Word: elme
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...alternative between Brookline-Elm and the route to the East was customarily pictured as one of homes vs.jobs. The arguments between advocates of the different locations flew fast and furious, with contradicting statistics and claims abounding. The essential difference was always one of running the highway through an area of homes and small businesses (Brookline-Elm) or into a prospering industrial sector (Portland-Albany). And if Brookline-Elm were chosen, it would create a natural residential-industrial boundary on one side of Massachusetts Avenue, but on the other side, would leave a substantial strip of homes wedged between the highway...
This was the broad planning calculus for Cambridge. But for the DPW, the issues were somewhat different. Since the Cambridge Planning Board's endorsement of the Brookline-Elm St. route, the DPW had slowly moved to adopt it as its own. Independent developments had made a Lee St. route much more difficult. And compared with the other possibilities further to the East, Brookline-Elm appeared to be superior in terms of locations and traffic service. In 1962, consultants to the department recommended Brookline-Elm, and everyone in the city knew that the DPW agreed with the recommendation...
...planning. And the highly visible opposition to the highway obscured some fundamental political realities: first, the forces against the highway were themselves splintered and not nearly so strong as they appeared; and second, there were many interests--mostly silent interests--which desperately wanted the highway to go down Brookline-Elm. The opposing forces neutralized each other. Once the DPW got around to picking the Cambridge segment of the highway, it could really heavily on engineering and traffic criteria, and by those standards, the DPW's engineers remained of one mind--Brookline Elm...
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...
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...