Building Route 128

I just watched your presentation on You Tube about your book, “Building Route 128” (which I bought, by the way), and I can answer several of the questions you couldn’t answer. I was born at Lynn Hospital, grew up on the North Shore, and have lived most of my entire life on Boston’s North Shore. I am a lifelong highway enthusiast, and have studied Route 128 and Boston’s cancelled highways extensively. Indeed, I wrote my seventh-grade term paper on the debate over the cancellation of I-95 and I-695, a.k.a. the Inner Belt, by Governor Francis W. “Frank” Sargent in 1972. So, with that as background, let me answer some of those questions that stumped you in your podcast.

Let’s begin with the easy one. Are any of the original bridges from the initial construction of Route 128 still visible in their original form? The answer is yes. Every bridge on 128 north of the I-95/Route 128 interchange in Peabody still exists largely in their original form. Indeed, the first bridge ever built on Route 128 was the overpass that carries Route 128 over Cabot Street (MA Route 97) in North Beverly. Almost at the same time, the bridge that carries Lowell Street over Route 128 in Peabody was built. This bridge is unique, in that the northern abutment contains two (2) garage bays built into it, that is still used to store Peabody DPW equipment to this day.

That leads directly to the second question that was asked. Where was the second traffic light on Route 128 located? The answer is the intersection of Summit Street and Route 128. This traffic light was at the bottom of a long hill, so traffic traveling at highway speeds northbound had to come to a screeching halt at the bottom of the hill, with predicable results! In one memorable accident, a tanker truck carrying #2 home heating oil jackknifed when it couldn’t stop, and closed Route 128 for almost a full day! In 1976, I ran out of gas at the top of the hill, on the way to take my SAT exams on a Saturday morning at Bishop Fenwick High School, and coasted to a stop at the Paige’s Hill Ski Area, located at the bottom off Summit Street! I had to walk to Bishop Fenwick, barely making the start of the exam with a minute to spare! The signal was removed in 1984, when the interchange that made the final connection between I-95 and Route 128, which included the new Centennial Drive interchange, was finally completed. Views of the Paige’s Hill Ski Area are available on the website for the Lost Ski Areas Project. 

The Paige’s Hill Ski Area was demolished in the 1970’s, to make way for the Boston Children’s Hospital campus that now occupies the site, in the Centennial Drive Industrial Park. The section of Rote 128 that was rerouted when the interchange was built is still visible as Jubilee Drive in Peabody.

The third (3rd) question that was asked was, if I understand it correctly, about interchanges. Specifically, why were many interchanges that were formerly cloverleaf interchanges, which require a right turn to enter the access ramp to the highway, converted to a diamond interchange, which requires a signalized intersection and a left turn to access the highway on-ramps? While the question wasn’t clear, that is how I understood the question that was asked. If I understood correctly, the simple answer is land! Or more specifically, the lack of land available when the highway was widened. To make room for the wider highway cross-section, land must be taken from the interchange. To keep the interchange open, it must be redesigned to use a more compact form, or additional land must be taken to expand the interchange as the highway itself is widened. Since land takings are expensive and politically unpopular, the interchange is redesigned to fit in the existing footprint of available land, despite the less efficient movements of traffic through the interchange that signals and left-turn movements require. The fact that the original designs often required that cars come to a full stop at the top of the ramps, which made merging onto the highway difficult and more dangerous, required that the interchanges be redesigned in any case, to provide for safer merging and exiting from the highway, so the interchanges were modified as part of this process. Two (2) examples of this process can be seen at Exit 41 (MA Route 35) and Exit 43 (MA Route 62) on Route 128.

The final question I can answer is also related to interchanges, specifically, the proposed redesign of the I-93/Route 128 interchange on the Stoneham-Reading town line. A question was asked about future widening plans for Route 128. As part of that project, MassDOT wants to widen Route 128 between I-93 and the MA Route 129 interchange in Reading, from the present six (6) lanes (three northbound and three southbound), to eight (8) lanes (four northbound and four southbound), to move the lane drop in Reading north to the Reading-Wakefield-Lynnfield town lines. Mr. Callahan’s foresight is evident here, as the bridges in that stretch of Route 128 are already wide enough for the extra lane. It is clear that Mr. Callahan always intended for the extra lane to be constructed in the future, as he built the bridges wide enough to accommodate the extra lane when Route 128 was first widened in 1959, the year I was born! Such a project is long overdue, and in my humble opinion, insufficient. The widening project, which can proceed independently of the interchange reconstruction, should be extended all of the way to the Route 128/I-95 interchange in Peabody, where Route 128 drops from six (6) lanes to four (4) lanes wide. Note: highway engineers discuss highway widths in terms of the total number of lanes to be built, with an equal number of lanes in each direction is implicitly understood. Indeed, I would advocate for the section of 128 north of I-95 be widened as well, from four lanes to six lanes until the highway reaches the MA Route 22 interchange in Beverly, north of the Beverly Plaza Shopping Center.

My brother alerted me to a story neither of us knew about. Hannah Chickering, a Dedham resident in the 1800s, was very interested in prison reform, specifically what she felt was the wrong incarceration of women in the male prison population. The women were subjected to violence and rape and frequently became pregnant as a result. She campaigned in the Mass state legislature, but in the meantime, she created the Temporary Asylum for Discharged Female Prisoners, a home where women could live together and with any children they had, while recovering from their prison experience. After release from the Dedham Jail, the women, totaling nearly 1000 women and children, were housed on a 25-acre farm with a large homestead and many outbuildings, where they were prepared for future employment by learning various domestic skills. The point is, there was a cemetery on the property, locally known as the Baby Cemetery, since a number of the babies died very young and of course some of the women died as well. The cemetery had 11 small, oval stones marking the graves of children, but more bodies were thought to be buried there. 

In the late 1940s, builder Joseph Stivaletta bought the property to build houses on, and was surprised to find the cemetery on the property. It was known only to the neighbors at that time. The plans for the building of Route128 had been laid, and Stivaletta knew that this would take the road right through the cemetery.  He contacted Transportation Secretary John Volpe, who happened to be from the same village in Italy that he was from, and asked him to alter the route! Volpe did so. I have never heard of this story or even of the Asylum, so my brother and I plan to try to find out if there is anything left of it. Stivaletta ultimately left the land to the Town of Dedham, and it became officially a Dedham Cemetery property, but we have no idea if there are still gravestones there. 

The idea that the Secretary actually changed the course of 128 seems extraordinary to me, however little it had to be altered. Apparently neighbors kept the cemetery mowed and planted with flowers over the years. The town knew nothing of it until 1991!  

(Barbara also sent along a link to the wiki page on the "baby cemetery.")