Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

    90. Rae, City, 361–63; Logue, interview by Joyce, Bowles, 46. Many people I interviewed noted how renewal efforts were undermined by the city’s steady bleeding of jobs; see Allan Talbot, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 13, 2007, New York, NY; Howard R. Moskof, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, April 21, 2006, Chevy Chase, MD.

    91. As early as September 1954, a mere six months into Lee’s first term, Logue was already scheming how to get more help from Yale; see Spence Toll to Logue, September 11, 1954, Rotival, Box 36, Folder “N.H. City, 1954–55.” For Logue’s criticism of Yale’s inaction in New Haven, see, for example, Logue, “Life as a City Builder—‘Make No Little Plans,’” written for the Yale Reunion Book, March 26, 1991, MDL; Logue to Linda Lorimer, Secretary, Yale University, May 12, 1995, MDL.

    92. Rob Gerwitt, “Death of a Neighborhood,” Mother Jones, September 1, 2000, 8–9.

    93. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

    94. Insert in AIM Newsletter 4, no. 20 (November 15, 1969), in Jackson, Model City Blues, 156.

    95. Logue, “The Boston Story—Getting Started,” draft chapter for memoir, “Tales of a City Builder, Compared to What,” January 2000, MDL, 6–v7.

  4. Sizing Up the Old Boston

      1. Logue, “The Boston Story—Getting Started,” draft chapter for memoir, “Tales of a City Builder, Compared to What,” January 2000, MDL, 6–8v7. For more on the recruitment of Logue to Boston, Joseph Slavet, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 31, 2007, Boston, MA; Lewis H. Weinstein, My Life at the Bar: Six Decades as Lawyer, Soldier, Teacher and Pro Bono Activist (Hanover, MA: Christopher Publishing House, 1993), 139–41. Amusingly, Logue wrote to a girlfriend from the military during World War II, after she had visited Boston: “Have much trouble finding your way around Boston? It’s the only town I have been in twice and still had a great deal of difficulty orienting myself”; Logue to Babe, October 5, 1944, EJL, Series 1, Box 3, Folder 44.

      2. Logue, “The Boston Story,” 8v7; also Logue, interview by Richard Heath, December 7, 1990, in Heath, An Act of Faith: The Building of the Washington Park Urban Renewal Area, 1960–1975, booklet originally published 1990, reprinted 2005, part 5, 2; Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 84 (1972): 84.

      3. “Logue Remains Silent on $40,000 Mass. Post,” NHR, January 22, 1960; “People,” AF (March 1960).

      4. Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 84; on the issue of Logue’s salary, see Janet Bowler Fitzgibbons, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 21, 2007, Cambridge, MA; Ellen Logue, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, April 13, 2008, Berkeley, CA; MLogue, interview. Logue took pride that he was the highest-paid public official in New England; Logue, interview, Schussheim, transcript, 26.

      5. See correspondence from Collins, Box 172, Folders 13 and 14: Logue to Jock Saltonstall, Jr., December 31, 1959; Saltonstall, Jr., to John F. Collins, January 4, 1960; Memos “Development Administrator—City of Boston” and “Development Program for the City of Boston,” January 26, 1960; Logue to Collins, February 2, 1960; Memo “Development Administrator—City of Boston,” February 2, 1960; Logue to Collins, February 5, 1960; Logue to Collins, February 23, 1960, with attachment “Development Program Outline, City of Boston.”

      6. “What’s Happening to Proper Old Boston?,” Newsweek, April 26, 1965; “Bold Boston Gladiator—Ed Logue: Planner Stirs Up a Ruckus and Battles Opposition to Build the Place of His Dreams,” Life, December 24, 1965, 126–34; “Meet Boston’s Mr. Urban Renewal,” CSM, December 18, 1965, 126–34; Nicholas von Hoffman, “Ed Logue—the Master Rebuilder,” WP, April 15, 1967.

      7. Edward J. Driscoll, Jr., “Edward Logue Is Dead, Gave Boston New Face,” BG, January 28, 2000; Logue, interview by Heath, 1.

      8. Irene Saint, “What Makes Logue Tick: He Has Wheedled $200 Million out of the Federal Government to Help Build the New Boston,” BH, December 5, 1965.

      9. Logue, “The Boston Story,” 13–17v7, 26v7, 35v7, 39v7, 47v7; Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 89–90; “$90 Million Development Program for Boston,” CR, September 24, 1960; Robert B. Hannan, “Huge Renewal Plan Offered by Collins,” BG, September 22, 1960; “Remarks of Mayor John F. Collins at a public meeting on the Proposed Development Program in the Old South Meeting House, October 7, 1960, 7 p.m.,” EJL, Series 6, Box 148, Folder 374.

    10. Barry Bluestone and Mary Huff Stevenson, The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, and Economic Change in an American Metropolis (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), 81.

    11. For more details and statistics on Boston’s economy in 1960, see Walter McQuade, “Boston: What Can a Sick City Do?,” Fortune, June 1964; “Boston Bonds’ Rating Slips a Notch,” BW, December 19, 1959; Nancy Rita Arnone, “Redevelopment in Boston: A Study of the Politics and Administration of Social Change” (Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 1965), 14–17; John Stainton, Urban Renewal and Planning in Boston: A Review of the Past and a Look at the Future, consultant study directed by John Stainton, commissioned by the Citizens Housing and Planning Association and Boston Redevelopment Authority, November 1972, 3, 24–35; Jeffrey P. Brown, “Boston,” in Cities Reborn, ed. Rachelle L. Levitt (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 1987), 9–27; Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 168; Thomas H. O’Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950–1970 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 42–43, 146–47; Gerard O’Neill, Rogues and Redeemers: When Politics Was King in Irish Boston (New York: Crown, 2012), 120; John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 142–45.

    12. Quote from CSM, August 2, 1960, cited in Timothy Francis Rose, “Civic War: People, Politics, and the Battle of New Boston, 1945–1967” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2006), 45.

    13. Logue, “The Boston Story,” 36v7.

    14. Quotes from BG, November 3, 1949, and William Shannon, “Boston’s Irish Mayors: An Ethnic Perspective,” in Boston 1700–1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics, ed. Ronald Formisano and Constance Burns (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 205, cited in Rose, “Civic War,” 82–83. Another source put the 1959 figure of city income from real estate taxes at 69.1 percent; George Sternlieb, The Future of the Downtown Department Store, mimeographed (Cambridge, MA: Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard University, 1962), 141. Jon Teaford cited a 1963 statistic from the U.S. Census Bureau of 61 percent of general revenue coming from the property tax, but even that made it far higher than in eleven other major cities, Cleveland being next highest at 53.3 percent; Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 144. For the definitive biography of James Michael Curley, see Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874–1958) (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992).

    15. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 95–97; the Brandeis quote is attributed to Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 495. The Cox quotation was brought to Logue’s attention; Stonewall J. McMurray III to Logue, August 11, 1965, EJL, Series 6, Box 150, Folder 433, 1.

    16. “Urban Development Prospects as Seen by Edward Logue,” speech given to a Boston College Citizen Seminar, April 12, 1960, CR, April 16, 1960, 318.

    17. O’Connor, Building a New Boston, 43, 91; for more on the lack of home rule, see Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Boston: The Job Ahead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pre
ss, 1966), 11–16; David J. Barron, Gerald E. Frug, and Rick T. Su, Dispelling the Myth of Home Rule: Local Power in Greater Boston (Cambridge, MA: Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2004); and Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron, City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

    18. Henry Scagnoli, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 20, 2007, Boston, MA.

    19. Opposition to Curley’s machine went beyond Yankees. Joe Slavet’s father was a socialist-leaning Jewish Democrat who said he “never voted Irish” and always supported Republicans to deprive Curley of support; Slavet, interview.

    20. Ryan quoted in “Is Boston ‘Beginning to Boil?’” Fortune, June 1957; “Route 128 Opens Boston’s High Tech Age, August 24, 1951,” Mass Moments, https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/route-128-opens-bostons-high-tech-age.html; William Holt, “The Man Behind Route 128,” BG, January 11, 2015; Massachusetts Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, Route 128: Boston’s Road to Segregation, January 1975, 37–42; “Urban General: James McCormack” and “Transportation: ‘If It Gets Any Worse, It May Never Get Better,’” AF 120 (June 1964): 85, 111.

    21. William J. Poorvu, “Yale, New Haven, and Me,” in Class of 1956 Book, Yale University, 2006, 75.

    22. On the redlining of lower-class, ethnic, and racial urban neighborhoods beginning in the 1930s, see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 197–218; and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2003), 170–72, 214, 221.

    23. Scagnoli, interview.

    24. Dero A. Saunders, “Department Stores: Race for the Suburbs,” Fortune, December 1951; “Downtown Loads Its Heavy Guns,” BW, November 23, 1957; Sternlieb, Future of the Downtown Department Store, particularly 162–70; “Downtown Boston Slips; Branches Up,” WWD, March 5, 1963; “Boston Makes a Comeback: A Look at an Old Metropolis ‘On the Move,’” U.S. News and World Report, September 21, 1964; “Boston Retailers Gain 5% for 1963; Downtown Lags,” WWD, February 25, 1964; “The Downtown Area: How to Clean It Up—and Make It Pay,” AF 120 (June 1964): 99; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Profile of a City—Boston,” HUD Notes, September–October 1966, 4.

    25. O’Neill, Rogues and Redeemers, 98, also 115–41; O’Connor, Building a New Boston, 21–149, passim.

    26. “Boston Makes a Comeback”; also James Aloisi, “The New Boston Was a Mix of Good and Bad,” CommonWealth, 2–3, September 26, 2013, https://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/007-the-new-boston-was-a-mix-of-good-and-bad/.

    27. Logue, “The Boston Story,” 38v7.

    28. John Collins, interview by José de Varon, Tape 12, March 24, 1977, EJL, 1985 Accession, Box 3, Folder “Oral History John Collins,” transcript, 2–4; Scagnoli, interview.

    29. On Kane Simonian, see articles on Simonian soon after his death in West Ender 15, no. 3 (September 1999); Slavet, interview; O’Neill, Rogues and Redeemers, 151–55, 173–74.

    30. James A. Aloisi, Jr., The Big Dig (Beverly, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2004), 5–9.

    31. For a detailed, insightful history of the Prudential Center, Elihu Rubin, Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Benjamin Waterhouse, “‘Through the Ordinary Operations of Private Enterprise’: The Prudential Insurance Company’s Corporate Renewal in Boston” (seminar paper, Harvard University, May 18, 2005), in possession of the author. In an otherwise laudatory column about Boston’s urban renewal, the NYT architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable condemned the Prudential Center as “a flashy 52-story glass and aluminum tower” that was “a Back Bay behemoth,” part of an “over-scaled megalomaniac group” of buildings, “shockingly unrelated to the city’s size, standards or style”; Huxtable, “Renewal in Boston: Good and Bad,” NYT, April 19, 1964.

    32. On the long negotiation with the federal government over placement of the federal building, see Richard Wallace Nathan, “The Government Center of Boston” (unpublished manuscript), Inter-University Case Program, October 1960.

    33. Wolf Von Eckardt, “Architectural Commentary on Boston Today,” Ekistics 18, no. 105 (August 1964): 88, 93. An earlier, more architecturally successful design for the site—then called the Back Bay Center—by an illustrious group of Boston architects headed by Walter Gropius, had been promoted by the downtown New Haven developer Roger Stevens during the 1950s, but it failed; Rubin, Insuring the City, 114–20, 167–72. As early as 1963, George Sternlieb cautioned that the construction of the Prudential Center in the Back Bay could speed the decay of downtown retail; George Sternlieb, “The Future of Retailing in the Downtown Core,” JAIP 29, no. 2 (May 1963): 111; for early discussion of Back Bay retail, see “Major Changes Affect Boston Retail Scene,” WWD, June 11, 1957.

    34. Mel King, Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 20–21.

    35. Emilie Tavel, “Debate Mounts in Boston Over Plan to Rebuild West End District,” CSM, July 9, 1956; Joseph A. Keblinsky, “Favoritism on Contract Denied in West End Row,” BG, December 8, 1956; Daniel M. Abramson, “Boston’s West End: Urban Obsolescence in Mid-Twentieth Century America,” in Daniel M. Abramson, Arindam Dutta, Timothy Hyde, and Jonathan Massey, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 47–69; Robert Campbell, “Boston’s Old West End Persists as a Palace,” BG, January 8, 2012, for historic and contemporary photographs of the West End.

  As with New Haven’s Oak Street neighborhood, the West End has an organization of active former residents who sponsor reunions; a newspaper, The West Ender, with the tagline “Printed in the Spirit of the Mid-Town Journal and Dedicated to Being the Collective Conscience of Urban Renewal and Eminent Domain in the City of Boston”; and a museum and archive (the West End Museum); see Barry Newman, “West End Story: A Neighborhood Died, but One Bostonian Refuses to Let It Go,” WSJ, August 23, 2000; Joe Battenfeld, “West End Story,” BH Magazine, February 15, 1987; Peter Anderson, “West End Story: A Neighborhood in Exile and Its Efforts to Go Home,” BG Magazine, May 24, 1987; Michael Kenney, “The Museum Feels Their Pain: A Lost ’Hood Gets Its Belated Due,” BG, October 21, 2007.

    36. On how Rappaport got the West End project, see Frank Del Vecchio, City Streets: A Memoir (North Andover, MA: Leap Year Press, 2016), 209–10; also Anthony Yudis, “West End Sidewalk Plan Set Off Logue-Rappaport Feud,” BG, August 12, 1963, on the state legislature’s frustration over the developers’ decision not to build subsidized housing. Joseph Lee provided Logue with a list of inappropriate actions by Kane Simonian and the BRA in the transaction of the West End’s urban renewal: Joseph Lee to Logue, February 14, 1961, EJL, Series 6, Box 148, Folder 375. The estimates of how many residents were dislocated vary wildly, from 1,729 to 7,000; many residents departed on their own over the many years that the project was in planning; O’Connor, Building a New Boston, 125; Kennedy, Planning the City upon a Hill, 164.

    37. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1962); Marc Fried, The World of the Urban Working Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973); Chester Hartman, “The Housing of Relocated Families,” JAIP 30, no. 4 (November 1964): 266–86. Logue responded to Hartman, who then had a rejoinder; Logue, “Comment on ‘The Housing of Relocated Families,’” JAIP 31, no. 4 (November 1964): 338–40; and Hartman, “Rejoinder by the Author,” 340–44. The whole debate is analyzed in Jay Curtis Getz, “The Progressive Technician and Mr. Urban Renewal: Lawrence Veiller, Edward Logue, and the Evolution of Planning for Low-Income Housing” (M.A. thesis, University of Illin
ois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990), 87–99. The urban historian Alexander von Hoffman recalled asking Logue how he would like to be introduced at an American Planning Association conference session years later; Logue replied, “Tell them I wasn’t responsible for the West End!” Alexander von Hoffman, email message to author, May 18, 2015.

    38. Yudis, “West End Sidewalk Plan Set Off Logue-Rappaport Feud”; also Logue, “The Boston Story,” 4v7.

    39. Collins, interviews by de Varon: Tape 17, May 13, 1977, 3; Tape 30, October 25, 1977, 4–8, 11–12; Tape 31, October 26, 1977, 1–3.

    40. Collins, interview by de Varon, Tape 30, October 25, 1977, 2, 9–11.

    41. On John Collins and the 1959 election, see Murray B. Levin, The Alienated Voter: Politics in Boston (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960); O’Neill, Rogues and Redeemers, 159–69; O’Connor, Building a New Boston, 150–61; Scagnoli, interview, on television in campaign; John Patrick Ryan, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 18, 2007, Cambridge, MA.

    42. Slavet, interview. On the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, see Boston Urban Study Group, Who Rules Boston? A Citizen’s Guide to Reclaiming the City (Boston: Institute for Democratic Socialism, 1984), 53–54. Slavet had made a study of urban renewal programs nationwide in 1959, including visiting New Haven, where he first met Logue; he was appalled at how much Boston lagged in per capita federal urban renewal spending; Joseph S. Slavet, Charting the Future of Urban Renewal (Boston: Boston Municipal Research Bureau, July 1959).