Route 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike that followed it also opened up vast new suburban tracts for residential development, luring away the younger, more upwardly mobile of the city’s population. Many were ex-GIs well supplied with VA mortgage loans usable only in white, middle-class suburbs, not in the inner-city neighborhoods of their parents and grandparents, which were redlined by banks.22 They were also driven out by the city’s poor services and deteriorating, outdated housing. Collins’s deputy mayor, Henry Scagnoli, was not unusual for his generation in growing up during the 1920s and 1930s in a Jamaica Plain house without heat or hot water and with a toilet only in the cellar. A major goal when he returned from the war was to own a better house than his parents did.23 Soon, department stores and other businesses followed the money out of town. Downtown lost an estimated $500 million in retail trade during the 1950s alone; by 1964, city retail sales would amount to less than half of the metropolitan area’s total.24
The first break in the city’s paralyzing stalemate came with the election in 1949 of John Hynes, an Irish Catholic Democrat like Curley but of a very different breed. Rather than grease the wheels of Curley’s machine, Hynes challenged it—and won. Hynes had been Boston’s city clerk when, in 1947, he suddenly found himself named acting mayor as Curley headed off to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, on a mail fraud conviction. A modest, mild-mannered, hardworking man, Hynes was furious when, on his return, Curley pronounced, “I have accomplished more in one day than has been done in the five months of my absence.”25 At that moment, Hynes decided to challenge Curley in the 1949 election, taking him on with the slogan “Restore Boston’s Good Name” and the promise of honest government. He won by fifteen thousand votes in the highest election turnout ever. Hynes would get reelected handily in 1951 (required by a charter change) and again in 1955.
Hynes was supported by others who shared his deep concern about the city’s future. Some critics of the status quo joined an organization called the New Boston Committee, founded in 1950 by an ambitious young reformer named Jerome Lyle Rappaport, who had come from New York to attend Harvard College and Harvard Law School and decided to stay and clean up his adopted city. He had founded the group Youth for Hynes in the 1949 election and became the mayor’s chief assistant afterward. Others among the discontented responded to a bold move by Boston College to break the political and cultural deadlock by sponsoring the Boston College Citizen Seminars, aimed at bringing together Yankee businessmen, Irish politicians, and civic leaders of all stripes—“the people who owned Boston and those who ran it,” as U.S. News and World Report so bluntly put it.26 After a lively presentation and discussion on an urban problem, the assembled socialized. Logue was convinced that “a wide open bar” followed by dinner was “the key to the whole thing,” given that “the Yankees and the Irish did not speak to and did not even know each other on a personal basis.”27
Hynes’s victory in 1949 was accompanied by a structural change in Boston’s city government that would have a major impact on the urban renewal efforts of Collins and Logue a decade later. In an attempt to break the Curley machine’s iron grip on the city, the New Boston Committee and other reformers proposed changing the city’s charter to take authority away from the mayor and the city council and institute a professional city manager. The Curley machine responded with an alternate referendum, which passed, to strengthen the mayor’s power but shrink the city council from twenty-two district representatives to nine elected at large, ostensibly to encourage more of a citywide consciousness among city councillors. But what the machine imagined would safeguard the autonomy of its mayor in the end strengthened the hand of victorious opponents, Mayors Hynes and Collins. With so much authority given to the mayor, the city council had little independent power to push back against executive ambitions. The council’s input into the budget, for example, consisted only of the ability to delete items, not to add them, which kept the council from initiating programs.28 The city council’s influence on policy would mostly come through its efforts to shape public opinion, which invited obstreperous behavior aimed at attracting media attention. As it turned out, the new at-large city council may have been smaller, but its ethnic complexion and loyalties barely changed. It remained the mouthpiece of the neighborhoods, dominated by the Irish from South Boston and Charlestown and the Italians from the North End and East Boston.
Hynes recognized when he beat Curley that he had won a rather empty prize unless he solved the city’s fiscal crisis. He cautiously reached out to the estranged business community and began strategizing how he might tap the new pots of federal funding becoming available through urban renewal. These funds promised to inject capital investment into his struggling city and to generate higher tax valuations on repurposed land, while also improving Boston’s deteriorating physical face. Hynes took the initial step of creating a modest BRA operation, first as a division of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) and then in 1957 as an independent agency. He named as its head Kane Simonian, a reliable supporter and a typical Boston civil servant from West Roxbury, who had worked up the ladder from a low-level post in the BHA to executive director of the BRA. Simonian was unusual only for being a Harvard graduate and Armenian rather than Irish. He was still heading the BRA when the newly elected Collins undertook his national search for a new chief.29
Hynes tried hard to make a success of urban renewal, but a combination of the city’s limited resources; the top-down, clearance-oriented federal approach to urban renewal prevailing during the 1950s; and the long legacy of neighborhood suspicion of downtown conspired to make his record a mixed one that would haunt renewal initiatives far into the future. Hynes’s efforts focused on both downtown and the neighborhoods. Downtown redevelopment moved two transportation projects forward. The first was the construction of what proved to be the disastrous John F. Fitzgerald Expressway, known as the “Central Artery,” which sliced through downtown to whisk suburbanites in and out of the city. The other was a massive garage under the Boston Common where commuters could park upon arrival.30
Beyond that, Hynes’s downtown strategy revolved around two projects that never came to fruition during his mayoralty: convincing the Prudential Insurance Company to build its New England regional headquarters on the site of the abandoned Boston & Maine railroad yards in the Back Bay and corralling the city, state, and federal governments to join forces to build Government Center on the location of Scollay Square, Boston’s honky-tonk red-light district. When Hynes left office in 1960, having declined to run for another term, the Prudential Center was already designed—albeit in a corporate architectural style that was sized too large for its site and that garnered little praise—but the project was at an impasse because the city could not give Prudential sufficient assurances about its future tax liability.31 And despite Hynes’s shuttling between his own city hall, the Massachusetts State House, and the nation’s capital, Government Center remained more of a hope than a reality, with the federal government preferring a less risky Back Bay site near Copley Square.32
Most problematic, however, was how these two simmering projects fell two miles apart, thereby diluting any effort to revitalize Boston’s downtown economy with new offices, retail, and, in the case of Prudential, residences. The Washington Post architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt, who dismissed “the Pru” as “so big and so bad,” despaired at the “sad mistake of the Prudential [Center] and the Government Center going up at the same time and sort of tugging the city back and forth,” both vying to be central. Von Eckardt’s prediction would prove disturbingly true. Over time many fashionable stores would come to prefer the upscale Back Bay shopping area in and around Prudential to downtown locations, thereby contributing to the latter’s decline.33
Whereas Hynes’s legacy in downtown renewal held some promise on his departure from office, his neighborhood initiatives in the New York Streets area of the South End and in the West End were horrendous examples of 1950s-era demolition-style urban renewal. The Ne
w York Streets project bulldozed thirteen acres of run-down but still viable residences in the South End, home to a mixed ethnic and racial community of 850 families. They were replaced with light industry, such as a new headquarters and printing plant for the Boston Herald Traveler newspaper, intended to yield higher land values and tax revenues along with jobs. Melvin King, who would go on to become an important South End organizer and citywide activist, grew up happily as an African American in this diverse neighborhood and recalled his shock at hearing, while he was away at college, that the home territory he cherished was now branded a “skid row” and destined for replacement.34
A larger project to raze and rebuild the predominantly Italian and Jewish forty-eight-acre West End would reverberate locally and nationally as a symbol of urban renewal’s destructive and hubristic approach in the fifties.35 Hynes and Simonian’s scheme involved condemning what they labeled a blighted slum, close enough to downtown to attract more lucrative uses, and replacing it with luxury apartment buildings designed to entice middle-class residents back to the city. It may have been ruthless but, unfortunately, it was not so out of sync with what other cities were doing at the time, including New Haven. But three factors distinguished Hynes’s efforts. First, with a suspicious lack of transparency, the mayor gave the project to his former assistant Jerome Lyle Rappaport, who had spearheaded the New Boston Committee and was now a partner in a real estate development firm that also won the auction to develop the University Towers in New Haven.
Second, the atmosphere of distrust that had long divided neighborhoods and downtown in Boston was reinforced by the BRA’s lack of responsiveness to residents’ initial inquiries and growing protests. The project eventually became a cause célèbre for dislocating several thousand residents and dozens of small businesses. The BRA’s anemic relocation operation, partly due to the minimal federal funding available for it, and the Rappaport group’s reneging on its promise to include some low- and middle-income housing for former neighborhood residents in the new project, only made matters worse.36
Third, the West End became a textbook case, quite literally, of the toll urban renewal took on city residents, as social scientists such as the sociologist Herbert Gans, the psychologist Marc Fried, and the planner Chester Hartman launched important studies of the impact of West End redevelopment. They argued that where outsiders saw aging, substandard tenements on blighted blocks, those who called the West End home, even if poor, considered it a familiar and affordable neighborhood, interlaced with extensive familial, ethnic, and religious bonds whose destruction left them bereft. Gans’s The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans of 1962 would remain a touchstone for urban renewal opponents long thereafter, so much so that throughout his life, Logue went out of his way to deny involvement in the BRA’s West End urban renewal.37 The fact that the clearance was done by the time he arrived in Boston in 1960, however, did not spare Logue from the taint of this misconceived project. Its long shadow would color everything he tried to do in Boston’s neighborhoods. And Rappaport, who had already frustrated Logue in New Haven by cleverly beating out Yale, would continue to exasperate him over the many years it took to complete the Charles River Park project.38
For all the hope that Hynes’s election in 1949 had signaled for turning around Boston, he stepped down a decade later with only limited achievements, leaving it to his successor to run the next lap in revitalizing the city. The selection of Hynes’s replacement would prove a surprising chapter in the annals of Boston elections, as John Francis Collins won a legendary upset against the powerful, well-connected Massachusetts state senate president John Powers of South Boston. Powers had lost against Hynes in 1955, but he seemed such a sure bet in 1959 that everyone, including the Kennedys and the cardinal, lined up behind him.
The forty-year-old Collins was an even more independent candidate than Hynes had been in 1949. A blue-collar kid who had grown up in Irish Catholic Roxbury, he had odd-jobbed his way through the working man’s Suffolk Law School without pausing for a college degree he couldn’t afford, fought in the wartime army, and served in both houses of the state legislature and the Boston City Council. Now he was occupying the sinecure of register of probate for Suffolk County, a well-paying position that he could have relaxed in for the rest of his career.39 But that was not Collins’s idea of a life worth living, particularly since surviving a devastating, near-death case of polio in 1955 while nursing his infected children back to health. They recovered fully. Collins spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair or occasionally using crutches or a cane.
The determination it took Collins to resume a public career—he ran for city council from his hospital bed—gave him political grit.40 By making creative use of television—including plotting how best to present his disability—and by condemning Powers as a corrupt Curley rerun with the campaign slogan “Stop Power Politics,” underdog Collins shocked the Boston bookies by winning nearly 56 percent of the vote. All but four of the city’s twenty-two wards became his. Having made it to city hall with only the voters’ mandate, Collins was a dark horse who owed no one for the ride—which gave him a rare independence as mayor to do things such as recruit an outsider like Ed Logue and give him enormous power.41
Urban renewal had not been a major issue in the campaign. After the West End debacle, no one in his right mind would want to raise it publicly. But candidates Powers and Collins were both being tutored on urban renewal, and in fact, they had the same teacher in Joseph Slavet, executive secretary of the clean-government, business-leaning Boston Municipal Research Bureau (MRB). Slavet was officially supporting Powers along with the rest of the establishment, but at the behest of his mentor, the MRB board chair Henry Lee Shattuck—a rare Brahmin lawyer who backed Collins—he started meeting with Collins to explain how other cities were coping with crises similar to Boston’s.42 By the time Collins took office in early January 1960, he had decided to make urban renewal the major priority of his administration. He began by extending a hand to the Yankee business and professional elite, who remained angry that tax assessments were unfair and the city was sinking deeper into deficit and decrepitude. Collins recognized that despite some early success, “Hynes spent the last few years of his term on a very defensive basis with the business community … They felt much more comfortable with Hynes than with Curley, but it was not a partnership by any means.”43
The city’s leaders had recently, in fact, formed the sixteen-member Coordinating Committee with representatives from the major business and civic organizations—soon to be popularly known as the “Vault” for their regular meetings in a conference room adjacent to the basement vault of the Brahmin banker Ralph Lowell’s Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company.44 Soon after he was elected, Collins went to meet them, confident that they had no claims on him, and when they offered one—to pick up the tab on his $62,000 campaign debt—he unhesitatingly declined: “That’s my debt; I’ll take care of it.”45 But he also knew that he couldn’t turn the city around without their assistance. Holding the line on property taxes and cutting municipal expenses and the public payroll would help, but it wouldn’t be enough. Lobbying at the state house for other revenue-producing powers beyond the property tax, such as a long-sought sales tax, and other ways of loosening the noose that the state had tightened around Curley’s Boston would require bigger guns than Collins carried on his own.46
The situation Collins faced was dire. As a case in point, the State of Massachusetts covered only 8 percent of city school costs, when the national average was 40 percent, making Massachusetts forty-sixth in state contributions to education.47 It remained to be seen how generous Boston’s Yankees would be with their influence and their wallets, but the idea of recruiting a pro like Logue with urban renewal expertise and experience attracting federal dollars appealed to them. Collins’s inaugural address announcing Operation Revival to “restore, rebuild, and redevelop” generated much enthusiasm in downtown boardrooms, captured in a banner
headline in The Boston Globe as “Business Leaders Hail Collins’ Program for Hub.”48
Such was the stage Logue entered when he began his work in Boston in March 1960, only a couple of months after Collins had gone public with Operation Revival. As Logue delved deeper that spring into Boston, he became more and more excited about the city’s potential, particularly what he would dramatically call the “walk to the sea” from the Charles River through the Common to Boston Harbor. But he also became less and less sanguine about how to make it happen: “I scoured just about every inch of the city—and came to love it. But it was also easy to see that the problems were tremendous.” Most disturbing, he felt, Boston was “a city without confidence in itself,” despite its potential to seed a new economy built around technology and ideas. Logue decided that he could do the job only under the right conditions: “If this was going to be my show, it had to be pretty much my way.”49 But as he wrote to a professional colleague, housing reformer Catherine Bauer Wurster, in mid-June, “At this point I am not the slightest bit optimistic that the right set of conditions can be created.”50 His most important demand was to replicate the authority over planning and redevelopment that Mayor Dick Lee had given to him in New Haven. Integration, he was convinced, kept planning practical and redevelopment robust.
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