Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

    44. Logue and David Crane both spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, eighth annual Design Conference, “The Role of Government in the Form and Animation of the Urban Core,” May 1–2, 1964; proceedings in Papers of Josep Lluís Sert, Special Collections, HGSD.

    45. Stephen Diamond to Logue, “Memorandum: Housing Design Review Panel,” July 25, 1963, EJL, Series 6, Box 151, Folder 472; “Carl Koch, 86; Noted Architect; of Prefab Homes, Cluster Housing,” BG, July 10, 1998; David Fixler, “Hipsters in the Woods: The Midcentury-Modern Suburban Development,” AB 12, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 27–29. Logue and Koch communications after Koch’s initial telegram in 1960 include other congratulatory notes to Logue, April 18 and November 18, 1966, in EJL, Series 6, Box 150, Folder 414.

    46. David Kruh, Always Something Doing: Boston’s Infamous Scollay Square, rev. ed. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), for an overview of Scollay Square before and during the construction of Government Center. Also Frank Del Vecchio, City Streets: A Memoir (North Andover, MA: Leap Year Press, 2016), 68; Daniel A. Gilbert, “‘Why Dwell on a Lurid Memory?’: Deviance and Redevelopment in Boston’s Scollay Square,” Massachusetts Historical Review 9 (2007): 103–33; Stephanie Schorow, Inside the Combat Zone: The Stripped Down Story of Boston’s Most Notorious Neighborhood (Boston: Union Park Press, 2017); Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 173–81.

    47. John King, “How the BRA Got Some Respect,” Planning Contents 56, no. 5 (May 1990): 6; Building Boston, video, Bob Nesson Productions and WGBH Educational Foundation, 1985. For the long-term history of locating a civic center on this site, see Boston Redevelopment Authority, “Research Report: A History of Boston’s Government Center,” June 1970, 12–16.

    48. “Statement of Edward J. Logue, Administrator, Boston Redevelopment Authority,” Federal Role in Urban Affairs (Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of Senate Committee on Government Operations, November–December 1966), Logue testimony, December 12, 1966, 2796, 2798.

    49. Mayor Collins received letters from Bostonians urging a traditional city hall “with pillars in the front and Bulfinch style and all the rest”; Collins, interview by de Varon, Tape 6, December 21, 1976, 10.

    50. This style of modernism, which emerged in France and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s through the inspiration of Le Corbusier, was long referred to as “brutalist,” in reference to béton brut, meaning “raw concrete.” Recently, some Boston architects and architectural historians have rejected that label for its disparaging connotations and have urged the renaming of Boston’s substantial examples of concrete modernism as “heroic”; Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, and Chris Grimley, eds., Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston (New York: Monacelli Press, 2015); also Robert Campbell, “Brutalism Gets a Reworking on UMass Campus,” BG, November 25, 2012.

    51. Albert Bush-Brown, “Critic Hails Prizewinner: No Copy Cat of Hub Styles,” BG, May 4, 1962.

    52. John Collins to Rt. Rev. Msgr. Francis J. Lally, November 14, 1960, EJL, Series 6, Box 148, Folder 374; the federal government’s willingness to shift from the Back Bay to the Scollay Square site depended on the State of Massachusetts also agreeing to build in the area; “City Council Meets Logue,” BH, April 2, 1960.

    53. A Competition to Select an Architect for the City Hall in the Government Center of the City of Boston (Boston: Government Center Commission, 1961), with an introduction by Mayor John F. Collins; Anthony J. Yudis, “And Here’s New City Hall, Apt to Stir Controversy,” BG, May 4, 1962; Bush-Brown, “Critic Hails Prizewinner”; “Three Columbia Faculty Members Win Boston City Hall Competition,” AR 132, no. 1 (July 1962): 14–15; Hélène Lipstadt, ed., The Experimental Tradition: Essays on Competitions in Architecture (New York: Architectural League of New York, 1989), 10–11, 96, 99, 160–61; Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 95–96.

    54. “Boston Government Center. Its Evolution Described by Charles Hilgenhurst. Appraisal by Henry Millon,” Architectural Design 41 (January 1970): 11–23, “jewel” quote on 16. For more on Government Center and Boston City Hall, see “Government Center Urban Renewal Plan, April 3, 1963, Revised May 29, 1963”; Paul D. Spreiregen, “The Boston Government Center: A Study in Urban Design,” Art and Architecture 82, no. 10 (October 1965): 21–23; “The New Boston City Hall,” PA 44, no. 4 (April 1963): 132–52; Brian M. Sirman, “Concrete Dreams: Architecture, Politics, and Boston’s New City Hall” (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 2014); David A. Crane, “The Federal Building in the Making of Boston’s Government Center: A Struggle for Sovereignty in Local Design Review,” in Federal Buildings in Context: The Role of Design Review, ed. J. Carter Brown, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 50 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 21–38; Martin Nolan, “City Hall Debate Has Been Raging for 300 Years,” BG, May 6, 1962; Ada Louise Huxtable, “Boston’s New City Hall: A Public Building of Quality,” NYT, February 8, 1969; Alex Krieger, ed., The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1988), 21–37; David Dillon, The Architecture of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood (New York: Edizioni Press, 2004), 12–19.

    55. Harold D. Hodgkinson, “Miracle in Boston,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 3, no. 84 (1972): 78; Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 96; also Scagnoli, interview.

    56. Scagnoli, interview.

    57. Michael McKinnell, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 15, 2010, Cambridge, MA; “Concrete Is Patient,” McKinnell, interview in Heroic, 22; Jack Thomas, “‘I Wanted Something That Would Last’: At 89, an Architect Stands by His Plan for City Hall After Four Decades of Both Condemnation and Praise,” BG, October 13, 2004; Leon Neyfakh, “How Boston City Hall Was Born,” BG, February 12, 2012.

    58. On the State Service Center, see Ada Louise Huxtable, “Complex in Boston Is Radically Designed,” NYT, November 7, 1963; Timothy M. Rohan, “The Rise and Fall of Brutalism, Rudolph and the Liberal Consensus,” CLOG: Brutalism, 2nd ed. (June 2013), 60–61; Rohan, The Architecture of Paul Rudolph (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 116–28; Tony Monk, The Art and Architecture of Paul Rudolph (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy, 1999), particularly “Boston State Service Center, Boston, Massachusetts, 1962–71”; Carol John Black, “A Vision of Human Space, Paul Rudolph: Boston State Service Center,” AR 154, no. 1 (July, 1973): 105–16; Hilgenhurst, “Evolution of Boston’s Government Center,” 14–15; “1st Draft, Health, Welfare and Education Building,” Paul Marvin Rudolph Papers, Library of Congress, Box PMR-3022-4, File “Governor’s Report”; James McNeely, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 31, 2007, Boston, MA; McNeely, “Architecture: The Training of an Architect,” Beacon Hill Paper, August 26, 1997; Rohan, “The Dream Behind Boston’s Forbidding State Service Center,” BG, September 7, 2014; and correspondence among Logue, Stubbins, and Rudolph in EJL.

    59. Logue, “Work of the Boston Renewal Administration in the Urban Core,” Address to the Harvard Graduate School of Design eighth annual Urban Design Conference, “The Role of Government in the Form and Animation of the Urban Core,” May 1, 1964, 5; “Government Center: Symbolic Showpiece of a New Boston,” AF 120 (June 1964): 92; McNeely, interview; Rudolph’s scale comment from Paul R. Kramer, “Summary of an Interview with Paul Rudolph, New York,” Werk 60, no. 4 (1973): 457.

    60. Jeanne M. Davern, “Conversations with Paul Rudolph,” AR 170, no. 4 (March 1982): 90–97, in Paul Rudolph, Writings on Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Architecture, 2008), 121.

    61. “Final Plan Unveiled for Boston’s New Government Center,” AR 133, no. 6 (Mid-May 1963): 14; “Winner Announced in Boston Competition,” AR 137, no. 3 (March 1965): 316.

    62. Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 94; Hilgenhurst, “Evolution of Boston’s Government Center,” 20; Daniel Golden and David Mehegan, “Changing the Heart
of the City,” BG, September 18, 1983. Logue admired the building’s design and remained grateful to the Leventhals for stepping up when their support was so needed; Keyes, City Builder; Robert Campbell, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 18, 2009, Cambridge, MA; Bryan Marquard, “Norman Leventhal at 97; Enhancer of Lives and Landmarks,” BG, April 5, 2015; Norman Leventhal, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 21, 2007, Boston, MA. Weak demand for new office space prompted Logue to pressure Joseph Slavet to consider moving ABCD to the Central Plaza building.

    63. On the Parcel 8 controversy, see McQuade, “Boston: What Can a Sick City Do?,” 137, 163; “Winner Announced in Boston Competition,” AR 137, no. 3 (March 1965): 12–13, 288, 300, 308, 316; Hilgenhurst, “Evolution of Boston’s Government Center,” 18; advertisement, “Boston Redevelopment Authority Announces a Competition for the Selection of a Developer for Parcel 8, Government Center,” WP, July 1, 1964; Irene Saint, “Government Center,” BH, November 29, 1965; “Government Center Shaping Up Despite Setbacks,” BH, November 29, 1965; Arnone, “Development in Boston,” 105; O’Connor, Building a New Boston, 202, 212; “Government Center: Symbolic Showpiece of a New Boston”; Henry N. Cobb, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 8, 2010, New York, NY; Lewis H. Weinstein, My Life at the Bar: Lawyer, Soldier, Teacher and Pro Bono Activist (Hanover, MA: Christopher Publishing House, 1993), 143–45. There was a lot of public criticism of the city council tying up the Government Center project; see, for example, Paul Benzaquin’s program on WEEI-CBS radio, July 30, 1963, where he complained, “However you look at it, the five angry men have created a spectacular embarrassment for Boston”; EJL, Series 6, Box 148, Folder 378.

    64. Boston Redevelopment Authority, 1965/1975 General Plan for the City of Boston and the Regional Core, 1965, 20.

    65. The Charles Center was a large-scale redevelopment project in central Baltimore’s downtown business district built in the late 1950s and early 1960s to stem decline; see Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 37–43. This strategy of a city encouraging its workers to patronize local restaurants persists today; Nellie Bowles, “San Francisco Officials to Tech Workers: Buy Your Lunch,” NYT, July 31, 2018.

    66. McKinnell, interview by Cohen; also see Ellen Perry Berkeley, “More Than You May Want to Know About the Boston City Hall,” Architecture Plus 1, no. 1 (1973): 72–77.

    67. Hilgenhurst,“Evolution of Boston’s Government Center,” 11 on workforce size, 22 on tax assessments.

    68. Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 215–17; Paul McCann, a longtime BRA staffer all the way back to Logue’s time, credited Government Center with being a catalyst for intense private development on its periphery; Paul McCann, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 1, 2007, Boston, MA.

    69. “Uses of the Past,” AF 137, no. 2 (February 1972): 24–33; Kathryn Welch, “Boston’s Old City Hall,” Antiques 107, no. 6 (June 1975): 110–15; Charles Lockwood, “An 1860’s City Hall Survives,” CSM, December 8, 1972, 13. “Maison Robert” closed in 2004 and has been replaced.

    70. Logue insisted that the “Friends of old Scollay were few, really non-existent” and that he recalled “few, if any, of the nostalgic comments about old Scollay Square that I occasionally hear today”; Logue, “The Boston Story,” 14, 31v7.

    71. On Logue’s appreciation for Beacon Hill and the North End, Logue, “Work of the Boston Renewal Administration in the Urban Core,” Harvard Graduate School of Design eighth annual Urban Design Conference, 5; “Urban Development Prospects as Seen by Edward Logue,” CR 52, no. 16 (April 16, 1960): 315. On the earliest historic preservation campaign in Boston, “Urban Preservation and Renewal: Designating the Historic Beacon Hill District in 1950s Boston,” JPH 16, no. 4 (November 2017): 285–304.

    72. “Scholars Join Forces to Rescue Sears Crescent from Developers,” BG, November 19, 1961; Anthony Yudis, “Cornhill May Be Blended with Modern Boston,” BG, February 26, 1962; Thomas H. O’Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950–1970 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 199–201; Nolan, interview, on impact of his Globe story on threatened Brattle Book Shop in fall 1961. Whitehill informed Logue of his other preservation activities, including the Old Corner Book Store Building “to make it a tangible asset to the city”; quote from Walter Muir Whitehill to John Crosby, November 21, 1960; also Walter Muir Whitehill to Logue, November 21, 1960, and Logue to Whitehill, November 22, 1960; EJL, Series 6, Box 151, Folder 459; on Charlestown, see Whitehill to Logue, February 9, 1961, EJL, Series 6, Box 151, Folder 459. The Government Center planner Cobb claimed that a “marriage of old and new” was always the goal; Cobb, testimony to Boston City Council, June 1963, in Henry N. Cobb, Words and Works, 1948–2018: Scenes from a Life in Architecture (New York: Monacelli Press, 2018), 74.

    73. Scagnoli, interview.

    74. George J. Gloss to Logue, February 7, 1964, EJL, Series 6, Box 149, Folder 405; also Alexander Burnham, “Struggle Is Under Way to Save Intellectual Landmark in Boston,” NYT, June 10, 1962.

    75. The architect Tad Stahl was involved in the restoration of many of Boston’s historic buildings; see Orwig, “Concrete Solutions: Tad Stahl’s Urbanism,” 19–20.

    76. Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 93; Logue, “Don’t Blame Me for the Old Howard’s Demise,” letter to the editor, BG, July 2, 1998.

    77. Logue, “The Boston Story,” Planning 1964: Selected Papers from the ASPO National Planning Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, April 5–9, 1964 (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1964), 5, 7.

    78. Stephanie Ryberg-Webster, “Urban Policy in Disguise: A History of the Federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit,” JPH 14, no. 3 (August 2015): 204–23; Jon Gorey, “As Filing Deadline Looms, a Look at How Taxes Have Shaped Our Architecture,” BG, April 12, 2018.

    79. Kruh, Always Something Doing, 141–42; “Foley Blasts Logue Plan for Historical Site,” BG, July 25, 1961.

    80. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Renewal in Boston: Good and Bad,” NYT, April 19, 1964.

    81. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Why You Always Win and Lose in Urban Renewal,” NYT, September 19, 1976. It would take until December 1976 for Boston to establish a Landmarks Commission; Halpern, Downtown USA, 195.

    82. Logue, “The Future of Boston, Its Architecture and Architects,” in Boston Society of Architects: The First Hundred Years, 1867–1967, ed. Marvin E. Goody and Robert P. Walsh (Boston: Boston Society of Architects, 1967), 101.

    83. Logue, “The Education of an Urban Administrator,” The Universitas Project: Solutions for a Post-Technological Society, conceived and directed by Emilio Ambasz, from a symposium January 8–9, 1972 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006), 176–79.

    84. Logue, “Could Growth Kill Boston’s Boom?,” Boston College Citizen Seminars, State Street Bank, May 19, 1987; also see Logue, “Garrity’s Impact and Other Thoughts on Boston,” op-ed, BG, May 2, 1983, and “A City Planner Shares His Values,” NHR, November 24, 1985, in which Logue argued that he and Collins “created the framework” for Boston’s “current downtown boom,” but in a way that put government in the position to monitor “the abuses of private enterprise—its selfishness, its greed, its unconcern for what we value—seems to me that businessmen alone are not to be trusted.”

    85. “Former BRA Director Logue Issues a Report Card,” BG, June 8, 1986; Logue, “Boston, 1960–1967—Seven Years of Plenty,” 95; Webb Nichols, “Rerooting Boston’s Skyline,” BG, March 1, 2006; the architecture critic Paul Goldberger shared a number of Logue’s concerns in “Urban Building Trends Lend Boston an Odd Mix,” NYT, June 16, 1985.

  In 1984 a columnist for the CSM expressed hope that the newly elected mayor, Raymond L. Flynn, and his new director of the BRA would live up
to the standards set in “the mid-1960s, when Edward J. Logue, a man of vision for tastefully blending of the old with the new, was running the redevelopment agency”; George B. Merry, “No Room for Haphazard Development in Reshaping Boston of Tomorrow,” CSM, September 6, 1984. In 2015, the then mayor Martin J. Walsh called for a renewed effort to “balance the old and new.” Speaking in familiar language, he said, “We should aim for world-class design. Our historic buildings reflect our unique past. New buildings should project the values and aspirations of our growing city”; Rachel Slade, “Why Is Boston So Ugly? How We Built the Most Mediocre Architecture in History, and How We’re Going to Fix It,” BM, May 2015, 111.

    86. Cobb, interview; Cobb by 2010 regretted that “a kind of engagement of the existing fabric … is totally missing from Government Center.”

    87. Nelson W. Aldrich, Pietro Belluschi, Henry R. Shepley, and Hugh Stubbins, Chairman, Memorandum to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, October 2, 1961; Logue to the Architectural Advisory Board, October 2, 1961, EJL, Series 6, Box 151, Folder 471. At a city hall hearing in January 1962, Logue publicly expressed his support for keeping the Sears Crescent building; Elvira Johnson, shorthand reporter, “Status of Government Center Project, Before Committee on Urban Redevelopment, Rehabilitation, and Renewal,” Boston, MA, vol. 1, January 25, 1962, 24. But in April 1962, The Harvard Crimson was still reporting that the Sears Crescent was slated for demolition; Russell B. Roberts, “Boston Redevelopment Will Claim Historic Sites in Cornhill Vicinity,” Crimson, April 9, 1962. The final plan would not be published until April 1963.