Mayor for a New America

by Thomas M. Menino

  Don’t take my word for it. Listen to an authority, Celtics legend Bill Russell, who battled racism during his long career in Boston. “Today,” he told the press in 2004, “we see a Boston that is making every effort to be one of our country’s most inclusive and progressive cities under the leadership of Mayor Menino.”

  Here are two factual outlines of the difference my mayoralty made to Boston’s communities of color. One traces the revival of a neighborhood; the other describes my frustration with a governor caught between his promise to locate a state office building in Roxbury and his ambition for higher office.

  The neighborhood was Grove Hall, on the Roxbury-Dorchester border. When I was a kid, my parents would drive the four miles of Blue Hill Avenue from Mattapan Square to buy fresh-baked bread and rolls at Kasanoff’s Bakery in Grove Hall. It was a thriving commercial district, with movie theaters, delicatessens, kosher butcher shops, and a supermarket. Two riots in the 60s, one following Martin Luther King’s assassination, left it a boarded-up shell.

  Driving through Roxbury with Angela after becoming mayor, I said, “You know, all I want to do as mayor is to make Roxbury as good as West Roxbury,” one of Boston’s nicest residential neighborhoods. The day after I was elected, I took a victory lap around the city to thank the voters. First stop, Grove Hall. In my inaugural and through my first year, I pledged: “We’re going to bring it back to where it was, a neighborhood that has economic development and hope for the people who live there. No, it won’t have Kasanoff’s Bakery. But we’ll have smaller businesses, we’ll have residences . . . we’ll bring people back to that place.” I was sticking my neck out: “If this works it will be one of the showpieces of my administration. If it doesn’t, it will be one of my big failures.”

  I’ll tell the Grove Hall story quickly, but it unfolded as change does in cities—slowly.

  The city owned a hundred parcels of abandoned land along Blue Hill Avenue. I began there. In 1994 I promised to turn fifty of them over to developers within a year and fill at least half of those properties with new businesses within two years. In the meantime, to “show somebody cares,” we put up white picket fences in front of the vacant lots.

  Blue Hill Ave was pocked with run-down apartment buildings. The landlords lived in the suburbs. So we ran ads in their local newspapers, listing their names and describing the condition of their properties. We headed the ads “House of Shame.”

  Entrepreneurs wanting to start businesses in Grove Hall needed capital. The banks said no. The city said yes—first to the Big Load Laundry, then to a single mom who, with a $500,000 loan from the city, opened Grove Hall’s first sit-down restaurant in years. She had no collateral but, as I explained, “she showed enthusiasm and drive. You have to have faith in people.”

  With “empowerment zone” money from Bill Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development combined with state and city funds, we built 150 units of new and renovated housing on the side streets off Blue Hill Ave. The Globe liked the “suburban feel” of these “modern, well-kept homes.”

  Over the objections of developers who wanted the land, I sited a $7.2 million early education center at the edge of the Grove Hall business district. A reporter tagged along while I showed off the center’s “handsome brick exterior and the state-of-the-art interior, with wooden floors, easy-to-maintain carpets and flexible, modular classroom layout.”

  The center was the area’s largest single investment until the 2001 opening of the $10 million Grove Hall Retail Mall, a project nurtured for a decade by the local Neighborhood Development Corporation. The tenants included CVS, Dunkin’ Donuts, and a fifteen-thousand-square-foot Stop & Shop supermarket, something last seen in these parts in the 1960s. Today a $9 million seventy-one-unit housing complex fills Kasanoff’s old space.

  “People are actually moving back into the community, people who left reluctantly at a point where they had no hope,” the director of a local nonprofit said in 1996. “Now they’re saying, ‘I can come home.’” And we were just getting started . . .

  I kept my promise to Roxbury. Mitt Romney broke his.

  From 1991 to 2006, Massachusetts had four Republican governors. Three of them understood that without Boston, Massachusetts is New Hampshire. They got it that Boston is the engine of the state economy. Three of them indicated that, when the time was right, they would help renew a lagging Boston neighborhood by moving a major state department there. The fourth Republican governor, Mitt Romney, sounded like he got it: “I believe great cities are a key to a great state.”

  The one thousand employees of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health were scattered across five separate facilities in Boston. Consolidating them in one headquarters made budgetary sense. Siting that building in Dudley Square made economic and social sense.

  Dudley Square is at the heart of Roxbury. Like Grove Hall, it had never recovered from the 60s. But, partly on spillover commerce from nearby Grove Hall, by 2003 it was showing signs of life. The plywood covering the square’s nineteenth-century buildings had come off. Restaurants were opening. An old hotel was being restored.

  But Dudley’s recovery could not gain momentum so long as a huge blighted building stood in the middle of the square. Ferdinand’s Blue Store, once one of the Northeast’s leading furniture retailers, closed in the 60s, and the 1898 building had been vacant ever since, discouraging investment in Dudley Square.

  In 1998, after years of pressure from my office and from Roxbury politicians and nonprofits, the state legislature voted to build a $70 million 200,000-square-foot DPH headquarters at the Ferdinand’s site.

  Delayed, the project was teed up for Romney when he took office in 2003. Merchants were adjusting business plans to handle the estimated $2 million annually in new trade. Big media events at Dudley Square had raised expectations. A neighborhood that had known no hope for decades knew hope now.

  Then Governor Romney found reasons to back out. Downtown rents were falling. The number of DPH employees was shrinking. The department might disappear in his restructuring of state government. There was an economic crisis, a budget squeeze . . .

  My development experts pointed out that rents would rise when the economy recovered. That, compared to the cost of its leases downtown, the state would save $500 million annually over the twenty years of its lease with the city in Dudley Square—and then own the building outright.

  But Mitt Romney wasn’t thinking long-term and he wasn’t thinking of Massachusetts. For him the State House was a steppingstone to the White House. He did not run for reelection as governor in 2006 but for the GOP nomination for president in 2008. He’d seen Massachusetts as a springboard since he challenged Senator Ted Kennedy in 1994.

  Teddy was in trouble that year. He called me. “I need your help,” he said. He got it. The turning point in the campaign was his debate with Romney at Faneuil Hall. Romney was like the character in The Candidate. Plastic. Teddy not only had all the answers; the human side came out. The warmth. The humor. Still, when the polls showed a close race, Romney must have seen a path to the presidency opening if he tamed the Lion of Liberalism. The path closed when the Lion roared, winning by 17 points. But it would open for Romney again in 2008 if he could show Republican primary voters that he’d brought conservative government to liberal Massachusetts.

  Dudley Square stepped on that story. Maybe Romney was afraid that his opponents would attack him for using the public sector to stimulate private investment—for believing that government is part of the solution when every conservative knows “government is the problem.” Or that GOP voters would not reward him for siting a project in a black urban neighborhood. Or that DPH employees who didn’t like working there would complain to Rush Limbaugh that they were pawns in a “liberal” social experiment. You guess at motives when reasons don’t add up.

  “The comeback of Dudley Square will be delayed for a while, but we’ll get there,” I said.

  Though the city has fewer resources than the
state, its eighteen thousand employees need places to work. But cities can’t borrow to erect new buildings whenever a mayor wants. Capital budgeting has a rhythm dictating when cities can spend. Unfortunately, there was a long clock on major construction in Dudley Square.

  We got there in stages. I asked the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) for an analysis of all city services. The Police Department needed a replacement for its fortress-like station in Dudley Square. We commissioned the Boston firm Leers Weinzapfel Associates to construct a new $17.5 million B-2 district headquarters. Nearly half the workers on the job were minorities. The 35,000-square-foot building they put up received an environmental award for “green features” like daylighting and the city’s first vegetative roof. The station’s two hundred employees work in a healthy space.

  The Ferdinand’s eyesore remained, blighting the square. We decided to fill that space with the Boston School Department, relocating it from its 1909 building near City Hall. Putting school headquarters in Roxbury was fitting, since all but 10 percent of BPS students are minorities.

  Five hundred school department employees are moving into a six-story $115 million building constructed behind the flatiron facade of Ferdinand’s Blue Store. It is the tallest structure erected in Dudley Square in a century and, with 250,000 square feet overall and 25,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor, the biggest. The project occupies an entire block, and it will include wider sidewalks for outdoor cafés and space for a park next to the busy Dudley MBTA station.

  This stylish new building, designed by an international team of architects, is an invitation to private investors to build in a district that can accommodate 2.4 million square feet of development. Some firms have already accepted the invitation. More will. The Dudley Square Vision Initiative opens a heady vista on a rising neighborhood at the geographic center of Boston.

  “You’re going to see a rejuvenation of this whole area,” I said at the groundbreaking ceremony. “It’s going to help people in the neighborhood stay put because there will be more jobs and economic opportunity. . . . We want people to raise their families there. That’s what this is all about.”

  As I left office, a crane towered over Dudley Square. Cranes are familiar sights downtown. But this was the first anyone could remember in Roxbury. It was visible from far off, pointing up.

  Chapter 2

  The Struggle for the Schools

  That the common school should serve the Benefit of the Poor and the Rich; that the Children of all, partaking of equal Advantages and being placed upon an equal Footing, no Distinction might be made among them in the Schools on account of the different Circumstances of their Parents, but that the Capacity & natural Genius of each might be cultivated & improved for the future benefit of the whole Community.

  —declaration of the Boston town meeting, 1784

  IT HAD NEVER been done before. No Boston mayor had ever publicly declared “judge me harshly” if he failed to fix the schools. I was the first one. I said it at my third State of the City address on January 17, 1996. I pointed my finger at the audience and at the thousands of Bostonians watching on television and charged them “to hold me accountable for what I have said tonight.”

  The setting, the auditorium of the Jeremiah E. Burke High School, shouted failure. The New England Association of Schools and Colleges measures schools by ten standards. The Burke had flunked eight.

  The Burke’s 940 students shared one guidance counselor. The science labs “imped[ed] instruction.” In the civics textbooks used at the Burke, Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive; so was John F. Kennedy. The building was crumbling. It crumbled on me. On my first visit as mayor, a chunk of the auditorium ceiling fell on my shoulder.

  The Burke was about to make history. Never before had a Massachusetts school lost its accreditation. That was a blow to the pride of the city that founded the public school. It was an embarrassment for me. It was a curse on the kids graduating from the Burke.

  Kids like Diane Wolcott, who wanted to go to college so badly that she snuck into the perpetually closed library to research a history paper. Diane was a cheerleader. Leafing through a teen magazine she saw an announcement for a $10,000 scholarship for cheerleaders. Her hopes soared. Then she read the fine print: “You must be enrolled in an accredited high school.”

  The Burke was not alone. Six other Boston schools were on notice to shape up or share its disgrace.

  “We’re going to bring the schools back,” I promised that night at the Burke. “In the most public of forums the mayor has staked his future on better schools,” the Boston Globe commented. Statistics suggested the hard pull ahead:

  Forty-three of the system’s 120 schools qualified for special state aid because their students did so poorly on state tests.

  In a recent test, juniors at Dorchester High had averaged 17 out of a possible 100 in reading, 18 in math.

  Nearly 40 percent of ninth-graders were dropping out before graduation.

  I listed specific goals: a longer school day, computers in the classroom,* new standards in reading and math, and the rebuilding of most schools and the redesign of some as community learning centers. I gave myself six years to deliver. That would be the end of my second term. Of course, first I had to win a second term.

  Commenting on my speech, John Nucci, former city councilor and School Committee member, outlined the “political risk” I was taking: “People don’t vote for mayor on the performance of kids in the schools. It’s crime, economic development, and just plain garbage pickup that drives the electorate in a mayor’s race.”

  During the ’93 campaign, my political consultants cited numbers making John’s point. They urged me to campaign on crime, the first priority of 43 percent of voters, over education, picked by only 13 percent.

  Fewer and fewer voters had a stake in the schools. The kids of the older whites whose property taxes paid for the minority kids in the system were long past school age. Nearly one in four young parents, like Robert Gittens, the first chair of my appointed school committee, sent their kids to parochial schools. Few of the “urban pioneers” moving into the South End, Jamaica Plain, and the Back Bay had kids of school age.

  The dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education saluted my “political courage” for tackling the schools, but I had not taken leave of my political senses. I knew that since World War II only one Boston mayor, James Michael Curley, had failed to win reelection, and he had been sentenced for mail fraud in his first term. I figured to clear that low bar.

  Improving education was an odd mission to put at the heart of my mayoralty. Me, a C student who didn’t go to college until my daughter went. When I graduated from the College of Public and Community Service at UMass Boston in 1988, journalists poked fun at me for receiving credit for “life experience.” Yet that experience made me the right man to lead the struggle for the schools. “I’m the guy who came by education the hard way,” I said at the Burke, “and that more than anything else qualifies me for this job.”

  It was a new job for a Boston mayor. For over a century, an elected school committee had run the schools—run them into the ground.

  Under the elected committee, Boston operated two school systems, black and white, separate and unequal. It spent less on black students than on white, less for textbooks in black schools, and nearly a third less on health care for black kids. A state law passed in 1965 required racial balance in all public schools on the grounds that “racial imbalance represents a serious conflict with the American creed of equal opportunity.” Yet thirty-five of Boston’s schools had a black student enrollment of 65 to 95 percent. For a decade the School Committee took desperate steps, like counting Chinese students as white, to reduce the number of schools classified as racially imbalanced.

  School Committee members won elections by resisting integration, not by improving the schools. As the quality of education deteriorated, they blamed the kids. “We have no inferior education in our schools,” said one c
hairman. “What we have been getting is an inferior type of student.” The schools weren’t a priority for the Irish American pols who dominated the committee. They were in it for the jobs. They “took care of their own,” as evidenced by the sixty-eight Sullivans, sixty-one Murphys, forty McCarthys, thirty O’Briens, and twenty-five Walshes on the School Department payroll in the 1960s.

  As late as 1976 a panel of educators concluded: “Friends, neighbors, and relatives of School Committee members ask for and get special consideration for jobs. Who you know often counts more than what you know. . . . Job and employment questions pervade and poison the entire operation.”

  Turn-of-the-century reformers advocated elected school committees to “take the politics out of the schools.” In Boston that worked, for a while. But after Maurice Tobin rose from the School Committee to mayor, governor, and then secretary of labor in Harry Truman’s cabinet, members saw the committee as a ladder up in politics. Only a saint could resist pandering to the white electorate by promising to preserve their “neighborhood schools.” But saints were rarer on the committee than Italians (two in seventy years).

  Fanning the protest against busing, the court-mandated remedy for racial imbalance, committee chairs like Louise Day Hicks and John Kerrigan encouraged the belief that Judge Garrity’s order could be resisted, though as lawyers they knew better. Their deceived supporters eventually turned them out of office.

  The elected committee never recovered its prestige from the likes of Hicks—and especially Kerrigan, who, outside Judge Garrity’s courtroom, once lampooned a black TV reporter by imitating a chimpanzee. Two mayors in a row, Kevin White and Ray Flynn, called for replacing this discredited elected body with one appointed by the mayor. But with support from whites protecting their jobs and from a black community defending the beachhead of its four seats on the thirteen-member committee, it survived into the early 1990s.