John Vitagliano was part of a neighborhood group that would actually follow his every move.

John Vitagliano: What did we called the truth squad and we'd followed king and a couple of his cohorts around from one neighborhood meeting to another.

NARR: And so every time King made his pitch for airport expansion or the new tunnel.

John Vitagliano: We would go up and would challenge him, in meeting, after meeting.

NARR: Mary Ellen Welch, one of the Maverick Street mothers, used to lead processions of cars that crept around the airport at 5 miles per hour -- basically taunting Ed King, who would be standing on top of the terminal with a pair of binoculars yelling at them.

Renee Loth: We didn't get the press releases from mass port. If we tried to contact anybody for a comment, they wouldn't comment. Um, it was a contentious relationship for sure.

NARR: But the battling and sleuthing had all came to an end in 1974, when the MassPort board fired Ed King.

Ann Hershfang: I fired Ed King, first thing

NARR: This detail is too good not to mention. It was actually Ann Hershfang, one of the highway activists from the last episode, who cast the deciding vote. The Massport board had been shifting for a few years at this point and King's vision of airport expansion was losing support. So in 1974, when Hershfang was appointed to the board, King made his last stand.

Ann Hershfang: He'd gotten all of his allies in the boardroom. The temperature's about 150 and they were all yelling at me.

NARR: It got so bad that the state police halted the meeting and escorted all the board members out of the room.

Ann Hershfang: So we all went into the office of Ed King and fired him.

NARR: King did not take that defeat lightly. And so a few years later, in 1978, he ran for governor. He was a democrat, so this was a primary challenge. But King was a very different kind of Democrat – his platform was more like a preview of Ronald Reagan.

Renee Loth: Welfare reform, tax relief, abortion, and the death penalty

NARR: Again, Renee Loth of the East Boston Community News

Renee Loth: And the thing about Ed King is that he would just hammer these over and over again, you know, it was, you could almost quote what he was going to say.

ARCHIVAL: I'm for capital punishment. Lit on state spending, raising the drinking age to 21, no taxpayer money being used for abortion,

NARR: This audio is from a televised debate between Dukakis and King.

Fred Salvucci: No matter what question they'd ask him, he'd say, I'm for the death penalty. He's against it. I'm far it.

ARCHIVAL: Capital punishment.

I'm for capital punishment

Fred Salvucci: And it was like apropos of nothing. He would just keep saying the same thing

ARCHIVAL: Mandatory jail sentences…Mandatory for drug pushers

NARR: And King's bet was that in 1978, a lot of people agreed with that message.

ARCHIVAL: That mainstream democratic party, that blue collar worker you ask him about taking his dollars to pay for abortions. Do you know what his answer is? No. The fringe is over here.

NARR: The fringe he was referring to, of course, was Michael Dukakis, the sitting incumbent, who frankly looks a little bored by this whole debate.

ARCHIVAL: Mr. Dukakis, you have 60 seconds to respond.

Renee Loth: the Dukakis campaign was kind of sleepy and not really, um, taking the threat of Ed King seriously.

NARR: But the East Boston Community News took Ed King very seriously. And they made it their mission to raise the alarm.

Renee Loth: So we ran a sort of fake front page, uh, the week before the primary, That we called the bad news and there was a headline that said, you know, king elected governor bulldozers to roll through Eastie tomorrow.

NARR: The issue was laid out in hot wax, then printed and distributed around the neighborhood as usual.

Renee Loth: And after a couple of hours, I started getting phone calls from like the fellow who ran the seven 11 type place in Maverick square saying, is there a problem with the community news today? And I'd say, no, why?

NARR: Apparently someone had just walked into the store, claiming to be with the Community News. They said there was an error with the issue and had to take all the copies.

Renee Loth: And I said, no, you know, we did not have this error that we did not order the papers to be recalled. And we did have evidence that, uh, the fellow who was taking the papers and throwing them into the back of his, um, station wagon had an Ed King bumper sticker

NARR: Each issue of the paper cost $350 to print, and they did not have another $350 lying around.

Renee Loth: A number of people in the community, John Vitagliano and other anti airport activists uh, raised the $350 out of, you know, five and $10 donations for us to reprint the issue.

John Vitagliano: I still have a copy of it, by the way.

Renee Loth: It was for us and for the people we represented, a really great moment.

Ian Coss: Can you take me to the 1978 election? Um

John Vitagliano: I'd rather not, but I will.

NARR: John Vitagliano was driving back home on the night of the primary, September 19th, 1978.

John Vitagliano: I can still remember. Having to stop my car and pulling off into a parking lot and so forth just to get my wits together. Cuz I couldn't quite believe what I was hearing.

NARR: Dukakis was the overwhelming favorite – in some polls from that summer he led by a forty point margin. And yet…

John Vitagliano: Ed king, who had pledged part of his life to essentially eliminate East Boston apparently he was winning. It was just mind boggling.

NARR: It was mind boggling for Dukakis as well.

Mike Dukakis: if you don't think that was a, a difficult defeat, you can't imagine.

NARR: A few months later, King won the general election and became the state's next governor. Meaning the war between the tunnels was about to enter a new phase.

ARCHIVAL: Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much!

NARR: Fred Salvucci learned an important lesson that day. That a good idea was not enough. In fact, a good idea was worth nothing if you didn't have the words to communicate it, and the coalition to support it.

Fred Salvucci: We were pretty exuberant in Dukakis won. We, we thought we had the right answers. In many cases I think we did, but well, it's the right answer. So it'll be self-evident. We'll just do it and people will love us. Well it didn't work.

NARR: For Salvucci, it was self-evident that tearing down this hulking, crumbling, congested highway and putting the whole thing underground, was a good idea. But that didn't matter anymore. Salvucci was out of a job and wound up teaching at MIT. The King administration dropped the idea of burying the Central Artery entirely. A reporter interviewed Salvucci the day after the Artery decision was announced.

ARCHIVAL: I had thought frankly, that the King administration was going to proceed, uh, at least with the environmental analysis, and I was pretty upset when I saw yesterday morning's newspaper.

NARR: You can tell Salvucci was bitter about it – it felt personal.  

ARCHIVAL: The other thing is he doesn't like me and he doesn't like Dukakis and so he can kind of undo it. It makes him, it gives him a kick somehow.

NARR: To King's credit, his main concern about burying the Artery was that it would be astronomically expensive, which was true. Of course, the project King did want to proceed with was the Third Harbor Tunnel, the one that would come right up in Maverick Square. For activists in East Boston, this was their worst nightmare come to life.

John Vitagliano: And you could notice that throughout the neighborhood, um, those were not just academic issues anymore. They became real world issues.

NARR: But by 1978 the activists were truly organized. It had been a decade since Anna DeFronzo and the other Maverick Street Mothers had successfully stopped the trucks rolling down their street, and they knew how to get things done.

Renee Loth: There was a meeting in east Boston. I am not exaggerating every night.

NARR: Land use meetings, airport noise meetings, housing meetings...

John Vitagliano: A lot of meetings

NARR: And sometimes, meetings with powerful people. Ted Kennedy came out against the tunnel. So did Congressman Tip O'Neil, who was then the Speaker of the House. He famously said the tunnel would have to be built over his dead body.

MUSIC: Enter

NARR: Then in 1981, the activists caught a lucky break, in the form of $1000 dollars in an envelope. The money was intended for a man named Barry Locke, Salvucci's successor as Secretary of Transportation.

Renee Loth: Who was sort of the un-Fred Salvucci. I mean, everything that Fred was for Barry Locke was against and vice versa.

NARR: Locke was the man in charge of making the Third Harbor Tunnel happen.

Renee Loth: Fortunately for east Boston, I suppose Barry Locke was a not very upstanding character.

NARR: That envelope of cash, it was a bribe, but it was opened by the wrong person.

ARCHIVAL: A sensitive subject: Barry Locke, he was your transportation secretary and he is now under indictment

NARR: Locke was indicted in July of 1981.

Renee Loth: that definitely stalled the king agenda,

NARR: The planning process for the tunnel did continue, but it had lost precious time…so much time that now the next election was approaching.

Mike Dukakis: I'm not sure at first that I thought I even had a shot at running for reelection again, I certainly didn't think so.

NARR: Again, Michael Dukakis.

Mike Dukakis: But King didn't do a great job either. And at some point A lot of people came to me and said, you know, you really, you messed it up, but you really, really gotta give it a try again. And, uh, I finally decided to do that.

NARR: It would come to be known as "the rematch."

John Vitagliano: It was kinda like one of those big heavyweight, uh, championship bouts when, uh, Muhammad Ali Lee would defeat Fraser and then one of them would go into retirement rest for six months and then he would come back and try to to retake the crown but this time, you know, Mike Dukakis applied some of the lessons that he learned in the, in 1978.

NARR: This time around, Dukakis kept his focus closer to the ground -- on voter outreach, working class issues – stuff he had neglected the last campaign.

In politics, second chances are pretty rare. Beating a sitting incumbent in a primary is also rare. In September of 1982, Michael Dukakis achieved both. The night of the election, Salvucci was so exhausted and relieved that he fell asleep with his face in the middle of a pizza.

Fred Salvucci: I literally woke up with my nose in the pizza , uh, yeah, it was, was incredible.

ARCHIVAL: I'm not sure I'm amplified, am I? Slightly? A little bit.

NARR: Dukakis won the general election easily, and before the end of the year he announced Salvucci would be coming back to run transportation.

ARCHIVAL: I'm delighted to announce his appointment. It's probably the best kept secret in America. So , um,

NARR: The reporters at least gave him a warm reception. And Fred Salvucci was ready to get back to work. Especially now… because he’d had a revelation about this war between the tunnels. Before the election, when he was sitting in his office at MIT, Salvucci got a call from an unlikely friend.

Fred Salvucci: I got a phone call from Bill Reynolds.

NARR: This is the same Bill Reynolds who had pitched Salvucci on the idea of burying the Artery -- the guy who loved highways and thought everyone else should too.

Fred Salvucci: Bill said, uh, gee, you know, what are you doing? I said, I'm grading papers just to needle him a bit, because he had supported King. And, you know, was one of the reasons I was grading papers instead of planning the artery.

NARR: Reynolds took the jab and pressed on.

Fred Salvucci: He said, Well, I, I got a little job, over by South Station and from where I'm standing, I can see the right alignment for the tunnel.

NARR: Reynolds was calling from a payphone, and when he said he could see the alignment, he meant a path for the harbor tunnel, a way to go from downtown Boston straight to Logan airport.

Fred Salvucci: He said, it's, it's totally clean. This thing can be built without taking a single building, so I said to him, Well that's interesting. Why don't you call your friends, uh, in the King administration and tell 'em it's a good idea? And he said, don't be like that. You know, they're idiots. They won't listen to me. They don't know what they're doing,

Ian Coss: Even though he had supported them.

Fred Salvucci: Yeah. Will you take a look at it?

NARR: Reynolds drove over to MIT, picked up Salvucci, and drove him back to that exact spot where he had called from. Now, Salvucci over the years had considered many options for how to build this tunnel, and all of them struggled with the same basic problem: this tunnel had to have a portal on either side – it had to come up somewhere. And it couldn’t make a lot of curves underwater, it had to be pretty straight. That’s why the original tunnel plans had it coming up in Maverick Square – because it was right across the harbor from downtown. Reynolds though, from that phone booth, had realized that if you just started the tunnel a little south of the downtown, it could go straight across and into the airport itself, and you wouldn't have to take a single property. He had, in effect, expanded the map of possibilities.

Fred Salvucci: I said, Well, you know, Bill, you're right again. This, this is the right way to build a tunnel.

NARR: Salvucci could see now that as long as the state was divided into the Artery camp and a Harbor Tunnel camp, neither of them would ever get done. The solution, he realized, was a combined project -- something that pleased the tunnel crowd and the Artery crowd. Something that could actually survive the long process of design, permitting, funding and construction. Plus the two projects, even though they were rivals, made good sense together: if you depressed the Artery and connected it to the new harbor tunnel, the whole system would work better.

Fred Salvucci: So I had a conversation with Dukakis and I said, Look, once you’re hopefully elected we should really take a serious look at this.

ARCHIVAL: Thank you all very much. And if the members of the press have questions for Fred and Marty, I'm sure they'll be.

NARR: But when Dukakis was re-elected and Salvucci was reappointed secretary, he had to tread carefully.

ARCHIVAL: We've all got an obligation to look at things in a careful way with our people.

NARR: Because Dukakis had still not embraced this vision of a combined project, and of course all the reporters were eager to know: what would Salvucci do about the two tunnels?

ARCHIVAL: So you're saying that your priorities have not been established? You'reYou're not saying you would necessarily go for the central artery depression over the third harbor tunnel.

Uh, I'm saying that we will look carefully with other people because there are other people who have a big stake in it too.

NARR: Salvucci took the opportunity to at least try and set the tone, and with any luck start to convince his boss who was standing right behind him. He offered this metaphor.

ARCHIVAL: We don't wanna get into a sort of a war of the Roses here. After a hundred years, everybody forgets who the reds and who the whites were. Uh, but they're just still fighting each other. We've gotta get the facts on the table and the general public that's caught in a traffic jam really doesn't care which, uh, color rose people wear on the lapel. They wanna see something done that's gonna make our transportation system work better and we have to get agreement to do that, it can’t be a unilateral decision...

NARR: In order to forge that kind of agreement, Salvucci first needed to get his own allies on board. But even with the new tunnel plan, there were still skeptics in East Boston.

John Vitagliano: Just the idea of supporting a tunnel, even on the airport, raised the hackle of a lot of folks in east Boston And I was one of them. But I know Fred was the only person that I can think of who could have pulled it off. It had to be Fred and he, he put us whole reputation online.

NARR: The person Salvucci went to for help was Anna DeFronzo, one of the original Maverick Street Mothers.

Fred Salvucci: And I got together with Anna and I said, Look, uh,

NARR: He made a very practical argument.

Fred Salvucci: One of these days the tunnel's gonna get built cause the traffic's building the political pressure from everywhere else wants the tunnel. And now we've got a tunnel that doesn't take our land. It takes the airport's land.

NARR: So basically he said: I won't be around forever, take this tunnel while you can.

Fred Salvucci: And it'll settle this issue once and for all and we’ll be free of this threat.

NARR: The state scheduled a pair of marathon public meetings for the project -- from 11am to 11pm, two days in a row. They were held upstairs at historic Faneuil Hall, the so-called 'Cradle of Liberty.' This is where the question of the American revolution was hashed out in public by the likes of Sam Adams, where Fredrick Douglass and JFK came to give speeches. And the meetings over the harbor tunnel lived up to that proud tradition.

John Vitagliano: A lot of yelling and screaming, uh, people getting up and shaking their fingers that Fred, you know, like if one would get up and say, well, that's not so bad, another one would get up, say it is bad. It's worse.

NARR: This was in early August, during one of Boston’s hottest summers on record. The temperature that first day climbed well above 90 degrees. The meetings dragged on. At one point, anti-tunnel activists held the floor for two hours straight. But eventually, Anna DeFronzo got up to speak.

Fred Salvucci: It was very dramatic. She said, I was always against the tunnel, but this tunnel's different and this tunnel's good for us. Let's support it.

NARR: It was stunning testimony, from the woman who perhaps more than anyone had put her body on the line for the neighborhood. From the woman who had stood in front of dump trucks, who had broken through fences, and once sat down in the bucket of a frontloader; who had been arrested and handcuffed who knows how many times. When she gave her blessing, for many people, that meant the tunnel was OK.

MUSIC: Transition

NARR: Anna DeFronzo lived to be 91 years old, long enough to see that tunnel built. Today, you can see the ventilation shaft for the tunnel from the very end of Maverick Street, just beyond the airport wall. Also at the end of Maverick Street, there's a park overlooking the water, and a senior center now named for Anna DeFronzo.

I took a walk around that park recently. It was early and quiet. I realized afterwards that by a strange coincidence, this day that I came out to record the park, the FAA had shut down all air travel in the whole country due to a weird technical glitch. It was the first time that all domestic air travel had been halted since 9/11. Looking around at the water and the empty sky, I had to imagine that Anna would be pleased with this scene.

ARCHIVAL:

Reporter: What do you hope Boston looks like in 10 or 20 years in the…,

Anna DeFronzo: I hope it'll be a beautiful place with a lot of trees, a lot of grass, which we used to have and is gone now and places for our elderly and mothers and children and the little kids. So they'll have a lot of place to play that we don't have anymore. That's all gone. We had so many things. They're all gone now.

Reporter: Would you leave east Boston?

Anna DeFronzo: Never. Here's where I was born and here's where I'm going to die.

MUSIC: Transition

NARR: In September of 1983, a month after that public meeting in Faneuil Hall, Salvucci won over the last big skeptic: his boss.

ARCHIVAL: Thank you all for joining us here today for the announcement of a very, very important decision, and it's a decision that's required more than a little soul searching on my part.

NARR: Dukakis is speaking in front of a whole row of big full-color posters. There is a map of the city with two thick red lines spreading out like a lobster claw. One of those lines is the Central Artery; the other is the Third Harbor Tunnel. And they were now linked.

ARCHIVAL: Because if the artery doesn't work, you won't even be able to get to the tunnel.

NARR: Many compromises were made along the way. But there was one compromise Dukakis and Salvucci would not make -- it was the promise Salvucci had made to his grandmother, and again to Anna DeFronzo.

ARCHIVAL: We can depress the artery, provide a third harbor crossing and we can do it without taking even one person's house or apartment anywhere without taking one person's house or apartment anywhere.

NARR: That day, a strange and fragile coalition was forged between the red rose and the white. It included environmentalists and community activists, but also business leaders and road builders. People who thought that burying the Artery was a waste of money, and people who thought the Third Harbor Tunnel was a pointless concession to car culture. People from Eastie, and the people who just traveled through Eastie to get to the airport. One Massachusetts congressman I talked to, called it an unholy alliance. They didn't all like each other, they didn't all trust each other, but in this case, they needed each other.

ARCHIVAL: This 2.2 billion project is, I believe, unique in highway building history

NARR: The last question Dukakis took that day was about the national politics of the project -- what made him think he could get money for this out of Washington? He more or less brushed it off.

ARCHIVAL: And, uh, my sense is that this is not a partisan issue in any sense of the word.

NARR: On that count, Dukakis would prove to be very wrong. Because in the four years he had been out of power, something very important had changed in Washington DC. Ronald Reagan had been elected president. And Reagan had his own feelings about this little project up in Boston.

ARCHIVAL: the 88 billion boondoggle of a highway bill sort of gives me a case of heartburn. How do I spell relief? V E T O.

NARR: That's next time.

The show is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Coss. It’s edited by Lacy Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Stephanie Leydon with support from Lisa Wardle. Mei Lei is the project manager, and the Executive Producer is Devin Maverick Robins.

The interview with Mary Ellen Welch was recorded and graciously shared by the filmmaker Naomi Yang. Her film “Never Be a Punching Bag For Nobody” is a deeply moving portrait of activism in East Boston. I’m also grateful to the Northeastern University Archives, which have digitized issues of the East Boston Community News spanning the paper’s 20 year history.

If you want to see the archival video we’re pulling audio from, including footage of Anna DeFranzo, Dukakis and Salvucci – go to GBH News dot org. It’s all up there.

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.