This lithograph shows the Southeast Expressway looking north from Hubbardston Road, with the Savin Hill Ave. bridge in the foreground. Art work by James Hobin (1994)

Dorchester is noisy. Close your eyes on any Dorchester street and you will hear the relentless pulsation of human activity: chatter in a variety of languages, all types of music and recorded announcements, slamming doors, barking dogs, car horns, airplanes, helicopters, jackhammers, police sirens, fire engines, boom boxes, firecrackers and other loud bangs, traffic jams, snowplows, subway trains, garbage trucks, buses and motor scooters, kids playing, kids fighting, whistles, bells, chimes, babies crying and, occasionally, the happy inebriate belting out a song.

The mother of all Dorchester’s noisemakers is the expressway, a river of asphalt and rubber that runs through several of our neighborhoods. Noise from the expressway is an underlying tone in the texture of the sound that reaches to the far corners of Dorchester. Closer to the source, the faint sounds become more winded, and begin to hum, like a rising tornado. Right on top of the road, the traffic makes a thunderous racket that practically overwhelms everything around it.

Officially, the Southeast Expressway picks up where the Central Artery ends, at Mass Ave., and continues to the Braintree split (8.3 miles), carrying Interstate 93, US Route 1 and Massachusetts Route 3. It is the only highway that connects Boston with the South Shore, and as everybody knows, it has the worst congestion in the region.

Completion of the expressway in 1959 was a milestone for the urban renewal program of the 1950s that razed the West End and dug the first Central Artery tunnel. Construction took more than eight years, but within a year of opening to traffic, the new road was already overloaded, exceeding its design capacity of 90,000 vehicles per day (recent data show that the 2013 average daily usage was 195,000 vehicles).

The expressway was built on top of old train routes that traversed Dorchester, replacing most of the track that serviced points south of Boston. Rail links were strangled and warehouses and manufacturing depots in the way were leveled. Eminent domain was in full swing while the project was under way; homes were dismantled and people were displaced. The landscape was reshaped by the blasting of a massive trench into the western slope of Savin Hill and the paving over of the southern rim of Dorchester Bay.

From the rail yard behind Andrew Square, the expressway turns south and makes a slow descent to the shoreline. Approaching Columbia Road, where the slope drops abruptly, the expressway is pitched overhead to an elevated platform that continues for one-quarter of a mile, covering the train tracks and parking lots of UMass/JFK Station, before settling onto the graded earthwork behind the houses on Sydney SLooking southeast, this 1927 photograph shows the wide expanse of railroad tracks that was demolished some 30 years later to make way for the Southeast Expressway.treet.

About four stories tall, the roadway platform is raised to a considerable height, made of steel and supported by a quantity of steel columns, all painted dull green. To stand beneath it is to be amazed. The scale of the thing is impressive: It holds up eight lanes, an exit ramp, and an on-ramp. At certain times of day, shafts of light break in from between the ramps, spreading out and filtering through the darkness that usually envelopes the underside of this structure. The effect is quite dramatic, illuminating the vastness of the enclosure – around two acres in total – as if it were a great cathedral.

The expressway then glides along at sea level by Savin Hill and meets the ocean at the gas tank off Morrissey Boulevard. The tank is a significant landmark that looks as if some giant had applied a few colorful strokes across it with his giant paintbrush. In the 1970s, when the tank was covered with Sister Corita Kent’s design, drivers on the expressway strained to see if the contour of the blue stripe was indeed the profile of Ho Chi Minh, or if it was just a blue stripe. Today’s drivers might not know about the blue stripe, which is a clue that points to all the forgotten or near forgotten details that accumulate around a road like this, as they speed by the gas tank, not recognizing Ho Chi Minh, or why he was ever seen there.

Next, the expressway skirts Tenean Beach, then goes on to choke off Port Norfolk from the rest of Dorchester before crossing the Neponset River into Milton at Granite Ave. We have become used to the expressway; it is very convenient – just imagine all the trouble it takes to get on the highway from other parts of the city. A lot of people depend on this road, but for those who live alongside it, the expressway is a void, the elephant in the room, cut off, dangerous, ignored and ignoring.

Yet, we probably would be unable to manage without it, nor would we want to lose its function as our modern-day “promenade.” Consider the expressway as the route of our grand processionals, where people can line the streets and bridges along its route to witness a funeral procession, a presidential motorcade, or a convoy, like the line of sleek black SUVs that brought Whitey Bulger back and forth to the Federal court house last year.

Car accidents also bring out the onlookers. It seems that there are a lot fewer car accidents along this road now than there were in the 1960s and ‘70s. Back then, neighbors would hear heart-stopping screeches from braking tires, and feel compelled to go out and watch road crews clean up the wreck. There is much less of that today, and drivers are up on their game. In the old days, drivers pressed on the car horn with a long and low “look out!” as a last resort. Now, drivers use the horn less, but when they do, it’s more quick and sharp, as a preemptory, “Don’t you even think of it, Buster.”

The traffic continues unabated, and the two sides move in opposite directions with the tension of opposing poles of a magnet. It’s going 24/7: approach, climax, recede, like the waves in the ocean. Actually, it does sound like the surf, rolling in at long intervals sometimes, and at other times in a fury of action.

Yes, 24/7 – unless there is a catastrophe, such as 9/11, which plunged the road into eerie silence, or the unprecedented shut-down after the 2013 marathon bombing. Our snowstorms, with February 1978 and February 2015 as outstanding examples, can close the road, too. This year it was practically closed for a few days, and a wonderful silence blanketed the area. Road crews made a quick recovery, however, with teams of powerful trucks that plowed and scraped to bare ground almost as soon as the snow stopped falling. The trucks moved in tandem, like the Patriots offensive line. The quiet was nice while it lasted.