After almost 20 years of indecision, the City of Boston says that it's finally getting serious about redesigning Rutherford Avenue, the aging, 10-lane-wide highway that divides Charlestown between Sullivan Square and the Charles River.
In a presentation to the Charlestown Neighborhood Council on Tuesday night, Interim Chief of Streets Nick Gove told neighbors that the city needs to meet a spring 2026 deadline to submit a new "25 percent" design for the project, or else risk losing $198 million in state, federal, and local funding.
The city's proposed design is still in a work in progress, but it will likely include dedicated bus lanes and a linear park with a two-way separated bike path along the east side of the new roadway.
The project will also reconfigure Sullivan Square, with plans to replace the traffic rotary with a new grid of city streets to open up several acres of land for potential new transit-oriented housing development.
The project's new bus lanes would also likely tie into a separated busway being planned for the Alford Street Bridge and Lower Broadway in Everett, and they could support a possible extension of the Silver Line from Chelsea.
Debated since the 2000s
Rutherford Avenue occupies a large swath of land on the edge of Charlestown along the historic riverbank of the filled-in Miller's River.
In the early 20th century, it was a much narrower city street that was lined with homes and businesses. Starting in the 1950s, though, government officials began to bulldoze adjacent neighborhoods to transform Rutherford into the wide expressway that exists today, with underpasses that let speeding drivers bypass intersections at the Gilmore Bridge and at Sullivan Square.
In 2008, the administration of Mayor Thomas Menino floated plans to redesign the highway as a narrower boulevard.
A 2011 Boston Globe article on those plans by Eric Moskowitz declared that "nearly all agree (that) Rutherford is ugly, crumbling, and must be rebuilt."
But Moskowitz also reported that neighborhood politician Gerard Doherty, a former state legislator who also led the Massachusetts Democratic Party in the 1960s, received a rousing round of applause from his neighbors when he lambasted the city's redesign as "Communist propaganda."
In 2021, yielding to the neighborhood's highway nostalgists, Mayor Marty Walsh's administration drafted a new plan for Rutherford Avenue that preserved the highway underpasses.
The city submitted a formal "25 percent" design to MassDOT in hopes of securing state funding for construction to begin by 2023.
But the next year, newly-elected Mayor Michelle Wu put the project on hold once again with a directive to eliminate the highway underpasses and put a greater focus on transit with a dedicated busway.
This time, they mean it
MassDOT and the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), which allocates federal transportation funding to projects throughout eastern Massachusetts, has been setting aside tens of millions of dollars for the Rutherford Avenue redesign since 2020.
The current 5-year capital plan for the Boston region budgets $45.6 million for the early stages of construction on the Rutherford project.
But after years of waiting for the City of Boston to get its act together, MassDOT and the MPO might reallocate those funds to higher-priority projects in less indecisive communities if City Hall can't submit an actual construction plan by May.
The city's streets cabinet last night announced that it will host three public hearings in the next two months – the first public meetings that the city's hosted for the project since 2021.
Although the Wu administration had previously committed support for a center-running dedicated busway (see the conceptual 2023 plan at left), Nick Gove, the city's new Chief of Streets, said that his team was also considering a design with curbside bus lanes instead.
'It's been a long time coming'
Unlike in 2011, the residents who attended Tuesday night's Charlestown Neighborhood Council meeting did not accuse Gove and his colleagues of foisting a communist plot on their neighborhood.
Instead, most attendees expressed gratitude that the city was finally getting serious about doing something.
"We're all really excited to see this get started. It's been a long time coming," said Council member Johanna Hynes.
"This is the first time in 40 years of meetings that someone has said they're actually going to do something," said Brian Callahan, a resident of Lost Village. "So thank you."
Charlestown resident Nathan Blanchet said that he'd been waiting for the city to redesign Rutherford Avenue since his son, now 18, was an infant.
He told city officials that his daughter has to cross Rutherford Avenue every day, often before dawn, to catch the Orange Line and go to school.
"People think about commuters all the time, about everybody in their cars, but we forget this is a corridor with lots of kids. So I'm excited to have it be more of a friendly boulevard, but you've got to keep them in mind and make sure it's safe."
