History
Designed in the 1960s, and with most of its links built in the 1970s, the junction was a major project in a scheme that led to the forcible acquisition and demolition of 15,000 dwellings in the inner suburbs, causing 50,000 people to move away from the area when the central motorway network was constructed - with major negative effects on the nearby Auckland CBD, and especially the Karangahape Road shopping area, which fell into decline for decades. Two Catholic schools St Benedict's College (secondary) and St Benedict's School (primary) were forced to closed down.
The junction was substantially extended (or in a sense, finally completed) in the 2000s, with the final links opened to traffic in December 2006. During the duration of this NZ$208m project, the existing motorways had to be closed several hundred times during nighttime, with traffic rerouted over local roads.
Read more about this topic: Central Motorway Junction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
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—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
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—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)