Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  110. Katherine M. Shannon, interview by Ruth Batson, December 27, 1967, Boston, MA, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Batson Papers, Schlesinger Library, Box 1, cited in Geismer, Don’t Blame Us, 81. Logue lamented the lack of support for his busing proposal and the limited scale of the METCO voluntary plan in Logue, “Crisis in the City: Lectures at Boston University 1968,” Boston University Urban Institute, 1970, 48.

  111. In 1970, Logue would make the radical proposal that Greater Boston learn from the example of Greater London and reorganize government on a two-tier metropolitan basis, with a metropolitan government assuming all assessing and taxing powers and local communities—Boston proper and a dozen small-scale town units within Routes 128 or 495—keeping control over services and facilities; Logue, “What Sort of Future for Boston? A Look at Home from Abroad,” Boston University Journal 18, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 49–51.

  112. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961); Logue, “The View from the Village,” in “American Cities: Dead or Alive?—Two Views,” AF 116, no. 3 (March 1962): 89–90; Walter McQuade, “Architecture,” Nation, March 17, 1962, 241–42; Anthony J. Yudis, “Logue Replies to Author-Critic of City Planning,” BG, April 5, 1962; Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 117, 119.

  5. Battling for a New Boston

      1. “The Past and Future of Planning in Boston,” The Taubman Center Report (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) (1999): 12; also see Linda Corman, “Former BRA Head Takes Another Look at the City He Helped Plan,” Banker and Tradesman, October 21, 1987, 9.

      2. Martin Meyerson and Edward C. Banfield, Boston: The Job Ahead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 68. The same U.S. Census of Housing determined that 90.7 percent of Boston’s housing units were built before 1939, indicating little new construction in the neighborhoods; “Monograph, City of Boston,” Massachusetts Department of Commerce and Development, revised December 1964, “Boston: III. Housing—U.S. Census, 1960,” EJL, Series 6, Box 148, Folder 380.

      3. Janet Bowler Fitzgibbons, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 21, 2007, Cambridge, MA.

      4. Langley Keyes, City Builder: An Interview with Ed Logue, Administrator of the Boston Redevelopment Authority from 1960–67, 1983, video, Rotch Architecture and Design Library, MIT.

      5. John Collins, interview by José de Varon, Tape 6, December 21, 1976, EJL, 1985 Accession, Box 3, Folder “Oral History John Collins,” transcript, 5.

      6. Logue, interview, Steen, December 13, 1983, New York, NY, 28.

      7. “The Old Seaport: Planning a Window on the World,” AF 120 (June 1964): 95–96; the plan was enthusiastically endorsed by the architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt in “Architectural Commentary on Boston Today,” Ekistics 18, no. 105 (August 1964): 90–92.

      8. Kevin Lynch Papers, MIT Archives and Special Collections (hereafter Lynch), contain important documentation on the waterfront project. These quotes from “Memorandum Preliminary to the Conference on the Downtown Waterfront Faneuil Hall Renewal Area,” Quincy Market, 1 p.m., October 17, 1961, prepared by Daniel J. Ahern and Samuel E. Mintz, Box 2, Folder “Waterfront”; also see “BRA with C of C Presentation to Logue,” Thursday, March 15, 1962, 8:30 p.m., and numerous meeting minutes from “Waterfront—BRA Staff & Logue”; “Downtown Waterfront–Faneuil Hall Renewal Area, Progress Report on Food Market Relocation Including a Recommended Site for a New Food Distribution Center,” December 1962; and Anthony Yudis, “B.R.A. Vows Waterfront Aid,” BG, June 27, 1962; Yudis, “New Look Waterfront Faces Major Hurdles,” BG, July 5, 1963.

      9. Timothy Orwig, “Concrete Solutions: Tad Stahl’s Urbanism,” Historic New England, Spring 2012, 19–20, on early involvement of Tad Stahl and Roger Webb in proposing the rehabilitation of the historic markets.

    10. Logue, “The Boston Story—Getting Started,” draft chapter for memoir, “Tales of a City Builder, Compared to What,” January 2000, MDL, 31v7; Corman, “Former BRA Head Takes Another Look at the City He Helped Plan,” 9; Walter McQuade, “Boston: What Can a Sick City Do?,” Fortune, June 1964, 166.

    11. “Boom Moves into the Hub,” BW, June 9, 1962, 116.

    12. On the CCBD and its planning, see Irene Saint, “Downtown Business Area Changes Made Cautiously,” BH, November 30, 1965; “$400 Million Plan for Downtown Revitalization Called Creative, Bold, Realistic,” CR 59, no. 21 (May 27, 1967): 409; Boston Redevelopment Authority, “Progress Report on the Central Business District Project,” March 12, 1962; and BRA, “Central Business District Project—Informational Memo,” August 27, 1962, EJL, Series 6, Box 152, Folder 481; “Statement by Charles A. Coolidge, President, The CCBD, Inc. before the Boston City Council,” September 26, 1962, EJL, Series 6, Box 153, Folder 501; Memo from Logue to Mayor John F. Collins, February 5, 1963, “Status Report—Downtown Plan,” EJL, Series 6, Box 152, Folder 482; CCBD and BRA, “Recommendations Concerning the Interim Report for the Central Business District Project,” February 19, 1963, EJL, Series 6, Box 152, Folder 485; Memo to Ed Logue from Robert Hazen, October 22, 1963, “CBD Status and Recommendations,” EJL, Series 6, Box 152, Folder 485; Memo from Brimley Hall to Robert G. Hazen, “CCBD Executive Committee Meeting with Victor Gruen—August 10, 1964,” and Memo to Logue from Robert G. Hazen, December 11, 1964, EJL, Series 6, Box 153, Folder 501; “The Downtown Area: How to Clean It Up—and Make It Pay,” AF 120 (June 1964): 100–101; “CCBD,” EJL, Series 6, Box 153, Folder 501; Memo to Board of Directors, CCBD from Robert G. Hazen, March 15, 1965, “Status Report—CBD and Related Development and Transportation Projects,” EJL, Series 6, Box 153, Folder 502; Memo from Robert G. Hazen to Logue, March 16, 1965, “Filene’s,” Series 6, Box 152, Folder 483; Memo to CBD Executive Committee from Robert G. Hazen, “Draft Central Business District Urban Renewal Plan,” February 11, 1966, EJL, Series 6, Box 153, Folder 503; Minutes of CCBD Board of Directors’ Meeting, December 12, 1966, EJL, Series 6, Box 153, Folder 513; draft and news releases for A General Plan for the Central Business District, 1967, EJL, Series 6, Box 152, Folder 484.

  On retailers’ concerns about the present and future of Boston’s retail center, see “‘Where to Park’ Guide Published by Chamber,” CR 55, no. 7 (February 16, 1963): 149; “Statement by Charles A. Coolidge, Esq., President of the CCBD, Inc. to the BRA Public Hearing, October 7, 1965, Faneuil Hall, Boston on the Central Business District Renewal Project,” EJL, Series 6, Box 153, Folder 502; Remarks of Harold D. Hodgkinson, Chairman of the Board of William Filene’s Sons Co. at the First Citizens Seminar on the Fiscal, Economic and Political Problems of Boston and the Metropolitan Community, “A Look at the Record and Unfinished Business,” November 19, 1963, sponsored by the College of Business Administration and Bureau of Public Affairs, Boston College; “Downtown Garage,” CR 57, no. 41 (October 9, 1965): 726.

  Robert Gladstone’s report was Downtown Boston Market Studies, 1963. For an astute observation of the work of the CCBD and the general situation in Boston’s downtown, see McQuade, “Boston: What Can a Sick City Do?,” 166.

    13. Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis—Diagnosis and Cure (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 321–26. For Gruen’s stillborn plan for Fort Worth, see M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of the American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 166–92.

    14. Saint, “Downtown Business Area Changes.”

    15. My argument resembles that of John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), who suggests that “political entrepreneurs” like Collins and Logue used government intervention to draw capitalists to their own objectives and did not simply do their bidding.

    16. Robert Hazen, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 14, 2007, New York, NY; Nancy Rit
a Arnone, “Development in Boston: A Study of the Politics and Administration of Social Change” (Ph.D. dissertation, MIT, 1965), 130; Robert Litke, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 25, 2006, Somerset, NJ.

    17. “Governor, Private Sectors Have Failed to Aid Mayors in Big Urban Crisis,” CR, August 5, 1967.

    18. “Boom Moves into the Hub,” BW, June 9, 1962, 118; “Young Promoters: Wood and Stahl,” AF 120 (June 1964); Henry Scagnoli, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 20, 2007, Boston, MA.

    19. John Quincy, Jr., Quincy’s Market: A Boston Landmark (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), 188–93, 215–19; “Faneuil Hall Markets: Operation Restoration,” CR, March 31, 1975.

    20. Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

    21. “Boston’s Prince of the Church,” excerpt from John H. Fenton, Salt of the Earth: An Informal Profile of Richard Cardinal Cushing (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965), 3–13, in The Many Voices of Boston: A Historical Anthology, 1630–1975, ed. Howard Mumford Jones and Bessie Zaban Jones (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 431–37.

    22. Logue, “The Boston Story,” 21. The archdiocese gave enthusiastic support to the hiring of Logue in 1961; “New Brooms,” reprinted from The Pilot in the BG, March 14, 1961.

    23. Ken Hartnett, “A Conversation with Monsignor Francis J. Lally,” BM, October 1984. For evidence of Monsignor Lally’s Progressivism before Vatican II, likely shared with Cushing, see “A Mike Wallace Interview with Francis J. Lally,” produced by ABC in association with the Fund for the Republic, 1958, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/lally_francis_t.html. For Lally’s views on urban renewal: “Churchly Chairman: Monsignor Lally,” AF 120 (June 1964): 86; Francis J. Lally, The Catholic Church in a Changing America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962); and his Boston College Citizen Seminars speeches, including “Remarks of Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis J. Lally, Editor of The Pilot, at the Eighth Annual Conference on Economic Problems of Greater Boston Area, May 23, 1961” and “Remarks of Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis J. Lally, Editor of The Pilot, Chairman of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, at the Third Citizens Seminar on the Fiscal, Economic, and Political Problems of Boston and the Metropolitan Community, ‘Youth-Education-Employment,’ January 28, 1964” (Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College, 1964).

    24. Quoted in Hartnett, “Conversation with Lally.”

    25. Philip Denvir, “Cardinal Officiates at West End Dedication; Priests’ Residence Blessed,” BG, December 28, 1964. On the El location, Gerard O’Neill, Rogues and Redeemers: When Politics Was King in Irish Boston (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 199; Frederick Salvucci, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 16, 2009, Cambridge, MA.

    26. My discussion of the Boston Catholic Church and Vatican II and urban renewal is based on the following sources: “The Unlikely Cardinal,” in “Catholics in the U.S.: A Surge of Renewal,” special issue, Time, August 21, 1964; Xavier Rynne, “Letter from Vatican City,” New Yorker, December 25, 1965; Patrick Allitt, Religion in America Since 1945: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 67, 80–86, 107–11; John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 205, 236–38, 256, 269, 283–84; James Carroll, “The Catholic Church’s Lost Revolution,” BG, September 30, 2012. On Boston specifically: Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 239–82; John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 125–26, 128–32, 145, 151, 158–64, 178–80, 209; Thomas H. O’Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950 to 1970 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 13–14, 37, 42, 45, 49, 92–98, 102–6, 116, 127–31, 177, 196–97, 216–19; and J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 354–56, 385.

    27. This discussion is drawn from my published essay “Re-viewing the Twentieth Century Through an American Catholic Lens,” in Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History, ed. R. Scott Appleby and Kathleen Sprows Cummings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press with the Cushwa Center, Notre Dame, 2012), 43–60. Also see McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 178–80; and William Leonard, “The Failure of Catholic Interracialism in Boston Before Busing,” 228–45, and James E. Glinski, “The Catholic Church and the Desegregation of Boston’s Public Schools,” 246–69, in Boston’s Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O’Connor, ed. James M. O’Toole and David Quigley (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004); Joseph Marr Cronin, Reforming Boston Schools, 1930–2006 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 78–80.

    28. Logue, “The Boston Story,” 11v7.

    29. Arnone, “Redevelopment in Boston,” 89–91, 144.

    30. With an eye on its burgeoning suburban readership, the Globe moved in 1958 from its urban headquarters on Newspaper Row to a more sprawling complex on Morrissey Boulevard closer to highways; Dan Adams, “Globe to Move to State Street Offices,” BG, December 11, 2015.

    31. Logue, “The Boston Story,” 10v7.

    32. On the Globe and Tom Winship, see Boston Urban Study Group, Who Rules Boston?: A Citizen’s Guide to Reclaiming the City (Boston: Institute for Democratic Socialism, 1984), 88–92; “Thomas Winship, 81; Editor,” LAT, March 15, 2002; Mary McGrory, “The Crusader Who Put the Boston Globe on the Map,” March 15, 2002; Lukas, Common Ground, 478–92; for affectionate notes between Logue and Winship, see EJL, Series 6, Box 151, Folder 460.

    33. Martin Nolan, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 24, 2007, Cambridge, MA. The Globe supported urban renewal throughout the Collins-Logue era. See, for example, Thomas Winship, “The Most Attractive City in America Is Our Goal and We Will Make It,” BG, May 21, 1967, signed editorial.

    34. Logue, interview by Richard J. Lundgren, April 18, 1990, in Lundgren, “Edward J. Logue: Public Entrepreneur” (paper submitted to Richard E. Cavanaugh, instructor, Kennedy School, Course M-484, n.d.), EJL, 2002 Accession, Box 22, Folder “EJL: Public Entrepreneur, Richard Lundgren, Kennedy School,” 13.

    35. Nicholas von Hoffman, “Boston Is an Ingrate,” WP, April 9, 1967.

    36. Nolan, interview; Nolan disapproved of the merger of news and editorial at Winship’s Globe, which was unlike the NYT, the WP, and the WSJ.

    37. Christopher Lydon, conversation with Lizabeth Cohen, April 11, 2015, Cambridge, MA. The Appleby report did, however, get covered in Robert F. Hannan, “Logue’s Moves Blunt Criticism,” BH, December 11, 1966. Jane Jacobs told the Village Voice that Logue “is just a slightly smoother Robert Moses” and that his coming to New York would be “New York’s loss and Boston’s gain”; Mary Perot Nichols, “Boston City Planner Rumored Lindsay Choice,” Village Voice, November 11, 1965.

    38. Thom Duffy, “A City Planner Shares His Values,” NHR, November 24, 1985.

    39. David A. Crane, “Mayor Richard S. Daley Lights the Way for the Boston Renaissance,” 1989, EJL, 2002 Accession, Box 22, Folder “Mayor Daley…,” unpublished manuscript, 1–17, with quote on 4, intended for Ann L. Strong and George E. Thomas, The Book of the School: 100 Years (Philadelphia: Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania, 1990), where it appeared in a shorter version, 188–89. For Crane’s urban vision, see 1965/1975 General Plan for the City of Boston and the Regional Core, 23–30 on the “capital web” and “broken seams”; Crane, “The Public Art of City Building,” Annals, AAPSS 352, “Urban Revival: Goals and Standards” (March 1965): 84–94; Kenneth Halpern, Downtown USA: Urban Design in Nine American Cities (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1978), 187. Tunney Lee described his Boston experience with Crane at his memorial service, Cambridge, MA, August 19, 2005, written remarks, in possession of the author; Lee discussed the “capital web” concept in
Tunney Lee, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, July 13, 2007, Wellfleet, MA.

    40. Jonathan Barnett, Redesiging Cities: Principles, Practice, Implementation (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2003), 281.

    41. Philip Sinclair Will, “Design Review in Urban Renewal: A Case Study of the Boston Redevelopment Authority” (M.A. thesis, MIT, 1966); Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 87, 94–95. The Architectural Advisory Committee to the Boston City Planning Board had already issued a report on the Government Center project in October 1959. Its members were much the same. Logue’s papers contain extensive documentation related to this committee, beginning with the invitation to architects to serve; see EJL, Series 6, Box 151, Folder 471, 472, for meeting summaries, memos, and correspondence.

    42. Design and Urban Renewal (BRA, n.d. but c. mid-1960s), last page; Chloethiel Woodard Smith to Logue, August 19, 1963, EJL, Series 6, Box 151, Folder 446.

    43. Lee, interview. The documents related to Logue’s Design Advisory Committee reveal constant discussion about defining the role of the committee versus the BRA’s design staff, and benefiting from members’ experience without overly burdening them or creating serious conflicts of interest.