HistoricSiteMarkers
Postwar & Contemporary

Central Artery Tunnel

Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts

Marker Inscription

The plaque is dedicated to the more than 15,000 workers who helped design, manage and construct the Central Artery/Tunnel Project from its inception in 1987 through its completion. Especially honored are those workers who lost their lives helping to build… transcription continues on the marker

This transcription may be incomplete

Our source stores marker text in a field capped at 255 characters, and this inscription appears to have been cut off. We won’t guess at the missing words — the inscription is the primary source, and inventing it would be worse than leaving it short.

Have you stood in front of this marker? Send us the full text or a photo of the sign and we’ll complete the record.

The Story

Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel Project — the "Big Dig" — buried the city's elevated highway underground and reconnected neighborhoods that concrete had severed. Begun in 1987 and running for well over a decade, it was one of the largest and most complex public-works projects in American history. This plaque honors the more than 15,000 people who designed, managed, and built it, and especially those who died in its construction.

Why it matters

It marks a landmark of modern American engineering and civic ambition, and the human cost behind the infrastructure a city takes for granted.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

By the second half of the twentieth century, Boston was a city choking on the road that was supposed to save it. An elevated highway had been driven straight through the heart of downtown in the 1950s, and while it moved cars, it also cast a permanent shadow over the streets below, walling the old waterfront and the North End off from the rest of the city. What had been sold as progress had hardened into a barrier of steel and concrete.

By the late 1980s, the region committed to an astonishing idea: take that elevated highway down and rebuild the whole thing underground, without ever shutting the city off from itself while the work went on. It was the era when American cities were reckoning with the damage postwar highway-building had done to their neighborhoods, and Boston chose to spend enormously to undo it rather than live with it.

The project honored here grew into one of the largest and most complex public-works undertakings in the nation's history, stretching across many years and reshaping the ground beneath one of America's oldest cities.

People & events

This is not a memorial to a general or a founder. It is a memorial to workers — more than fifteen thousand of them, as the plaque records — the engineers, planners, ironworkers, tunnelers, and laborers who designed, managed, and built the project from its beginnings.

Think about what that work actually asked of people. Crews dug and braced tunnels directly beneath a living, breathing downtown, threading around subway lines, utilities, and the foundations of buildings that had stood for generations, all while traffic kept moving overhead. It was slow, dangerous, meticulous labor, repeated across seasons and years.

The plaque reserves its deepest honor for those who did not live to see it finished — the workers who lost their lives helping to build it. That dedication is the quiet heart of this memorial: a reminder that a project measured in miles and years was also measured in human lives.

Its place in the American story

The elevated highway that once divided Boston is gone, replaced by tunnels below and open parkland above where the old roadway used to loom. That transformation stands as a landmark of modern American engineering and civic ambition — proof that a city could not only build big, but rebuild what an earlier generation had gotten wrong.

It belongs to a larger national story, too. Across the country, the mid-century rush to run highways through the middle of cities left scars that later generations tried to heal. This project became the most famous and most expensive attempt to stitch a downtown back together, and its lessons — about cost, complexity, and consequence — have shaped how Americans think about infrastructure ever since.

Most of all, it stands for the people behind the concrete. Every city takes its roads, tunnels, and bridges for granted; this plaque insists that someone built them, and that some gave everything to do it.

If you visit

Stand near the memorial and let yourself feel the strangeness of it: the roar of a major highway is here, all around you, and yet you can't see it. It runs beneath your feet. Above, where a rusting overhead expressway once blotted out the sky, there is now open air and green space.

Read the dedication slowly. Fifteen thousand workers is an abstraction until you stand where they worked and try to picture the tunneling, the night shifts, the sheer scale of it. Then let the honored dead settle in — this is a place to pause for them.

It makes a thoughtful stop on any walk through downtown Boston. Look for the ribbon of parkland that now sits atop the buried highway and follow it a while; you are walking on the roof of an achievement, and over the memory of the people who made it.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

Plan your visit

Nearby

Make a day of it — museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.

Museums & culture

Attractions

Food & drink

Places to stay

Places data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Hours and details change — call ahead.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related events

  • · Central Artery/Tunnel Project (Big Dig)

Themes & tags

TransportationIndustry & InventionMemorial

Nearby & related markers

The Harvard Bridge

Boston, MA

Completed in 1891, the Harvard Bridge stretched across the Charles River to link Boston with Cambridge, carrying the growing traffic of two cities in the industrial age. Though it bears the name of the Puritan minister John Harvard, the span itself is a work of late-19th-century engineering, rebuilt in 1988–1990 atop its original granite piers and abutments. It remains one of the busiest crossings of the Charles.

TransportationIndustry & Invention

Ichabod Glover House

Salem, MA

In the last decades of the 18th century, Salem was one of the busiest and wealthiest seaports in the new United States, its wharves thick with vessels bound for the West Indies, Europe, and the fabled ports of the East. A resident like Ichabod Glover — remembered here as both a chairmaker and a mariner — embodied the town's double life, plying a skilled craft on land while the sea offered the real fortunes. This plaque marks the house built for him by 1799, one of the many surviving Federal-era homes that give Salem its historic character.

Industry & InventionTransportation

Middlesex Canal crossing

Billerica, MA

Chartered in 1793 and carrying its first boats a decade later, the Middlesex Canal was one of early America's most ambitious public works, floating timber, farm goods, and passengers 27 miles between the Merrimack River and Boston Harbor. For half a century mule-drawn barges glided across this crossing at a walking pace, knitting inland New Hampshire mill towns to the sea. The railroads that arrived in the 1830s and '40s eventually outran it, and the canal closed in 1853.

TransportationIndustry & Invention