Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Probably the most important evolution over the decade and a half between when Dahl first asked, “Who governed?” and when Lee stepped down as mayor occurred in the locus of political authority. Experts—so central to the liberal pluralist democratic order—found themselves on the defensive as participatory democrats gained ground. Analysts like Ellen Herman and Fred Turner have argued for other professional realms—psychology and the media, respectively—that after the traumas of World War II and in the midst of the Cold War of the 1940s and 1950s, rule by experts was considered the best way to preserve democracy from the threat of authoritarianism, whether fascist mobs or communist dictators. Only the profound disillusionment that came with the Vietnam War, the prolonged struggle for civil rights, and the battles over other social causes unraveled that linkage between expertise and democracy.93 Urban renewal likewise contributed to citizens’ growing recognition that the most crucial kind of social knowledge required for democratic change resided with ordinary people, not just independent experts. Many participatory democrats actually recognized that some expertise was still needed to achieve their goals; as one Hill resident succinctly put it, “We do need ‘experts,’ but we must have experts who will plan what we want instead of what the people downtown want.”94 All these tough questions were raised in the years that Logue spent in New Haven, and in many ways the rest of his career in urban redevelopment would revolve around responding to their challenges.

  But this reckoning all lay in the future. When Logue left for Boston in 1961, he thought New Haven’s future looked bright. He had faith that a more economically viable and inclusive city was on the horizon and that it was time to put the skills he had developed over the past seven years to work in a bigger city with a higher profile on the regional and national stages. “I had done about as much as I could do in New Haven except stay the course and see it through. After a while there’s not much challenge in that,” he remembered later.95 Confident of his own abilities and the great importance of this work, Ed Logue felt that his New Haven experience had made him all the wiser about what to do—and what not to—in the good fight to save America’s cities. But he would soon discover that he still had a lot more to learn, as urban renewal in Boston thrust him into many of the same battles that would grip New Haven.

  PART II

  Boston in the 1960s: Rebuilding the City on the Hill

  4.   Sizing Up the Old Boston

  The summons to come meet Boston’s newly elected mayor, John Collins, arrived in December 1959. Ed Logue knew from his well-tuned professional network that Collins’s people had been inquiring about him as a possible leader of Boston’s revitalization. He might also have known they were investigating other candidates, including his former deputy Ralph Taylor, familiar to Bostonians from his work in neighboring Somerville before he decamped for New Haven. Logue accepted the invitation to visit. He met with the mayor-elect Collins, he looked around a city he barely knew outside of Harvard-Yale games, and he posed two key questions: Where’s the comprehensive plan, and can an outsider do this job in a city notorious for its vicious political infighting?1

  The answer to the first question was that there was no overall plan—only an inadequate and dated General Plan for Boston conceived back in 1950. Collins’s predecessor as mayor, John Hynes, had launched Boston’s urban renewal with two controversial and still-incomplete projects: redeveloping the West End and the New York Streets section of the South End. Hynes’s next two ambitious moves—to persuade the Prudential Insurance Company to build a New England headquarters in the Back Bay and to construct the Government Center in downtown Boston—had stalled.

  Collins’s second answer was more encouraging: “Ed, only an outsider can do anything in this town. Around here they keep score on you from the time you’re in short pants.”2 Anyone local, Collins believed, would inevitably be identified with one side or the other in the decades-long political feuds that divided the city. After meeting Logue and consulting with his advisers, Collins decided that in fact Logue alone—with his established track record in New Haven and Midas touch for attracting federal dollars, and without any compromising local affiliations—could head the much-invigorated Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). And he would be worth his shockingly high price tag of $30,000 a year, which was $10,000 more than the mayor himself, or indeed the Massachusetts governor, was earning.

  Logue, who was intrigued by the Boston opportunity, had taken a risk and said that no lesser salary would motivate him to give up his satisfying work and comfortable life in New Haven, even if his pay there was only $13,500.3 No one, including Logue, was exactly sure why he put such a high price on his own head, but the speculation of family members and colleagues ranged from a lifetime of insecurity about money traceable back to his fatherless youth to his high opinion of his own abilities to an ideological conviction that public service should not require financial sacrifice. Logue also knew from experience that federal urban renewal grants would cover most, if not all, of his salary. When he was asked by an intermediary for Collins, “What makes you think you’re worth that?” Logue shot back, “When I was in the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy during the War, I got combat pay, and when I served in New Delhi in the Foreign Service, I got hardship pay … From what I hear about your town, it qualifies on both counts.”4 John Collins and Ed Logue agreed that Logue would start as a per diem consultant that spring, learning about the city and developing a plan. They would see where it led.5

  Where it would lead was to a seven-year run as the powerful development administrator of what became Boston’s more than $200 million federally funded urban renewal. In no time, Boston would move from seventeenth to fourth in per capita dollars received from Washington, making Boston by far the largest investment the Feds made in a city of its size. Those funds would underwrite multiple projects under way simultaneously in the city’s downtown and residential neighborhoods. This was an achievement greatly lauded by some and detested by others. Few kept their opinions to themselves. What became known as the “New Boston” provided almost daily front- and editorial-page copy for Boston’s newspapers and juicy material for in-depth features in the national press. Major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post; the newsweeklies Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, National Review, and U.S. News and World Report; business publications like Fortune, The Economist, and Business Week; and professional publications like Architectural Forum—all were fascinated by the question Newsweek aptly phrased as “What’s happening to proper Old Boston?”

  Logue himself attracted an outsize amount of attention. Life’s profile, “Bold Boston Gladiator—Ed Logue: Planner Stirs Up a Ruckus and Battles Opposition to Build the Place of His Dreams,” proclaimed him “the most successful redevelopment boss in the country—and … the most controversial.” The Christian Science Monitor introduced readers to “Boston’s Mr. Urban Renewal, one of the top men in the renewal field.” The Washington Post tagged him “the master rebuilder” in 1967.6 Comparisons were frequently made with Christopher Wren’s remaking of London in the seventeenth century, Charles Bulfinch’s reenvisioning of Boston in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris later in the nineteenth century.7

  It was thus no mystery why the Boston Herald described Logue in 1965 as “more controversial, more discussed, more fervently admired and feverishly hated than any personality since James Michael Curley,” referring to the Democratic Party machine boss who had dominated twentieth-century Boston politics.8 If small-scale New Haven was a controlled laboratory experiment in urban renewal, then bigger Boston became the national testing ground for how to turn around a major American city—the tenth largest in the nation in 1950 at its population peak. In that effort, Logue would make allies and enemies as he grappled with the major dilemma that still confronts urban planners and public officials today: how to balance improving a city’s economic profile as measured in the health of its tax base,
its attractiveness to investors, and its success in providing jobs and services, against ensuring a decent—and equitable to the extent possible—quality of life for all its residents. In other words, how should a city’s viability be assessed? From the very start in the contentious cauldron that was Boston, Logue faced choices and criticisms that propelled him to confront this question in ways that he had not needed to in New Haven, where citizens did not raise substantial challenges to Logue and Lee’s agenda until the mid-1960s, several years after Logue had departed.

  BECOMING THE BOSTON OF 1960

  During that first spring and summer of 1960, Logue spent four days a week in Boston and weekends doing his New Haven work. He would walk from one end of this new city to another, scouting the territory around every Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or “T,” stop and talking to anyone who was willing. Finally, after three months of observations and three days of intense work holed up in his basement study in New Haven, doing “the most effective writing I have ever done,” Logue was ready by June to present Mayor Collins with the first draft of an extensive plan. He did so at an intimate meeting in Collins’s Jamaica Plain home, with only Collins and a few of his closest advisers in attendance. Logue took it as a high compliment to his sleuthing that Collins’s first reaction was “Hell, I could have done that!”

  By late September, his “$90 Million Development Program for Boston,” encompassing downtown and ten neighborhoods—and potentially affecting a quarter of the city’s acreage and half of its population over a ten-year period—was ready for public viewing. It was presented with great flourish at an evening meeting in the historic Old South Meeting House, “filled to the rafters,” Logue recalled, with seven hundred invited neighborhood representatives and business, civic, and professional leaders.9 Logue had taken the federal requirement of a “workable plan” to a whole new level of comprehensiveness, never doubting that his short, intense immersion in Boston and previous expertise in redevelopment were a sufficient-enough basis on which to recommend a massive reconfiguration of the city. He knew that public hearings and city and federal approvals would need to follow, but still, he (and Collins) considered it his job to launch the process with an ambitious vision for a New Boston.

  That Boston was a city in crisis was obvious to everyone, even if they disagreed vehemently over what to do about it. The city was bleeding people and resources. Curley’s conflicts with the national Democratic Party had deprived the city of its fair share of New Deal handouts, and its already declining manufacturing base got very little lift out of World War II.10 Since 1950, Boston had lost 13 percent of its population, thinning out many of the city’s neighborhoods. Good jobs were disappearing as well, with the loss of forty-eight thousand in manufacturing and fourteen thousand downtown, contributing to an 8 percent drop in city employment. Meanwhile, suburban jobs increased by 22 percent. This job loss gave Boston the lowest median family income of the nation’s seven largest metropolitan areas. With slightly less than 10 percent of the city’s population being African American in 1960—smaller than in many other major American cities—whites made up most of the city’s poor.

  Boston was also on the verge of bankruptcy. Its tax rate of $101 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, twice the rate in Chicago and New York and higher than in any other large American city, discouraged investors, who feared endlessly rising real estate taxes. As a result, only two new downtown office buildings had been constructed since 1930. The most dependable employer in town was city hall, bloating Boston’s civil service payrolls by 50 percent higher than what was average for the nation’s largest cities while draining Boston’s coffers. It was no wonder that in 1959 Moody’s had downgraded the city’s bond rating from A to Baa, near junk level, making it the only city with a population over half a million to carry that stigma and borrowing burden.11 WGBH, the local educational television station, regularly broadcast alarming programs like City in Crisis, a twenty-part series. While Logue was preparing to go public with his plan for a New Boston in August 1960, the Boston-based, politically progressive Christian Science Monitor wondered aloud, “Is Boston worth saving? The streets are choked with traffic, vast jungles of blighted housing, faded business districts … Is it all worth the effort to change this?”12

  If anything became crystal clear to Logue from his initial, intense immersion in Boston, it was how the long arm of history had shaped the troubled city he now saw before him. Much of the current paralysis could be traced to the bitter, decades-long struggle between the Yankee Protestant (often referred to as “Brahmin”) elite and the immigrant workers and their descendants—many of them Catholics and Jews—who labored in the city’s once-flourishing ports, markets, shipyards, and manufacturing plants. It was “a confrontation,” Logue was convinced, “of a deep nature” that did great “harm … to the city.”13 The Yankees had dominated the city economically and politically from its earliest days as a center of local fishing and global trade. They continued overseeing its transformation in the nineteenth century into a regional marketplace and the commercial heart of a thriving textile empire that stretched into the river-rich hinterlands of New England, including such mill towns as Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire.

  As the size of Boston’s immigrant working class swelled—at first predominantly with the Irish but during the first decades of the twentieth century broadened to include substantial numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans—the Yankees found their Republican hegemony threatened. By 1905, savvy Democratic politicians like John F. Kennedy’s maternal grandfather John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, hailing from the city’s then Irish and later Italian enclave of the North End, managed to turn the exploding numbers of ethnic voters into an engine powering a potent Democratic Party machine. From 1913 to 1949, the machine’s undisputed leader, James Michael Curley, dominated Boston politics, serving multiple terms as mayor, governor, and congressman—as well as two terms in federal prison. Curley’s strategy was simple: milk downtown to feed the ethnic, working-class neighborhoods. With as much as 80 percent of the city’s revenue coming from real estate taxes, he kept tax assessments low in the neighborhoods and sky-high and unpredictable—and, it was rumored, in pencil—downtown, to maximize the possibility of making tax abatement deals with business, one of his many party- and self-aggrandizing corruption schemes. A commanding orator, Curley took great delight in lampooning the Yankees as the “codfish aristocracy,” who were “descended from rum runners and slave traders.” He boasted that “it took the Irish to make Massachusetts a fit place to live.”14

  Not surprisingly with so fragile an economic base, citywide infrastructure and services—from sewers and streets to schools—deteriorated badly under Curley, while the Yankee elite retaliated with a roving eye. Some remained in the premier neighborhoods of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay, but many others left town. As Harvey Cox wrote in The Secular City in 1965, “The frontal collision between Yankees and Irish drove many people with money and civic interests to the suburbs. As Mr. Justice Brandeis reported, at the turn of the century the wealthy citizens of Boston told their sons: ‘Boston holds nothing for you except heavy taxes and political misrule. When you marry, pick out a suburb to build your house in, join the Country Club, and make your life center about your club, your home, and your children.’” Cox proceeded to note that by midcentury, “the advice was taken not just by the sons of the wealthy, but by everyone with enough savings to flee to Newton or Belmont” or, “the most ludicrous anomaly of all,” the town of Brookline, which, although “almost completely surrounded by the City of Boston,… nonetheless clings to its independent status, pretending to spurn all involvement with the corruption of The Hub.”15

  Businessmen similarly invested their substantial financial capital elsewhere—whether in Boston’s suburbs, out west and down south, or halfway around the globe—leaving the city’s factories, company headquarters, department stores, banks, and law firms languishing more and more w
ith every passing decade. Boston took shabby-genteel to new heights. In a public speech as early as April 1960, when Logue was still a consultant, he openly criticized this disinvestment in the city: “Boston capital is at work all over the world. We need to create effective ways of putting it to work at home, on a business, not a charity, basis.”16

  The Yankee elite perhaps registered its greatest opposition by shifting its political ambitions from the city to the state, controlling the corruption at the Boston City Hall as much as possible from the Massachusetts State House only blocks away, in alliance with the state’s western and suburban legislators. State aid to Boston was kept at a minimum and essentially the state deprived the city of home rule. It granted it no authority over revenue, other than collecting property taxes, and empowered the governor-appointed Finance Commission to monitor all city finances.17 The controlling hand of the state even extended as far as the governor appointing the Boston police commissioner and overseeing his budget, a response spurred by the strike of the city’s Irish Catholic–dominated police force in 1919.18 Curley and his ilk might rule the Boston roost, but the Yankees were going to make damn sure they had few tools with which to do it.19

  Whatever postwar prosperity Greater Boston enjoyed during the 1940s and 1950s took place outside the city’s limits, particularly along the newly opened Route 128, the first high-speed circumferential highway built around an American city. Here an entrepreneurial electronics boom took off, spawned by experiments at MIT and other university labs—so much so that the roadway was nicknamed “America’s Technology Highway” and then the “Space Highway,” as transistor and semiconductor development gave way to aerospace (and eventually to computers). It was there, in fact, in 1951 that Boston’s old-time Yankee real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes pioneered the industrial-park concept that guided its own local investing and created a national model. A few years later, the company vice president Robert H. Ryan likened Boston to “an apple with a shiny skin, rotten at the core.”20 Into the next decade, the local developer William Poorvu made sure to focus his own real estate investing on Harvard Square and Route 128, “markets [that] were outside the urban center.”21