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John F. Fitzgerald Expressway Plaque

Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts

Marker Inscription

John F. Fitzgerald Expressway

The Story

This plaque names Boston's Central Artery for John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the colorful Irish-American mayor and congressman who was also the maternal grandfather of President John F. Kennedy. The elevated expressway cut through the heart of downtown when it opened in the 1950s, a monument to the postwar faith that pushing highways straight through cities was progress. Decades later the Big Dig famously buried the roadway underground, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway now runs along the old corridor.

Why it matters

It ties a beloved figure of Boston's Irish-American political rise to the mid-century highway boom that reshaped—and eventually had to be undone in—American downtowns.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

Boston in the years after the Second World War was a city in a hurry to modernize. Like downtowns all across America, it faced snarled traffic, aging infrastructure, and a booming automobile culture that planners were eager to serve. The answer of the age was concrete and steel: elevated expressways driven straight through the urban core, on the confident theory that faster car travel meant a healthier city.

The result in Boston was the Central Artery, an elevated highway that opened in the 1950s and cut directly through the heart of downtown. It was a monument to a particular postwar faith — that you could pour a river of traffic over the middle of a city and everyone would be better for it.

That faith reached back to an older Boston, too. The plaque here carries the name of a man whose career belonged to an earlier, more colorful chapter of the city's political life, binding the machine-age highway to the human story of the people who ran the city long before the concrete was poured.

People & events

The expressway was named for John Francis Fitzgerald — "Honey Fitz" — one of the most vivid figures in Boston's Irish-American political rise. He served as both a member of Congress and as mayor of Boston, and he was famous for his warmth, his showmanship, and his gift for working a crowd in a city where politics was intensely personal.

He is also remembered for his family. Fitzgerald was the maternal grandfather of President John F. Kennedy — a thread that ties this downtown plaque directly to one of the most storied families in American public life.

The roadway that bore his name did not have a happy career. Elevated highways that had once seemed like progress came to be seen as barriers, dividing neighborhoods and casting the streets below into shadow. Decades after it opened, Boston undertook the enormous project popularly known as the Big Dig, which buried the roadway underground. In its place, along the old corridor, the Rose Kennedy Greenway now runs — a ribbon of parks where an elevated highway once stood.

Its place in the American story

This one plaque quietly holds two great American stories at once. The first is the rise of Irish-American political power, the journey of an immigrant community from the margins to the mayor's office and, eventually, to the White House. Honey Fitz stands near the beginning of that arc, and his grandson near its summit.

The second is the story of the mid-century highway boom and its reckoning. Across the country, cities drove expressways through their downtowns in the name of progress, and across the country, later generations grappled with what those roads had done to the neighborhoods around them. Boston's decision to tear its elevated artery down and put it underground became one of the most dramatic examples of a nation rethinking that earlier confidence.

To name a highway for a beloved local figure and then, decades on, to bury that highway and lay a park over it — that is the whole cycle of American urban ambition compressed into a single stretch of ground.

If you visit

Read the plaque and then look around at what has replaced the road it names. Where an elevated expressway once roared overhead, you'll find open sky and green space threading through downtown — one of the most striking before-and-after transformations in any American city.

Walk the corridor and try to picture the earlier version: steel columns, shadows, the constant sound of traffic passing above the sidewalks. The contrast between that vanished structure and the parkland now in its place is the real thing to experience here.

It makes a thoughtful stop on any walk through downtown Boston, a small marker with an outsized story. Pair it with the harbor and the historic streets nearby, and let it prompt the question every great city eventually asks: what do we build, and what do we later decide to undo?

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

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