Help me find this abandoned highway in Northeastern Massachusetts

August 22, 2013 5:31 PM

Several years ago I read about an abandoned stretch of highway midway up the North Shore in Massachusetts, possibly in Danvers or Peabody. Google has turned up this page about an abandoned road in Newburyport, and a reference to an unfinished onramp in Lynn. I could have sworn there was something north of Lynn and east of the Merrimac River, but all my searches have redirected me to those two pages. Am I hallucinating this, or is there an unused onramp or stretch of road south of Newburyport and north of Lynn?
posted by pxe2000 to Grab Bag (7 answers total)

Search for "Hale St, Newburyport, MA" in Google Maps or Google Earth. Look for where Hale crosses I-95. The stretch of abandoned road is visible in the satellite view as an arc running alongside 95 just to the east, and north of Hale.
posted by zippy at 6:06 PM on August 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I actually mentioned Hale Street in Newburyport in the question. :)
posted by pxe2000 at 6:10 PM on August 22, 2013

Sure. And if you do that search with satellite view on, it's visible as a patch of tree-lined road with no homes or businesses.
posted by zippy at 6:16 PM on August 22, 2013

For what it's worth, I grew up in Danvers (as did my parents and all my aunts and uncles), but I never heard of such a thing. I'm fairly oblivious about geography and directions and things like that, though.
posted by mskyle at 6:43 PM on August 22, 2013

Right, she's looking for somewhere south of Hale St. I know Hale St. too, but in the question it's clear that's the northern reference point, not the location she's searching for.

I thought about this a lot, but I can't identify such a place - and since that used to be my commute, I would have thought I'd have seen it.
posted by Miko at 8:32 PM on August 22, 2013

You'll want to write to the BostonRoads guy or find a community of (self-dubbed) roadgeeks. Somebody likely knows what you're thinking about. Meanwhile, here's a Wikipedia list of unused highways in MA -- it's possible you're thinking of one of the expressway continuations that was never completed, or one of the interchanges that was "capped" as a trumpet instead of a cloverleaf.
posted by dhartung at 4:00 AM on August 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

Not on the North Shore, sorry, but this description (from mefi's own adamg) of an abandoned highway in Roslindale is worth a read, especially for the extensive, educational, and entirely polite comments.
posted by nonane at 5:28 AM on August 23, 2013 [3 favorites]