But it was cleared. Twenty-five hundred buildings were torn down, and 10,000 residents were scattered to the winds. The plan was done in secret. The land was sold to a private developer and high-rise, high-end-rent luxury apartments were built on this site. It was a big grassy plain with towers sticking out of it, which looks like some alien form parachuted into the old, dense city that Boston is. Mercifully, the money ran out. Also, a number of books were written condemning this massive slum clearance program that was being conducted around the country and it ran to a halt. Boston is very lucky in that it only lost one of the original ten neighborhoods scheduled to be demolished.

Still, an enormous amount of damage was done. The Central Artery carved huge swaths through once-vibrant neighborhoods. There was a wholesale clearance of Boston’s former red-light district. In its place now is a vast government center with state, local, and federal government buildings scattered around a very large and empty plaza. It wasn’t the improvement they were hoping for.

But now we are starting to try to repair the well-intentioned but catastrophically misguided changes that were made over the last 35 years. We are in the process right now of redesigning that government plaza, of adding buildings and creating edges to give it more definition, and trying to program it adequately so it won’t be so empty and windswept. Many other repairs are also in the works.

As most of you know, we are in the middle of putting the elevated highway underground: “The Big Dig.” It was initially expected to cost four billion dollars and is now up to $15 billion. It is a huge project. They are building a tunnel underneath the elevated highway. After they open the tunnel to traffic, they will then tear down the Central Artery. On the surface, where the elevated highway will be removed, they are planning for the creation of new parks, museums, and playgrounds. It will be a wonderful public resource. And rather than have the highway as a barrier between the downtown and the harbor, it will be an important public connection between the two.

There was a cartoon published in The New Yorker during the time we were making all these mistakes. It showed a couple of women sitting on the train, and one is saying to the other, “I feel I should warn you they’re taking down most of Boston and they are putting up something else.” That was really true. But as we moved through the 1970s we began to come to our senses.

In the mid-1980’s, we started looking around the city and started to realize that Boston was becoming an important tourist destination. It became clear that the reason people wanted to visit here, not only from other cities in the United States, but from around the world, was because Boston really had, aside from where all the demolition had been done, a wonderful old historic fine grain. It had a fine scale pedestrian environment with old buildings, narrow streets, lots of shops and a beautiful park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also did your open space system in Buffalo.

We started thinking about a kind of re-imaging of Boston. We started thinking that maybe our planning and urban design efforts should focus more on trying to identify those attributes that were specifically unique to Boston and work to emphasize them. We thought about how, from now on, we could construct new buildings and neighborhoods that would blend in with the existing fabric of the city. We thought about how to fill empty lots with buildings that respected the character of Boston rather than trying to stand dramatically apart from it.

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