Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Given the short leash on which the state held the city, such a fundamental change in BRA structure required an amendment to Chapter 121A, the legislation by which the state had designated the BRA as the city’s administrator of federal urban renewal funds. Logue made the passage of this amendment a nonnegotiable condition of accepting Collins’s offer, and while he waited for the slow wheels of the state legislature to turn, he worked from October to December 1960 under a ninety-day contract. “I made it clear to the mayor and everyone else that I would not renew that arrangement. Either I got to run the show or not. No more extensions.”51

  GETTING APPROVED

  When the amendment finally passed, Logue had orchestrated what Architectural Forum described as “the most massively centralized planning and renewal powers that any large city has ever voted to one man (other than New York’s Robert Moses).” Or as Fortune magazine more succinctly phrased it, Logue “cooks and serves.”52 As part of this same amendment that empowered him, Logue wanted a legislative change that would allow the abandoned railroad yards to be ruled blighted and thereby eligible for special tax treatment, moving the Prudential project forward.53 Logue also insisted on sufficient independence from the appointed BRA board, such as allowing them only up-or-down votes on projects, not the right to tinker with the details, “putting them in a straitjacket,” as he described it. He likewise sought a free hand to recruit nationally and hire outside of civil service.54 Logue wanted no part of what he jokingly called the “Irish social security system” for himself either. So he requested that the city pay $5,000 of his salary, instead of charging it all to federal urban renewal grants, to ensure that the mayor could fire him at will.55 Ever since civil service workers in Connecticut had obstructed Governor Chester Bowles’s reforms back in the late 1940s, Logue had taken a principled stand against tenure for high-level employees. He also hoped that a less protected status would “take care of any concern about a ‘czar,’” so “completely different was it from the arrangements Bob Moses had made for himself in New York.”56 With all his demands now met, Logue’s candidacy as development administrator was finally ready for approval by the BRA board, made up of five individuals charged with overseeing the city’s redevelopment activities and affiliated with different powerful local interests—the Catholic Church, the local press, real estate, and labor.

  Like everything in Boston, Logue’s approval by this BRA board would surely be politically charged, no slam dunk. Rather, Logue predicted, “A Boston political battle royal loomed.”57 Collins had inherited the board from Hynes, who by law had appointed four members, with the governor naming the fifth. Collins’s contribution—and it was a constructive one—was to move BRA member Monsignor Francis “Frank” Lally, the liberal editor of the Catholic Church’s Pilot newspaper and a close confidant of Cardinal Richard Cushing’s, into the chairmanship. Lally would prove a loyal supporter and helpful partner to Logue throughout his Boston career.58 But there was only one other assured vote for Logue beyond Lally’s—the real estate executive’s—until some members of the Vault got wind of the board’s resistance. Worried about a loss of momentum for change and the new Kennedy administration scooping up Logue, they pressured the editor of the Record American newspaper to force his photo editor, who was a BRA board member, to vote for Logue.59

  In contrast to the board, a wide cross-section of Bostonians expressed enthusiasm for Logue. The Cambridge architect Carl Koch conveyed a common sentiment when he sent Logue a telegram the day before the vote: “For Boston’s sake you must win.”60 The same day, Melnea Cass, the president of the NAACP’s Boston Branch, mailed a letter to each member of the BRA board endorsing Logue’s appointment “because of our basic interest in the improvement of our city, and because of the large number of Negroes living in deprived areas due to the discriminatory factors that tend to keep them there.” As it had in New Haven, the local NAACP was hopeful that urban renewal would bring Boston’s blacks long-awaited attention and was confident of Logue’s “ability to implement this program in the best interest of Boston and all the people therein.”61 In expressing the NAACP’s position so forthrightly and linking the fate of the black community to the larger city, Cass was claiming the NAACP’s rightful place in Boston’s pluralist democratic coalition, which Robert Dahl was describing for New Haven in his Who Governs? the very same year. On the morning of the vote, January 25, 1961, hundreds of people rallied outside the BRA offices to promote Logue’s candidacy as the rescuer of “our distressed and sick city,” as one advocate bluntly put it.62 The Christian Science Monitor, which watched the showdown closely, concluded that “the real persuader, the real push, came with the outpouring of demands—in letters and phone calls—from virtually every section of the city … The extraordinary community support became articulate almost overnight.”63

  After meeting for nearly five hours, the BRA board begrudgingly voted 3 to 2 for Logue. It was hardly a mandate, but it was good enough for Logue, who by personality was more energized than undermined by a fight. One battle that would rage on was the Kane Simonian problem. With the encouragement of the BRA board member James Colbert, an influential newsman, the civil servant Simonian refused to accept Logue’s hiring. In fact, as soon as Logue’s appointment became official, Simonian brought suit, charging that he had been illegally demoted even though he retained the title of executive director. Although the case would be thrown out by the state’s highest court in May, a compromise was reached whereby Simonian remained secretary of the BRA board and was responsible for the BRA’s operations division—overseeing appraisals, land acquisition, site preparation, property maintenance, and the like. Simonian would also complete the already launched New York Streets and West End projects, from which Logue was more than happy to keep his distance.64

  So began an unusual governance arrangement, where Simonian’s division and Logue’s much larger organization operated out of different offices a block apart and every BRA board meeting had two agendas, with the secretary and the development administrator taking turns presenting their business. John Ryan, a real estate man who joined the BRA board in 1961, recalled with amusement that Logue’s shrewd strategy for coping with his less-than-supportive board members was “to deluge everyone with paperwork,” giving them both everything and nothing.65 There was never any doubt, however, who was really in charge. When queried about why he hadn’t contented himself with the status of coordinator of redevelopment programs, Logue retorted, “That’s what you do when you don’t have authority. I don’t go into a job without power. Can you imagine [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara as coordinator of defense?”66 After the vote on January 25, Logue headed back to his office, but, he said, “I stopped briefly, I confess, at the traffic island at Scollay Square,” a spot that would soon become the centerpiece of the new Government Center. “I said to myself, ‘The program, the money, the power, it is all there. And thanks to the mayor, I have it all.’” Later he reflected, with his characteristic confidence, “I don’t remember any basic doubts on my part. I had been blessed with the opportunity to remake a rundown, somewhat dispirited city [and] had been given the resources to do the job.”67

  Logue made one more request in his negotiations with the Collins administration that, although relatively minor, provides some insight into his mind-set as he settled into Boston. He asked that it arrange for his admission to the Tavern Club, a fairly prestigious, invitation-only men’s club that attracted the literary, artistic, and intellectual set among the city’s elite but was not the ultra-exclusive Brahmin Somerset or Algonquin Clubs.68 Here Logue got to know prominent local figures like the historian and Boston Athenaeum director Walter Muir Whitehill, a relationship that would prove useful to his work. When Collins heard this last demand of Logue’s, he reputedly told him, “Are you crazy? I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never even been invited to those places.”69

  Logue had been staying at the Tavern Club while doing his consulting work and wanted to join. As in Ne
w Haven, he valued male sociability. Undoubtedly, he thought membership would help him integrate into insular and standoffish Boston, giving him a place in the inner circles to which he’d had easy access in New Haven, having lived there most of his adult life since arriving as a Yale freshman and having benefited from connections through his wife’s well-established family. An astute Logue had surely figured out that Boston was a clubby town. According to Cleveland Amory, a son of privileged Boston and the author of the satirical The Proper Bostonians in 1947, “The core of the Bostonian social system is clubdom; and here the status quo remains awe-inspiring.”70 Logue went on to join other clubs in Boston—the Thursday Evening Club, the Examiner Club, the Saturday Club, and the Union Boat Club. All expanded his networks. “That’s where he met the power players,” explained Robert Campbell, The Boston Globe’s architecture critic (and a fellow Tavern Club member).

  It is possible, too, that these clubs helped Logue navigate the tricky terrain of being an Irishman in the upper echelons of Boston society. Wife Margaret recalled his discomfort early on in Boston when “Ed encountered slurs from Yankees who didn’t identify the name as Irish. He would let one remark go by but thereafter declare himself as Irish.” She joked at the time that Logue should write a book called “Passing in Boston.” Herbert Gleason, a mover and shaker in the city who befriended Logue early on, agreed that his Irishness mattered. “Tavern Club was status. Big status. I think he had … some Irish underdog element in his personality.”71 Perhaps, too, these clubs offered Logue new opportunities to perpetuate his old pattern of being a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast. It didn’t escape him that the 1962 edition of the Directory of Directors in the City of Boston and Vicinity—of banks, insurance companies, law firms, and the like—documented “the monolithic Yankee character of the Boston business establishment.” Not only were there no Irish, but “they didn’t know anything about women. Italians didn’t exist.”72 It had been a bruising battle to get named development administrator of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and Logue was determined to make a success of it—without compromising who he was and what he set out to do.

  SETTING UP SHOP IN BOSTON

  When Logue’s appointment finally became official in January 1961, he had seven years under his belt doing a similar job in New Haven. He was not quite forty years old, a young man to have just been given so much power. And it thrilled him to have this opportunity to move the practice of urban renewal to the next stage. Everyone in the business understood that cities like Boston were in desperate shape—and that the demolition-style urban renewal of the 1950s was not the answer. “The Cinderella dream of cities—to turn the old and shabby into the new and beautiful with the magic wand of Federal funds to live happily, urbanistically speaking, ever after,” lamented the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, had proved instead “a discouraging record of cross-country failures.” What could be more exciting, Logue thought, than figuring out how to do the job right in the backyard of one of the worst abuses of urban renewal, the infamous West End project, described by Huxtable as “a definitive demonstration of how to destroy a community with a bulldozer.”73

  Logue’s allies in Washington—including Robert Weaver, incoming administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, and William Slayton, commissioner of the Urban Renewal Administration—were keeping a close eye on Logue’s progress and stood ready to grant his requests for funds and special privileges, such as permitting early land acquisitions and relocations before the full approval processes were complete. (It didn’t hurt that native son John F. Kennedy became president at the same time and that Boston’s John McCormack was the number-two Democrat in the House.)74 Long before Logue’s plan was publicly announced in late September 1960 and his position made official the following January, a personal visit by Logue and Collins to the regional Housing and Home Finance Agency office in New York City had clinched an advance of $28 million on the first federal grant of $60 million, pending the plan’s approval by local authorities.

  Getting the required approval from the Boston City Council was not without its challenges. Weak in formal power, its members seized every opportunity to assert themselves, and they were no friend of urban renewal. City Councillors William F. “Bill” Foley, Jr., from South Boston, and Katherine “Kitty” Craven, from Hyde Park and a native of Charlestown, most visibly built their reputations during the 1960s around publicly drubbing Logue and Collins (who had given their man John Powers a thrashing in the 1959 mayoral race), but plenty of others joined in.75 Logue bore the abuse stoically, buoyed by the support he received from professional colleagues, his large staff, and even ordinary citizens who wrote to him frequently to apologize for “the insults you are forced to take in the line of duty,” as one city resident put it.76 Given this treatment, Logue and the mayor delighted in having this early money securely in hand in time for the city council’s hearing on the $90 Million Development Program. When Councilman Foley proclaimed dismissively, “John, the Feds will never approve it,” Collins took pleasure in retorting, “Bill, they already have.”77 That sealed the deal, as the city council was in no position to give back federal dollars.

  Logue brought experience building a redevelopment agency from New Haven to Boston—recruiting professional talent nationally, developing an organizational structure, and creating a dynamic esprit de corps, even as some staff protested, as they had in New Haven, that he could at times be too arbitrary and hard-driving as a boss. The BRA staffer John Stainton recalled that “he had a lot of charm” but he could “also be very abrasive and aggressive. ‘Cruel’ is a little strong, maybe, but he could really put people down.” Logue was not oblivious to the charge. He claimed to have learned a lesson when his assistant, Janet Bowler, reported that Peter Riemer, whom he considered a “genius” as the Government Center project director, complained, “You know, I don’t mind if he chews me out but he shouldn’t chew me out in front of other people”—a reaction not unlike what Logue had expressed years earlier to Dick Lee.78

  In time, Logue’s redevelopment agency became much larger than New Haven’s. When Logue arrived in 1960, Kane Simonian’s office had sixteen staff members. By the time Logue stepped down in 1967, his BRA employed somewhere between five hundred and six hundred. (Totals varied, probably given the different ways of counting part-timers and Simonian’s separate operations division. In any case, the payroll was huge, “probably the largest planning-renewal team in the nation,” according to Architectural Forum.)79 Many were young, idealistic, and well-educated at the nation’s best planning, architecture, and law schools. Students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) and MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning eagerly pursued the BRA’s plum jobs upon graduation.

  In 1967, the average staff age was a young thirty-seven. The BRA was also known by African American professionals as a welcoming place to work. Black employment grew from 2 percent in 1961 to 13 percent by 1967 as a result of Logue’s explicit commitment to recruiting minority staff, which took substantial effort given the small number of nonwhite professionals living in Boston in the 1960s. “He looked very hard to find black people with credentials who could run programs,” recalled the BRA project director Robert Litke.80 Few women served in the higher ranks of the BRA, however, with most female staff working as assistants and secretaries, typical of offices in the era. Esther Maletz, the only woman at a high managerial level—first as a lawyer experienced in housing and urban development and then as Government Center project director—felt that she “was not treated differently in any meaningful way [from] my male colleagues” while working closely with Logue for five years.81 But Maletz’s having few female peers suggests not only the paucity of candidates but also the fact that Logue’s progressive hiring agenda during the 1960s put more emphasis on breaking down barriers of race than of gender. This was particularly striking because Logue’s wife, Margaret, held jobs outside the home throughout their marriage, albeit in the female-d
ominated field of education. Upon moving to Boston with young children—eight-year-old Kathy and four-year-old Billy—Margaret secured employment, first as acting director of the Beacon Hill Nursery School and then as a teacher at the Winsor School, an independent school for girls.82

  Logue sought ways to distinguish the BRA from the sluggish business as usual practiced in most Boston city departments. To bring good modern design to the office, Logue got help from the firm of the dean of Harvard’s GSD, Josep Lluís Sert. When the elevator opened on the tenth and eleventh floors of City Hall Annex, observed a Fortune magazine writer, “suddenly the wall colors change” from the institutional green paint and bare bulbs below “to such vivid tones as mustard. Office doors are painted in bright primaries; lowered ceilings accommodate new lighting fixtures and acoustical surfaces,” though he failed to mention that Logue playfully flaunted Corbusier’s primary-colors palette with his Yale-blue door.

  This journalist also admired the “zealous young multitude” that “walk[ed] swiftly in the halls.” An MIT graduate student who was a participant-observer at the BRA for five months confirmed that in contrast to the first nine floors “staffed by elderly paper shufflers,… the immediate impression one gets of the BRA staff is of youth and vitality.”83 They may not have had the job security of Boston civil servants, but they were paid much better.84 Not only were salaries higher, thanks to Uncle Sam picking up 90 percent of the payroll, but Christmas brought annual bonuses, creating, according to Fortune, “an envious shudder … through the other nine floors of City Hall Annex,” as regular city employees asked, “Was Santa trapped on the top floors?” Arthur Reilly, who landed a job at the BRA through his family’s political connections to Hynes and Collins, feared the consequences. Not only were other city employees resentful—“they’ve been working for the city for thirty years and were making $6,000 a year, and here’s … some kid from New York, who’s in upstairs, and he’s making $16,000”—but also, as he predicted (rightly), the affront would come back to haunt the BRA’s urban renewal efforts in a neighborhood like Charlestown, where many city workers lived.85