Apparently no one took him up on the offer. With Margaret Logue already ensconced as principal of the Carroll School for dyslexic children, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, Logue said a bittersweet farewell to his staff at a party on January 10, 1985 (where the cake was decorated with a Charlotte Gardens house with a picket fence and the message “Our One and Only Edward J. Logue”), and headed north. Margaret’s career advancement this time dictated the Logues’ relocation away from New York. A skeletal staff remained at the SBDO to complete Charlotte Gardens under the newly appointed president, Jorge Batista, a smart, politically visible Puerto Rican attorney who had served as a deputy borough president of the Bronx and turned out to have ties to Velez. Bray, who stayed on as a consultant to the SBDO, was very critical of Batista’s leadership, claiming “his real agenda was apparently to put SBDO to sleep,” which was interrupted, Bray felt, only when the Charlotte Gardens homebuyers publicly raised holy hell. Given the extent to which Logue was the SBDO, this retreat was not surprising, nor was Batista’s closing down of the SBDO in March 1987, upon running out of funds. Seeking independence, Karolyn Gould had already spun off the human services division of SBDO as the South Bronx Human Development Organization.113 Logue left the South Bronx reluctantly, but with pride that “the most important thing we [did] is to help change people’s attitudes … We have spread a new commandment around. We should not speak ill of the South Bronx.” By this, Logue meant changing how Bronx residents, not just outsiders, viewed the borough’s future prospects.114
The passage of time would reveal that the SBDO had another major impact: providing the model for a more extensive turnaround of the South Bronx and for building affordable housing in New York City more broadly. Not long after Logue left the South Bronx, Mayor Ed Koch made a historic commitment to renovate and upgrade more than 100,000 (later 250,000) units of housing over ten (in the end fifteen) years at the cost of $4.2 billion (eventually $5.12 billion) to deal with a growing crisis of homelessness and deteriorating housing.115 It was soon clear how formative the SBDO’s experiments had been. Koch said as much. He told an interviewer that after he recovered from the shock of President Carter pulling out of his commitment to the South Bronx, “I decided that I would go forward anyway, first with Charlotte Street … and then ultimately expanded that into a ten-year program.” Even if Koch’s historical rendering was oversimplified, the clear link he made between the two projects is significant.116
The Bronx historians Lloyd Ultan and Barbara Unger concurred in their history of the borough that “the effective rebuilding of The Bronx began when Mayor Edward I. Koch placed Edward J. Logue in charge of the South Bronx Development Organization.”117 LISC’s Anita Miller likewise contended, “I believe that Charlotte Gardens turned the South Bronx … That was really, I think, the beginning of creating a new image.” The message it sent New York City and far beyond, she continued, was that “you can have this kind of economic integration that everybody wanted to see happen but nobody knew how to achieve. We have to thank Ed Logue for that.”118 A later LISC president, Paul Grogan, credited Charlotte Gardens’ “very strangeness” with “a symbolic wallop” that “reverse[d] the hopelessness.” He concluded, “Absent Charlotte Gardens, it’s hard to imagine the extensive revitalization happening.”119 Even MBD’s Julie Sandorf, who was not without her criticisms of Logue as a project and money manager, was thoroughly convinced of the impact of Charlotte Gardens: “I always felt it was, Anita and me, and Ed and Gennie, to do this, was the gutsiest thing I’ve ever known. And it was the loss leader. It created so much attention and so much heat and so much excitement, and the reality is there were six hundred families lined up to buy these houses, and 90 percent of them came from the South Bronx.”120
With the SBDO as inspiration, Koch’s ten-year plan took advantage of the very large number of buildings and vacant lots that had come to New York City through tax default, what was called in rem housing, to make possible the widespread construction and renovation of residential units. A core tenet of Koch’s plan was that housing would be developed through onetime capital subsidies, low-interest loans, and tax abatements, and in the end would be owned by nonprofits, individuals, landlords, and tenants in some cases, but, crucially, not by government, which had cut its subsidies way back. Building on SBDO precedents, the city worked with neighborhood-based CDCs. It partnered with “third sector” nonprofits like LISC, Rouse’s Enterprise Foundation, Rockefeller’s New York City Housing Partnership, and the Community Preservation Corporation (founded in 1974 but now much expanded in scope and resources). It pioneered homeownership in struggling neighborhoods and more generally aimed to create mixed-income neighborhoods with a variety of housing types, though usually not single-family homes. It made use of manufactured housing, now available in townhouses and rowhouses. It combined multiple sources of funding—public and private—some in quite small amounts. And it pressured banks to step up. All these strategies had proved essential ingredients in the SBDO’s formula for developing affordable housing in this new era of privatization.
The SBDO’s impact on the Koch plan can, of course, be exaggerated. There were surely other inspirations. But when in 1998, after fourteen years away, Jill Jonnes, a keen observer of the South Bronx’s fall and revival, revisited the places where from 1981 to 1984 she had spent many a day researching her book South Bronx Rising, she couldn’t believe “the size and scope of the renaissance,” how “the Bronx had roared back to life.” Drawing a direct line between the SBDO and the success of Koch’s ten-year plan, she wrote, “As we drove up towards Charlotte Street and the blocks and blocks of ranch houses came in sight,… I felt a great wave of emotion at seeing Logue’s dream flourishing.”121
It was no surprise that Jonnes observed so much improvement in her old haunt of the South Bronx. Continuing the SBDO’s momentum in another way, the greatest share of new housing provided under the Koch plan—36 percent—went to the Bronx, creating what came to be called the “Bronx Miracle.” In the South Bronx in particular, often in small-scale two- or three-family houses, LISC financed 4,182 units, the Enterprise Foundation 2,949 units, and the Community Preservation Corporation 9,000 units. The New York City Housing Partnership built 6,000 units, and Nehemiah Houses, working with South Bronx churches, 2,000 units. All told, between 1987 and 2000, the Bronx gained 57,361 new units in rehabbed apartment buildings and 9,557 units in new, two- and three-family townhouses, equivalent to remaking 15 percent of the Bronx’s total housing stock. Much of it was low density, given the prohibitive cost of erecting larger multi-family units without substantial government financing.122 When another president, this time Bill Clinton, visited Charlotte Street in October 1997 on the twentieth anniversary of Carter’s fateful tour, he found a thriving community with residents whose homes were now worth on average $200,000. By the time reporters returned for the thirtieth anniversary in October 2007, that value had grown to $500,000.123 For a few lucky Bronx residents, Logue’s SBDO had delivered the American dream of a home that was a growing capital asset, not simply a shelter. For many more Bronx residents, the SBDO provided a blueprint and the inspiration for building thousands of units of affordable housing.
TAKING STOCK
Many observers saw the South Bronx as Ed Logue’s resurrection. “His comeback came in the South Bronx,” the reporter Jim Yardley told New York Times readers in 1997. The sociologist Herbert Gans, who had been a critic of Logue’s work in Boston and did everything he could to block Lindsay’s hiring of Logue back in the 1960s, acknowledged, “He did a lot of good by my standards toward the end of his career when he was building affordable houses in the Bronx.”124 But in many ways, Logue was doing the same thing he always had, constantly adapting his strategy for building affordable housing and improving cities to changing policy and funding environments. Whether it was New Haven in the 1950s, Boston in the 1960s, New York State in the 1970s, or the South Bronx in the 1980s, it was always about improvisation. Lassoing the pri
vate market to subsidize homeownership for lower-income, particularly minority, families was just Logue’s latest approach, and one that would reverberate in President Clinton’s National Homeownership Strategy of the 1990s and President George W. Bush’s Ownership Society of the early 2000s—culminating in the overreach that produced the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.125
Logue left the South Bronx in January 1985 a humbler urban redeveloper than he’d been earlier in his career: more modest and incremental in his goals, more collaborative in how he achieved them, and more realistic about what was now possible. He was surely frustrated with the glaring limitations in what he could achieve but was never apologetic, self-pitying, or defeatist. Logue had regretfully abandoned his utopian visions of plentiful federal funding, idealistic New Towns for living and working, and cutting-edge experiments in technologically and architecturally innovative modernist architecture. A greater departure from the ambition—some would say hubris—of New Haven’s massive urban renewal of some thirty years earlier is hardly imaginable. As Litke put it drily, “You don’t go from the high-rise concept of redevelopment [in 1961] to single-family housing in the South Bronx [in 1983] without evolving.”126
When Logue left New York in early 1985, he acknowledged his difficulties turning around the South Bronx, yet he was confident he had made a positive difference. Only sixty-four, Logue headed back to Boston, the place where he had felt most effective and valued. He now hoped to add a final chapter to his career that would make use of his many years of experience seeking a healthier urban America. But he knew, too—better than he had at other transitional junctures—that there were limits both to what he could achieve at this stage in his life and what America in the last decades of the twentieth century was willing to support.
Conclusion: The End of a Life and an Era
During the last fifteen years of Ed Logue’s life, he sought to extend his influence in the field of urban redevelopment by teaching as a senior lecturer at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and taking on various projects through the small consulting business he set up in Boston. He also spent considerable time in his cherished Martha’s Vineyard, particularly after he and Margaret built a new year-round house in West Tisbury and Margaret retired there in 1989. Logue would not join her full-time until he retired himself in 1996 after suffering a small stroke the year before. But he became increasingly involved over these years in volunteer activities on the Vineyard that called on his professional expertise, whether conserving undeveloped land as a principal founder of the Vineyard Open
Land Foundation, advocating for affordable housing, strengthening Dukes County government, or defending the Steamship Authority, the primary means of transport between the mainland and the island, from legislative attack. For the first time in his life, Logue was on the other side of the fence as a grassroots community activist.1
Logue remained in frequent touch with many of his former compatriots from India, New Haven, Boston, and New York, even recruiting some of them—like Al Landino from New Haven days; John Bok, John Ryan, and the architects Don Stull and Paul Rudolph from his Boston Redevelopment Authority period; Rebecca Lee from the South Bronx Development Organization; and the ever loyal Janet Murphy—to help with his consulting work.2 His most important contracts involved trying (and failing) to relocate Emerson College to economically depressed Lawrence, Massachusetts; exploring moving Suffolk University from its valuable Beacon Hill property into the State Service Center in Government Center that he had helped build in the 1960s—and when Suffolk bailed out, making it a new home for the Boston University Law School (also unsuccessful); overseeing the development of a multimillion-dollar medical complex to revitalize downtown Worcester; and counseling the Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson on how the city might profit from the Summer Olympics of 1996.3 Bill Tuttle, one of the handful of employees who worked in Logue’s consulting business (in his case, for two and a half years after he graduated from MIT in planning), noted that even in Logue’s position as a private developer he sought less to make money and more to make deals that helped nonprofits like universities and cultural institutions leverage their real estate holdings to enhance their economic survival. As Tuttle put it, “This was private development with the most public minded person you could think of running it … I’m working for a private developer who is probably more of a public servant than most of the people who are actually in public service.”4 Needless to say, Logue’s consulting business did not prove terribly profitable.
Despite Logue’s involvements, it was no surprise that a New York Times headline in 1997, three years before Logue’s death, said of him, “Forgotten by the Public, ‘Mr. Urban Renewal’ Looks Back.”5 During his last years, Logue receded in relevance, considered a vestige from an earlier era, invited to speak when a symposium revisited the urban past but rarely its future, and greeted more with affection than awe at his old Boston haunts like the Tavern Club. When Lawrence Vale, today a professor of urban design and planning at MIT but then a student, attended one of Logue’s classes, “Development Delivery Systems,” in fall 1986, it was more to observe the once powerful man up close than to learn new redevelopment techniques from him.6 Robin Berry worked for Logue as a research assistant while a master’s student at MIT from 1985 to 1987 and then for a short time afterward at his consulting office. She observed that by the time Logue returned to Boston in the mid-1980s, he no longer knew the players and they didn’t know him. “Ironically, years earlier when he arrived in Boston, he had had to get to know all the old families and firms,” Berry explained. But now, twenty years later, Logue’s successful efforts to revive Boston “had yielded new blood to whom he was invisible.”7
Logue still sought ways to make an impact, writing letters to the editor and communicating, often unsolicited, with those he still knew at The Boston Globe or in city government.8 But even an old, admiring associate like John Stainton, who had worked with Logue in Boston and at the New York Urban Development Corporation, acknowledged Logue’s marginality. “In a way he tried to go about doing things the same way he had done when he had the power. He did it fairly gracefully. I never heard grumbling.” But Stainton concluded, “I think it was hard for him. I don’t think it was an easy time.”9
Logue’s contributions were far from forgotten by those who had worked closely with him over the years or benefited from his efforts. Conferences and events marking anniversaries of the emergence of the “New Boston” or the opening of Roosevelt Island still paid homage to Logue’s pivotal role.10 He always attended with enthusiasm and appreciation. When he showed up at BRA headquarters to pitch a project to convert the South End’s Benjamin Franklin Institute into condos and a new home for the Boston Shakespeare Company, the room was packed with worshipful former BRA staff, “who wanted to see the old lion at work again,” recalled an observer.11 And he took tremendous pride in receiving the American Planning Association’s Distinguished Leadership Award in April 1998, particularly knowing that the recognition resulted from a letter-writing campaign by colleagues from New Haven onward. When Logue died unexpectedly on the morning of January 27, 2000, at almost seventy-nine, he had been planning to meet the next day with someone who was traveling to the Vineyard to interview him about his work at the BRA.12 The final tribute, which he would have loved for how it gathered together his friends and associates from a lifetime in the city building business, was a memorial service at Faneuil Hall on April 12, 2000. At least two hundred people attended, despite a raging storm that prohibited some, including scheduled speakers, from making it to the event.13 His pals were quick to note that Logue went out of this world at the turn of a new twenty-first century with the same ferocity that he had brought to redeveloping cities in the second half of the twentieth.
PERSISTENT AND SHIFTING GOALS
Taking measure of a life’s work as complex as Ed Logue’s raises challenges. He described his career to an oral historian from the Library of Congress in 1995 as “a helluva ride.”14 It wa
s a career of continuities fueled by unwavering personal passions and ideological convictions, and of changes resulting from significant shifts in his thinking as well as strategic adaptations made to the evolving rules of urban redevelopment.
Some of Logue’s commitments he never compromised. Keeping American cities viable was the first commandment for this Philadelphia-born, New Haven–educated, Boston- and New York–devoted urban professional. Next, the goal of providing all Americans with decent housing propelled him to redevelop neighborhoods, even when it seemed—particularly in the early days in New Haven—that he was tearing down more buildings than he was putting up. He never doubted that there was method to what some thought was madness. A great deal of Logue’s neighborhood renewal—New Haven’s Dixwell and Wooster Square, Boston’s Roxbury and Charlestown, Roosevelt Island and the Nine Towns in New York’s Westchester County, and Charlotte Gardens in the South Bronx—was motivated by his conviction that the highest hope for cities and their residents lay in creating mixed-income and mixed-race communities. He was convinced that even if there was some displacement in the short term, the segregation of urban populations in distinctive neighborhoods of cities and in separate municipalities across metropolitan areas only fed inequity in public services and life chances. Otherwise, the better-off always got the best.
As far back as Logue’s student days at Yale College and Law School, he had devoted himself deeply to racial integration. The pursuit of racial, not just income, diversity in residential projects animated all his work, from New Haven to Boston to all over New York State. Logue held to this ideal, even when its opponents came to include not just entrenched whites but also separatist-oriented African Americans in the era of Black Power. In the South Bronx, although white buyers were scarce for Charlotte Gardens homes, Logue sought a balance between black and Latino residents. Everywhere he worked, he insisted that minorities be well represented among contractors and their subcontractors and that school integration be made a top priority.15
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