Fearful that it would need help dealing with the experts and bureaucrats in the BRA, the LRCC approached a group of mostly white advocacy planners known for their effective organizing against the Inner Belt and the Southwest Expressway, new proposed highways that were expected to intersect at the Madison Park High School site. These housing and planning activists, many of them young faculty from Harvard and MIT, had met up while protesting the North Harvard urban renewal plan as well as the highways. They had just recently incorporated as a nonprofit advisory group called Urban Planning Aid (UPA).58
The LRCC contracted with UPA in July 1966 to come up with an alternative plan for Madison Park and to conduct a community survey to investigate residents’ needs and desires.59 The founding UPA members were an impressive group. The lone African American was Denis Blackett, a project designer at the BRA. Others included Gordon Fellman, an assistant professor of sociology at Brandeis; Robert Goodman, an assistant professor of architecture at MIT; Chester Hartman, an assistant professor of city planning at Harvard; Daniel Klubock, a young activist lawyer; James Morey, the full-time UPA executive director, who, as a psychologist and a systems analyst, had recently left the defense industry in disillusionment; Lisa Peattie, an anthropologist and associate professor of urban affairs and regional planning at MIT; and Fred Salvucci, a BRA transportation planner.60 Over the spring, summer, and fall of 1966, a fascinating, well-documented three-way struggle transpired between Logue’s BRA, the Madison Park community as represented by the LRCC, and UPA, with UPA carrying the torch for the LRCC with the BRA, while the LRCC’s mostly African American organizers and members grew increasingly distrustful of their advisers.
During summer 1966, the BRA held several public meetings where Logue and the project director John Stainton explained the plans to mounting neighborhood opposition. Meanwhile, the LRCC was meeting on its own and with the UPA to develop an alternative approach that provided for twenty-five acres of replacement housing. In October, UPA’s inner circle requested a private meeting with Logue in his office, without LRCC representatives present, to explain their advocacy planning work with the community and request a four-month delay to allow them to undertake a community survey.61 Detailed notes written by Fellman provide an almost word-for-word report of this meeting, including prior discussions about who should attend centered particularly on Blackett as a BRA employee and Hartman as a known Logue foe.
As the result of several testy encounters in the past, including a very public dispute over the BRA’s relocation record, Hartman clearly “irritate[d] Logue,” who felt that his attacks on urban renewal in print and in person undermined confidence in the local government and the BRA. At the meeting, which both Blackett and Hartman in the end attended, UPA members pushed Logue to entertain “more satisfactory representation of divergent views and incorporation of them into the planning process.” Logue responded in controlled but angry tones that the BRA was already taking all views into account, “including the interests of low-income people,” and criticized the UPA’s negative response to the Campus High relocation plan as “irresponsible.” The meeting ended with UPA charging Logue with depriving neighborhood people of the “power they would like to have,” and Logue dismissing UPA as liking “conflict for its own sake.”
Soon, frustrations grew between the UPA and the LRCC. Fellman reported to UPA’s board about a well-attended LRCC meeting in early December to hammer out a proposed memo of understanding to submit to the BRA. After a variety of views were expressed, including many by non-community members, the LRCC’s leaders asked everyone to leave except for the residents. According to Fellman, “After a closed door session, Mr. Smith (LRCC’s Chair) advised UPA the situation had to change for the group was being pulled and advised from too many directions. He requested just one UPA member act as advisor to the new coordinating committee they would establish.” Fellman took on that role. Then, revealing honest self-reflection, UPA’s minutes continue, “The Board generally agreed that the Madison Pk. project has taught them much. Unfortunately, the LRCC people did not trust them, they have not seen UPA as their advocates but acting more as their directors rather then [sic] advisors. And like the BRA (incorrectly or not) was perceived as telling what was ‘good for them.’” Fellman concluded positively, however, that “as a result of all that happened, it forced LRCC closer together as a group that now wanted to make its own decisions. This is an important aspect of a group’s maturing process.”62 Further tensions developed between UPA and the LRCC over UPA’s dissatisfaction with the quality of work performed by the community volunteers recruited by the LRCC to help with UPA’s neighborhood survey.63
This triangular contest played out in four days of contentious hearings in front of the city council’s Urban Renewal Committee and then in a memorandum of understanding, dated January 5, 1967, between the BRA and the LRCC, with no mention of UPA. It reserved at least fifteen acres for no less than four hundred new or rehabilitated housing units.64 In some ways the invisibility of UPA in this final negotiation could be viewed as a desirable outcome by advocacy planners who defined their mission as helping communities articulate their own needs and preferences. But more was at play here. Logue deeply disliked what he considered the challenges of troublemaking radicals to his liberal planner’s agenda. Discrediting them as “academic amateurs” during the city council hearings, he made it clear that he preferred to deal directly with the community and proceeded to cut out UPA. As The Boston Globe reported: “Noting the presence of Chester Hartman, a Harvard assistant professor of city planning and a Logue critic, the Boston Redevelopment Administrator said sharply, ‘I question whether Mr. Hartman and his colleagues (in UPA) are interested in solving this problem or having a little fun. I’m of the opinion they want to have a little fun.’” Although it was not UPA’s intended strategy, its presence so irritated Logue that he bent over backward to deal directly with the LRCC, and in that respect UPA indirectly helped to further empower the LRCC.65
Eventually, after more wrangling with the BRA post-Logue, new housing did come to Madison Park, along with a new Madison Park High School designed by the prominent modernist architect Marcel Breuer.66 The LRCC won the right to be the housing developer and renamed itself the Madison Park Development Corporation, claiming with its LRCC founding date of 1966 to be “one of the country’s first Community Development Corporations” and describing itself as “a community-based, non-profit that independently developed affordable housing for low and moderate-income residents.”67 When LRCC members and Roxbury community organizers were interviewed years later about the historical background to the revised Madison Park plan, they rarely made mention of UPA, mostly taking pride in the indigenous neighborhood leaders who emerged, particularly Ralph Smith and Cameron Vincent Haynes, for whom the new buildings would be named.68 Moreover, the housing constructed in Madison Park reflected as much in appearance as in origin the independent vision of the neighborhood’s residents. After carefully checking out what they liked and disliked in nearby Marksdale Gardens, Charlame, and Academy Homes and then working closely with a committed community architect named John Sharratt, “they wound up,” according to Fellman, “with the housing they wanted. We all thought it was rather unimaginative, but that’s what they wanted. I mean, we had visions of compounds and inner courtyards and so on. They wanted housing with their front on the street and a backyard.”69
The negotiated cityscape of Madison Park revealed not what Logue’s BRA originally intended—the experts’ plan to devote all the acreage to an exemplary Campus High School—nor what UPA’s advocacy planners desired—an innovative approach to subsidized housing—but rather exactly what the residents of Madison Park themselves wanted: a new high school plus new homes with front doors and backyards, developed by and for the neighborhood. The LRCC alone won the rehabilitation planning game in this low-income Roxbury community.
CORRALLING CHARLESTOWN
If any neighborhood in Boston epitomized community opposition
to urban renewal during the Logue era, it was Charlestown. The BRA had fairly easily identified its negotiating partners in both the Washington Park and Madison Park neighborhoods. In Washington Park, middle-class pluralist Democrat leaders, organized around an established institution like Freedom House and recognized by city hall as official community spokespersons, welcomed the BRA as their ally and urban renewal as their strategy for preserving the middle-class character of their neighborhood. In Madison Park, the grassroots LRCC insisted on making its own case as participatory democrats unwilling to let elites—whether the BRA or UPA—speak for them. In the end, they won a compromise that incorporated their vision of housing into the BRA’s plans. Charlestown was a different story. For most of Logue’s administration, the BRA struggled to find a viable negotiating partner in Charlestown that could rally enough support to make the rehabilitation planning game work there at all.
Charlestown was a physically isolated and socially insular community that was not doing well by any measure. Separated from the mainland by the Charles River and Boston Harbor, it was the oldest settled land in the Boston area and only legally annexed to the city in 1873. Apart from an attractive historic residential core around the Revolutionary-era Bunker Hill monument, much of Charlestown consisted of blocks of deteriorating three-decker wooden tenements crisscrossed with highways, access ramps, bridges, railways, and transit lines. Charlestown also featured the nation’s oldest navy yard, steadily being abandoned; big areas of open-lot truck storage and waning industrial plants; a huge public housing project, dating from the 1940s and containing 1,150 units, housing 20 percent of the community’s inhabitants in 1960; and the “El,” a relic of the circa 1900 Elevated Street Railway system that bisected Main Street and cast a dark and sooty shadow over Charlestown’s paltry downtown. No surprise that the population had plummeted by a third from 1950 to 1960—to 20,000—and by 1965 would fall still further to 17,400. Charlestown’s residents were overwhelmingly Irish Catholic, divided into three parishes with shrinking congregations, including the one where Monsignor Lally, chair of the BRA board, resided. Many Townies dwelling in Charlestown in the early 1960s struggled financially, as its median income of $2,700 was among the lowest in Boston, due in large part to the many public housing residents.70
Whereas Charlestown’s physical deterioration might have cried out for greater investment of public resources, its residents’ history of political infighting and suspicion of outsiders was a hindrance. This conundrum made the BRA’s task both pressing and precarious. In the end there were three organizations vying to represent Charlestown in negotiations with the BRA. First to emerge was the Self-Help Organization of Charlestown (SHOC), a grassroots citizens’ group that initially expressed great enthusiasm for renewing the neighborhood, spurred by what had happened across the river in the West End. As the group’s founder, Leo Baldwin, wrote in a letter to the weekly Charlestown Patriot, “The people of the West End formed their committee when the West End was doomed. Have you seen the West End lately?”71 But after some early success working with SHOC, the BRA’s staff became concerned that the group was too volatile and not attracting a wide-enough cross section of the community, excluding in particular important groups such as the pro-renewal Catholic clergy, local business leaders, the longshoremen’s union, and many other established civic, fraternal, and religious organizations. In its place, the BRA encouraged the creation of a broader umbrella organization, the Federation of Charlestown Organizations (FOCO), in which SHOC would be only one of many voices.
This insult to SHOC and other errors of judgment by multiple parties turned the BRA’s first public meeting, on January 7, 1963, into a fiasco. The BRA’s Charlestown staff—led by Pat McCarthy and Joe Vilemas—expected enthusiastic approval of the BRA’s plans, including early land acquisition to begin construction on replacement housing, but they had thoroughly misread community sentiment and not done nearly enough to rally supporters to attend the meeting.72 What they got—ironically only a week before the lovefest hearing in Washington Park—was “a defeat, a rout, a retreat,” in the words of Frank Del Vecchio, who would soon replace McCarthy as project director when the BRA began to pick up the shattered pieces of its Charlestown project after the disastrous meeting.73 More than a thousand Townies crammed into the Clarence Edwards Junior High School auditorium, many of them brought out by SHOC sound trucks blaring “Save your homes” and “Come fight the BRA.” When Logue tried to present the plan, he was booed. FOCO supporters who spoke were greeted with hoots and catcalls. When Catholic priests gave their blessing, they met stony silence, and when Monsignor Lally finally called for a show of hands, the BRA’s plan was overwhelmingly voted down.
Furious that “we were clobbered,” Logue took a step back.74 After having failed with two negotiating partners, the BRA now cast its fate with a third, the Moderate Middle (MM), headed by a former, more temperate member of SHOC who hoped to thread a reasonable path between an increasingly radicalized SHOC and a discredited, ineffective FOCO. Even more importantly, Logue changed BRA staff leadership in Charlestown, replacing outsiders Vilemas and McCarthy with Del Vecchio, whose standing as a native of the West End gave him community credibility. As Del Vecchio told it, a day or two after the failed hearing, “I went in to see Logue. I said, ‘You can have this project. It’s not over. You’ve just got to go to the people, and you didn’t. I know how to do it … I’ll do it for you.’”75
Under Del Vecchio, the BRA shifted strategy, seeking new ways of connecting directly to Charlestown residents and not relying on any one organization in this politically fragmented community. SHOC was hopeless at this point, having alienated even founder Baldwin, but FOCO and MM held some promise. To counter the situation he inherited, where “the only people who came out were against,” Del Vecchio established a site office in the basement of the public library; hung maps of the renewal plans on the wall rather than keeping them secret; distributed an enticing, well-illustrated booklet, The Urban Renewal Plan for Charlestown, an Opportunity for Every Resident; held block meetings week after week for an estimated four thousand residents; and did surveys and planning from a van that traveled through the streets of Charlestown. “I would get out of the van, and knock on the door, and tell them who we were and what we were doing there … I took slides, put together a slide show … We would open the doors, people would come in ready to fight, but instead they sat down and they saw a slideshow [titled ‘Your Home, Your Future, Your Charlestown’]. We pre-empted [them].”76
Most significantly, selling urban renewal to Townies forced the BRA to improve the deal it was offering. By the time the second public hearing was held, in March 1965, Charlestown residents were being promised that there would be only 10 percent demolition, much less than the 20 to 30 percent elsewhere. All dislocated residents would be rehoused within Charlestown in new or rehabbed subsidized buildings, with special provision for the elderly and assurances that there would be no more public housing, which Townies feared would attract unwanted outsiders, particularly nonwhites. Homeowners would receive grants and cheap loans for renovation and free architectural and construction advice. New construction would include three schools, parks, playgrounds, a recreation center, two fire stations, a library, a shopping center, and what would later be called Bunker Hill Community College. Traffic would be rerouted away from pedestrian areas, while roads, sidewalks, and utilities would be improved. Last—as the big deal clincher—the long-hated El would be removed to the tune of $12 million, as a result, according to Keyes, of “the BRA invest[ing] enormous quantities of time and money lobbying the Urban Renewal Administration to convince it that removal of the ‘El’ represented a valid expenditure of federal renewal funds.” Until they had that promise in hand, Logue and Del Vecchio knew there was no point in even considering another public hearing.77
With what seemed like progress, Logue decided to try again for a public hearing and endorsement, and this time he was better prepared. On Sunday, March 14, 1965, a
little more than two years after the first calamitous meeting, twenty-eight hundred Townies gathered at 1:00 p.m. in the largest inside public space available, the cavernous Charlestown Armory. Many arrived in buses chartered by the BRA to bring them directly to the armory from High Mass at the three local churches, where they were encouraged to attend from the altar. Forty-five Boston police were on hand to keep peace. Even Mayor John Collins made a short, rare appearance, making his way slowly down the center aisle in his braces and then urging the tense community not to turn down a precious $41 million to regenerate Charlestown. Said Logue: “That was the one, with his instinct for Boston, where he knew showing the flag would make a difference.”78
The plan for the meeting was to alternate on an hourly and then half-hourly basis between proponents and opponents until everyone who wanted to got a chance to speak. The first hour of supporter testimony went smoothly enough, but the mood became more inflammatory when an emotional leader of SHOC incited the crowd with, “It’s my home and that’s what I’m fighting for. You can stick the money up your ass.” After hours of debate, broken by occasional fistfights, including the punching of a priest, and emotional testimony by Charlestown native daughter and city councilwoman Kitty Craven, Monsignor Shea from Saint Catherine’s suddenly shocked the crowd by calling for a vote: “All those in favor of a renewal plan for Charlestown, stand. Stand for Charlestown!” Pandemonium broke out, as opponents who were standing dove for the floor and Logue stood on a table to count. No one was sure what the actual vote breakdown was, though most observers gave the “yes” vote a clear edge, and the renewal-friendly Charlestown Patriot estimated it won by a 3-to-1 margin. Logue, in any event, declared victory and left the armory with other city officials under a tight police escort.79 Even after this outcome, over four hundred SHOC opponents carried the fight through twelve raucous sessions of city council hearings in April and May 1965, though the mayor and the BRA had already locked up seven of the nine votes.80
Saving America's Cities Page 26
