Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  101. Greenhouse, “Panel Reports U.D.C. Collapse Was Result of 3 Wrong Moves.”

  102. Robert C. Alexander, “What Is the Lesson of UDC for Other State Housing Agencies?,” JH 32, no. 4 (April 15, 1975): 178.

  103. Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 124; also see Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 12; Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 2:1.

  104. Joseph P. Fried, “Banks Assailed by Head of U.D.C.,” NYT, January 17, 1975.

  105. Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 3:38. Rockefeller took a similar position in his testimony to the Moreland Commission in December 1975. When pressed as to why there wasn’t a better contingency plan, he retorted, “We weren’t running a corporation. We weren’t running a bank. We were running a social institution trying to help people”; quoted in “UDC’s Fiscal Woes Were Beyond Control of Any New Yorker, Rockefeller Testifies,” WSJ, December 4, 1975.

  106. William Ellinghaus Statement on MAC Program, July 31, 1975, Binder: MAC material, Jack Bigel Papers, Baruch College Archives, quoted in Kim Phillips-Fein, “The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Idea of the State,” in Collection of Conference papers for “The New History of American Capitalism,” November 17–19, 2011, 193. For a more extensive analysis, see Kim Philips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017).

  107. Joseph P. Fried, “The Roof Falls In,” Nation, August 16, 1975, 102–6. For a similar reminder of how the rebuilding of depressed urban areas and the promoting of housing integration had recently been an important, shared goal, see Oser, “How the U.D.C.’s Reach Came to Exceed Its Grasp.”

  108. Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 124.

  109. Zuccotti, interview.

  110. Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 168–70.

  111. Francis X. Clines, “Rockefeller Set Up Urban Development Group on Rebound from Voter Rejection,” NYT, February 26, 1975; Weisman, “Nelson Rockefeller’s Pill,” 44. Smeal remained no fan of the UDC. His description, quoted by Clines, of the UDC as a “stylish, highly visible agency, more cooperative with editorial writers than with bankers” that committed to “build, build, and build some more, without regard as to who would pay” was often repeated by him and others.

  112. Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 170; Alan Campbell, “It Has Built Where Nobody Else Would: The Big Goals of the U.D.C.,” NYT, March 2, 1975.

  113. Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 123.

  114. Loewenstein, “Forgotten Failure,” 269, 271–72; Moreland, 104; also see Fried, “Roof Falls In,” 103; Kutz, “How Could It Happen to the UDC?,” 14.

  115. Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 162–63; Campbell, “It Has Built Where Nobody Else Would,” NYT, March 2, 1975; Kahan, interview.

  116. Ravitch, interview.

  117. Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 124.

  118. Moreland, 11.

  119. A sampling includes “Housing New York: Ed Logue and His Architects,” exhibition by the Architectural League and Municipal Art Society, the Urban Center, New York, NY, February 5–April 14, 2001; panel discussion on Ed Logue and Roosevelt Island, Municipal Art Society, March 7, 2001, full transcript at http://www.edlogue.org/docs/Logue-Roosevelet_03-07-01.pdf; “Policy and Design for Housing: Lessons of the Urban Development Corporation 1968–1975,” exhibition, June 10–September 10, 2005, Architectural League of New York, Center for Architecture, New York, NY, and extensive symposia April 8, 2005, June 10–11, 2005; exhibition also traveled to MIT, September 21–December 22, 2006; Susan Saegert and Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, “Making Housing Home,” Places Journal 19, no. 2 (2007); “Friends of Ed Logue” website, http://www.edlogue.org/.

  120. On other states influenced by the UDC: Marlin, “After the Pratfall,” 123; Loewenstein, Private Benefits, Public Costs, 112; Kutz, “How Could It Happen to the UDC?,” 14; Alexander, “What Is the Lesson of UDC for Other State Housing Agencies?,” 177–79.

  121. Walsh, Public’s Business, 139, 161; Loewenstein, “Forgotten Failure,” 266–69, which includes details of the resolution of the UDC crisis.

  122. Joseph P. Fried, “Goodbye, Slum Razing; Hello, Grand Hyatt,” NYT, July 15, 1979; Maurice Carroll, “Development Unit Tests Ambitious New Agenda,” NYT, January 29, 1981; Martin Gottlieb, “U.D.C. Looking to Suburbs and Rural Areas,” NYT, November 27, 1983; “Who’ll Set the Beat for 42nd Street,” editorial, NYT, October 3, 1984; Ravitch, interview; Hilary Botein, “New York State Housing Policy in Postwar New York City: The Enduring Rockefeller Legacy,” JUH 35, no. 6 (September 2009): 845–46.

  123. Brilliant, Urban Development Corporation, 170, also 161–71 more broadly. Wolf Von Eckardt, who had been following Logue’s career for many years, agreed that “a good many people will rejoice if and when Logue joins the ranks of the unemployed,” but he has been “a dynamic, strong leader who has the arrogance to be an unassailable idealist as well … They have been calling Ed Logue an S.O.B. ever since he started to get things done in New Haven”; Von Eckardt, “The Housing That Logue Builds,” WP, January 25, 1975. For discussion of how Logue offended others, Nicholas Katzenbach, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 26, 2006, Princeton, NJ.

  124. Logue, interview, Steen, July 11, 1991, Boston, MA, 19; Logue wrote to Rockefeller that “to give his position credibility he [Carey] needed a scapegoat. I was rather eligible for that purpose”; Edward Logue to Nelson Rockefeller, January 9, 1975, EJL, 1983 Addition, Box 31, Folder “Rockefeller, Nelson A. 1974–75,” quoted in Freemark, “Entrepreneurial State,” 303.

  125. Goldman, interview; Penn Kimball, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, July 18, 2007, Martha’s Vineyard, MA; also Lefkowitz, interview; Kahan, interview. Margaret Logue concurred: “He had felt all his life that his own reputation was his most precious possession”; MLogue, interview.

  126. Alan S. Oser, “Logue Asks U.S. Act on Housing,” NYT, May 7, 1976; Litke, interview; Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:44; Raymond, Parish, Pine & Weiner and Logue Development Company, “The Role of Local Government in New Community Development,” Washington, DC, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research, 1979, project supervised by Edward Logue; Robert Litke, project manager.

  127. On what he was doing, see Linda Greenhouse, “Why a Bill with Ardent Backers and Firm Opponents Has Gone Nowhere in 5 Weeks,” NYT, March 8, 1976; Oser, “Logue Asks U.S. Act on Housing”; Robert Geddes, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 25, 2006, Princeton, NJ.

  128. Joseph P. Fried, “South Bronx Story: Ed Logue Returns,” New York, October 16, 1978, “Legislator Assails ‘Logue’s Lush Lair,’” NYT, March 27, 1971.

  129. Frank Logue to Edward Logue, November 11, 1971, EJL, Series 6, Box 150, Folder 426, 3.

  130. Litke, interview; Stainton, interview.

  131. Liebman, interview.

  132. Logue, interview, Steen, October 31, 1986, Lincoln, MA, 28; MLogue, interview.

  133. Logue, interview by Jean Joyce, October 22, 1976, Bowles, Part 9, Series 3, Subseries 3, Box 398, Folder 199b, 48.

  9. Ashes to Gardens in the South Bronx

      1. Charles J. Orlebeke, New Life at Ground Zero: New York, Home Ownership, and the Future of American Cities (Albany, NY: Rockefeller Institute Press, 1997), 34–39, 231; for “bored” quote, Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:55. For other job opportunities that came Logue’s way, including the deanship of the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts, see Wolf Von Eckardt, “Baron of South Bronx: Urban Renewer Ed Logue’s New Challenge,” WP, November 4, 1978.

      2. Carter’s statement and photograph became ubiquitous; for Logue’s version, Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:53–54. For others, see Von Eckardt, “Baron of South Bronx”; Jill Jonnes, South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 310–17; Alexander von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 34–35. On the Carter administration’s cuts in federal funding and devolution of federal responsibility in urban policy, see Thomas J. Sugrue, “Carter’s Urban Policy Crisis,” in The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post–New Deal Era, ed. Gary M. Fink and Hugh Davis Graham (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 137–57; and Tracy Neumann, “Privatization, Devolution, and Jimmy Carter’s National Urban Policy,” JUH 40, no. 2 (March 2014): 283–300.

      3. Logue to Hon. Herman Badillo, May 3, 1978, in “May 5, 1978, Logue Proposal to City,” EJL, 1985 Accession, Box 62, Black Binder; Joseph P. Fried, “Logue, Who Led U.D.C., Is Asked to Head Bronx Plan,” NYT, June 17, 1978.

      4. For Badillo’s view of his plan, see Herman Badillo, interview by John Metzger, March 8, 1994, COH, 1–7. For details of New York City’s response to Carter’s visit under Mayors Beame and Koch, see Thomas Glynn, “Charlotte Street, the Bronx,” Neighborhood: The Journal for City Preservation 5, no. 2 (August 1982; special issue on the South Bronx): 26–31. On Logue’s appointment, “Remarks by Mayor Edward I. Koch at a Press Conference Announcing the Appointment of Three Aides for the South Bronx Redevelopment Program, Blue Room, City Hall, Manhattan, Monday, September 11, 1978, 10:30 A.M.”

      5. Von Eckardt, “Baron of South Bronx.”

      6. Anna Quindlen, “The Politics of Charlotte Street,” NYT Magazine, October 7, 1979; Jonnes, South Bronx Rising, 324–25; Robert P. Wagner, interview by Jonathan Soffer, August–September 1992, COH, 2–102; Badillo, interview, 5, 8, 10; Peter Bray, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, February 18, 2010, New York, NY; “Statement of Edward J. Logue, South Bronx Director, before the Board of Estimate of the City of New York at its public hearing on November 16, 1978 in support of the request of the New York City Housing Authority for approval of its plan and project for the Charlotte Street Housing Project in the South Bronx,” Bray. On the Board of Estimate rejection, Andy Logan, “Around City Hall: Symbols,” New Yorker, February 26, 1979, 90–95; von Hoffman, House by House, 35–36.

      7. Badillo, interview, 1–10; Wagner, interview, 2–102; former SBDO staff member Rebecca Lee argued that Koch established the SBDO to show that he was taking action; Rebecca Lee, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, March 10, 2010, Boston, MA; Lee Dembart, “Koch, in a Reversal, Orders New Plan for South Bronx,” NYT, February 13, 1979; “South Bronx Debate; Dig It Now or Plan It Later,” NYT, February 25, 1979.

      8. Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:59–60.

      9. Of this, $1.5 million came from the federal government, $1 million from the State of New York, and $500,000 from the City; see Glynn, “Charlotte Street, the Bronx,” 29; Neil R. Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom, “Two Years After Carter’s Visit, Islands of Hope Dot the South Bronx,” National Journal, October 6, 1979, 1644–48.

    10. Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:58; “hunting license” and city cars from Logue, interview by Peter Bray, April 23, 1982, Bronx, NY; Bray, interview, on SBDO’s vulnerability.

    11. Logue to Badillo, EJL, May 5, 1978.

    12. Joseph P. Fried, “Robert Garcia Dies at 84; Bronx Congressman Undone by Scandal,” NYT, January 26, 2017.

    13. On the growth and decline of the South Bronx, see Patrick Breslin, “On These Sidewalks of New York, the Sun Is Shining Again,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 1995, 100–111; Thomas Glynn, “The Neighborhood,” Neighborhood: The Journal for City Preservation 5, no. 2 (August 1982; special issue on the South Bronx): 2–34; Robert Jensen, Devastation/Resurrection: The South Bronx, exhibition catalog, November 9, 1979–January 13, 1980, Bronx Museum of the Arts; Constance Rosenblum, “Grand, Wasn’t It?,” NYT, August 21, 2009; Ian Frazier, “Utopia, the Bronx: Co-op City and Its People,” New Yorker, June 26, 2006.

    14. Bill Moyers, “The Fire Next Door,” December 5, 1980, in In the South Bronx of America, Photographs by Mel Rosenthal (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2000), 51.

    15. Lisa Kahane, Do Not Give Way to Evil: Photographs of the South Bronx, 1979–1987 (Brooklyn, NY: Powerhouse Books, 2008), 18; Peter L’Official, “Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2014); von Hoffman, House by House, 22–23; Jonnes, South Bronx Rising, 249–67, provides details on arson.

    16. On demographic change, displacement, and social problems, see Peirce and Hagstrom, “Two Years After Carter’s Visit,” 1647; Jonnes, South Bronx Rising, 100–102, 111–14, 118–26; Edward J. Logue to Whom It May Interest, Memo with South Bronx Profile, April 27, 1984, Bray. On Puerto Ricans in the South Bronx, see Nicholas Lemann, “The Other Underclass,” Atlantic, December 1991, 96–110.

    17. Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds., Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 263; quote from NYT, March 17, 1976, in Orlebeke, New Life at Ground Zero, 33.

    18. On Father Louis Gigante, Jonnes, South Bronx Rising, 168–70, 302–303; von Hoffman, House by House, 24–30.

    19. Trisha Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Randy Kennedy, “A Feast of Street Art, Luminous and Legal: Graffiti Art of the City, from the Bronx to Brooklyn,” NYT, August 29, 2013.

    20. Owen Moritz, “Departing Ed Logue Sees Hope for South Bronx,” NYDN, October 7, 1984.

    21. On Velez, Wayne Barrett, “Señor Big: How Ramon Velez Bleeds New York,” Village Voice, December 31, 1985; David Gonzalez with Martin Gottlieb, “Power Built on Poverty: One Man’s Odyssey,” NYT, May 14, 1993; David Gonzalez and Martin Gottlieb, “The Baron of the Bronx: In an Antipoverty Empire, a Clinic Is an Opportunity,” NYT, May 15, 1993; Douglas Martin, “Ramon S. Velez, the South Bronx Padrino, Dies at 75,” NYT, December 3, 2008; David Gonzalez, “A Second Look at a Bronx Baron’s Methods,” NYT, December 5, 2008; David Medina, “Controversy Clouds Projects,” NYDN, June 27, 1980; Jonnes, South Bronx Rising, 164–68, 170–74.

    22. Kahane, Do Not Give Way to Evil, 10.

    23. Logue, interview by Bray; Joseph P. Fried, “South Bronx Story: Ed Logue Returns,” New York, October 16, 1978, 21–22; Edward I. Koch, interview by Alexander von Hoffman, May 1, 2001, New York, NY; Logue’s hiring was covered in all major national papers.

    24. Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 4:56–57.

    25. Stephen Lefkowitz, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 14, 2007, New York, NY.

    26. Fried, “South Bronx Story: Ed Logue Returns,” 22.

    27. Logue, interview by Bray.

    28. Lawrence Goldman, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 3, 2010, Newark, NJ. Ted Liebman agreed: “I thought it was below [him] … I didn’t want him to have a lesser job”; Ted Liebman, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, October 15, 2006, New York, NY.

    29. Richard Kahan, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 15, 2007, New York, NY.

    30. John Stainton, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 30, 2007, Jamaica Plain, MA.

    31. Fried, “South Bronx Story: Ed Logue Returns,” 21–22.

    32. MLogue, interview; Ellen Logue, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, April 13, 2008, Berkeley, CA; Allan Talbot, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 13, 2007, New York, NY; Robert Litke, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 25, 2006, Somerset, NJ. Also, Anthony Pangaro, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 24, 2009, Boston, MA, who acknowledged that Logue “enjoyed the power … and being able to pick up the phone and get something done is a tremendous thrill, but it wasn’t, in and of itself, the end. It was a means. It was a tool. It was always about what’s the mission. How do we get that done?”

    33. Bray, interview; Logue, interview, Steen, March 3, 1986, Lincoln, MA, 34.

    34. Lee, interview.

    35. Logue said that one of his greatest satisfactions was mentoring the next generation; Bray, interview; Peter Bray, letter to the
editor, NYT, February 4, 2000.

    36. Jennifer Raab, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, February 27, 2009, New York, NY; Lee, interview.

    37. Bray, interview.

    38. South Bronx Development Office, Areas of Strength, Areas of Opportunity: South Bronx Revitalization Program and Development Guide Plan, December 1980.

    39. Quote from Neighborhood, August 1982, cited in Rosenthal, In the South Bronx of America, 89; A. O. Sulzberger, Jr., “Job Growth Since 1976 Is Mostly in Manhattan,” NYT, October 6, 1981. In this period the Bronx and Brooklyn lost jobs, while Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island gained them; Logue to Whom It May Interest, Memo with South Bronx Profile, April 27, 1984, Bray. For a thorough analysis, see Peter Bray, “SBDO’s Economic Development Role” and “Private Perspective,” chapters 4 and 5, MIT thesis draft, Bray.