History has a sly sense of humor. It caused an epiphany regarding infrastructure projects — roads, harbors, airports, etc. — to occur on a bridge over Boston’s Charles River, hard by Harvard Yard, where rarely is heard a discouraging word about government.
Last spring, Larry Summers, former treasury secretary and Harvard president, was mired in congealed traffic on the bridge, which is being repaired, and he suddenly understood “American sclerosis.” Repairing the bridge, which was built in 11 months in 1912, will take about five years. The problem, he concluded in a blog post, is “a gaggle of regulators and veto players” — Massachusetts’ government, contractors, environmental agencies, the historical commission, etc. — “each with the power to block or to delay, and each with their own parochial concerns.” Summers’ sunburst of understanding continued:
“I’m a progressive, but it seems plausible to wonder if government can build a nation abroad, fight social decay, run schools, mandate the design of cars, run health insurance exchanges or set proper sexual harassment policies on college campuses, if it can’t even fix a 232-foot bridge competently. Waiting in traffic over the Anderson Bridge, I’ve empathized with the two-thirds of Americans who distrust government. … We seem to be caught in a dismal cycle of low expectations, poor results and shared cynicism.”
Groundbreaking for the Empire State Building was on March 17, 1930. Construction soon began and the building officially opened May 1, 1931 — just 410 days, during the Great Depression. The Pentagon was built in just 16 months, during wartime. After seeing reconstruction of Manhattan’s West Side Highway take 35 years (construction of the George Washington Bridge took 39 months), Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan despaired that whereas America once celebrated people who built things, it now honors those who block building.
