When I think of my hometown Boston I think three things: the undefeated Patriots, the world champion Red Socks and the “Big Dig”. Growing up in the east cost city I remember sitting in the back seat of my fathers Lincoln town car weaving through back streets of Boston, flying over pot holes and bumping over speed bump in an effort to avoid the traffic the Big Dig created. The highways in Boston look like vines, tangled green rusty steel stretching over city streets always looking as if it were in seconds from crumbling to the ground. The tunnels in the city leaked when it rained and in the winter the water froze and made black ice. The detour signs were so many they were almost impossible to follow. There were unmanned excavators and bulldozers sitting on piles of dirt just off of the highways like yellow dinosaur skeletons. This is the Boston I remember, dirty, grimy and hard to navigate. The Big Dig made everything difficult.

The central artery/third harbor tunnel project most popularity known as the Big Dig that broke ground in 1991 but was first conceived in the early seventies to decongest the narrow pre-colonial streets of Boston is finally complete. Thirty some odd years since conception and with a price tag that jumped from2.6 bill to 14.8 bill dollars is finally done! December 31st is the official last day of the dig. Because of the mistakes and setbacks the project was infamous for, like the shortcutting of safety codes and the building of a faulty tunnel ceiling that resulted in the death of a driver. I’m sure most Bostonians were done with the project years ago.

Now that the biggest and most costly face-lift in America’s history is complete Bostonians can go back to what they go best eat baked beans and hating the Yankee’s.
—Donny Lumpkins