Historical Overview of the Southwest Corridor and the Boston Contemporary Writers
Written by Nicole Vetere, edited by Jessica McCann and Cassandra Nicholson.
The Southwest Expressway proposed in the Master Highway Plan was intended to be a continuation of I-95 from Route 128 to downtown Boston. It was determined that a line of travel was needed from the business district to the outlying southwestern communities among them Roxbury, Dorchester, Milton and Dedham. Preparation for this construction had devastating effects to those neighborhoods it was intended to benefit. Hundreds of businesses and homes between Forest Hills and the South End were destroyed. As demolition progressed, community residents and activists lobbied in protest. Governor Francis Sargent, swayed by both budget and community upset, agreed to reexamine the project.
It was determined that if the Master Highway Plan was continued an estimated 370 families would be dislocated and 800 jobs would be lost. Governor Sargent decided that enough damage had been done and that the city had already paid a high price; therefore, Sargent made the executive decision to scrap all plans for highway construction in 1972. The funding set aside for I-95 was then transferred to public transportation. The Orange Line, which was at the time an elevated line on Washington Street, was relocated into an underground rail corridor.
In an effort to heal the neighborhoods affected by the construction, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) partnered with Urban Arts, Inc., a nonprofit company, to develop a program that would reestablish a sense of community and bring beauty to demolished areas. Together, the MBTA and Urban Arts developed Arts in Transit: The Southwest Corridor. This program consisted of three parts:
- The Permanent Art Program designed to install permanent works of art in each of the nine new Southwest Corridor stations.
- The Historic Art Program for research on A. Phillip Randolph (whose statue is installed at the Back Bay Station) and the history of railroad workers in Boston.
- The Educational Art Program broken into three sub-divisions: photography, literature and oral history.
The Boston Contemporary Writers Program is the literature sub-division of the Educational Art Program. Writing on the Line focuses on this program that resulted in the selection of eighteen literary works, nine poems and nine prose pieces obtained through a statewide competition. The chosen submissions were then engraved on granite monuments and placed in various locations along the Orange Line, one prose and one poem to each station.
