INTRODUCTION

In 1987, as Boston prepared for the Washington Street Elevated’s closing and the opening of a new Orange Line submerged along the Southwest Corridor, Martin F. Nolan, editor of the Boston Globe’s editorial page, summarized the El’s impact on the Washington Street corridor:

The squeal begins on baritone, then escalates to soprano, a giant fingernail scratching a blackboard. The sound moves with a massive shadow 30 feet above the sidewalk that blots out all light, then rumbles into a thumping clickety-clack, its echo reverberating along steel girders down the track. This teeth-chattering ritual occurs every time an Orange Line train negotiates a curve around Dudley Street—336 times a day, flooding the streets below with noise, darkness, and confusion. Silence, then light, will soon rule Washington Street from Forest Hills to Chinatown as the El ends its 86-year reign.

The Orange Line is now part of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) and is one of five color-coded transit lines that provide an average of 1.3 million passenger trips each week. The rapid-transit line that would become today’s Orange Line opened in 1901 and was then managed by the Boston Elevated Railway Company, a private enterprise established in 1894 with the support of the Massachusetts Legislature to oversee construction and management of this new electric rail service.

In 1897, the West End Railway Company, which managed Boston’s electrified streetcar service, was absorbed by the Boston Elevated Railway, which would oversee the city’s rail transit for the next 50 years. That same year, the first subway system in the United States opened in Boston, running beneath Tremont Street adjacent to Boston Common. Four years later, the first elevated trains began offering service from Charlestown to Roxbury.

The Main Line Elevated, the rail service that would, in 1966, become the Orange Line, opened in 1901 with its northern terminus at Sullivan Square, located at the northern edge of Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood between its border with the city of Somerville and the Mystic River. From there, trains rode the Charlestown Elevated down the neighborhood’s Main Street, crossed the Charlestown Bridge into downtown Boston, and entered the Tremont Street Subway, a tunnel it then shared with the streetcar line that would become the Green Line. Trains emerged from the tunnel at the Pleasant Street Incline, in the Bay Village neighborhood, and proceeded from there south down the Washington Street Elevated tracks, through the South End and Roxbury, to the southern terminus in Dudley Square.

Running a different route through downtown Boston—but connected to the Charlestown and Washington Street legs of the Elevated—was the Atlantic Avenue Elevated, which opened shortly after the Main Line. This route arced through Chinatown and the Leather District, past South Station, and along the downtown waterfront to a junction with the Charlestown Elevated at the foot of the Charlestown Bridge. The Charlestown Elevated gained an intermediate station at Thompson Square in 1902, and the Elevated saw major changes in 1908. On November 30 that year, the new Washington Street Tunnel opened, giving Main Line trains their own underground route through downtown and returning the Tremont Street Subway to streetcar use only. The Washington Street Tunnel, descending into the ground at the Canal Street Incline just north of Haymarket Square and emerging through the Ash Street Incline in the South Cove area, included four new underground stations oriented in the downtown area along Washington Street.

A year later, the southern end of the Washington Street Elevated was extended from Dudley Square to the Forest Hills area of Jamaica Plain, with an intermediate station at Egleston Square where Washington Street crosses Columbus Avenue. An additional stop was added at Green Street, between Egleston and Forest Hills, in 1912.

In 1919, the Charlestown Elevated was extended to Everett, with plans to eventually bring elevated service to Malden Center and beyond. The Charlestown El never would extend to Malden, but in 1975, the northern leg of the Orange Line was rerouted to the west, Malden Center was introduced as a stop, and the Charlestown El was dismantled.

In 1938, after years of declining ridership, accidents, and decreasing interest in and activity along Boston’s waterfront caused by the Great Depression, the Atlantic Avenue El ceased operation, taking with it the last elevated railway through downtown.

The absence of elevated transportation through the city’s financial center would not last long, however; in the 1950s, motor vehicles began traveling to and through Boston using the elevated John F. Fitzgerald Expressway, or Central Artery, which ran along much of the same Atlantic Avenue route previously occupied by the Elevated. The elevated Central Artery would dominate downtown Boston for nearly 50 years until its route was moved underground by the $14.6-billion Central Artery/Tunnel Project (more commonly known as the Big Dig).

In 1947, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts purchased the Boston Elevated Railway Company and, through the establishment of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, made rapid transit in the Boston metropolitan area a publicly owned amenity.

The MTA became the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in 1964 and remained publicly operated. The MBTA quickly began making significant and lasting changes to the transit system serving Greater Boston. In 1965, it introduced the “Circle-T” emblem, or the “T,” as the symbol and the transit system became popularly known.

The emblem was modeled after the graphic used for the Stockholm, Sweden, transit system, which remains in use today. At the time the new emblem was announced, there was discussion in the Boston press about how riders would interpret this new symbol of the MBTA, with some suggesting that it would become known as the “Big T.”

This new emblem, part of an MBTA modernization program that eventually cost $9 million, was also an effort for the MBTA to further distance itself from its predecessor, the MTA. An MBTA spokesman at the time said: “We would appreciate your seeking clever ways to use the ‘T’ to identify us . . . and we hope the symbol will become a natural expression as was the ‘El.’” Despite these early efforts, the authority continues to be known both as the MBTA and the T, with the terms used interchangeably.

Simultaneous with the introduction of the new emblem, the MBTA announced that the major lines of Boston’s transit system would become color coded. The new designations were not implemented until 1966, when the line to East Boston became the Blue Line, the route between Ashmont and Harvard Square Stations became the Red Line (the extensions to Porter and Davis squares and Alewife would not be introduced until the mid-1980s), the trolley lines between Lechmere and points west became the Green Line, and the route between Forest Hills and Everett—the southern and northern termini for the Elevated route in 1966—became the Orange Line. A fifth, the Silver Line, opened in 2002, serving as a long-desired but sometimes maligned rapid bus route.

The Charlestown Elevated was closed and dismantled in 1975, a time when some community members could still remember the first wooden train cars that ran through Charlestown in 1901. According to Boston newspapers at the time of its dismantling, community efforts to remove the Charlestown Elevated were almost as old as the structure itself.

In 1908, just seven years after the Elevated opened, Charlestown residents unsuccessfully petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature to have the railway removed. Such early efforts would not start to pay off until the 1960s, when plans to reroute the Orange Line to the west started to take hold. The Haymarket North Extension would take the line underground at North Station, through a tunnel below the Charles River, and through Charlestown partly beneath an elevated Interstate 93.

One factor in the route change and demolition of the Elevated in Charlestown was the effort to revive the residential and commercial areas along the railway. The population of Charlestown had reached about 40,000 in 1900, just prior to the El’s construction. By 1960, though, that population had been cut nearly in half. Many believed this decline was at least partly caused by the El’s shadowy route down the neighborhood’s Main Street.

At the same time that the state was making plans to remove an unpopular elevated railway in Charlestown at the northern end of Boston, it was planning a new superhighway network that would have cut through the southern neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and the South End. Through the 1960s and 1970s, plans were developed for the Inner Belt network of highways connecting with the elevated Central Artery that would have torn through parts of Cambridge, Milton, Canton, and much of Boston. The southwest-bound highway through downtown Boston was referred to as the Southwest Expressway and would have extended Interstate 95, after passing through Cambridge to the north, through the South End, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain.

In 1972, after sustained community protests, Gov. Francis W. Sargent cancelled the Southwest Expressway project. Interstate 95 was instead incorporated into Route 128, an existing highway circling the Boston metro area. Soon after the expressway plans were killed, community members began working with the MBTA to determine the appropriate use of more than 100 acres of land that had been taken by eminent domain to make way for the failed expressway project. This land sat vacant for years and fell into disrepair. The idea of using it as the site of a new route for the Orange Line quickly took hold.

In 1987, the rerouting of the Orange Line from the old Washington Street Elevated to the new Southwest Corridor, created from the abandoned Southwest Expressway, resulted in the removal of the last elevated sections of the railway running through the South End, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain—taking with them the ornate elevated stations that once served those communities.

The old elevated Orange Line blocked out the sun along Washington Street, but it also connected some of the city’s poorest communities with opportunities for education, employment, and shopping in downtown Boston. The loss of that transport is still deeply felt by many it served, even after the introduction of the Silver Line, which serves communities that lost ready access to rapid transit with the dismantling of the Washington Street El.

Boston and its Orange Line have come a long way from that day in June 1901 when the first train ran on the original Elevated tracks between Dudley and Sullivan Squares. A reporter for the Boston Globe summed up the excitement at the time of that momentous expansion of rapid transit: “There will doubtless be a great many lame necks in Boston tonight, for not only were the first trains watched from the sidewalks, housetops, and windows of houses and stores along the line of the road, but the passengers were equally curious to see how Boston looked from the air.”