II.

Cambridge really lost, or began to lose, the battle over Brookline-Elm many years ago. And it began to lose because it became isolated from its natural allies--other cities affected by the Belt--in a fight against the highway. Ironically, the very thing that protected Cambridge so long from the Belt also contributed towards isolating the city. This was the so-called veto.

For years--beginning in 1961--progress on the Inner Belt had been stalled by the existence of a veto that Cambridge, like other cities affected by the highway, could exercise over any route picked by the DPW. In 1963, the state legislature diluted the veto and made it no longer absolute. An arbitration panel, consisting of one representative of the DPW, one representative of the DPW, one representative of the affected city, and a neutral chairman, could now decide any conflict between a city and the DPW. But this arrangement was still referred to as the "veto," and it conveyed an impression of safety.

The existence of the veto was no accident. Cambridge's delegation to the Great and General Court (the state legislature), led by Rep. John J. Toomey, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, had fought to put it there. The veto had been effective, or so it seemed, and the city's representatives were determined to keep it part of the law. This was Cambridge's shield. The city--the Administration, the threatened neighborhood--feared the highway, but, protected by the veto, did little to organize a permanent political opposition to it.

But the protection was deceptive. Not only was the veto no longer absolute, but the DPW had begun to move forward on a route for the highway. In late fall of 1963, it won tentative approval of a route through Boston from Mayor John F. Collins, and the next January it received a similar nod for the location of the small but important segment of the highway in Somerville. Cambridge had done nothing to join in opposition with either of these cities, and now the opportunity to do so was gone forever.

Crucial Link

Cambridge became the crucial link, though it still was certain that it could make use of the modified veto. DPW commissioner James D. Fitzgerald appeared before the Council in October and left little doubt that his agency favored the Brookline-Elm St. route. Newspaper accounts later in the fall indicated that the DPW might reconsider a route along railroad tracks in East Cambridge, and a number of councillors wanted Fitzgerald to return and give his views on this location. By a 5-4 vote, the Council defeated a resolution inviting the commissioner; the majority wanted no part of any Inner Belt. For the rest of winter and following spring the issue lay dormant.

During the summer, Cambridge was stripped of the shield to which it had clung so many years--the veto. A new DPW commissioner, Francis W. Sargeant, went to Beacon Hill determined to get rid of the veto. And he did. Sargeant has become known in the Boston press, as an effective "salesman," and his meteoric rise in politics (he left the DPW in the summer of 1966 to run for Lieutenant Governor, won his race, and is now seriously mentioned as a possible candidate for Governor in 1970) is often attributed to his personable, but persistent approach.

Moreover, with each passing year, the state's case became stronger. Sargeant could make the claim that the DPW had to move on the Inner Belt, or risk not completing the road by 1972 and thereby forfeiting millions of dollars in federal funds (the Interstate Highway program, financing 90 per cent of the Inner Belt, was scheduled to stop then).

The fortunes of Cambridge's delegation to the legislature had also sagged in 1965. There had been a leadership fight for the Speaker's chair, and in the ensuing struggle, John Toomey lost the chair of the Ways and Means Committee. Whereas he enjoyed the ear of the former, retired speaker, John F. "Iron Duke" Thompson, he had no c'ose relationship with his successor. Sargeant's bid to remove the remaining vestiges of the veto did not run into opposition from the new leadership in either the House or the Senate.

By the fall of 1965, then, progress on the Belt was further along than most people in Cambridge realized. Cambridge was the only holdout, the last obstacle in the way of the completion of the project. In December, the formal plans for the Boston section of the highway would be announced. (Sargent was taking a "soft" line and trying to alter the DPW's image of constructing "inhuman" "ugly" highways; the DPW's plans for Boston included a 3000-foot tunnel through the Fenway district of the city and a tunnel under the Charles -- both significant concessions to complaints raised by private groups in the city.)

By this stage, the struggle against Brookline-Elm had suffered grave, perhaps insurmountable setbacks. The Inner Belt's location had been set on either side of Cambridge--and the agreement with mayor Lawrence F. Bretta of Somerville to put a key interchange in the heart of a proposed industrial park was to prove especially troublesome. The DPW had gained momentum. In Cambridge, City Councillors, residents along Brookline and Elm streets, state legislators would all speak against the highway. However, concrete plans to fight--or accommodate--the highway were almost non-existent. There was no prominent local group specifically organized to oppose the highway.

At least so it appeared. But over the summer and in the early months of the fall, a small group of young professionals--its members included a planner for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, a young architect, a real estate broker and an assistant professor at Harvard -- got together and concluded that the Inner Belt must be fought. And into the struggle, they brought new skills and, more importantly, a new strategy, one sharply at odds with the prevailing plan of the City Council.

For the young planners, though professing to be unconvinced of the need for an Inner Belt. were convinced that there would be a highway. Given the Belt's inevitability, their approach was to look for the "best possible" route through the city, a route other than Brookline-Elm. Their opposition to Brookline-Elm reflected a shift in values from those of an earlier generation of planners: where earlier planners had satisfied themselves that Brookline-Elm was a good route because it went through low-value real estate, the new planners saw the highway as a destroyer of neighborhood stability (and the neighborhood was stable, they argued repeatedly). Where earlier planners viewed the highway as a way to get rid of "deteriorating" areas, the new planners saw it uprooting thousands of families who could never replace the homes they lost. For these reasons and more, Brookline-Elm could not be tolerated. The DPW, the group was sure, would pick Brookline-Elm unless they were presented with other feasible routes through the city and persuaded that these other routes would do just as well. The planners set out to find such routes, using as a start some of the alternatives rejected by the DPW. Refining and redesigning some of these basic routes, they hoped, would lead to a practical alternative to Brookline-Elm.

Despite their enthusiasm, the group, which called itself the ad hoc committee on the Inner Belt, did not provoke unqualified support in city government circles. There were good reasons for low-key response. The ad hoc committee had challenged the City Council's long-established strategy against the highway: that is, the Council was opposed to an Inner Belt anywhere and was not going to give its stamp of approval (qualified or not) to the highway by favoring one route over another. And not only this: the new committee was also challenging, though probably ambiguously and somewhat unintentionally, the Council's political role. The committee was saying, in essence, that the Council had to be serious in its opposition to the Belt, that it had to take an active lead in preventing the DPW from sending eight lanes of