My latest for the Globe tackles a redevelopment project 50 years in the making — the rebuilding of Jackson Square, along the JP/Roxbury line. The square was cleared a half-century ago to make way for the Southwest Expressway.

The doomed Expressway project became the Orange Line and Southwest Corridor Park, but vertical construction around Jackson Square has lagged. The gray blocks on the map above represent present-day building footprints. They’re layered on top of the 1931 Bromley atlas for the neighborhood. Highway and slum clearance wiped out most of the old square, leaving emptiness and blight behind. Now, after decades of false starts, construction is commencing on a set of buildings that will make Jackson Square a city square again, not just a vacant intersection. 

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]

My latest for the Globe looks at an effort to reassemble the coalition that sank the Inner Belt and the Southwest Expressway. Forty years ago, activists from Somerville to Hyde Park crossed neighborhood boundaries to stop highway construction; now, they’re coming together as a constituency for transit-oriented development. Read the whole thing here.

[Creative Commons image via]

Nice job by the Herald today, pairing this column about Mitt Romney’s embarrassing efforts to run for Class President of Michigan Republicans with a banner ad from a Detroit-based car company Romney wanted to bankrupt.

My latest op-ed for the Globe looks at crumbling roadways around the region — the McGrath Highway, the Longfellow Bridge, Storrow Drive and the Bowker Overpass — as opportunities for reorienting infrastructure’s relationship with the city, and correcting mistakes from the 1950′s and 1960′s.

Since the roadways have to be rebuilt anyway, it makes sense to seize the chance to radically reshape them, instead of just refurbishing the flaws already in place.

Read the whole thing here.

[BPL images, before and after Storrow's widening]