Lexington house made with material from the Big Dig on sale for $2.3M

Some 300 tons of steel and concrete from the highway mega-project went into the six-story modern’s construction

By Tom Acitelli@tomacitelli Dec 6, 2018, 11:28am EST

Lexington’s famed Big Dig House at 8 Bird Hill Road is on the market.

A little background: The home’s original owner was an engineer on that grand civic project to sink Interstate 93 into a series of tunnels underneath Boston.

What the state Department of Transportation aptly called “the largest, most complex, and technologically challenging highway project in the history of the United States” threw up a lot of byproduct (as well as gave us the Kennedy Greenway!). Among that byproduct was a temporary I-93 that had to in turn be torn down once the tunnels were ready.

The engineer who originally owned 8 Bird Hill Road used more than 600,000 pounds of reclaimed steel and concrete from that temporary I-93—and other discarded infrastructure from the Big Dig that would have otherwise ended up in landfills—to build the six-story house during the middle of the previous decade.

The house has since changed hands and has been renovated, too, but the unmistakable signs of its industrial provenance remain. The steel and concrete from America’s most ambitious highway project are clearly visible throughout.

The 4,027-square-foot house has three bathrooms and the potential for four bedrooms. There’s a garden and a hot tub on the roof, and plenty of ginormous floor-to-ceiling windows. What’d you think? Yours for $2.295 million through Sotheby’s International Realty.