
Last night I caught Fred Salvucci talking about 1960′s-era highway-building projects at MIT. These highways pop up in my Globe columns all the time, because the roads that got built, and the ones that didn’t, still shape Boston-area land use, 40 years after the last construction projects were abandoned.
Fred, who was working for the pro-highway BRA during the day and organizing to stop the highways in Cambridge at night, was in rare form last night. He said anti-highway organizing resonated in Cambridgeport and Central Square because organizers could point to urban renewal projects like the West End and Mass. Pike clearance in Brighton and show that the promises were empty. Here’s how he put it:
Bad public policy is like measles — you get exposed to it enough times, you get immune to it. We had a lot of bad public policy around here, but we learned, the next time somebody tells you they’re going to do you a favor, they’re going to tear down your house and move you into a better one, tell them to go screw. They’re lying. They might not know they’re lying, but it’s BS.
[1967 Inner Belt schematic from the BPL's government document collections, via the Internet Archive]