Interstate 695 (Massachusetts)

Interstate 695 (I-695; also called the Inner Belt) was a planned six-lane auxiliary Interstate Highway in Boston, Massachusetts, that would have run through parts of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville.

Route description

The highway would have been called I-695 and would have provided a circumferential route inside the Route 128 corridor. A 1955 plan suggested this routing:

Connection with I-93 in Charlestown at Yard 8, what is now Inner Belt Road, Somerville

Paralleling Washington Street, Somerville (right-of-way is now New Washington Street)

Connection with Northwest Expressway/US Route 3 (US 3)/Route 2 (unbuilt) in Union Square, Somerville

Along Elm Street past Inman Square

Past Central Square, Cambridge, through Cambridgeport paralleling Brookline Street

Crossing the Charles River at the Boston University Bridge, replacing the local street bridge with a two-level local and elevated highway bridge, or bypassing the bridge with a tunnel

Connection with the Western Expressway (Massachusetts Turnpike) near the Charles River

Running under the Back Bay Fens along the Fenway or Park Drive

Connection with the Southwest Corridor (unbuilt)

Running via what became Melnea Cass Boulevard

Connection with the Southeast Expressway via what is now the Mass Avenue connector

(A 1948 plan called for the Southeast Expressway and Southwest Corridor to meet the Inner Belt at the same point.)

History

Cancellation

Organized community opposition to the project began in 1965, when three city planners at the Boston Redevelopment Authority (now the Boston Planning & Development Agency)—Tunney Lee, Fred Salvucci, and Dennis Blackett—founded the Cambridge Committee on the Inner Belt. The group, which later became incorporated as the Urban Planning Aid (UPA), published articles in the Cambridge Chronicle criticizing the highway plan and disseminated maps of the route to residents, highlighting the Inner Belt's potentially disastrous effects on Cambridge's urban landscape. With the help of Father McManus, a local priest, the UPA mobilized Cambridge residents against the state's highway plan, and the anti-highway activists won over the Cambridge City Council, which became committed to stopping the project. The following year, in 1966, Cambridge residents protested the Inner Belt outside the Massachusetts State House, leading then-Governor John A. Volpe to order a restudy of the highway's route through Cambridge.

The Black United Front (established in 1968) also mobilized residents in Roxbury against the Inner Belt and broader racial justice issues, working with the UPA to mobilize residents across Greater Boston. A new group, the Greater Boston Committee (GBC) on the Transportation Crisis, was founded in 1968 to coordinate the anti-highway movement. The GBC's work culminated in the People Before Highways protest on January 25, 1969, when hundreds of residents flooded the Massachusetts State House, demanding that Governor Francis Sargent (who assumed office just three days prior when Volpe was confirmed as President Richard Nixon's secretary of transportation) cancel the Inner Belt and Southwest Corridor.

The project was canceled in 1971 after intense protests organized by community activists, and following Sargent's 1970 moratorium on highway construction inside Route 128.