CultureNOW - South Bay Interchange: Peter Vanderwarker

South Bay Interchange

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"The foreground object in the older photograph is the former Wang building, looking like a misplaced fragment of Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy. With its dark archways and flat bright surfaces, the Wang echoes the hollow, funereal grandeur of the dictator who liked to think of himself as a modern successor to the Roman emperors.

Like Mussolini, the Wang company is history. Its building, which today goes by the plebeian name of 185 Kneeland Street, is now headquarters of the Big Dig. The construction on the dig is what fills all those acres in the foreground of the new photo. We’re looking at the future South Bay Interchange, where the
Massachusetts Turnpike, the Southeast Expressway, the Ted Williams Tunnel, and the new underground Central Artery will someday come together in an intricate interlacing of concrete.

The South Bay Interchange has been called the most complex construction site in the world today. This is partly because of the need to build all the new roads and tunnels without disrupting existing rail and auto routes. One example of the amazing technology is what’s called a tunnel jacking pit. Three of these are in the new photo, although you can’t see them in the jumble. To create a jacking pit, Big Dig crews first excavate a deep hole some 250 feet wide. Working in the hole, they cast concrete sections of a box-shaped tunnel. Still from within the hole, a so-called road header machine then grinds its way forward, carving a tunnel a few feet horizontally into the soil and forming the wall of the pit. (The soil is frozen to make it stiff.) Then, with powerful horizontal jacks, the crewmen shove the concrete tunnel box into the tunnel. Then they grind a few more feet, push again, and so on. Eventually, the tunnels will connect all parts of the highway system, running beneath the Amtrak rail line and crossing the Fort Point Channel as concrete tubes that will rest on the channel’s floor.

Bad news for Big Dig freaks: Public tours of the dig, recently announced, are already fully booked through October, which is as long as they’re expected to be given."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Diggin in," Boston Globe, 2000

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Location

South Bay Interchange
Boston, MA 02111
United States

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