The tunnel is backed all the way up

By ScottB on Thu, 11/28/2019 - 9:42pm.
In the historical context
I'm not convinced we'd have a dramatically different transit system today even had those grandiose postwar plans come to fruition. The Boston area, like much of the Rust Belt, went through an extended economic decline due to an exodus of manufacturing jobs -- this finally reversed with the Massachusetts Miracle in the 1980s

You were close -- except there was no correlation to the Rust Belt decline and the reversal wasn't due to the so-called Massachusetts Miracle. I don't presume to know the full story -- its full of many twists and turns. However, I've been an interested observer and sometimes participant in the story for nearly 60 years -- so I think I've got some bits in hand.

Here's a bit of the context of the fall and rise of Boston and the rise of Greater Boston:

The decline in Massachusetts manufacturing was almost exclusively in terms of footwear and textiles -- those were the Big Industries in Massachusetts and their decline started with the advent of electricity knocking out the Mill Cities [textiles] and Post WWII cheap off-shore labor kayoed footwear manufacturing although not all the companies left -- some survived as HQ's.[e.g. New Balance, Converse and even Strideright]. Boston's stagnation was mostly due to the Great Depression both in terms of direct financial losses [huge] and the secondary effects of the loss of the Textile Industry to the south.

Logistically and Infrastructuraly -- The rebound began with the construction of RT-128 allowing large-scale development of Industrial Parks outside of the stagnating city. Simultaneously, Rt-128 provided the opportunity for the many thousands of returning WWII Vets [Greatest Generation] to start a new life with a home and a yard for a family [Baby Boomers], dogs, growing up in suburbs like Lexington, Burlington, Winchester, Weston, etc.

However while the highways were important -- much of what enabled Rt-128 as in "Rt-128 America's Technology Highway" to grow explosively in the 1950's and 1960's -- which predated the "Mass Miracle" and incidentally also "Silicon Valley" by several decades-- flowed out of MIT and the True Miracle -- Vanevar Bush and the Radiation Lab at MIT aka Building 20.

At end of WWII -- the Radiation Lab --- incidentally whose staff were rewarded by more Nobel Prizes than the Manhattan Project staff -- begat the MIT Research Lab for Electronics and eventually Lincoln Lab and indirectly led to Raytheon [in its modern form] and Digital Equipment Corporation and others less well known. These companies and their offspring and cousins such as Data General, Wang, Analog Devices, Analogic and subsequent generations of electronics companies and Polaroid [a strange cousin] a few other strange cousins [e.g. Avco, GTE Sylvania] in turn created thousands of jobs along the various highways -- manufacturing things from Spacecraft Heat Shields [AVCO -- Textron] to radar-guided anti-aircraft and anti-missile missiles [Raytheon], eventually lots of telecommunications and networking equipment [many] and of course mini-computers by the thousands [DEC, etc.].

The Highway Building boom then continued with the Turnpike and its extension into Boston and outside with the Big I-93, I-495 and somewhat smaller Rt-2, Rt-3 providing virgin territory for the Rt-128 to morph into "Rt-128 America's Technology Region" about the time of the so-called Mass Miracle. The myraid of Industrial Parks spread along these highways also attracted external competitors such as RCA, Sun Microsystems, eventually Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, etc.

Meanwhile the Insurance Companies [John Hancock, New England Life, Liberty Mutual, etc.] grew rapidly with the demand from the Baby Boomers and their parents [the Greatest Generation] and a whole new financial industry pop-ed-up created by a Massachusetts invention from the 20's called the Mutual Fund*1 --- these regenerated a static and moribund Financial District along with the demand for financial and legal services to serve the burgeoning electronics companies.

In the same way that we owed most of the Massachusetts growth and dynamism in the 1980's and 1990's to the Radiation Lab and WWII -- we owe much of the growth and dynamism of the Massachusetts economy today to the Cold War, the Human Genome Project, Nixon's War on Cancer, and the Apollo Moon Project. The Cold War drove the creation of computers which enabled the Human Genome Project [about 1/3 of which occurred in Kendall Square]. The War on Cancer led to MIT's huge boom in biology at the cell, virus and molecular level -- leading to the Human Genome Project. The Moon Project leveled a lot of old industrial buildings [many of which were still functioning circa 1960] for the NASA Electronics Center [see RT-128] and then Lyndon Johnson "stole the money" for his NASA Manned Space Center [aka "Houston Tranquility Base -- the Eagle has landed" ] leaving an empty field which enabled the modern Kendall Square ["the Future Lives Here"] where hundreds of companies are endeavoring to convert bio-tech into bio-profit [e.g. Biogen, etc.]. These native Bio-pharma companies and some Big Pharma outsiders who moved in [e.g. Novartis, Phizer] and bought-in [e.g. Sanofi, Takeada, etc.] proved the ground in Kendall for other big name outsiders [e.g. Google. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Boeing, Schlumberger, IBM possibly Appple, etc.] not directly connected with Bio -- who either dropped down fully formed or bought-in through local start-ups][ e.g. Boeing].

By the way -- we wouldn't be having an on-going discussion about the Seaport District and Transit without the Ted Williams Tunnel being built through the Seaport to Logan and the Big Dig connecting I-93/95 with I-90, Of course Fidelity and some greedy men in the persons of Anthony Athanas and Frank H. McCourt Jr provided a very useful function aggregating disparate odd tracts of land over a few decades -- but that's for another time.

Finally -- we have to think where the next phase of growth is going to come from and try to see if we can be prepared for where it wants to go in its quest to once again remake the Massachusetts economy --- an on-going center of innovation for almost 400 years. My money is on AI, Robotics and Nano-tech all currently centered in Cambridge in Kendall Square although the roboticists are also proliferating in the suburban parks left behind by the minicomputer and telecom / network equipment companies.

*1
Mutual Fund
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/mutualfund/05/mfhistory.asp

The creation of the Massachusetts Investors' Trust in Boston, heralded the arrival of the modern mutual fund in 1924. The fund was opened to investors in 1928, eventually spawning the mutual fund firm known today as MFS Investment Management. State Street Investors' Trust was the custodian of the Massachusetts Investors' Trust. Later, State Street started its own fund in 1924 with Richard Paine, Richard Saltonstall and Paul Cabot at the helm. Saltonstall was also affiliated with Scudder, Stevens and Clark, an outfit that would launch the first no-load fund in 1928. A momentous year in the history of the mutual fund, 1928 also saw the launch of the Wellington Fund, which was the first mutual fund to include stocks and bonds, as opposed to direct merchant-bank style of investments in business and trade.