Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  After considering a wide range of prominent architects, including Norman Fletcher, Carl Koch, Eero Saarinen, Hugh Stubbins, Harry Weese, and Minoru Yamasaki, Logue settled on Paul Rudolph, whom he described as “young (39) and of a very flexible and practical temperament.” This new chair of the Department of Architecture at Yale, Logue asserted, was not only “the best man in New Haven, but the best man in the United States.”129 It did not hurt that hiring Yale’s Rudolph helped address—on paper if not in spirit, given Rudolph’s national reputation—Lee’s constant refrain, reinforced by pressure from Democratic Party regulars, to hire local (what he called “insiders”) while still offering Logue the expertise of a prominent “outsider.” Before Rudolph was chosen, Lee had instructed Logue: “I want you to employ a local architect as an associate on those Temple Street garages. I will not have it any other way … We are going to hire outside architectural firms—and I do approve this approach—to do the important architectural work on our projects, but we must have local firms.”130

  As design consultant to the Church Street Project, Rudolph made extensive plans and elevations, some of which influenced the final design.131 The greatest prize he walked away with, however, was the commission to design the two-block-long, 1,300-car Temple Street Parking Garage, which has probably become his best-known urban renewal project. Margaret Logue recalled how excited Ed was about the distinctive—to his eye, almost sensual—modernism of the garage. “He loved the line created and was excited by the beauty used in such a utilitarian way. That sort of structure was very unusual then.”132 Architectural Forum gave Rudolph’s garage the imprimatur that Logue had hoped for when it devoted a six-page spread to its opening and proclaimed it “an enormous, unabashed piece of sculpture.”133 Similarly, Vogue’s feature on the garage and its architect—illustrated with a bird’s-eye view of Rudolph standing confidently at military ease alongside a sports car on the garage’s top deck—recognized the architectural sophistication the redevelopers sought.134 Logue’s experience in New Haven, working with Rudolph in particular, would encourage him to institutionalize professional design review by prominent architects thereafter in Boston and New York. Almost twenty years later, in 1972, Logue admitted, “I cringe every time I see it [the telephone company building]. But the memory of it has led me, over the years since its completion, to be appropriately demanding of good design when it hurts. That is the real test. Everybody … is for good design—until it hurts. It counts only when you insist on it all the way.”135

  Logue would develop strong relationships with many architects over his years in city building, some of whom—like Rudolph and Johansen from his New Haven days—he would employ repeatedly. But Ed Logue retained for life a special feeling for his first design partner, Paul Rudolph. Margaret Logue attributed their connection to “the chance occurrence of the two living in the same university community and sharing a focus on urban problems early in their careers and early in the recognition of urban decay.”136 Both Logue’s and Rudolph’s personal papers contained clippings about the other, suggesting that they kept track of their respective careers. At their last known public meeting, a conference at the New School in New York City titled “Rethinking Designs of the 60s,” Logue acknowledged Rudolph with warm affection. “I had a long interest in design, but when I realized how ignorant I was, I called a friend, head of the Yale Architecture School, one Paul Rudolph. He is responsible for a lot of the sins I’ve committed I guess ever since.”137

  One of Rudolph’s most important lessons for Logue was that modern structures should be of sufficient quality, scale, and grandeur to be considered monumental. Logue felt that Rudolph’s garage qualified: “My friends like to rib me from time to time over my ‘architectural monument’ … dominating the Church Street project.”138 Rudolph himself considered his Temple Street Parking Garage a worthy civic gateway to a city being recalibrated to suit the automobile, a transformation he approved of.139 The urban renewers also strove to give the full downtown an élan of monumentality. “The centers of our great cities are too often uninteresting,” Logue lamented. “They lack the magic appeal of the western European cities. A city … must have a focus; it must have something that lifts the spirit.”140 Superblocks provided one common tool urban renewers used to achieve modernist monumentality. In merging small pieces of real estate into larger parcels conducive to big projects, planners encouraged long and broad avenues and large, open plazas for public space. Although critics would ultimately—and often rightfully—condemn superblocks for decreasing density and creating vacant and alienating urban space, in the 1950s they appealed to many planners as a way to break out of what they considered the confining grid of the nineteenth-century city and introduce more light, air, and grand scale into modern urbanity.141

  Logue’s dispute with the developer Roger Stevens over the Chapel Square Mall design partly revolved around Logue’s desire to place monumental public space, not simply profitable commerce, at the heart of the rebuilt downtown. He wanted a setback at the corner of Church and Chapel and a pedestrian promenade with fountains, whereas Stevens resisted reducing rentable space, arguing that he needed every inch to make a profit on the city’s high, at almost nineteen dollars per square foot, land cost. Ultimately, they compromised, and the city considered open spaces as non-income-producing public use, relieving Stevens of taxes and maintenance for them.142 Creating impressive civic space would remain a top priority for Logue, evident a few years later when he put Government Center at the core of his downtown Boston renewal.

  Modernist design also offered Logue a way of achieving the integration of new infrastructure and social improvement that had impressed him in the community development work he’d observed in India. This ambition can best be seen in the assault that Lee and Logue made on New Haven’s poor-quality schools. Whenever Lee and Logue strategized about how best to thwart the suburban threat to New Haven, they fixed on the importance of improving the city’s schools, which long had been underfunded, overcrowded, and physically deteriorated. Only two schools had been built in New Haven between 1920 and 1950, and many of the others bore the telltale signs of neglect.

  A mounting exodus from the city’s public schools had resulted. In 1959, one child out of five in New Haven attended private school—the wealthy in nonsectarian independent schools, the less-well-off in Catholic parochial schools. By 1964, one in four students was opting out.143 Meanwhile, New Haven’s suburbs were spending extravagantly on their schools, particularly for new construction, at a rate even faster than their enrollments were growing. In a period when Branford’s pupil population increased by 57 percent, its education expenditures went up by 291 percent; Milford’s student enrollment soared by 115 percent, and its school budget by 440 percent.144 Logue and Lee responded by launching a New Schools for New Haven initiative, which managed to construct twelve new schools, including two high schools, a replacement of about a third of the city’s thirty-seven schools.145 Logue’s clever use of federal urban renewal funds made this massive overhaul possible, as capital expenditures for school construction were counted as a non-cash credit toward fulfilling the required local contribution.

  Most telling, however, was how the renewers used the opportunity to build new schools to innovate socially. For example, the Conté School in Wooster Square and the Hélène Grant School in Dixwell were experimental “community schools” intended to serve neighborhood residents as well as schoolchildren during the long day and evening hours they stayed open. Both were designed by well-known architects—Conté by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; and Grant by John Johansen. The Conté School, which Logue considered “as fine as anything in the suburbs will offer,” housed programs designed to benefit the entire Italian working-class community. In addition to the school, it included a senior citizens’ center with card rooms and bocce courts, a branch library, social service offices, community meeting rooms, a swimming pool, and an auditorium. The K–4 Grant School in Johansen’s Florence Vir
tue project received acclaim for its state-of-the-art design, with clusters of classrooms surrounding internal courts and a gardenlike central courtyard providing light to much of the school’s interior. But the Grant School also had a social mandate to become a racially integrated school in a city that had few of them, an opening wedge into creating the racially mixed neighborhoods that Lee and Logue desired. An article in Architectural Forum in 1966, a year after the school opened, reported that the school “is as advanced in program as in design … The entire school has an atmosphere of experimentation.” City officials considered the true test of its success that the white families moving into the neighboring Florence Virtue houses, who as a minority of residents had previously “talked about sending their children to private schools,” were “now all enrolled at Grant for next fall.”146 In the years ahead, Logue would carry this awareness of the potential of school building for architectural and social innovation with him to Boston and then on to New York.

  MODEL CITY ON DISPLAY

  As early as 1958, thirty-four official delegations from cities all over the United States had trooped through New Haven to learn from its efforts in urban renewal. By 1966 that stream had become a “constant flow of engineers, planners, city officials, citizens and sociologists” from home and abroad who visited New Haven—more than any other city—“to see what can be accomplished when a full-scale attack on blight and poverty is undertaken,” according to the newly created U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).147 That same year, WNBC-TV broadcast a documentary titled Connecticut Illustrated: A City Reborn, celebrating “the spirit of New Haven,” whose commitment to solving difficult urban problems has transformed it over the last ten years from one “choked with slums into a model modern city.”148

  Luminaries likewise gave their blessings. “New Haven is the greatest success story in the history of the world,” proclaimed the U.S. secretary of labor Willard Wirtz rather hyperbolically. “I think New Haven is coming closest to our dream of a slumless city,” echoed Robert C. Weaver, who was the first secretary of HUD—and the first African American presidential cabinet member in the United States.149 Popular national magazines like Time, Harper’s, Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post carried major features about how New Haven was miraculously reinventing itself—and these were only a small portion of the estimated 242 magazine articles and 8 books documenting the city’s urban renewal by the late 1960s.150 Awards mounted and praise reverberated everywhere, as the small, troubled city of New Haven, Connecticut, was touted as a significant site for innovation. Lee and Logue were particularly proud that when New Haven’s example was acclaimed far beyond its borders, their achievements were understood to be much greater than the physical urban renewal visible to the eye.

  2.   Urban Renewal as a Liberal Project

  Remaking New Haven with bricks and mortar, ambitious though it was, played only a part in Lee and Logue’s approach to renewing their city. Three other commitments featured prominently. One they called “human renewal” for how it sought to attack the social problems of struggling New Haven residents caught in the city’s economic decline. The second revolved around defining an appropriate relationship between government officials and the public to engage citizens democratically in urban renewal. And the third was their establishment of a new kind of urban administrator to oversee the renewal process, armed with professional expertise that would also affect how planners, architects, and developers participated in redevelopment. All three innovations expanded into the postwar-era

  commitments made during the New Deal and World War II to create a liberal welfare state suitable to the American context. As New Haven’s leaders experimented with these new strategies for remaking New Haven socially and politically, as they had done with physical renewal, they promoted their city as “a national showcase” to which people “make pilgrimages … to see how it’s done,” according to The New York Times.1

  HUMAN RENEWAL

  Not long into his redevelopment work in New Haven, Logue became frustrated that New Haven’s existing social agencies were not meeting the needs of the “multi-problem families,” often minorities, that the Redevelopment Agency was encountering on a daily basis. So he invited an old acquaintance, Paul Ylvisaker of the Ford Foundation, to visit New Haven. Logue, who was home ill that day, said, “We sat outside at my house. I teased him about the fact that the Ford Foundation didn’t know there were any blacks in America. He was somewhat startled and said that was absolutely not true. And I said, ‘Well, you haven’t got a single grant that has anything to do with black people in this report,’” referring to Ford’s latest annual report.

  Ylvisaker purportedly committed himself at that moment to what became the Gray Areas Program, ultimately established in New Haven and five other places.2 This funding led to the creation in New Haven of a new social agency named Community Progress Inc., known locally as CPI, whose founding document, “Opening Opportunities,” made the case for the necessity of interweaving social programs with infrastructural improvement, what Logue had observed with community development in India and had strived to achieve through school building in New Haven: “More and more the central cities of the metropolitan complexes are becoming places where much of the deprivation of our society is concentrated.” It continued, “As New Haven has met the need for physical improvements in a manner as yet unequalled elsewhere, so also the city intends to tackle the social problems in a comprehensive manner.”3 Later, when some critics accused CPI of paternalism and ineffectiveness, in an effort to rid New Haven of poor people, CPI’s creators argued that, to the contrary, its very establishment testified to their commitment to improve poor New Haveners’ lives, not remove them from the city.

  Logue’s version of the origins of CPI and Ford’s Gray Areas Program more broadly may have exaggerated his own and New Haven’s importance. In fact, Ylvisaker, a smart, charismatic, morally driven reformer, had been struggling for several years to figure out a way for Ford to intervene in the unfolding racial dimensions of the urban crisis despite the foundation board’s reticence to address race outright. Most likely, Logue’s clearly articulated desire for more comprehensive, better integrated social intervention into the lives of poor, often black, urban residents offered Ylvisaker a welcome opportunity.

  New Haven’s CPI would eventually spend $22 million, $5 million of it from Ford, most of the rest from the federal government, a collaboration that pleased Ford as evidence that the foundation’s investment in “demonstration” was attracting additional support. At its peak, CPI would employ about three hundred workers. Experimenting with job training and placement, prekindergarten education, legal assistance, community schools and health centers, tutoring, adult literacy, juvenile delinquency prevention, and other programs, CPI was widely recognized as the incubator for many of the community action programs—such as the Job Corps, Head Start, and Neighborhood Legal Services—that would become signatures of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s (LBJ) national War on Poverty by the mid-1960s.

  From its inception in 1962 until 1966, CPI was headed by Mitchell “Mike” Sviridoff, a pal of Logue’s going back to his union-organizing days at Yale.4 Born in the same working-class neighborhood of New Haven as Dick Lee, Sviridoff, like Lee, could not afford college upon graduating high school and so headed into the labor force, where he became a sheet metal worker on the assembly line of United Aircraft in Stratford, Connecticut. In no time, his reputation for being shrewd, pragmatic, and fair propelled him to head the United Auto Workers local. Within a few years he was president of the union statewide, and by age twenty-seven, president of the Connecticut Congress of Industrial Organizations, which in 1957 became a consolidated AFL-CIO. Logue met Sviridoff when organizing workers at Yale, continued to collaborate with him while labor secretary to Governor Bowles, worked on voter registration for him in fall 1951 as he awaited his security clearance for India, and remained his friend and colleague throughout their prominent careers
in urban affairs—Logue on the physical planning side, Sviridoff on the human services side. When New Haven first received Ford money to launch CPI, Sviridoff was off working for the Alliance for Progress, the U.S. State Department’s new development program for Latin America. Convinced of Sviridoff’s talent and deep social commitment, Logue proposed him for the CPI executive directorship.5 Soon Sviridoff, like Logue and Rotival, was bringing experience in a third-world aid job to bear on solving the urban crisis in the first world.

  Lee and Logue took great pride in the way CPI made New Haven’s total planning even more comprehensive. When Lee appointed Sviridoff to New Haven’s Board of Education, of which he soon became president, CPI became tied all the tighter to the mayor’s overall reform efforts, making use of the city’s community schools as outposts for delivering coordinated social services at the neighborhood level. Moreover, the renewers felt comfortable with CPI’s approach of developing programs that helped clients overcome their personal problems—whether unemployment, illiteracy, or legal jeopardy. It fit well with their liberal ideology of maximizing individual opportunity, rather than transforming larger societal or economic structures. When Logue headed to Boston in 1961, he secured a promise from Ylvisaker to name Boston as another of the six sites to receive Ford’s Gray Areas Program funding. Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) was born as a close cousin to CPI, as Logue again aspired to weave physical and social renewal together.