Customer Reviews

Building the Mass Pike (Images of America)

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This is a great book to anyone who grew up around the Mass Turnpike. It is very interesting to see the pictures of the land before the Pike. I would have like to have seen more text but that is more the fault of the series and not the author. I own this book and think it is a fine addition to any collection on Boston history.

I wanted to like this book but was disappointed in it. There are 135 miles of the Mass Pike. About 10 or 12 miles of the road are inside Route 128 but out of 120 or more pages in the book about 80 deal with those 10 or 12 miles. For a Western Mass resident like me, that was disappointing but not surprising. We're used to it. Boston is the only place in Mass that matters to some people. Perhaps the most Dramatic structure on the entire Pike is the Westfield River Bridge. It's 150 feet high or more but you don't see that in this book. You don't see it when you drive over it either. It's at the bottom of the steep decline pictured in the book in Russell. You don't see the Bridge unless you get off the Highway and view it from U. S. Route 20, the road the Pike replaced. It is quite dramatic but totally absent from this book. The book is poorer for it.

In a way the sparse narrative in what is essentially a photo colelction is a tease because the pictures really pique your interest; and the "rest of the story" is not told. Nonetheless, anybody who rides the Pike, lives in or around the Pike or has an interest in big road building project will find this little book fascinating. The author tries to orient the reader in all of the pictures because so much of what was available for reference is either gone now or because the pictures themselves have a moonscape quality to them. I would have liked a large locator map in the front of the book, with reference to it tagged on each photo. That would have helped me to "put things in place" in my mind. I also would have liked a little more detail on why things went they way they did (why did the Pike not go through Worcester, for example). All that being said, however, I know a lot more about the Mass Pike now than I did before; which is what I hoped would happen when I bought the book.