Another SBDO initiative was land reclamation and revitalization, since block after block of the South Bronx was strewn with rubble from buildings crumbling out of neglect and abandonment. Any efforts to turn them to new purposes or even to create usable open space for recreation would require stabilization first. The SBDO experimented with various approaches, settling on soil compacting as far cheaper than rubble removal. The Bathgate Industrial Park first introduced the problem and the solution. The “dynamic compaction technique” developed there, in which a crane dropped a six-ton ball with a flat bottom from a height of forty feet to pound the rubble, was later used to prepare all other SBDO sites, including for housing.43
By far the most important SBDO undertaking, however, was the one that had mattered most to Logue throughout his career: the construction and rehabilitation of housing. The housing program in fact claimed so much of Logue’s time and attention that the staffer Jennifer Raab, who was assigned to human services, lamented that she missed out on more of Logue’s mentoring than did her colleague Rebecca Lee, who worked closely with Logue on physical development. Not surprisingly, it was in the area of housing that the SBDO would make its most significant contribution to turning around the South Bronx.
MAKING CHARLOTTE GARDENS GROW
It was such a startling idea that it made headlines not just in New York City but nationally and even internationally. In the middle of decimated Charlotte Street—President Carter’s stomping ground—Logue’s SBDO constructed Charlotte Gardens, a new neighborhood of ninety freestanding single-family homes with white picket fences that were heavily subsidized for purchase. It was nothing less than the suburban American dream plopped down in the middle of one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, if not the nation. As Logue had familiarized himself with the South Bronx, he had noticed that amid ravaged blocks, a few homeowners persisted in caring lovingly for their homes. He had also learned, as he told Mayor Koch, that many new arrivals to New York, “Southern Blacks, Island Blacks and Island Hispanics[,] do not consider a row house a home! A home has to have a back yard and a garden, and you have to be able to walk around it!” Homeownership, it occurred to Logue, offered just the stability needed in South Bronx neighborhoods. (To ensure their permanent commitment, in fact, buyers of homes in Charlotte Gardens had to agree not to sell their subsidized homes for ten years or encounter substantial penalties.)44 In a statement that surely would have amused his nemesis Jane Jacobs for how it echoed her own preaching, Logue declared, “We need front stoops again.” In truth, however, Logue’s commitment to Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” had been evolving for some time, particularly in the UDC’s low-rise, high-density experiment of Marcus Garvey Park Village, where every unit had its own exterior entrance.45
Logue’s strategy was practical as well. In the dawning age of privatized solutions to social problems, Logue calculated that subsidies for home purchase would be easier to secure than the public funding needed to put up large-scale multiple dwellings with rental units. Detached homes would also cost less to build, because they could make use of existing sewer connections and would avoid the expensive masonry firewalls required by the city’s building codes for attached units.46
Even so, delivering affordable, single-family homes for purchase would surely be challenging, particularly given the elimination of the Section 235 mortgage subsidies to owners. So Logue turned to a cost-saving strategy that had long intrigued him, first in Boston and then in more significant ways at the UDC: manufactured housing. Labor and materials for prefabricated structures, Logue figured, would be far cheaper, with better quality control, than more conventional building in New York’s high-cost construction market. Moreover, production in a factory eliminated the risk of vandalism and the high security costs that scared home builders away from jobs in rough neighborhoods like Charlotte Street.47 The clincher: Logue argued that using manufactured housing to repopulate the South Bronx provided a way of simultaneously advancing the borough’s economic development. If a factory for building manufactured homes was opened in one of the SBDO’s industrial parks, it would create many new jobs along with new residences.48
Defying the vocal skepticism of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development commissioner Anthony Gliedman, Charlotte Gardens was a huge hit.49 Early on, Logue had realized that he was up against the common view that, in the words of one observer, “there’s no way in hell that anyone is going to buy a single-family house in the middle of the South Bronx when you look outside and all that you can think of is ‘I’m going to be dead in the next twenty-four hours.’” Responding to these concerns, Logue cooked up the idea of opening model homes, much like those in new suburban developments.50 The gamble paid off. When the first two model houses opened in April 1983, thousands of curious visitors snaked in long lines for a chance to take a look. After only three weeks of active marketing, more than 360 potential buyers applied for a home. After six weeks, there were 500; and in time, there was a waitlist of over 2,000—far more than could be accommodated.
The basic Charlotte Gardens house was a conventional, 1,152-square-foot raised ranch with three bedrooms, one and a half baths, and a full basement dug on-site, which was partly aboveground for later finishing as living space. It was constructed in one of the few factories producing prefab houses, the Deluxe Manufactured Homes plant in Pennsylvania, and then trucked in modular halves during the dead of night over the George Washington Bridge, flanked by Port Authority police and met at the other side by the New York Police Department.51 Homeowners could customize such design options as the color of the house’s exterior siding and bathrooms, type and color of the wall-to-wall carpeting, and whether they wanted a bay window, though getting the factory to meet these specifications accurately proved a huge headache for the SBDO. The purchase price for a quarter-acre lot and a home was highly subsidized through various sources, so that the price tag of about $50,000 was at least $30,000 below the actual construction cost (and if all expenses were included, less than half the full $114,000 sticker price). With the requirement of a down payment of 10 percent, a buyer needed to scrape together around $5,000.52 With philanthropic funding, the Cooperative Extension of Cornell University offered workshops at local schools and churches attended by hundreds of potential purchasers to teach basic lessons in insurance, home maintenance, landscaping, and the budgeting and cash flow needed to pay taxes and a mortgage. Help from the Community Development Legal Assistance Center cut closing costs. And phased tax abatements from the city cushioned the burden of real estate taxes for the first eight years.53
It is hard to convey the amount of attention that Charlotte Gardens’ model houses attracted. An illustrated article on one of them appeared on the front page of The New York Times, and it took off from there.54 This publicity was no accident, of course, as Logue’s SBDO had geared up to maximize the potential of its fourteen-acre Charlotte Gardens project to revitalize the South Bronx. Most brilliant was the ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 17, 1983, which included bigwig elected officials—Senator Alfonse D’Amato, Congressmen Mario Biaggi and Robert Garcia, the Bronx borough president Stanley Simon, the state assemblywoman Gloria Davis, and Mayor Ed Koch—photographed whitewashing a picket fence Tom Sawyer–style in front of the model houses. All this enthusiasm won over even the formerly reluctant Mayor Koch. Koch recalled, “As we were getting dragged in, I was saying to myself, ‘What am I getting into?’” But as the publicity mounted, he called up Logue to stake his claim. “‘This is my project, right Ed? This was my idea, wasn’t it?’” recalled Logue, with amusement. When at the dedication of the model homes, a heckler in the crowd cynically yelled out his prediction that in no time these houses would surely be destroyed, as so much else in the neighborhood had been, Koch responded combatively, “These people will defend their houses with their lives!” Eventually Koch concluded, “This was the best thing we could have done. It anchored the community.”55
To an impressive degree, Charlotte
Gardens attracted just the population that the SBDO had hoped for—skilled workers and lower-middle-class public employees from the area.56 Robert Litke recalled that early on, “Ed would take me there and we would look at the land, the raw land, and he would paint his vision … I mean he was in heaven thinking about the opportunities he was creating for working stiffs, a cop, a single mother.”57 Of the 507 applicants who were processed before the list was closed, most were the “working families” Logue had targeted: policemen, firemen, truck and bus drivers, transit conductors, foremen, mechanics, plumbers, secretaries, teachers, and nurses and other hospital workers. A quarter were employed by the city or one of its independent agencies such as the Transit Authority or Public Housing Authority; 15 percent worked for the state or federal governments, many of the latter for the post office. On average, households had 1.65 wage earners. Forty-nine percent were local, from the South Bronx; 30 percent were from the North Bronx; 11 percent were from Manhattan, mostly Harlem and East Harlem; and the remaining were from working-class communities in New Jersey or neighboring towns like Mount Vernon, most originally from the South Bronx and eager to return.58 Forty-seven percent of the prospective buyers were black, 45 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian, and 1 percent white. None of these hopeful buyers had owned a house before.59
When the ninety homeowners who succeeded as purchasers were surveyed in 1985, there were slight alterations in the totals, reflecting both who actually qualified to buy and the priorities of the screeners. Notably a larger number (82 percent) were Bronx residents, particularly from the South Bronx (68 percent). Most (slightly less than three-quarters) were employed by private companies rather than the public sector. The median household income of $33,000 was slightly higher than among the applicants and, in 60 percent of the households, made possible by at least two wage earners. A very large proportion of Charlotte Garden residents were under eighteen. None of the actual buyers had owned a home before, and residents were fairly evenly split between blacks and Latinos.60 Charlotte Gardens seemed to be helping to retain—even lure back—the lower middle class of the Bronx. And they stayed, taking pride in their neighborhood and improving their homes—often through their own labor—with finished basements, patios, aboveground swimming pools, gardens, carports, and the like.
As the SBDO had hoped, there was remarkably little turnover in homes in Charlotte Gardens, even long after the penalty for selling had expired. Twenty-five years later, two-thirds of the original owners were still there, and when an owner had left, in two out of three cases the house had changed hands only once.61 Interviews with three original owners—Josephine Cohn and Preston Keusch, Carmen and Rafael Ceballo, and David and Irma Rivera—revealed how hard they had lobbied to get a house (in some cases bugging the sales office weekly or monthly), how frustrated they became over endless construction delays, and ultimately how much pride they took in being part of this unique community in the South Bronx. In Josephine Cohn’s case, the fact that she was white, living in Manhattan, and had no kids were strikes against her, she feared. “So I worked really, really hard to charm everybody in sight,” Cohn recalled laughingly. The day she moved into her new home was “one of the best days of my life next to my wedding … I walked into my own house, brand new, untouched, cream carpeting. And I was just so excited and tearful.”62
Not everyone was so enthusiastic about Charlotte Gardens. Some critics charged that the neighborhood needed housing for low-income residents, not those who could afford to buy a single-family house, however much it was subsidized. Logue’s response was that in the long run the entire community would benefit from buyers willing to commit their hard-earned dollars and their family’s security to becoming pioneering homeowners with a financial stake. Options for the less well-off in a mixed-income community would follow later.63 Moreover, even better-off Charlotte Gardens homeowners still experienced economic insecurity. For example, David Rivera, the very first resident to move in, owned a local shoe store when he was accepted as a buyer, but by the time he sold his house in 1995, he identified himself as a “peddler,” claiming he had been forced out of his store by rising rent and other expenses.64
The most common criticism of Charlotte Gardens was that single-family suburban-style housing was inappropriate in density and architecture for an urban setting. Logue was not unaware of how far he had strayed from the cutting-edge modernism that he had promoted through his UDC housing. He freely admitted, “This stuff will not win the architectural awards that I have so enjoyed receiving in the past.”65 It was painful for him to lose the approval of the national community of planners and architects he had so carefully cultivated through much of his career when they criticized this project as a hare-brained scheme, too low in density and too low-brow in aesthetics. Close Logue associates like Ted Liebman, who had been chief architect at the UDC, found it so difficult to stomach the look of Charlotte Gardens that he strictly avoided the topic whenever he met up with his much-admired former boss.66 Still today, a recent American Institute of Architects guide to New York City’s architecture describes Charlotte Gardens as “another kind of destruction: that of valuable, close-in, urban land through underutilization. Silly.”67
As surreal as Charlotte Gardens may have looked for the South Bronx, Logue was convinced that he needed to embrace a different set of priorities to help overcome the stigma of Charlotte Street. Here, Logue the pragmatist won out over Logue the modernist. Even the contrast in names between Logue’s very different New York ventures—Roosevelt Island versus Charlotte Gardens—suggested the replacement of his heroic, male monumental modernist project with a domesticated, female-gendered alternative. And it is noteworthy that the esteemed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, a self-described “unrepentant modernist,” praised Logue for “put[ting] up little houses in the rubble on Charlotte Street that symbolized hope and renewal when the South Bronx had become the poster child for terminal urban decay. You could say they were the right thing in the right place at the right time.”68
More than anything else, the shift from the publicly subsidized housing that Logue had been able to build with federal urban renewal funds in New Haven, Boston, and New York State to projects more dependent on the private marketplace affected the architecture of what got built. The bold, innovative, modernist designs of the UDC, promoted by an architecturally adventurous, independent public official like Logue, gave way to conventional styles that appealed to ordinary homebuyers and conservative mortgage lenders. “Real houses for real people,” was how Litke described it. In fact, many of the blacks and Latinos who signed up to buy Charlotte Gardens homes aspired to own the kind of new houses that were blanketing suburban areas of New York, which they couldn’t afford and which, as minorities, they were not welcome in. Logue had learned that lesson only too well in his failed UDC experiment with Fair Share Housing. Their tastes, one journalist confirmed, were “nothing unusual here, nothing that seemed experimental, trendy, or less than the suburbia these buyers wanted.”69
Whereas architects had enjoyed great importance in the hierarchy of professionals who propelled federal urban renewal, in this new era of private-market approaches to housing they frequently found themselves sidelined. In a project like Charlotte Gardens, architects were only minimally involved.70 Taking their place in influence were developers and nonprofit and private-sector financiers, often local bankers lending money to private borrowers, incentivized or mandated by the government under antidiscrimination legislation, such as the Fair Lending Act of 1974, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. These laws required banks to disclose where they were lending and to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they did business.71 As the federal government’s role shifted from direct sponsorship of affordable housing to encouraging the private sector to invest in it, architects who had once enjoyed shaping “social housing,” as it was often called, saw their impact decline along with the public dollars that had supported it.72
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NEW PARTNERS IN CHARLOTTE GARDENS
Charlotte Gardens and other housing constructed by the SBDO in the South Bronx marked important shifts in how Logue went about practicing urban redevelopment. He collaborated with a different set of partners than he had before. And he depended on a substantially altered business model to fund his work.
In the past, Logue had often resisted pressure to submit his redevelopment projects to grassroots review, whether in Boston’s Allston or in the suburbs of Westchester. He now found himself looking to community groups well rooted in the South Bronx and not to his former allies in high places. Given the political changes in Washington, HUD bureaucrats were increasingly hostile, and officials in city hall were notably ambivalent. A stranger to the area with neither local ties nor external backing, Logue knew he needed the legitimacy that would come from being supported by well-known and trusted neighborhood groups. Accordingly, Logue developed his closest working relationship with a nonprofit community development corporation, the Mid Bronx Desperadoes (MBD), so named by its African American founder Genevieve “Gennie” Brooks, “because we were desperate. Our streets were lined with garbage, we had drug trafficking and arson. We needed everything, especially decent housing.”73
Brooks had moved to the South Bronx from a farm in South Carolina at the age of seventeen to live with an uncle. Over time, she watched her stable neighborhood deteriorate, and finally decided as a widow in her forties that she had to take action. She first organized a tenants’ association in her apartment building, then a block association on Seabury Place, and finally a day care center, which soon grew into a more multifaceted community organization, the MBD. By the time that Logue arrived in the South Bronx to head the SBDO, Brooks was sharing the leadership of the MBD with a Catholic priest from the neighborhood, the Reverend William J. Smith.74 A few years later, Brooks and Smith were joined by a young Julie Sandorf, who became the MBD’s project director for Charlotte Gardens.
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