Word: elme
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...solution to both problems was to move the highway East of Central Square. This is precisely what the Planning Board's consultants recommended; they endorsed--and the Board followed suit--a route along Brookline and Elm Sts., saying in part: "It passes directly through blighted and deteriorated areas in need of urban renewal and redevelopment." There were other reasons too. By locating a route just East of Central Square (in reality, through the heart of the business district), the highway would bring business to the area and make "possible the rebirth of Central Square in terms of retail and office...
...years later the arguments for Brookline-Elm have not disappeared and its advocates in Cambridge have not evaporated. Some, like the Planning Board and its director, Alan McClennen, have been muted by political pressures. Others have been converted by new arguments and new facts...
...Cambridge planned was killed in a bitter political battle because the people in the project areas vehemently opposed the plans. Similarly, people in the path of the highway didn't want the Belt through their homes. When, in 1965, a group of young planners joined the fight against Brookline-Elm, the neighborhood described in 1957 as "deteriorating" and "in need of urban renewal" was pictured in much different terms...
...heterogeneity of Cambridge, prized by many as one of its most important social features, is exemplified by the Brookline-Elm area's mixture of Negroes, Portuguese, Greeks, French, Canadians, Jews, Irish, and Italians, many of whom are in the low and moderate income group. Many families have lived in their homes for many years. Their lives are built in significant ways on their relationships with relatives and friends living nearby, often on the same block, even in the same multiunit house, with churches and clergymen in the neighborhood, with schools and teachers, and with shopkeepers whom they know and trust...
...younger planners began searching for an alterantive to BrooklineElm and they looked even further east--specifically, two routes, one along, railroad tracks next to the M.I.T. campus (the state DPW had already ranked this as inferior to Brookline-Elm) and a path along Portland and Albany Streets, several blocks further from the railroad tracks. It was Portland-Albany that the planners preferred...