Street revival

The restitching of these streets, some dating to the 17th century, will not occur all at once. In some cases, along Cross Street from Atlantic Avenue to North Washington Street, for example, old offramps and other barriers have already been taken away, and the street is back to the way it was 300 years ago.

In others, such as Hanover Street, which will be restored from the North End to Congress Street, the reconstruction has to wait for the elevated Central Artery to come down.

That demolition can finally start this weekend, when traffic is taken off the structure and diverted permanently underground. The excitement of city officials and project managers is palpable, as they envision historic streets becoming part of the daily lexicon for commuters, pedestrians, and drivers traveling from one part of the city to another. In the reestablished street layout, everything old will become new again.

"We're putting back what was there to start," said Charles F. Sterling, director of traffic operations for the Big Dig.

The changes will require a primer in urban geography, even for longtime residents. The new landscape will be simple to learn, Sterling said, compared with the detours in the maze of surface streets from Chinatown to Faneuil Hall to Causeway Street over the last 12 years.

In most cases, the restored streets will come full circle, historically speaking, from major Colonial thoroughfares to obscurity, to landmarks once again.

Take Oliver Street, once a vital link from what is now Post Office Square to the Colonial wharves on the Fort Point Channel. About three blocks long, Oliver Street was cut short by the construction of the elevated Central Artery in the 1950s. Now it will become the key route to the Seaport District over the Evelyn Moakley Bridge, for motorists coming from north of the city and taking Exit 23 in the new Interstate 93 south tunnel.

Cross Street, once disrupted by ramps leading to and from the Sumner and Callahan tunnels, will similarly reemerge as a way to travel north on the surface through the city, without using the new Big Dig tunnels at all. The intersection of Hanover and Cross streets, once a hub of Jewish, Italian, and Swedish merchants, as lively an urban crossroads as 5th Avenue and 42d Street or Hollywood and Vine, will once again become a recognizable city spot.

"Those kinds of places are going to work their way into people's consciousness," said former state transportation secretary Frederick Salvucci, one of the original architects of the $14.6 billion Big Dig.

The great promise of the Big Dig, Salvucci said, was not only that it would smooth traffic flow and end bottlenecks, but also that it would repair the damage done by the construction of the elevated Artery and restore Boston's old street network.

The parks and development parcels in the 30-acre corridor that is the long footprint of the Central Artery, the surface of the Big Dig, will be framed by those restored streets, both running alongside the parcels and across them, said James Gillooly, executive director of the city's Central Artery team.

The streets that will cut across the surface of the submerged Central Artery include Hanover, State, Milk, Broad, High, Oliver, Pearl, and Congress. The streets running alongside the parcels are Atlantic Avenue and then Cross Street, which will be one-way northbound; and Surface Artery and then Purchase Street and then Surface Road, one-way southbound.

City officials are considering restoring Surface Road with the name of Albany Street, because it originally ran past Kneeland Street into Chinatown. Surface Artery is also a prime candidate for renaming, city officials say, given its echo of the elevated highway.

But for the most part, downtown streets are being reconnected to the waterfront, and their names, however obscure, are being kept, Gillooly said.

"It's creating a network of one-way streets, playing off the existing street system of the city as much as we can," he said. "It's a great moment."

Boston's crazy quilt of streets is a function of the way the original Shawmut Peninsula was expanded and filled in, historians say -- and not the meanderings of cows or as part of a plan to confuse the British, as legends have it. As such, it's not a New York City-style street grid.

Several streets were rerouted, renamed or changed long before the Central Artery, and others were altered in the years after the elevated highway's construction, said Yanni Tsipis, author of a book on the Central Artery and project manager at the real estate firm of Meredith & Grew.

The restoration of streets over the next year or so "will really be more of an evolution" in a city that is continually reinventing itself, Tsipis said.

Of course, some of the city's original road network, such as Haymarket Square, a bustling rotary where the Government Center parking garage is now located, is gone forever, said Nancy Seasholes, author of "Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston," an account of Boston's practice of filling in waterways and adding to itself.

"There's no way to go back to the way it used to be in those cases, but for Hanover Street, the demolition of the artery will realign the way Bostonians think about the city," she said. "For 50 years there was never a clear path from Government Center to the North End, and now there will be."

The new southbound I-93 tunnel will open to traffic sometime during the day on Saturday.

Anthony Flint can be reached at flint@globe.com.