Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Apart from his frustrations making human renewal and metropolitan governance work as he hoped, the move to Boston offered Logue exhilarating opportunities to innovate beyond what he and Mayor Lee had been able to do in New Haven. He now had the chance to pioneer a new model for the nation of how to revitalize a major city. In Boston, Ed Logue was determined to show Jane Jacobs that urban renewal could be done right.

  5.   Battling for a New Boston

  One of Logue’s greatest challenges when he arrived in Boston was figuring out new strategies for building strong citywide support for urban renewal. The West End’s demolition had created a searing memory among Bostonians, and his own recent battle to get approved as development administrator of the Boston Redevelopment Authority only confirmed the importance of cultivating a diverse spectrum of allies. With memories still fresh of New Haven’s reluctant corporate leaders and of suits brought by both jeweler Robert Savitt and the Central Civic Association’s small retailers downtown, Logue was determined to avoid the delays that had slowed New Haven’s urban renewal. This was time he felt he did not have in Boston.

  Logue had seen enough of Boston to know that a pluralist democratic structure like New Haven’s Citizens Action Commission—uniting a wide range of New Haven’s constituencies in a singular, official mouthpiece of community support for urban renewal—would be impossible. Boston was too polarized and fragmented from years of bruising ethnic, racial, class, neighborhood, and political battles to speak in one voice. So Logue tried a different approach to building broad backing for the BRA that would engage representatives of key constituencies in the city—and in turn, he hoped, win their support. He would reach out to these parties separately to become his partners, appealing to how urban renewal might serve their particular interests. Aware that the redevelopers “were not going to accomplish anything” without far-reaching local backing, Logue admitted to seeking “a partner everywhere we went.”1 That was also the best insurance that the BRA would not be accused of favoring any one interest group. So it was that Logue’s major allies in building the New Boston became the business leaders, the Catholic Church, the media—in particular The Boston Globe—and the architectural community. If flanked by leaders of these influential groups, bringing along their own rank and filers, Logue felt, then the BRA would be in a strong position to succeed with its two-prong attack to revive downtown economically and rejuvenate Boston’s neighborhoods, there updating deteriorating infrastructure and improving residences that the U.S. Census of Housing in 1960 had found seriously wanting. One in four dwellings was judged substandard, more than in most large American cities.2

  ALLIES IN BUSINESS

  When Mayor John Collins first called on the Vault following his election, he simply opened a dialogue. Now the bigger challenge was to enlist the Yankee business elite’s substantive support for urban renewal. Collins and Logue continued to meet with the Vault every two weeks, and in between, Logue spent time courting key business leaders, hoping to hook them.3 At first, Logue recalled, “They were skeptical. They didn’t think anything was going to happen. Why should they? Government Center had stalled for ten years. [So] I gave them a present … I told them that I wouldn’t do anything downtown without a business partner.”4 He also calculated that if local leaders became committed to the plan, then they—and not the BRA—would have to cope with more reticent peers fearing eminent domain takings and pressure for significant financial investment. Reserving the linchpin of downtown renewal—the Government Center project—for the BRA, Logue officially turned over two adjacent projects to business leaders for detailed planning: the waterfront and the retail core of the central business district (CBD). A key player in both endeavors was Charles Coolidge—Boston Brahmin, senior partner in the prestigious law firm Ropes & Gray, member of the Harvard Corporation, and president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce—who agreed to lend his substantial credibility to promoting both initiatives.

  Boston’s waterfront, once a bustling center of fishing and shipping, had become virtually abandoned by the early 1960s, filled with rotting wharves and low-life dives made even more derelict by the unfortunate fate of being cut off from the rest of the city by the six-lane, elevated Central Artery, which opened in 1959—an inheritance from Mayor John Hynes that Collins called “that miserable expressway.”5 Given the waterfront’s proximity to downtown and the absence of any controversial residential relocation problems, Logue gave the project, labeled the “Downtown Waterfront–Faneuil Hall Urban Renewal Plan,” to the Chamber of Commerce to shepherd: “We’ll set up a joint plan, it’s your responsibility to make the plan, but you have to make it with me and together we’ll carry it out.”6

  The Chamber created a Waterfront Redevelopment Division and raised $150,000 to fund two full-time professional staff members, assisted by part-time and student workers and many consultants, including two well-known planners: Kevin Lynch of MIT and Charles Abrams, then of City College of New York, soon to move to Columbia. State and federal agencies were also enlisted to study relocating the food markets and designating the Faneuil Hall area a historic district. Ideas for revitalization included relocating Atlantic Avenue to create more usable space alongside the harbor, constructing new recreational facilities on the waterfront, rehabilitating abandoned wharves as apartments for a diversity of income levels, renovating Faneuil Hall and adjacent Quincy Market for new uses, and attracting tourists to a world-class aquarium, hotel, and restaurants. Once the plan was approved by the BRA and the city council, it would become part of the BRA’s overall program and subject to public hearings.7

  The waterfront project would take many years to complete, and not all the grand schemes of broad access to housing and recreation would come to fruition. The Central Artery would remain a hated obstacle for many decades, until the roadway was finally moved underground with the Big Dig, completed in 2007. But the planners from the BRA and the Chamber nonetheless proposed imaginative reuses of the waterfront’s once-impressive granite wharves and historic Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market to create “a range of residential and recreational opportunities for persons of all income levels” and to maximize “visual access” (“Boston’s window to the sea”) and “public access … to much of the water’s edge.”8 Although the next mayor, Kevin White, would receive the credit for the adaptive reuse of Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market as the festival marketplace that opened under his watch, the origins of the project date back to the Collins and Logue era.9

  Turning away from the water and toward the city’s “very rundown shopping district,” Logue sought another partner in the newly constituted Committee for the Central Business District (CCBD). The CCBD tackled rethinking the city’s retail core with an executive board headed by Coolidge that included the heads of Boston’s three major department stores: Jordan Marsh, Filene’s, and Gilchrist’s. Logue told them, “It will not work if you will not do it with us.” Fortune noted the rarity of this collaboration between Jordan Marsh and Filene’s: “These mighty two merchants put their renowned rivalry aside temporarily and together made the rounds of the stores, the banks, the newspapers, and other businesses in the area ‘hat in hand’ … and came back with a good hatful of funds—$250,000—for replanning the whole district.”10 Fortune may not have realized how alarming downtown retailers had found the closing in 1961 of four large stores doing $50 million annually, which motivated them to dig uncharacteristically deep into their pockets.11

  Having learned a lesson from the resistance of many local New Haven merchants to redevelopment, Logue let Boston’s retailers recommend to the BRA the extent of change in the retail district, the most desirable mix of large and small stores, and solutions to the always-sticky problem of temporary relocations. The CCBD used its quarter million dollars to hire a commercial architect and urban planner, Victor Gruen, and a Washington economist, Robert Gladstone, whom it charged with analyzing potential growth in the downtown Boston market.12 Gruen was surprised at what he called the “pa
ttern of cooperation” between the CCBD and the BRA. No stranger to the kind of conflicts that had wracked New Haven and his own Fort Worth, Texas, where he had struggled—unsuccessfully—to implement a futuristic downtown plan, Gruen appreciated the Boston agreement “that whatever is planned must be acceptable to both parties.”13 The Boston Herald likewise remarked on Logue’s unusual restraint in approaching the planning of the retail core, with “a caution untypical of his usual drive to get things done, now if not sooner, as if there was a ‘proceed cautiously’ sign on the central business district so as to disrupt operations as little as possible.”14 Logue acknowledged to Monsignor Lally shortly before the public unveiling of the CCBD’s proposal in May 1967 that while planning for the CBD had taken longer than he would have liked, he thought that “the result has been to get support and depth from the retailers.”

  Boston’s business class clearly enjoyed more visibility in planning Boston’s downtown urban renewal than New Haven’s ever had, lending credence to the Left critics’ claim that private capital used the New Boston to pursue its own interests.15 Collins was in fact so sensitive to this charge that he went out of his way to insist that he alone set the agenda for his meetings with the Vault, not the other way around. And on Logue’s instructions, BRA staffers kept a close eye on renewal projects delegated to business. Bob Hazen, Logue’s assistant who had moved from New Haven to Boston with him, recalled how, as BRA liaison to the CCBD, he would sit in the offices of Jordan’s Edward Mitton and Filene’s Harold Hodgkinson at the end of many days and chat with them about how the planning effort was coming along. “The intent was to get an aggressive, comprehensive plan that you could execute, and Ed [Logue] guided that … As the planning staff, we worked very closely with it.” According to a knowledgeable observer, BRA staff members had to “exercise the utmost tact in attempting to curb the enthusiasm of the CCBD for the most grandiose schemes.”

  The BRA’s Robert Litke likewise oversaw the waterfront project from an office in Quincy Market. He orchestrated moving the produce market to Chelsea and the meat wholesalers to South Boston. When “Ed was not happy with the progress” being made by the chamber’s operation—“it was taking forever, they were planning the hell out of it”—Litke said, “He sent me over there to make things happen. So I made things happen.” Logue’s staff consequently became deeply involved in planning the new waterfront.16

  Despite the BRA’s collaboration with the Vault, the Chamber of Commerce, and the CCBD, any assumptions about corporate capital’s calculus must take into consideration how cautious, even unwilling, many local business leaders remained to invest in the New Boston. This proved true even after Collins delivered on his promise of decreases—albeit small ones—in real estate taxes. In a candid speech to his colleagues at the National League of Cities in August 1967, on the eve of stepping down as mayor and still smarting from the summer’s racial tensions, Collins bitterly slammed “elements of our society that are not doing enough … to help cities and respond to mounting civic unrest,” including “the private sector [that] has, by and large, stood by,… taking remarkably little initiative other than token [minority] hiring.”17 It was in fact a foreign firm, British Investors Ltd., that broke the investment boycott of downtown Boston and put up the first office skyscraper, the thirty-story State Street Bank Building, in 1966. This outsider appreciated more than locals that “Boston has some of the best bargains in real estate of any city in the U.S.”18 Casting forward to 1974, no local bank still would provide the financing to the Rouse Company to renovate historic Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market as a pioneering festival marketplace. Only enormous pressure from Mayor White’s administration led a risk-averse consortium of ten Boston banks to agree to collectively match the New York–based Chase Manhattan Bank’s $3.75 million investment. They were shocked when the project proved an enormous success almost immediately upon its opening during Boston’s bicentennial in 1976.19

  CRUSADING WITH THE CHURCH

  If Boston’s business community was an obvious, if reluctant, partner for Logue’s urban renewal efforts, then a more surprising but enormously influential one was Boston’s powerful Catholic Church. Boston was the most Catholic of major American cities—80 percent of the population throughout most of the twentieth century—and Boston’s church was a very Irish one, with strong ties to James Michael Curley’s neighborhood base. It had even managed to keep Italian Catholics marginalized. Cardinal Richard Cushing had made his support for Collins’s opponent John Powers quite evident in the 1959 mayoral race. But for many reasons, the Church became one of Logue and Collins’s staunchest allies in building the New Boston. To begin with, the archdiocese had a huge financial investment in Boston, with its many parish churches, parochial schools, hospitals, colleges, social service agencies, seminaries, and convents. So a decline in the city’s population and attractiveness, particularly among the more affluent, suburban-bound middle class, translated quickly into empty pews, vacant school desks, and meager takes in Sunday collection baskets. In that way, the archdiocese, already coping with debt, differed little from any other Boston business, whether bank, manufacturer, or department store. Moreover, because church parishes were defined geographically, they were tied more tightly to their original locations than businesses or other religious institutions like Jewish synagogues, whose congregations could easily transplant when they moved to new neighborhoods or suburbs. For Catholic churches, survival meant making the most of where you were rooted.20

  But beyond these considerations, the Boston Catholic Archdiocese—and in time the full American and indeed global Roman Catholic Church as well—was undergoing significant changes in its relationship to broader civil society that played to Logue’s advantage. Cardinal Cushing had taken over at the death of his predecessor, Cardinal William O’Connell, in 1944.21 Whereas Cardinal O’Connell had subscribed to the sectarian impulses of Curley and his Democratic machine, Cushing sympathized with the greater open-mindedness of the Irish Catholic reform mayor John Hynes and, once elected, John Collins as well. It was under Cushing that the Boston-born Jesuit priest W. Seavey Joyce, upon his assumption of the deanship of the Boston College School of Business Administration, created the Boston College Citizen Seminars, which opened a dialogue between the Yankee business elite and broader political, religious, and civic leaders.

  The Church’s fingerprints were all over Boston’s urban renewal, back to the early Prudential project.22 Cushing assigned his trusted adviser Monsignor Lally to serve as one of the original BRA board members in 1957 and then, in 1960, encouraged him to accept becoming chair. Lally was Cushing’s right-hand man in matters of civil rights and interfaith relations, so it had been a progressive act to name him editor of the archdiocesan weekly newspaper, The Pilot, in 1952, and then to the BRA post. Throughout Logue’s tenure in Boston, Lally’s support, and through him the cardinal’s—communicated through leadership on the BRA board, Pilot editorials, archdiocesan instructions to parish priests, and many other means—remained crucial. At every ribbon cutting or ground breaking, Lally was a dependable presence, donning a hard hat and wielding scissors or shovel, often joined by Cardinal Cushing himself.23 Lally testified to the depth of the Cardinal’s commitment. “He wanted everyone to stay in the city,” he told an interviewer. “He made his investment in [Boston], saving parishes, supporting schools … If he could keep not just the Irish but the Catholic ethnic in the city, he would keep a coherence, a community.”24

  A characteristic statement of support for urban renewal from Cardinal Cushing came at the dedication of a new residence for retired priests in the West End in 1964, where he promised that this was but one of many contributions that the church would make to the New Boston, including building a new chapel in Government Center to be named for the city’s namesake, Saint Botolph. “This is a time of change, and we cannot afford to be opposed against [sic] progress. We must move along with it,” he asserted. He also made sure to remind his audience of the BRA’s return
favor to remove the hated Washington Street Elevated structure that overshadowed Boston’s Mother Church, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End. The Yankee bosses of the Boston Elevated Railway (the “El”) had callously put it there at the turn of the century—“a kind of finger to the Catholics,” as the Boston transportation planner Frederick Salvucci described it—and it had long remained hated as “a symbol of oppression.”25

  From 1962 to 1965, the Roman Catholic Church thoroughly reinvented itself through the deliberations and decrees of the Second Vatican Council. Launched by Pope John XXIII and continued after his death by Pope Paul VI, the Ecumenical Council called for “updating” in multiple dimensions: in the nature of church liturgy, ritual, education, and relations within the hierarchy and between the clergy and laity; in attitudes and policies toward pluralism and religious freedom; in interactions between Catholics and other Christians and Jews; and in the realm most relevant to Logue’s urban renewal project, the church’s involvement in the world, including the complex social problems confronting the urban communities in which most dioceses were located. Boston’s Cardinal Cushing had anticipated many of these changes. In fact, when Time magazine devoted an August 1964 issue to Catholicism, it singled out Cushing more than any other American bishop for epitomizing “the surge of church renewal.”26