Saving America's Cities
Page 47
LIVING IN MARCUS GARVEY. Logue and his colleagues hoped to demonstrate that low-rise housing could achieve the same density per acre as high-rise towers, while also creating an environment where families felt safe and in control. The project’s 626 units were organized in four-story, four-unit buildings, each with private entrances and outdoor space. (THEODORE LIEBMAN, FAIA)
THE UDC IN HARLEM. The distinguished psychologist Kenneth B. Clark (second from left), a longtime UDC board member and friend of Logue’s, and his accomplished psychologist wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, worked with the UDC to develop Arthur A. Schomburg Plaza at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue. Twin thirty-five-story octagonal towers contained six hundred mixed-income apartments and the Clarks’s Northside Center for Child Development, the first facility to offer psychological services to families in Harlem. At this cornerstone ceremony in 1973, the Clarks are flanked to the right by Logue and William H. Hayden, director of the UDC’s New York City Region field office. A subsidiary, the Harlem Urban Development Corporation, initiated other projects nearby. (URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION)
PROMOTING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. Logue made a strong commitment to affirmative action, requiring that minorities’ participation in all aspects of UDC projects be proportional to their presence in a local area. UDC-sponsored loans and technical assistance programs helped minorities compete. Here, the architectural firm Castro-Blanco, Piscioneri & Feder is working with Gruzen & Partners on Schomburg Plaza. (ANNUAL REPORT OF THE NEW YORK STATE URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION, 1972)
THE BATTLE OVER FAIR SHARE HOUSING IN WESTCHESTER, 1972. Logue welcomed the opportunity provided by the state-level UDC to solve racial and income inequities with metropolitan solutions. But the UDC’s effort to build one hundred units of garden apartment–style subsidized housing in nine Westchester towns met with ferocious rejection, evident at this Bedford public hearing. (ANNUAL REPORT OF THE NEW YORK STATE URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION, 1972)
UDC COLLAPSE IN WINTER 1975. After the defeat of the Fair Share Housing proposal, problems continued to plague the UDC that neither Logue nor his board of directors, pictured here, could overcome. When the newly elected governor Hugh Carey discovered the precarious financial condition of New York State, he targeted the UDC as a prime offender, firing Logue in anticipation of the UDC’s default on notes and bonds in February 1975. (URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION)
JIMMY CARTER’S SOUTH BRONX TOUR BEGETS THE SBDO. On October 5, 1977, President Carter (center) visited the most ravaged parts of the South Bronx with the New York mayor Abraham Beame (right) and Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Patricia Harris (left). Shocked at the devastation on Charlotte Street, he vowed to help. His promised federal dollars never came through, but that failure prompted the next mayor, Ed Koch, to create the South Bronx Development Organization (SBDO) and hire Logue to lead it. (PHOTO BY BETTMANN ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES)
SBDO COLLABORATES WITH NEIGHBORHOOD GROUPS. Without the big government subsidies of the past, Logue tapped small surviving pockets of public funding for housing, human services, and economic development in the South Bronx. He also built alliances with local community development corporations (CDCs) and community planning boards, like the one he is meeting with here. The SBDO practiced a more grassroots participatory democracy rather than the pluralist democracy of Logue’s earlier career. (© BOLIVAR ARELLANO)
GROWING IMPORTANCE OF PRIVATE FUNDING. The CHEMICAL BANK sign hanging below the one crediting the City of New York and the SBDO for this Crotona-Mapes housing signaled the increasing role being played by the private sector during the Reagan administration. New intermediaries like the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, an offshoot of the Ford Foundation, helped channel private resources into projects sponsored by the public and nonprofit sectors. (COURTESY OF PETER BRAY)
MANUFACTURED HOMES FOR CHARLOTTE GARDENS. The best-known project of the SBDO was Charlotte Gardens, ninety single-family, detached, suburban-style ranch homes prefabricated in a factory in Pennsylvania and trucked to the site where Jimmy Carter had walked in horror. Logue hoped that invested homeowners would provide just the anchor needed to revitalize the South Bronx. (COURTESY OF PETER BRAY)
PRE-FAB DREAM HOUSES FOR LOGUE AND PROSPECTIVE BUYERS. Charlotte Gardens fulfilled Logue’s ambition to use technology to make quality housing more affordable. These houses gave black and Latino police, firemen, teachers, and others in the lower middle class access to the kinds of homes that whites could buy in the suburbs, communities where nonwhites did not feel welcome or comfortable. (COURTESY OF PETER BRAY)
POLITICIANS DEDICATE CHARLOTTE GARDENS, APRIL 17, 1983. Although Logue’s SBDO got minimal government help, all the politicians showed up at the opening, from the United States senator Alfonse D’Amato down to the New York State assemblywoman Gloria Davis. To the right of Logue are the congressman Mario Biaggi, the Bronx borough president Stanley Simon, and the speaker, Mayor Ed Koch, whose support for Charlotte Gardens grew when he saw its enormous popularity. (COURTESY OF PETER BRAY)
GENEVIEVE BROOKS AND HER MID BRONX DESPERADOES. Logue’s indispensable partner in Charlotte Gardens was a neighborhood CDC called the Mid Bronx Desperadoes (MBD), co-led by the organizational dynamo Genevieve Brooks (here talking with resident Donald Gould) and a local priest, Father William Smith. Relations between the SBDO and the MBD were sometimes tense, but they respected each other’s unique contributions. (© SUSAN FARLEY)
FATHER LOUIS GIGANTE’S SEBCO. Ten years before Logue arrived, Father Louis Gigante had founded the South East Bronx Community Organization (SEBCO) to renovate housing and provide much-needed social services in the poor Hunts Point neighborhood of his Saint Athanasius Church. Logue grew to admire the parish-level priests like Gigante and Smith, who devoted themselves to neighborhood improvement, displaying a more grassroots level of Catholic Church commitment to urban renewal than seen in Boston, where the Archbishop had taken the lead. (PHOTO BY BETTMANN ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES)
THE (PHOTO) SHOT SEEN 'ROUND THE WORLD. When this image of Logue standing behind the white picket fence of a Charlotte Gardens home appeared in New York magazine in June 1984, it was just one of hundreds of photos publicizing this unique project. Charlotte Gardens helped to turn around the South Bronx, inspiring many of the strategies that would bring thousands of new and rehabbed housing units to New York City through Mayor Koch’s ten-year plan, more than sixty-five thousand to the Bronx alone. (© JON LOVE, 2018)
VELEZ BEATS OUT LOGUE FOR SCARCE HUD DOLLARS. The $1 million from HUD that had kept the SBDO afloat ultimately went to four other Bronx organizations, with the largest amount going to the corrupt Ramon Velez in return for delivering the Latino vote to the Republicans in the 1984 election. When Logue and Koch’s protests failed, Logue resigned in disgust, departing in January 1985. (PHOTO BY TOM CUNNINGHAM / NY DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES)
A BUS TOUR THAT WENT NOWHERE. Logue depended on an annual $1 million technical assistance grant from HUD to cover salary and administrative costs. Despite his best efforts to impress the HUD secretary Samuel Pierce with this tour of the SBDO’s accomplishments, Pierce remained hostile and invited other Bronx community groups to compete for the funds. (© BOLIVAR ARELLANO)
PURSUING THE PUBLIC GOOD WITH THE PRIVATE PURSE, 1980S ONWARD. When Logue resettled in Boston in 1985, he worried that the absence of generous public funding was allowing private developers to dictate too much of the city’s development. This cartoon by Dan Wasserman in The Boston Globe in 1987 expressed a similar concern that the current director of the BRA, Stephen Coyle, was increasingly beholden to private interests. (DAN WASSERMAN © THE BOSTON GLOBE, 1987)
A GRASSROOTS COMMUNITY ACTIVIST IN HIS RETIREMENT. After Logue returned to Boston, he was admired more for what he had accomplished in the past than for what he was doing in the present. It was at his summer retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, where he gradually retired in the 1990s, that he had his greatest impact, advocating for land conservation, affordable
housing, and a more robust county government. He died there in January 2000, just before turning seventy-nine. (PHOTO BY KIRSTEN ELSTNER)
NOTES
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
AAPSS—American Academy of Political and Social Science
AB—Architecture Boston
AF—Architectural Forum
AR—Architectural Record
BG—Boston Globe
BH—Boston Herald
BM—Boston Magazine
Bowles—Chester Bowles Papers, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT
Bray—Peter Bray Papers, private collection
BSB—Bay State Banner, Boston, MA (Boston’s major African American newspaper)
BW—Business Week
COH—Columbia Center for Oral History Archives, Edward I. Koch Administration Oral History Project, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY, transcripts
Collins—Papers of John Collins, Boston Public Library, Boston, MA
CR—City Record, Boston, MA
Crimson—Harvard Crimson newspaper, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
CSM—Christian Science Monitor
CT—Chicago Tribune
Dahl—Robert Dahl Papers, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT, transcripts
EJL—Edward J. Logue Papers, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT
FH—Freedom House Papers, Northeastern University, Archives and Special Collections, Boston, MA
HGSD—Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA
JAIP—Journal of the American Institute of Planners
JH—Journal of Housing
JJ—John Johansen Papers, Avery Library, Columbia University, New York, NY
Jones—Frank Jones, interview with Edward J. Logue, April 1999, Martha’s Vineyard, MA, Edward J. Logue Papers, 2007 Addition, Box 2, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT, transcript
JPH—Journal of Planning History
JUH—Journal of Urban History
LAT—Los Angeles Times
MBD—Mid Bronx Desperadoes Community Housing Corporation
MDL—Margaret DeVane Logue Papers, Martha’s Vineyard, MA; some of this material moved to Edward J. Logue Papers, 2007 Addition, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT
MLogue—Margaret DeVane Logue, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, July 18, 2007, Martha’s Vineyard, MA
NAACP—National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NHR—New Haven Register
NYDN—New York Daily News
NYPL—New York Public Library, New York, NY
NYSA—New York State Archives, Albany, NY
NYSUDC—New York State Urban Development Corporation
NYT—New York Times
PA—Progressive Architecture
PD—Paul Davidoff Papers, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
PT—Patent Trader (Mount Kisco, NY, newspaper)
RCL—Richard C. Lee Papers, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT
Rotival—Maurice E. H. Rotival Papers, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT
Ruben—Gregory Ruben interviews, 2006, New Haven County Bar Association Centennial Celebration Oral History Project, New Haven, CT, transcripts
Schussheim—Morton Schussheim, interview with Edward J. Logue, May 24, 1995, Pioneers in Housing Oral History Project, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, transcript
SEP—Saturday Evening Post
Steen—Ivan Steen, ten interviews with Edward J. Logue, 1983–91, Edward J. Logue Papers, 2002 Addition, Box 21, Folder “EJL Rockefeller Oral History,” Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT, transcripts
UPA—Urban Planning Aid Records, 1966–82, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA
WM—Washington Monthly
WP—Washington Post
WSJ—Wall Street Journal
WWD—Women’s Wear Daily
YULocal35—Yale University of Union Employees Local 35, AFL-CIO, Papers, 1941–81, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT
YMA—Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, New Haven, CT
Introduction: Cities in Crisis
1. These totals vary slightly from source to source, likely because of inconsistencies in tallying; see Louis K. Loewenstein, The New York State Urban Development Corporation: Private Benefits, Public Costs, an Evaluation of a Noble Experiment (Washington, DC: Council of State Planning Agencies, 1980), 38–39, 123–24; Steven R. Weisman, “Nelson Rockefeller’s Pill: The UDC,” WM, June 1975, 35; Lawrence Goldman, “Federal Policy and the UDC,” Planner 61, no. 5 (May 1975): 177; William Marlin, “After the Pratfall: UDC Dusts Off the Debris of Default,” AR 158, no. 6 (Mid-October 1975): 107–24; Jim Yardley, “A Master Builder’s Mixed Legacy: Forgotten by the Public, ‘Mr. Urban Renewal’ Looks Back,” NYT, December 29, 1997; New York State Urban Development Corporation Annual Report 1974, 5.
2. Louis K. Loewenstein, “The New York State Urban Development Corporation—a Forgotten Failure or a Precursor of the Future?,” JAIP 44, no. 3 (July 1978): 262; Eleanor L. Brilliant, The Urban Development Corporation: Private Interests and Public Authority (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, D. C. Heath, 1975), 184.
3. Weisman, “Nelson Rockefeller’s Pill,” 35; Loewenstein, “Forgotten Failure,” 262. Loewenstein, Private Benefits, Public Costs, 112, calculated that the default affected forty-four state housing finance agencies. Franziska Porges Hosken, in “Planning and Urban Renewal: A Discussion with Edward Logue,” in The Functions of Cities (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1973), 109, singled out Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio for having particularly strong interest in the UDC model.
4. “Big daddy government” was a phrase that Logue attributed to critics of the UDC’s effort to build affordable housing in Westchester County; Logue handwritten statement, no title, no date, EJL, 2002 Accession, Box 22, Folder “Notes, Misc., 1980s,” 10.
5. Linda Greenhouse, “Logue Sees U.D.C. as ‘Whipping Boy,’” NYT, October 21, 1975; Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 3:38.
6. Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 39.
7. Nicholas von Hoffman, “Ed Logue—the Master Rebuilder,” WP, April 15, 1967; Logue, “New York: Are Cities a Bust?,” Look, April 1, 1969, 70–73; Richard Schickel, “New York’s Mr. Urban Renewal,” NYT Magazine, March 1, 1970; “Housing: How Ed Logue Does It,” Newsweek, November 6, 1972.
8. Alice O’Connor, “The Privatized City: The Manhattan Institute, the Urban Crisis, and the Conservative Counterrevolution in New York,” JUH 34, no. 2 (January 2008): 333–35; Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
9. Bryce Covert, “Give Us Shelter,” Nation, June 18–25, 2018, 15.
10. William Lucy, “Logue on Cities,” Planning 1, no. 8 (August 1985): 15. On memory versus the reality of urban renewal, see J. Rosie Tighe and Timothy J. Opelt, “Collective Memory and Planning: The Continuing Legacy of Urban Renewal in Asheville, NC,” JPH 15, no. 1 (February 2016): 46–67.
11. Richard Rogin, “New Town on a New York Island Named Welfare,” City 5, no. 3 (May–June 1971): 43.
12. Critiques of top-down planning for valuing rational expertise over local, indigenous knowledge include James Scott, Thinking Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); and Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
13. Logue, “The Head Table—Briefly,” March 21, 1981, EJL, 2002 Accession, Box 23,
Folder “Recognition to Friends.”
14. A classic statement of the growth-machine argument is J. R. Logan and H. L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
15. The masterful and comprehensive, if highly critical, book on Robert Moses is Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975); for a revisionist account that acknowledges more of his contributions, see Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
16. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961); for a critique along these lines at her death, see Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Outgrowing Jane Jacobs,” NYT, April 30, 2006. For other recent considerations of Jacobs, see Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (New York: Knopf, 2016).
17. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964); Reason website, http://www.reason.com, particularly Jacobs’s obituary, “Jane Jacobs, RIP,” http://reason.com/blog/2006/04/25/jane-jacobs-rip, and “Jane Jacobs at 100,” http://reason.com/blog/2016/05/04/jane-jacobs-at-100, which labels her “the great defender of urban freedom.” Peter Laurence offers a careful analysis of where Jacobs’s thinking overlapped with that of prominent conservatives like Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper and where she recognized that government action was needed; Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs, 289–305.