Boston Noir

I blame it on a cat video.

I was looking for the story behind this video, I read this article about it. Then I stumbled over this story about the history of making movies in Boston. I'm not a big movie buff, but the opening line was such classic hard-boiled snark:

When I was growing up in Roslindale a few decades back -- among tribes of ignorant, second-generation immigrant kids whose favorite words began with "f" and "n" and who liked to torture small animals and beat up small children before they moved on to their future vocations as petty criminals, dead dope users, or real-estate agents -- it didn’t occur to me that this was a setting rich in literary and cinematic potential.

Boston, as a city, is, well, different. The streets and neighborhoods are so convoluted that even a GPS will get confused. In good weather, the central city itself is easily walkable.

I haven't been back there since they finished up the Big Dig. The Big Dig, arguably one of the more corruption-ridden public works contracts in the last few decades, was a project to fix one of the more destructive postwar road-building contracts. In the early 1950s, the powers that be blasted an elevated highway right through the center of Boston. The road, known as the Central Artery, was originally built with an embedded network of piping to heat the road surface, so they wouldn't have to plow it in the winter.

That did not work so well.

What the Central Artery did was to cut the shoreline of Boston, and the North End, from the rest of the city. When the plans were being worked on in the early `90s to "depress the Central Artery", one of the jokes was that there was no need to spend billions of dollars to depress the Central Artery; all that was necessary was to have Michael Dukakis go read some speeches to it.

One of the projects of the Big Dig was to build a tunnel so that traffic from I-90 and coming north on I-93 could more easily get to Logan Airport. Previously, that traffic had to go part of the way up the Central Artery and then go through the Callahan Tunnel to East Boston, which could be a real nightmare. The Ted Williams Tunnel made that more-or-less a straight shot. One of the problems with the Ted Williams Tunnel, besides the fact that the ceiling collapsed at one point, killing someone, is that the tunnel itself does not go very deep, which may limit the possible draft of ships entering Boston Harbor. There was one scenario which assumed that if a barge sank in a storm and came to rest over the tunnel, an incoming ship could crack open the tunnel, but I don't know how likely that is.