Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

    18. Lawrence P. Goldman, “Eulogy, Edward J. Logue, Memorial Service, April 27, 2000,” Faneuil Hall, Boston, MDL, 4. For Logue’s opinion of Moses, see Logue, interview, Steen, December 13, 1983, New York, NY, 31, where he called him a “high-handed son-of-a-bitch”; January 16, 1991, Boston, MA, 34, where he railed against Moses’s public housing as an “outrageous” national model, with “no redeeming qualities,” “no sense of community”; and July 11, 1991, 22–23, where he said Moses “could be the most charming guy in the world. But you don’t have to read more than two chapters of Caro to know that he had another side to him.”

    19. Robert Moses to Edward Otis Proctor, Esq., October 17, 1966, New York, NY, and Edward Otis Proctor to Robert Moses, October 21, 1966, Boston, MA, Robert Moses Papers, Box 84, NYPL, Rare Books and Manuscript Division, with thanks to Adam Tanaka.

    20. Ada Louise Huxtable, “New York’s 9/11 Site Needed Not a Moses but a Logue,” WSJ, August 27, 2008.

    21. Logue, “The View from the Village,” in “American Cities: Dead or Alive?—Two Views,” AF 116, no. 3 (March 1962): 89. Also see Walter McQuade, “Architecture,” Nation, March 17, 1962, 241–42, on the Logue-Jacobs debate at MoMA; Logue, interview, Steen, December 13, 1983, New York, NY, 44, where Logue said, “The only thing I have any respect for Jane Jacobs for is that when her son became a CO in the Vietnam War, she said, ‘The hell with this, I’m going to go to Canada with him.’”

    22. “Godmother of the American City,” interview by James Howard Kunstler expanded from Metropolis, March 2001, in Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2016), 73–75, 95. Also, Yardley, “Master Builder’s Mixed Legacy,” NYT. Logue claimed that he wrote to Jacobs “and offered to take her on a tour of any neighborhood [he] worked in, in New Haven or Boston”; Logue, “Reflections of ‘Mr. Urban Renewal, the Forgotten Master Builder,’” 1998, MDL.

    23. John Zuccotti, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, December 10, 2007, New York, NY.

    24. Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, The State of the Nation’s Housing 2018 (Cambridge, MA: Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2018), 1–6; Covert, “Give Us Shelter,” and Jimmy Tobias, “The Way Home,” Nation, June 18–25, 2018; Mathew Desmond, Eviction: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown, 2016); “Reach for the Sky: Running San Francisco,” Economist, June 2, 2018. “Moving to Opportunity” was the name of a demonstration research project implemented in the 1990s by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to assess the impact of mobility in housing achieved through Section 8 vouchers on the social and economic prospects of low-income families.

    25. Housing Act of 1949, Section 1441, Title 42, 3891, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2010-title42/pdf/USCODE-2010-title42-chap8A-subchapI-sec1441.pdf.

  1. The Making of an Urban Renewer

      1. Quote from Logue to John M. Golden, September 25, 1953, EJL, Series 4, Box 26, Folder 56. For more on Logue’s involvement in the Lee campaign, see Chester Kerr to Logue, October 7, 1953, EJL, Series 4, Box 27, Folder 67; and Logue to Chester Bowles, October 19, 1953, EJL, Series 3, Box 13, Folder 10, where Logue is listed as a member of the Executive Committee of Independents for Lee.

      2. Mayor Richard C. Lee, Speech to the New Haven Board of Aldermen, November 11, 1960, in Fred Powledge, Model City: A Test of American Liberalism; One Town’s Efforts to Rebuild Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 42. Lee used versions of this phrase frequently; also see Allan R. Talbot, The Mayor’s Game: Richard Lee of New Haven and the Politics of Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 88. So did Logue; see Logue, interview, Schussheim, 20.

      3. Logue frequently described his home as “without racial prejudice” in oral histories; see, for example, Logue, interview, Schussheim, 2.

      4. Logue quote in Ruth Knack, “Edward Logue, AICP,” Planning 64, no. 4 (April 1998): 16.

      5. Ellen Logue (sister), interview by Lizabeth Cohen, April 13, 2008, Berkeley, CA. Later in life, Logue credited Philadelphia with sparking his interest in urban design, “a city not without style and grace” where “I went to school in Rittenhouse Square and learned at a formative age what a delightful place a modest public square can be”; Logue, “The Education of an Urban Administrator,” in The Universitas Project: Solutions for a Post-Technological Society, conceived and directed by Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 177.

      6. Ellen Logue, interview; “Requiem Mass Celebrated for Sister Maria Kostka,” Catholic Standard and Times (Philadelphia), January 10, 1958.

      7. On Logue’s youth in Philadelphia, see Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 5:13–34; Paul Hogan, Philadelphia Boyhood: Growing Up in the 1930s (Vienna, VA: Holbrook and Kellogg, 1995); Ellen Logue, interview; Frank Logue, “From Yale to City Hall, and Back Again,” Yale Herald, December 6, 2002; Seymour “Spence” Toll to Margaret Logue, January 28, 2000, MDL. Toll, a high school friend of brother John, recalled “the years of terrible financial stress” during the Logues’ youth.

      8. On religious and class discrimination at Yale, see George Wilson Pierson, A Yale Book of Numbers: Historical Statistics of the College and University 1701–1976 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1983), 85, 87, 89, 96, 127; Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in cooperation with the American Jewish Archives, 1985), 70–71, 91–93, 181–82, 348n19; Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 200–219; Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), xviii, 14, 128, 131–32, 218; Geoffrey Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution: How Two Yale Presidents and Their Admissions Directors Tore Up the ‘Old Blueprint’ to Create a Modern Yale,” Yale Alumni Magazine, December 1999, http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/99_12/admissions.html, and the appreciative response by Frank Logue, http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/00_02/letters.html; Frank Logue, “From Yale to City Hall, and Back Again”; Frank Logue, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, February 15, 2006, Hamden, CT. On discrimination against Jewish faculty at Yale, which particularly hurt the sciences, see Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 416. William Horowitz, a local New Haven businessman and politician (and father of the historian Daniel Horowitz), was the first Jewish member of the Yale Corporation, elected in the mid-1960s by alumni petition. As of 1974, no Catholic had ever been a member, according to Raymond E. Wolfinger, The Politics of Progress (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 27–28. Daniel Horowitz’s fascinating study of the Yale College Class of 1960 shows how slowly the social order changed at Yale: On the Cusp: The Yale College Class of 1960 and a World on the Verge of Change (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).

  Thomas Bergin (Class of ’25, Ph.D. ’29), a New Haven High School graduate who attended Yale in the 1920s and felt excluded from the dominant prep-school culture, appreciated how much the college system improved the social experience of “the plebian class” when he returned as a professor in 1948. Nonetheless, when Anthony Astrachan (’52), a Jewish student from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, arrived that same year, he still encountered discrimination: “If you did not request specific roommates, the Yale of 1948 automatically put four Jewish strangers together. This concern for our comfort discomfited us by telling us we were all outsiders”; Thomas Bergin, “My Native Country,” and Anthony Astrachan, “Class Notes,” in My Harvard, My Yale, ed. Diana Dubois (New York: Random House, 1982), 160–67, 212.

      9. John Arcudi, interview by Deborah Sue Elkin, December 16, 1997, “Bridgeport Working: Voices from the 20th Century Oral History Project,” Bridgeport Public Library, transcript, 6, 10–13, 56; for the La Guardia rally and Winchester strike, Log
ue, interview by Deborah Sue Elkin, September 18, 1993, New Haven, CT, transcript from Elkin, 28–30; Bud Scher to Margaret, Frank, and John Logue, February 4, 2000, MDL.

    10. On the Labor Party of the Yale Political Union, see Deborah Sue Elkin, “Labor and the Left: The Limits of Acceptable Dissent at Yale University, 1920s to 1950s” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1995), 51.

    11. FBI, Report from New Haven, November 1, 1951, for United States Civil Service Commission, Security Clearance File, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on April 20, 2009, received on September 18, 2009, 3; Hood to FBI Washington Field, cable November 19, 1951, FOIA; Logue, Elkin interview, 15–16.

    12. Logue, interview, Schussheim, 10. Arcudi felt a similar connection to New Haven: “I go to New Haven in 1939, and I don’t have any money, you know? But I had great entertainment, walking around the streets of New Haven”; Arcudi, interview, 56.

    13. Quote from Logue, Elkin interview, 2. On Logue’s support of the union cause while a student, see letter to the editor, Yale Daily News, November 4, 1941. At a debate at the Yale Political Union, “Laborite” Logue defended the resolution “Resolved, That Yale C.I.O. employees should have a union shop”; “Moderates Pull Coup; P.U. Upholds ‘Protective Shop,’” Yale Daily News, November 27, 1941.

    14. Ellen Logue, interview.

    15. MLogue, interview.

    16. On Logue’s work as a labor organizer, see YULocal35, Boxes 1 and 3, including Logue to A. D. Lewis, September 8, 1948, Box 1, Folder 3; Elkin, “Labor and the Left,” 48–228; Logue, Elkin interview, 16–18. For conditions of Yale workers, see George Butler, “Yale Needs the C.I.O.,” Nation 146, no. 3 (January 15, 1938): 67–68. On labor in New Haven more broadly, see Frank E. Annunziato, William Carey, and Nick Aiello, Labor Almanac: New Haven’s Unions in the 1990s, a joint project of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association and the Greater New Haven Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, 1995.

    17. Logue to Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 29, 1942, EJL, Series 1, Box 6, Folder 94; Military Intelligence Service, War Department, Washington, DC, to Honorable J. Edgar Hoover, Director, FBI, July 3, 1943, with accompanying report by Intelligence Division, Army Service Forces, June 10, 1943, FOIA.

    18. From YULocal35, Box 1, Folder 7: Logue to Member, January 29, 1942; Logue to A. D. Lewis, January 26, 1943: “I am more than happy,” he wrote in his resignation letter, “to fight as a member of the Army Air Corps for our democracy and for the cause of free labor everywhere.”

    19. “Master Pieces: Ed Logue Talks with Rebecca Barnes AIA,” AB 1, no. 2 (1998): 32; Logue, “Life as a City Builder—‘Make No Little Plans,’” March 26, 1991, written for Yale Reunion Book, The Yale ’42 Story: 50 Years Out, MDL, 2; “Another Droopsnoot Bombardier Checks In,” Crosshairs, September 1994, 15.

    20. On Le Corbusier, see M. Christine Boyer, “Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier’s Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940s,” diacritics 33, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2003): 93–116; quotation in Le Corbusier, trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, originally published 1930), 236.

    21. Logue to Mary Nelles, November 4, 1944, EJL, Series 1, Box 5, Folder 77; Max Page and Timothy Mennel, eds., Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2011), 5–6. For Maurice Rotival’s bird’s-eye viewing, see Rachel D. Carley, “Tomorrow Is Here: New Haven and the Modern Moment,” report prepared for New Haven Preservation Trust, June 2008, 16.

    22. Logue’s work as a union organizer from 1946 to 1948 in YULocal35, Box 1, Folders 11, 12, 13, and EJL, Series 1, Box 7, Folders 110–23. For Logue’s appointment as a part-time organizer, see Logue to A. D. Lewis, October 7, 1946, and A. D. Lewis to Logue, November 1, 1946, EJL, Series 1, Box 6, Folder 109, and a detailed paper Logue wrote for Fred Rodell about his efforts, “Organizational Techniques,” April 21, 1947, EJL, Series 1, Box 6, Folder 102.

    23. MLogue, interview; Logue’s references for jobs included Rodell, Dean Wesley Sturges, Harry Schulman (a labor arbitrator), and Thomas I. Emerson, probably the most politically radical member of the Yale Law faculty; Glenn Fowler, “Thomas I. Emerson, 83, Scholar Who Molded Civil Liberties Law,” NYT, June 22, 1991.

    24. Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale, 1927–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Laura Kalman, “Legal Realism,” in The Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History, ed. Stanley L. Katz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Neil Duxbury, “In the Twilight of Legal Realism: Fred Rodell and the Limits of Legal Critique,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1991): 354–95; Charles Alan Wright, “Goodbye to Fred Rodell,” Yale Law Review Journal 89, no. 8 (July 1980): 1455–62; “Journals of Opinion and the Work of Democracy: A Conversation with Victor S. Navasky,” Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Navasky/navasky-conl.html. At an August 1944 union meeting, Rodell said, “I’m even more grateful for the honorary membership you have given me than for the honor of belonging to the University Faculty”; clippings: “Union Will Seek Contract Revision with University” and “Law Professor Joins Employees Union,” scrapbook, YULocal35, Box 3, Folder 1. I am grateful to Laura Kalman for guiding me through the complexities of legal realism at Yale.

    25. As early as 1942, Logue spoke out against redbaiting: Logue to A. D. Lewis, October 21, 1942, YULocal35, Box 1, Folder 3: “It is my belief that the labor movement in general can gain nothing by a policy of redbaiting. I don’t like Communists, but there are other ways of getting them out of their positions of power than crying ‘Bolsheviks’ to the general public.” For his efforts to expose Yale’s discriminatory quotas against blacks, Jews, Catholics, and other minorities, as well as politically motivated hiring and firing, see EJL, Series 1, Box 6, Folder 101; Logue to Margaret DeVane, April 23, 1946, EJL, Series 1, Box 3, Folder 31; also Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 67–68, 250–53; and Seymour quote, Crimson, June 4, 1949, 111.

    26. On factionalism in the AVC: Logue, “Citizens First, Veterans Second,” Progressive 10, no. 48 (December 16, 1946): 4, 11; Logue, Elkin interview, 32–33. Also, John S. Atlee, “A.V.C. Sets the Pace,” Nation, June 22, 1946, 740–41; “Veterans: ‘Citizens First,’” Time, June 24, 1946, 23–24; Julian H. Franklin, “Why I Broke with the Communists,” Harper’s, May 1947, 412–18; Robert L. Tyler, “The American Veterans Committee: Out of a Hot War and into the Cold,” American Quarterly 18, no. 3 (Fall 1966): 419–36; Robert Francis Saxe, “‘Citizens First, Veterans Second’: The American Veterans Committee and the Challenge of Postwar ‘Independent Progressives,’” War and Society 22, no. 2 (October 2004): 75–94. At nearby Columbia University, the freshman and later prominent sociologist Emmanuel Wallerstein found the AVC to be “the most vibrant political organization on campus” but “torn apart (and destroyed) by this … split”; http://iwallerstein.com/intellectual-itinerary/.

    27. Logue, “Negro Labor: A Call to Action,” Progressive 10, no. 13 (April 1, 1946): 10; Philip Burnham to Edward Logue, April 24, 1946, EJL, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 13.

    28. Harold Grabino, interview, March 22, 2006, by telephone, Ruben, transcript, 2.

    29. Logue’s “Grades for 1946 Fall Term” included “Property I”; “Grades for 1947 Spring Term” included “Legal Aspects of Community Planning and Development,” EJL, Series 1, Box 6, Folder 98. Logue also took “Law, Science and Policy” under Harold Lasswell in spring 1946; EJL, Series 1, Box 6, Folder 100. In May 1947, he wrote a paper proposing a “labor law firm” to service the legal needs of workers, which began, “The law is a thing that makes rich men richer and poor men poorer”; EJL, Series 1, Box 6, Folder 106. Also, Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale, 176–87.

    30. FBI
, Report from New Haven, November 1, 1951, FOIA, 4; “Logue, 1942, Succeeds John Clark, as Head of Yale Employees Union,” Yale Daily News, July 6, 1942. Logue’s sister, Ellen, remembered that when his union activity angered Yale alumni in Philadelphia who had funded his scholarship, Ed’s response was, “It’s the right thing to do”; Ellen Logue, interview.

    31. Logue to Ellen Logue, April 24, 1947, EJL, Series 1, Box 3, Folder 45.

    32. Milton DeVane, interview, April 13, 2006, Ruben, transcript, 26.

    33. Allan Talbot, email message to author, June 13, 2007.

    34. “Interrogatory No. 5” in “Interrogatory for Edward J. Logue,” eleven questions with responses by Logue, June 23, 1952, to Conrad E. Snow, Chairman, Loyalty Security Board, U.S. Department of State, 1–7, in response to request from Mr. Snow, May 27, 1952, MDL.

    35. Logue to M. H. Goldstein, September 15, 1947, EJL, Series 1, Box 2, Folder 28, expressing determination “to take a long look at the Philadelphia City Planning Exhibition.” More on Logue’s visit to the exhibition in EJL, Series 1, Box 5, Folder 83. Quote from “The Better Philadelphia Exhibition: What City Planning Means to You,” 1947, General Pamphlets, Box 521, Temple University Urban Archives, cited in Scott Gabriel Knowles, ed., Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 87, also see 29–31, 86–91. In addition, “Philadelphia Plans Again,” Newsletter, Citizens’ Council on City Planning, EJL, Series 1, Box 5, Folder 83.