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]

But who needs rent money when you’ve got totally subversive and unprofessional government memos? That’s what we’ve got here. By all means, please do read on.

Here’s a quick addendum to a post from last month on urban renewal run amok in the Back Bay, and to this item in the April issue of Boston (On newsstands now! Buy buy buy!).

While I was researching the history of the Back Bay Architectural District’s borders and the debate over whether the district could be saved from itself with the addition of a couple modernist residential towers, I came across this July, 1967 memo from a BRA planning official named William Weismantel.

Weismantel sketched out three possible outcomes to a proposal to build towers in the Back Bay. High-rises might mix attract new residents and spur rehabilitation of the neighborhood’s increasingly shabby row houses; they might not mix with the neighborhood, and instead become oases of wealth in the midst of a death-spiraling slum; or, the city could block the towers altogether, and instead focus on preserving and rehabbing the Back Bay’s existing buildings.

It’s the second possible outcome that terrifies Weismantel, and he sketches it out in language that, it’s safe to say, rarely finds its way into BRA memos anymore:

New high rise fails to stimulate rehabilitation of row houses. High rise face out towards Public Garden or Charles River, on Arlington Street and the water side of Beacon Street, trying to ignore the “environmental sink” overcoming the middle of the district. In the middle, old row houses get older without the benefit of rehabilitation, except the worst kind: conversion to tiny apartments, dormitories, rooming houses, fraternities. William Lloyd Garrison’s statue on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall is pulled down and Dr. Timothy Leary’s lifted onto the empty pedestal during one of the spontaneous love-ins.

BRA planners don’t exactly write like that anymore. Sad.

The answer goes back to urban renewal, when Mayor Collins and the BRA were tearing down and encasing in concrete as much of the city as they could. Collins even proposed saving Old Boston from itself by placing up to eight high-rise condo towers along the A, B, C and D blocks of the Comm. Ave. Mall.

The Back Bay historic district was formed, in part, as a way to keep Collins from doing to the neighborhood what he was doing to Scollay Square.

The historical preservation push didn’t come without a good deal of controversy, though. I came across this utterly hilarious – not to mention wicked prescient – 1964 letter from noted local architect Isidor Richmond to the City Council, begging them to slap a few towers in Frederick Law Olmsted’s park before it was too late.

The consequences of not doing so were dire indeed. Without condo towers, Richmond warned, Comm. Ave. would become “A region of rooming houses and eventually a slum, with all the attendant evils of a bad slum. It is now necessary to tear down and reconstruct the South End by Urban Renewal… The days of Commonwealth Avenue are numbered unless something extraordinary is done.”