Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Fourth, Logue’s high profile in Boston also contributed to his defeat. After seven years in the city, “Mr. New Boston” was both extremely visible and still considered an outsider by many multigenerational Bostonians, elite and working class alike. Even the strategic green and white coloring on all Logue’s campaign material, and the deliberate mention of his Irish parents in his personal biography, failed to help.127 Building his candidacy around the slogan “One man stands out,” Logue emphasized that he was a “proven capable administrator” and not a politician, who had brought over $200 million in federal funds to Boston and would “keep the rebuilding program going while tackling the other needs of Boston,” particularly improving the city’s schools. But despite his frequent reminder to voters that “Ed Logue pioneered the principle of ‘planning with people,’” his pitches only served to remind some voters of the anger and frustration that urban renewal had sowed in the neighborhoods.128 Logue admitted as much in a campaign swing in Charlestown: “I have to go around and show them I don’t have horns.” In an op-ed quite favorable toward Logue, the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker put it drily as “his name is known everywhere, not always favorably.”129 The reality was crystal clear to the politically well-connected BRA staffer Arthur Reilly: “Louise Day Hicks, family in South Boston for a hundred years. Kevin White, West Roxbury, living in Beacon Hill, a hundred years. And Ed Logue from New Haven who took my grandmother’s house.”130

  Fifth, and perhaps most damaging of all, Logue’s campaign made what turned out to be a fateful error when, after consulting with handwriting experts, it challenged Kevin White’s nomination signatures in hopes of knocking him out of the race or at least discrediting him. There were good reasons to doubt the accuracy of White’s petitions and embarrass the state official responsible for overseeing the election laws. But the devious way that Logue’s campaign handled the situation—setting up an unknown, shadowy figure to lodge a complaint of forgery who then disappeared until he was tracked down and traced back to a denying Logue campaign—opened it up to accusations of “dirty politics” and hurt Logue more than White in the end.131 On Logue’s handwritten list of career mistakes prepared for his memoir, “Challenging White’s signatures” appeared second after “The North Harvard Street Project.”132

  Finally, Logue’s pursuit of the mayoralty suffered as Louise Day Hicks’s campaign—with its barely disguised racist message “You Know Where I Stand”—gathered steam. Liberals in the city increasingly felt pressure to coalesce around one candidate judged to have the best chance of beating her in November. Although Logue was clearly identified as a progressive candidate—labeled a “New Deal liberal” in the Globe’s series of candidate profiles and positioned at “the other end of the pole” from Hicks, who called him “the enemy” and “the intruder”—hometown boy White, with one foot in Irish Boston and the other in elite Beacon Hill, seemed like the safest choice.133 On primary day September 26, 1967, it was White in the number two slot, with 30,789 votes to Hicks’s 43,722. Sears and Logue received 23,924 and 23,766, respectively.

  Hicks’s electoral strength, garnering over 28 percent of the vote in this large field of candidates, shocked the anti-Hicks forces into rallying behind White in November, prompting The Boston Globe to make its first mayoral endorsement ever and carrying White to a 12,552-vote victory (out of 192,673 cast). (Although the Globe didn’t endorse any candidate in the primary, Logue’s good friend, the editor in chief Tom Winship, kept him company at home on election night, along with several other close associates.)134 White would go on to serve four terms as mayor of Boston from 1968 to 1984, trying periodically for higher office such as Massachusetts governor in 1970 and the nation’s vice president in 1972. Hicks, blocked from the mayoralty, would go on to be elected four times to the Boston City Council and once to Congress. Her greatest visibility would come with her rabble-rousing leadership of the anti-busing campaign in the mid-1970s.

  Logue described his primary loss as leaving him “broke but not broken.” His BRA colleague Litke detected a “little bit of funk” that “took a little while to get out of.” His BRA assistant, Janet Bowler, detected quite a bit more: “He was devastated … He was a real optimist, in the sense that I think he always thought that anything was doable. And this was the first time that he had really failed in a very public way.”135 Logue was also saddled with a $60,000 campaign debt to pay off.136 There were compensations, however. Logue took pride that he won the support of the architects who had helped him build the New Boston. Architects for Logue, with Carl Koch, designer of Roxbury’s Academy Homes, serving as secretary and a roster of twenty other major names, reminded designers that “he has fought for architecture and architects and in turn we have been more aware of our responsibilities for improving design in the urban center.”137 Some of the downtown business leaders who had backed the New Boston, like the Brahmin Henry Shattuck, supported Logue over Sears because they felt he’d do a better job, much to Sears’s annoyance at being abandoned by his own kind.138 Developers who had benefited from Logue at the helm of the BRA came through as well, anticipating continued prosperity under Mayor Logue.

  But the support Logue prized the most came from Boston’s Twelfth Ward, the only one he won outright with a healthy 37 percent of the vote, in the heart of Roxbury’s black community. The Snowdens and their Washington Park neighbors did not forget that Logue had responded to their call for neighborhood renewal and they rewarded him with campaign support and their votes.139 Interestingly, at least two UPA board members acknowledged backing Logue, and there likely were other community activists—similarly engaged in negotiations with the BRA—who feared rocking the boat and jeopardizing their deals.140 Even the BRA employee Fred Salvucci, often a Logue critic, understood the favorable conditions for community negotiation that existed under Logue’s BRA. At the first UPA board meeting after Logue was defeated in the primary, Salvucci reported that “the BRA is taking a turn to the right. People taking over will be worse than those there now (many [are] looking for new jobs).”141

  What should Ed Logue do next? Holed up in his West Cedar Street home, he contemplated options ranging from joining a Boston law firm to plotting another run for mayor or even governor to pursuing one of the job inquiries coming his way from cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Cleveland.142 In the end, ironically, it was Joe Slavet—who had recruited Logue to Boston seven years earlier, who had battled him as head of Action for Boston Community Development, and who was now establishing an urban affairs program at Boston University—who arranged for Logue to become the first Visiting Maxwell Professor of Government. This temporary post required very little beyond a set of public lectures and gave Logue an office and a secretary. He hired the Radcliffe graduate Janet Murphy, then working at Harvard Law School. She would work closely with him for the rest of his professional career. A $20,000 travel study grant from his loyal patron, the Ford Foundation, put a little extra cash in his pocket, which he used to visit India, Russia, and New Towns in Sweden and Finland, gaining insights that would soon prove influential in his work.143 But the permanent solution to “What next?” came with an unexpected phone call in January 1968. Janet Murphy came into his office to say, “The Governor is on the phone.” “Which governor?” inquired Logue. “The Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller,” she replied, and so began the next period of Edward Logue’s career and a new, state-level phase in the nation’s quest to renew its still troubled cities.144

  PART III

  New York in the 1970s and 1980s: Winning and Losing an Empire in the Empire State

  7.   Constructing a “Great Society” in New York

  When Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller surprised Ed Logue with his phone call in January 1968, he expected an immediate response: “Can you come down tomorrow to take a look at a bill?” The next day, Logue was in Rockefeller’s New York City office, meeting first with members of Rockefeller’s inner circle, particularly his top legislative aide Ste
phen Lefkowitz, and then alone with the governor. Rockefeller’s goal was to persuade Logue to come to New York to serve as president and CEO of a soon-to-be-announced, $6 billion ($44.1 billion in 2019 dollars), powerful state-level urban renewal agency, the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC).1 For many years, this long-serving liberal Republican governor had been trying to revive depressed urban areas and build new subsidized housing in New York State; the urban riots of the mid-1960s had made that goal seem only more urgent. But state bond issues, the tool to fund such initiatives, required voter approval, according to the state’s constitution, and in frustration Rockefeller had watched five of them go down to defeat.2 Now he and his team had come up with a new scheme to skirt the referendum problem: a state-level public benefit corporation (the legal term for public authority) with the ability to self-finance through issuing its own tax-exempt bonds. Special state appropriations and federal housing programs would supplement private-sector funding.

  Rockefeller was attracted to Logue’s deep experience and outsize reputation, though the two men had never met. Rockefeller was pushing hard for his UDC in the New York state legislature, and Logue was a free agent since being defeated in Boston’s mayoral contest. Rockefeller, used to getting his way, turned his famous charms on Logue to woo him to New York. As Logue later remembered the courting at a commemorative event for Rockefeller, “He just pours it on. Remember the way? I suspect each of us has never been more flattered by anybody, including our spouses, in our whole lives. So he tells me I’m the greatest thing since whatever.”3

  But Rockefeller had met his match in Logue. After carefully reviewing the draft legislation Rockefeller intended to submit to the New York state legislature, Logue congratulated the governor for his ambition (“This is the greatest development bill that I’ve ever seen”) and then told him bluntly, “But it won’t work.” “What the hell do you mean?” the governor shot back. Logue proceeded to explain that without the ability to acquire property through eminent domain, to reduce or exempt projects from local real estate taxes, and, most radically, to override exclusionary local zoning and outdated building codes, he doubted the UDC would get anywhere. Then, in a strategy to hammer home his point, which Logue later admitted may have taken unfair advantage of the infamous rivalry between Rockefeller and New York City’s mayor John V. Lindsay, he added, “If Mayor Lindsay doesn’t like what you want to do, he won’t do it. It will get stuck in his building department or zoning board, and it will never come out.” Logue continued, “You’ll never know why you’re not getting it, but you won’t get it.” “You’ve got a point,” admitted Rockefeller.4 By day’s end, Logue was heading back to Boston, Rockefeller’s staff had begun revising the legislation to Logue’s specifications, and the two men agreed to keep talking. Logue was truly reluctant at first to accept the governor’s offer. He and his family were happy in Boston, and their beloved Martha’s Vineyard, where the Logues had summered for many years, was nearby. But in time, Logue was seduced by Rockefeller’s persuasive powers as well as the unique professional opportunity that the UDC offered: to create on a grand scale an extraordinary “one-stop service” that could acquire project sites and then develop, finance, design, build, and sell or own the resulting structures.5

  By the end of April, Logue and Rockefeller had come to an agreement, and by summer, Logue was installed as the UDC’s president and CEO. He lived at the Yale Club and commuted back to Boston until the Logues found an apartment the next spring, moving in time for the children—Kathy now fifteen, Billy eleven—to begin at a new school in the fall. Once the family settled in, Margaret would restart her career as a teacher and then middle-school principal at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights. These two men—one, a fifty-nine-year-old privileged heir to the greatest of American family fortunes, who had been serving as Republican governor of mighty New York State for nine years; the other, a forty-seven-year-old Irish Catholic Democrat from Philadelphia who was a self-made pioneer of postwar urban redevelopment—soon discovered that they had a great deal in common. Both were socially committed promoters of monumental projects who believed that the troubles of their time—poverty, poor housing, unemployment, inferior education—could be solved by major interventions in the physical environment. And they were both doers, ambitious and confident executives impatient to turn big, innovative plans quickly into even bigger realities.6 Logue had undertaken large-scale rebuilding of a New Haven and Boston in steep decline. For his part, Rockefeller had aimed to enhance the state’s much neglected capital city of Albany by constructing a massive civic center, the Empire State Plaza; to improve health care delivery by adding thousands of new hospital and nursing home beds; and to strengthen higher education by vastly expanding the multi-campus State University of New York (SUNY) system.7 Rockefeller’s penchant for building was so great that his critics had a field day satirizing his “edifice complex” and “whim of iron,” to which Rockefeller retorted, “All they see is steel and concrete … I see jobs. Not only construction jobs, but clerical jobs, service jobs, all kinds of jobs for all kinds of people.”8

  Together Logue and Rockefeller forged a potent partnership that would last until Rockefeller stepped down as governor of New York in December 1973. Although Rockefeller left office voluntarily to better position himself to secure the Republican nomination for president in 1976—perhaps this liberal Republican’s last shot at the long-coveted prize that had eluded him in 1960, 1964, and 1968—the UDC would forever be credited to him. For almost six years, Rockefeller and Logue collaborated to build much-needed new housing, a great deal of it subsidized for low- and moderate-income tenants; to revitalize crumbling downtowns; and to jump-start the state’s sputtering industries to create new jobs, as New York’s economic growth seriously lagged behind the nation’s. Rockefeller and Logue had a symbiotic relationship. Margaret Logue described it as not so much a friendship as a mutual respect, closer to the kind of partnership Ed had experienced with John Collins than with father-figure Chester Bowles or brother-like Dick Lee.9

  Rockefeller put his distinctive ideological stamp on the new agency’s structure, combining a deeply held social liberalism with an embrace of Republican orthodoxy that states should play a larger part in governance and that enlightened capitalists should assume a significant role in addressing public needs.10 Empowering states and private capital presented a stark alternative to President Lyndon Johnson’s urban policy, in which federal funding and grassroots engagement (labeled “maximum feasible participation”) expanded under his Great Society initiatives. Moreover, urging more public-private sector collaboration aligned Nelson with his banker brother David, president and soon the CEO and chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. In a Washington speech in early 1967, David had proposed a plan whereby every dollar of government money would be matched by four dollars of private capital, after which Nelson picked up the phone to say, “David, I’ve got the twenty cents if you’ve got the eighty cents.”11

  Nelson Rockefeller’s description of himself as having “a Democratic heart with a Republican head” was never more apt than when it came to his urban strategy.12 His liberal profile would later be overshadowed by repressive policies in the last years of his governorship, such as the storming of the Attica Prison in 1971 that left forty-three dead and the passage of tough mandatory sentencing laws for drug sale and possession—which became known as the “Rockefeller Drug Laws”—in 1973. But for much of his administration, Rockefeller advocated for state government to play a progressive role in American society, including directing private capital to socially worthy causes.13

  The UDC also grew out of Nelson Rockefeller’s long-standing interest in architecture, a passion he shared with Logue.14 As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Rockefeller had seriously considered becoming an architect until discouraged by his family. “With the responsibilities the family had,” Nelson concluded, “I didn’t see how I could justify giving way to a personal whim.” He also feared that he could never h
ave an independent practice: “I thought what would happen would be I’d get projects that the family was doing. It wouldn’t be a genuine operation. I wanted to get out on my own.”15 Although he did not pursue professional training as an architect, much of what Rockefeller did in later life reflected his twin passions for building and artistic expression. Soon after graduating from Dartmouth, Nelson supervised the construction and leasing of his family’s Rockefeller Center in New York City. He then went on to oversee development projects in Latin America first as watchdog for the family’s Standard Oil Company and then as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs.16 Throughout his adult life, Rockefeller remained a devoted art collector and an aficionado of architecture.