In the heat of the UDC crisis, a New York Times op-ed headline reminded readers “It Built Where Nobody Else Would” and urged that the question now should not be “‘What is wrong with the U.D.C,’ but rather, ‘if not the U.D.C. what?’”115 In a way, even Logue’s archenemy Ravitch agreed. Ravitch did not so much reject the UDC’s lofty goals as argue that in taking them all on, the agency was trying to accomplish the impossible—subsidized housing, racial integration, great architecture, open space, first-rate education, community involvement—and pay for it by combining inadequate state and private-sector funding with a federal requirement to keep rents affordable. The difference was that Ravitch, a man of business, did not assume that the state or federal governments must step up or that bankers must take more responsibility. Ravitch was a pragmatist who felt that the UDC had no choice but to live within its means, as limited or unfair as they might be, and adjust its ends accordingly. In contrast, Logue—hard-nosed as he often seemed—was actually the idealist, driven by what he felt could and should be.116
Logue’s bold UDC undertaking to revitalize cities in a new way ultimately went bust. But he could take some solace in what he had managed to build and how colleagues in the urban policy and architecture fields would long applaud the UDC’s valiant efforts. Reviewing the UDC debacle in fall 1975 while the Moreland investigation was under way, Architectural Record concluded, “In all events, the Urban Development Corporation set fresh solutions and strategies in motion, establishing a benchmark by which other efforts, across the country, will be measured for a long time.”117 Even the Moreland Commission concluded that the “UDC was led and staffed by creative and highly motivated persons who conceived and built many projects of which the citizens of the State can be proud.”118 And indeed, for decades after 1975, the UDC would remain a touchstone for advocates of building affordable housing and breaking through the suburban zoning barrier, inspiring any number of conferences, exhibitions, and idealistic new efforts to provide all Americans with a decent home.119
THE FUTURE FOR THE UDC AND LOGUE
The infamous default and subsequent demise of Logue’s UDC, after having been the largest developer of subsidized housing in the country, created shock waves nationwide. Directly affected were the dozens of states that, inspired by the UDC, were funding housing with moral obligation bonds or similar instruments now coming in for closer scrutiny.120 Logue’s projects were eventually finished under Ravitch, who remained the UDC’s chair until 1977. Ironically, given that New York taxpayers’ lack of support for subsidized housing had inspired the creation of the UDC, they ended up footing the bill, as private investors were repaid in full to preserve the state’s credit.121 Logue’s UDC would survive in name only, barred from building any more housing and reconstituted as a more conventional economic development agency for New York State—“a cautiously run real-estate enterprise rather than a daring sprearhead for social betterment,” in the journalist Fried’s brutal assessment—until it even lost the name in 1995 and was relabeled the Empire State Development Corporation.122
Ed Logue had his own rocky recovery from the loss of the UDC. Some critics were quick to blame him, taking a cue from Carey and Ravitch. Others were more appreciative. The analyst Brilliant, for example, concluded that “Logue had made enemies for some of the best of reasons. He wanted to develop New Towns for integrated economic and social goals, and he wanted to build housing in the suburbs and in the most troubled inner-city areas. He developed major minority employment programs; and he had upgraded the architectural style of publicly assisted housing, if not always the livability of individual units.” She acknowledged, “It might be argued that Logue was too ambitious or too tempestuous in his style,” but she insisted that even if Logue “had been the most superlative politician and the most charming of entrepreneurs, it seems doubtful that UDC could have conquered the forces against it.”123 Logue agreed and felt unfairly scapegoated. “I would never want to say that we didn’t make any mistakes,” he freely admitted, “but the blame that I acquired was somewhat disproportionate, I think.”124 The chorus of criticism and the sullying of his reputation were particularly stinging for a public servant who, his staff all agreed, prided himself on being “an ethical guy … and a very careful guy,” in the words of the UDC staff assistant Larry Goldman. He was someone, said his longtime friend Penn Kimball, who deeply valued “his reputation for being on the side of right and justice,… a powerful man of principles.”125
Professionally, Logue tried to keep his hand in the urban field that had been his life’s work, piecing opportunities together with the help of loyal friends and colleagues. At first he set himself up in Rockefeller’s Critical Choices Commission, until he was invited to share offices with his friends Kenneth and Mamie Clark at 60 East 86th Street, where he opened a consulting firm, the Logue Development Company. A typical project enlisted George Raymond and Robert Litke in an assessment for HUD of why some New Towns had failed and what could be done about it.126 Sympathetic and still-admiring associates also offered him part-time teaching opportunities—at Yale and NYU law schools, Princeton’s School of Architecture, and the University of Pennsylvania’s City and Regional Planning Program.127
Personally it was a dark period. The journalist Fried reported that initially “Logue was bitter and depressed at the way he was expelled from the top ranks of his profession.” Once the lion king presiding over “Logue’s Lush Lair” and driven around in a chauffeured car, he was now operating out of a modest ground-floor office in a small building surrounded by mementos of better days—awards, citations, aerial photographs, redevelopment maps, and a 3-D model of Roosevelt Island. From his desk he looked out at the tiny backyards of houses on 85th Street rather than sprawling majestic vistas of New York all the way to the Catskills.128 Drinking that previously had greased the wheels of male sociability and aided unwinding at the end of hard-driving workdays now threatened to become more than that, a fear that his brother Frank had voiced a few years back in an intimate letter. “I don’t know what demon makes you treat yourself so badly,” Frank had written. “I’m sure it’s not negative self-image. You like yourself. You do indeed do important public work and do it surprisingly well. But you won’t do it long at the rate at which you are drinking.”129 Longtime associates like Litke and Stainton who stayed in touch with Logue after the UDC debacle worried that his drinking was worsening.130 With Margaret Logue working at Saint Ann’s School, the Logues moved to Brooklyn Heights, leaving behind their posh East End Avenue address for what Ed described to Ted Liebman as “a smaller, less expensive place,… not as grand as what we had” but, Ed added, “we like it.”131 For the first time in their marriage, Margaret’s job, not Ed’s, dictated where they would live.
Through it all, however, Ed kept in mind the negative example of Fred Rodell, his Yale Law School mentor who had let the university’s retaliation against his unpopular political stances make him, in Logue’s words, “a hater,” someone “who blighted his own life terribly,… inflicting more damage on himself” than anyone had inflicted on him. Reflecting back on those years, Margaret felt confident that despite the injustice Ed felt, he in fact succeeded in not becoming bitter like Rodell.132 Nonetheless, in a revealing interview that Logue gave in October 1976 to Jean Joyce, a former colleague from the Indian embassy days who was documenting the career of their common mentor Chester Bowles, Logue interpreted Bowles’s defeat for the Connecticut Democratic Senate nomination in 1958 in terms that reflected his own fears. “In ’58 he was at the end of the road of personal, political power … I’ve had to go through a lot of this myself, in the last couple of months. This happens, and what does it mean? And even your best friends don’t always tell you … As far as being a major dominant force, with not only a power base but a place in which to use it—that’s when he lost it.”133
What was next for Ed Logue? At the time of his resignation from the UDC, he was still a relatively young man, in his mid-fifties, with twenty years of
intense city-building experience under his belt. But if the future was unknown, one thing was certain: if Logue ever got another chance to do significant work in his chosen field of urban redevelopment, it would be under very different conditions, and not only because of the black mark he bore as a result of the UDC’s downfall. Clearly, the end had come to the era of large-scale government programs of which Logue had been a master. While it lasted, the UDC—although far from perfect—had given Logue rare opportunities to experiment with making subsidized housing more plentiful, affordable, and livable; better designed and technologically advanced; further integrated by race, income, age, and physical disability; and built by a more racially integrated workforce. If Logue were to continue to grapple with the still-pressing problems of urban America, particularly the dire need for decent housing, he would have to find some other way.
9. Ashes to Gardens in the South Bronx
Ed Logue was making a decent living piecing jobs together, but “I was bored with what I was doing,” he admitted as he watched and waited for what might be his next opportunity in urban redevelopment. In an uncanny foreshadowing, during the winter of 1976 he tried using his connections to Vice President Rockefeller to pitch an idea to President Gerald Ford’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Carla Anderson Hills, and HUD’s New York regional administrator, S. William Green. Logue proposed to use Section 8 subsidies and FHA insurance to build extensive low-rise rental housing on vacant land already owned by New York City, particularly in the fast-deteriorating South Bronx. But despite Logue’s dogged efforts to sell the idea in Washington and New York, it went nowhere.1
The next year, however, fate intervened. When Vernon Jordan, president of the National Urban League, rebuked the new Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, for shirking his responsibilities to American cities, an abashed Carter and his staff secretly planned a visit to the Bronx, the northernmost borough of New York City and one of the most poverty-stricken areas in the United States, while Carter was in town to address the United Nations. On October 5, 1977, the president and his entourage drove through the South Bronx, stopping for a photo opportunity amid the ruins of Charlotte Street. In what became an internationally infamous photograph, a horrified Carter stood, hands in pockets, amid acres of rubble with the haunting shells of abandoned, burned-out apartment buildings looming in the distance. (The site had actually been cleared for a new school that was never built, but the photo became known for portraying a South Bronx so devastated that it resembled bombed-out London or Dresden.) Shocked at the evidence of overwhelming urban poverty and devastation, Carter turned to his HUD secretary, Patricia Harris, and instructed her, “See which areas can still be salvaged … Get a map of the whole area and show me what can be done.”2
New York City officials lost no time taking advantage of the South Bronx’s moment of infamy and urged a major White House initiative to address the deteriorated housing, huge unemployment, and multiple other social problems confronting the South Bronx. Soon after Ed Koch took over as mayor from Abraham Beame in January 1978, he gave Deputy Mayor Herman Badillo, a former Bronx borough president and congressman and the most visible Puerto Rican politician in the city, the assignment of preparing a plan. By April, Badillo had formulated an ambitious preliminary $1.5 billion proposal to rehab and build 26,500 units of housing in two- and three-story buildings over seven years. Aimed at a population of 750,000, “it was to be a massive redevelopment project to rebuild … the whole South Bronx, and in the process to show how we could rebuild all the slums in this country,” Badillo explained. The centerpiece would be a 732-unit low-income housing co-op on Charlotte Street, heavy with symbolism as the site of Carter’s visit. At the suggestion of the New York area HUD administrator Alan Wiener and through no lack of lobbying on his own, Logue emerged as Badillo’s consultant on the project.3 In September 1978, Mayor Koch, seeking to win the confidence of the White House for a major investment in the South Bronx, established a South Bronx Development Office with Logue—still working as a consultant—at its helm.4 The Washington Post architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt wrote that “Logue, try as he will, can hardly contain his excitement over getting back into harness … ‘The area is bigger than all of New Haven,’ he says like a boy bragging about all the gadgets on this new bicycle.”5
The eighteen months between Carter’s Bronx excursion in October 1977 and the rejection of Badillo’s plan by the powerful New York City Board of Estimate in February 1979 unfolded as a series of misleading cues and backpedaling by the White House, grandiose and wishful thinking by some New York officials, and mistrust of the plan and its promoters by other city leaders. By the time the eleven-member Board of Estimate—made up of the mayor’s representatives, the city council president Carol Bellamy, the city comptroller Harrison Goldin, and all the borough presidents—finally scuttled the plan in a 7-to-4 vote, the case against it was manifold: fear that it would isolate poor people without the services they needed; well-founded concern that a cautious, cash-strapped White House would never come through with the money; and resentment by other borough presidents over the Bronx getting so many new resources. As the Brooklyn borough president cynically put it, “If President Carter’s chauffeur had taken a right turn instead of a left turn on his trip here, we’d have all the money going to Bushwick now.”6
The council president Bellamy’s opposition to the plan—likely at the urging of an apprehensive White House—proved particularly damaging. A furious and disgraced Badillo, convinced that Koch had failed to put his full weight behind the proposal, immediately resigned from the project and, before long, from being deputy mayor, sufficiently embarrassing Mayor Koch that he kept Logue on to signal that something would still happen in the South Bronx. Even if the Carter White House had made it clear that it favored job programs over housing and above all wanted to reduce the price tag, Koch calculated that launching a planning process for revitalizing the South Bronx would at least buy some time and assuage proponents.7 Brooded Logue, “So I’m left with a job and this hopeless place of ground, the South Bronx, with no program, nothing for anybody.”8
But never one to be daunted for long, by April 1979, a year after Badillo’s initial unveiling of his billion-dollar Bronx dream, Ed Logue had pieced together a modest budget of $4 million from the Feds, the state, and a half-heartedly committed and still fiscally crippled city (its contribution almost all in-kind—office space and the use of a few official cars) to undertake an eighteen-month comprehensive planning effort.9 So it was that Logue became director of the South Bronx Development Office (SBDO, renamed in January 1981 as the South Bronx Development Organization, a nonprofit with Logue now president rather than director). The SBDO emerged as an unusual operation that functioned as an administrative unit in the New York City Planning Department but had minimal authority, few development tools like the power of eminent domain, and little dependable funding. All it had for its mission to improve the South Bronx was a “hunting license,” according to Logue, and a leader eager to redeem himself because, said Logue, “I’m not going to let that son-of-a-bitch Hugh Carey write the last chapter in my public life.”10
Thus began the fourth and last major chapter of Ed Logue’s career in urban redevelopment. After remaking New Haven and Boston in the heyday of federal urban renewal and leading the New York Urban Development Corporation in a groundbreaking but ultimately imperfect experiment in public-private and federal-state collaboration, Logue was now taking on the South Bronx at the dawn of a new era of small-scale, neighborhood-oriented, market-based urban interventions. After Nixon had effectively killed federal urban renewal, Carter’s Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program aimed to incentivize private investment. His successor, Ronald Reagan, went even further in promoting private-sector solutions to cities’ problems.
In the South Bronx, Logue would face the worst urban devastation of anywhere he had worked, with fewer resources than he had ever before had at his disposal. “In retrospect, it make
s the challenges I faced years ago with Dick Lee in New Haven and John Collins in Boston seem very modest indeed!” Logue was the first to admit.11 Once having prided himself on being an effective rebel in the belly of the establishment beast—whether fighting to reform tradition-bound Yale University or lobbying in Washington to improve HUD policies—he now had to content himself with being a pesky fly on the back of a hostile establishment. But ironically, it would also be here, with much less support from those in power in the city, the state, or the nation, and in a South Bronx hobbled by impoverishment, arson, and population loss, where he would come closest to fulfilling his long-touted but at times empty promise of “planning with people.” This once-powerful pluralist Democrat who previously had consulted with handpicked representatives of organized interests would now, by necessity, work closely with grassroots groups, collaborating with the kind of participatory democrats with whom he had previously jousted. When Logue brought this last major stage of his career to an end in 1985, he would leave behind a scorecard of gains and losses that would prove complex to tally.
THE SOUTH BRONX, CAULDRON OF URBAN ILLS
It was no accident that Jimmy Carter’s White House staff picked the South Bronx for the president’s public display of concern for urban poverty in fall 1977. It won the contest hands down. The 1980 census would identify these twenty square miles, with more than six hundred thousand residents, as the poorest area in the nation.12 The Bronx had undergone rapid growth in the 1920s, with the northern expansion of the city’s subways, to become an attractive residential area for working-class white ethnics—the Irish as well as more recent Jewish and Italian immigrants making a leap out of the ghetto—and middle-class families in search of larger, more affordable apartments like those on the Grand Concourse. But after World War II, a combination of factors conspired to propel the Bronx toward a dramatic descent. More than its fair share of low-income public housing projects were located here. The redlining of heavily ethnic neighborhoods discouraged investment in what had been—and often still were—blocks of decent six-story brick apartment houses. Cheap mortgages through the GI Bill and the Federal Housing Administration made homes in the suburbs an attractive option for white, upwardly mobile returning veterans, particularly when there were relatively few opportunities for homeownership in the rental-dominated Bronx. And the development from 1966 to 1973 of Co-op City—the largest cooperative residential community in the world, with more than fifteen thousand units in thirty-five high-rise towers—lured lower-middle-class residents away from their old Bronx neighborhoods to a new, state-subsidized, affordable alternative nearby in the far northeastern reaches of the borough. The ultimate blow was the construction of Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway—the first American highway built in a crowded urban environment. It slashed through viable Bronx neighborhoods, displacing sixty thousand residents and depressing the value of the remaining homes nearby.13
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