DL: The original proposal that Fred Salvucci first put before Alan Altschuler and then pushed when he became Mike Dukakis' Transportation Secretary was to depress the artery and, in the median, build a railroad link between North Station and South Station, which were the major two railroad stations in Boston. These are stations that date to the late nineteenth century and have never been connected and, for years, people have been saying, geez, it ought to make some sense to connect these two railroad stations or finish the network. This is a very appealing idea. It was one that Dukakis was particularly attracted to as somebody who was very pro-transit. It, unfortunately, had innumerable technical problems. It was not clear how you would pay for that project. And it wasn't at all clear that it provided any serious transportation benefits. It's one of those projects that sounds really good but when you actually begin to look at how many riders you get for how much money you're going to spend, the numbers don't look that great. That was not a major concern for Salvucci at the time but the technical problems turn out to be somewhat daunting.

DL: The prospect of the rail link was very appealing. It helps bring Dukakis on board. It helps bring some of the environmental groups who are pushing a transit agenda on board and there's a small subset of people who believe passionately in rail and in the rail link. And so they're excited by this prospect. So, at least, at that point in time, it helps build a bigger political coalition for the project.

DL: When Fred Salvucci and Mike Dukakis come back into office in 1983 and assemble this grand project of the artery and the tunnel, the rail link dies several deaths. The first is that they make a decision that the new artery has to have more lanes than the old artery because the Federal Highway Administration had always argued, if you're just replacing the same number of lanes below ground, this is not really a highway project. It's a beautification project and we don't want to pay for it. Well, as soon as you add lanes, you basically squeeze out the rail link because the space that you can build the underground artery in is constrained by the buildings on either side of the artery. So the right-of-way isn't big enough for four lanes in either direction plus a rail link. The second problem is that they make a design decision that the artery will be a fully covered tunnel.

DL: One of the things that's really striking about the death of the rail link in 1983 is it basically dies without anybody really caring. So something that looked important in the 1970s as part of the coalition in support of this project turns out in 1983 to not be all that important. There were a few environmentalist groups that complained but in general, everybody says, okay, that's fine. It's not that big a deal. Interestingly, about ten years after that, a group of people kind of rise up and say, no, there really ought to be a rail link and there's a whole new round of planning in support of that. And to make a long story very short, the artery figures out a way to advance the rail link a little bit without committing a lot of money or having to change the schedule or the design substantially. So the idea of the rail link survives and, as soon as somebody can find four, five or six billion dollars to build it, it might be built someday.

DL: I think on balance, people felt very positively about the Big Dig proposal that Salvucci puts forward in 1983. It doesn't appear to have any serious negative impacts. It doesn't look like it's going to cost Boston a lot of money because the argument is that it's federally funded. So here's a proposal that's going to make the city look better, supposed to fix these terrible traffic problems and it's not going to cost a lot. It's a no-brainer.

DL: Fred Salvucci had several localized problems. There are three biggies. The first is he has to go out to East Boston and sell them on this new tunnel. And this is very hard because Fred Salvucci and Mike Dukakis had made a great deal of their political reputation fighting the tunnel plans to East Boston. So they have to go out to East Boston and they basically say, look someday there's going to be a tunnel to East Boston and this is the best tunnel you're ever going to get. And, in fact, we think it's going to help you because, if it works, we'll pull some of the traffic off local streets. And the key here is that the tunnel comes up on airport land. It doesn't come up in East Boston, which was what the previous tunnel plans pushed by Ed King, the former Director of the Port Authority and then the governor, had done. So they say to the neighborhood, you don't have a tunnel coming up in the middle a neighborhood. You have a tunnel coming up over there in Logan Airport. They don't win over the hardcore opponents of the tunnel but they generally win over East Boston. There are lots of other problems in East Boston at the time and that is a relatively solvable problem. The second problem they have is in the North End of Boston -- a neighborhood that was greatly harmed by construction of the original Central Artery. And they have a very hard time convincing people that they're going to be able to build this new artery without closing off the North End forever. And there's some fight about what happens to the land the artery - - where the old artery was - who's going to control the development of the new parcels that are created. Some of this is purely a political problem. There are North End politicians who are fighting this proposal perhaps on its merits, perhaps on the sense that they wanted to get their fingers into the pie.

And here Fred Salvucci has a brilliant strategy, which is he end-runs those people. They're disrupting all his public meetings, so he basically says, I'll do small private meetings, coffee klatches, I know lots of people in the North End and I can isolate these very flamboyant, very telegenic opponents of the project and sort of marginalize them off to the side by saying that they're in this for narrow, self-interested reasons. And a great selling point in the North End, of course, is I'm not going to take a single building in the North End, not one. And there's going to be this land created and we will develop a process in which you will get some control over that land.

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