In September 1953, thirty-two-year-old Ed Logue returned to New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Margaret, to await the birth of their first child after six years away. They were resettling into a city that had launched Logue into adulthood. Here he had widened his horizons as a scholarship student at Yale College, had worked his first full-time job as a labor organizer, and had trained for a profession at Yale Law School. Here, too, he had met and married Margaret, the daughter of an influential couple in New Haven academic circles, the much-admired dean of Yale College William Clyde DeVane and his wife, Mabel Phillips DeVane. Casting about for his next career move after working in India for eighteen months as Ambassador Chester Bowles’s special assistant, Logue was considering hanging out his shingle as a New Haven lawyer.
But then opportunity intervened. Logue had arrived just in time to help with the mayoral campaign of the Democratic reform candidate Richard Lee, who was mounting his third attempt to be elected mayor of New Haven. The determined, thirty-seven-year-old hometown boy, “Dick” Lee, currently the director of the Yale News Bureau, built his run around an ambitious promise to “renew” what was undeniably a deteriorating New Haven. Factories were closing, downtown retail was stagnating, and middle-class residents were decamping for the city’s flourishing suburbs. These departures, furthermore, were fueling growing discontent among those remaining behind, who resented how the city’s property tax rates kept climbing simply to sustain existing services. Logue, identifying himself as a “longtime admirer of Dick Lee,” became a key player in Independents for Lee, an effort to position Lee as an alternative to business as usual as practiced by New Haven’s Democratic Party machine. The third time was the charm, and Lee claimed victory on the night of November 3, 1953, with 52.3 percent of the vote.1
Within weeks of his election, Lee invited Logue to be his executive secretary, an ostensibly part-time post that Lee created to tap the unique combination of smarts, energy, and vision that he saw in Logue. Logue accepted, but it quickly became apparent that the job was much bigger, more like an unofficial deputy mayor. They lost little time collaborating on an ambitious plan to remake New Haven as “a slumless city—the first in the nation,” as they liked to say.2 In February 1955, Lee officially appointed Logue as the development administrator of the New Haven Redevelopment Agency. Logue’s brilliance at garnering newly available federal urban renewal funds, combined with Lee’s intimate knowledge of New Haven, made them an irrepressible and nationally admired team who could boast that they were attracting more federal dollars per capita to New Haven than any other American city was getting. The masterful politician and his bureaucratically savvy partner together piloted schemes in New Haven that other cities would watch and copy.
Medium-size New Haven, a struggling old industrial city in an increasingly suburban postindustrial age, became the model city of urban renewal, a laboratory for salvaging urban America. The problems that Dick Lee and Ed Logue were addressing were faced by many American cities that had flourished with the rise of America’s industrial might in the nineteenth century. Now, in the second half of the twentieth, these cities were atrophying as their manufacturing bases disappeared. Strategies to renew American cities would evolve continually for at least two more decades, in response to new ideas, mistakes made and learned from, the ebb and flow of funding, and political pressures exerted from many quarters, most notably policy makers in Washington and critics at the grass roots. The successes and failures of Dick Lee and Ed Logue’s efforts in New Haven reveal how the urban renewal project fared in its first phase during the 1950s.
The charges brought against urban renewal by the mid-1960s as pro-business, undemocratic, and racially biased would have been anathema to the Ed Logue who joined forces with Dick Lee. He was by personal history and self-perception quite the opposite: a political progressive on many fronts who viewed urban renewal as the next worthy liberal cause demanding immediate government action.
Logue was born and raised in Philadelphia in a devoutly Irish Catholic and staunchly Democratic home, which he would recall later as being “without any racial prejudice.”3 Until his father died in 1934 when Ed was thirteen and his four siblings—John, Gordon, Frank, and Ellen—were eleven, ten, nine, and seven, respectively, the family lived comfortably in a rowhouse on Mount Vernon Street just north of Center City, Philadelphia. Ed’s father earned a decent salary as a city tax assessor, good enough to send five children to the private Notre Dame Academy in Rittenhouse Square and to nearby Cape May for the summer. Logue’s happiest early memories were linked to the excitement of downtown Philadelphia: “From childhood, I was always interested in cities.”4 He particularly prized the “walking trips” he made with his father around town.5 He also enjoyed hearing his aunt, a Catholic nun named Sister Maria Kostka, discuss with his father an ambitious architectural design for Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic women’s college she founded in 1924 and ran for her order, the Sisters of Saint Joseph.6 But then Ed’s father suddenly died during a routine hernia operation, leaving the family precariously dependent on a meager monthly insurance check of $134.84 and the charity of an uncle who bought them a semidetached house in the outlying Overbrook neighborhood. Renting out the third floor barely helped make ends meet.7
Yale College, where Logue matriculated in September 1938 as a bursary or scholarship student after rejecting the free ride at Catholic University arranged by his aunt the nun, shaped many aspects of Logue’s adult life. Logue was a political science major who studied with Harvey Claflin Mansfield, Albert Galloway Keller, and the labor economist E. Wight Bakke, author of a remarkable eight-year study of unemployed workers and their families in Depression-era New Haven, published in 1940, that made a deep impression on Logue.
Yale influenced young Logue outside the classroom as well. The Yale College that Ed Logue entered in fall 1938 newly aspired to having a more diverse undergraduate community of academic as well as athletic and societal leaders, having lagged behind Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago in this regard. Carrying the name of a traditional Yale family had been the best ticket to Yale admissions, so much so that the application requested a mother’s maiden name to catch candidates with maternal rather than paternal connections.
As a striving, not-well-off, Irish Catholic graduate of a public high school in Philadelphia, Logue encountered a Yale that was beginning to break down social boundaries among its students but was still a bastion of elite Protestant prep schoolers. Only 213 students out of his freshman class of 855—about a quarter—had graduated from public high schools. Almost a third of the total matriculants were “Yale sons.” At Yale, Catholic students historically had experienced less prejudice than Jewish students had. Interestingly, however, because Catholics were less oriented toward higher education in the first half of the century and Catholic colleges eagerly recruited those who were, the Catholic presence on campus lagged behind the proportion of Catholics in the general population. In contrast, Yale’s Jewish students far exceeded their numbers nationally. Moreover, many of the Jews and Catholics who attended Yale gained entrance because they grew up in New Haven and qualified for the scholarships Yale reserved for local boys to improve town-gown relations.
Yale’s first residential colleges had opened in 1933, only five years before Logue arrived, thanks to a $16 million gift from the alumnus Edward Harkness aimed at improving the undergraduate residential experience. By 1940, Logue’s junior year, the popular colleges had succeeded in decreasing the proportion of undergraduates living off campus to 13 percent from 38 percent in 1920, and the fraternities and exclusive senior societies that had fragmented the student body were declining in influence as well. But although the new colleges aimed to bring together students of different backgrounds, exclusionary policies still guided roommate matching. Rooming committees were told never to mix Jews and Catholics with Protestants, prep school with public school students, or the well-off with scholarship recipients. Not surprisingly, then, Logue’s Yale friends were overwhelmingly Catholic and Jewish. Brother Frank Logue (Class of ’48) well understood the Yale that he and his brothers entered: “A great WASPy university admitted those four sons of a widowed Irish kindergarten teacher” is the way he later put it, wryly noting that most of their Berkeley College roommates were Jews, a sign of how fully Yale segregated its students.8
Attending Yale at this moment in time made Ed Logue, his brothers, and his friends grateful for the liberalization of the university that was enabling their attendance but resentful of the still-powerful vestiges of privilege. Logue’s good college and law school friend John Arcudi, an Italian Catholic whose parents owned a small grocery in nearby Westport, explained how, as a bursary student, he felt apart from what he called the “white shoe boys” from prep school. “We … the people who had been the waiters in Commons … were a separate part of the Yale society.” The lower social status of students like Arcudi and Logue played out politically as well. Both recounted their alienation from a student body that in the presidential election of 1940 overwhelmingly supported the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie against their hero, the Democratic incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They responded by inviting the Republican New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, an enthusiastic FDR supporter, to a rally to reassure New Haven’s many Italians that the president bore no prejudice, despite his criticism of Mussolini. When Roosevelt won the election, Logue and a Jewish friend on scholarship, Allen “Bud” Scher, “celebrated quietly” and walked across a Yale campus that “was like a graveyard. There was no celebration for FDR by the Yalies,” according to Scher, who derisively called them “the bloods.”9
Watching so many of his peers shun Roosevelt made Logue only more combative. He joined the Labor Party in the Yale Political Union debating society (a more left alternative to the Liberal and Conservative Parties and the nexus for pro-union students) and devoted himself to supporting New Haven’s working class, whether by leafleting at the nearby Winchester Repeating Arms Company plant or rallying behind Yale’s own dining hall workers—many of whom he knew well from working in Freshman Commons—when they went on strike in 1941.10
A decade later, in 1951, when Logue needed security clearance to work in the American embassy in New Delhi, the FBI talked to a supervisor in the Yale dining services who remembered him as “not dependable” and “‘sneaky’ in all of his actions, including always eating the leftovers from the plates in the dining room.” The FBI agent investigating continued, “She stated that he was in her opinion the poorest worker that was ever employed in the Yale Dining Room. She further advised that applicant was constantly spreading ‘malicious rumors’ about the management of Yale University, stating that ‘they were dictators, slave drivers, and oppressing the employees of Yale.’” It was not clear how much of her condemnation was due to Logue’s pro-labor politics, his incompetence as a worker, or his hearty appetite—most likely, a combination of all three. In any event, Logue was eventually fired for “inadequate effort.”11
Logue didn’t just connect to Yale’s workers on campus. His social position and political sympathies made him more at home in their urban world outside the campus gates than most other Yale students were. When as a senior he showed a date around New Haven and “she was totally uninterested,” he took that as grounds enough to end the relationship.12
Logue’s bond with Yale’s low-level employees, so appalling to his dining-services supervisor from freshman year, only grew over his college career and drew him into helping with a full-scale union-organizing drive mounted during his senior year, 1941–42. The 1930s and early 1940s were a dynamic period for labor in New Haven, as elsewhere in the United States. Garment workers, clock workers, metalworkers, and other local laborers succeeded in organizing unions for the first time. Even the drivers for the Chieppo Bus Company, hired by the university to drive students to the Yale Bowl and other sports fields, struck for union recognition. With so much local activity, Yale’s janitors, maids, maintenance, and power and boiler room workers joined in, motivated by serious complaints of their own: miserably low wages, long hours (often seven days a week), and poor working conditions—no overtime, sick leave, holiday pay, job protection, or vacations other than a three-month summer layoff. With the arrival of a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizer, long-simmering discontent boiled over and led to the chartering of a CIO local in May 1941, followed by an overwhelming electoral victory for the union in October. When negotiations with the university broke down the next month, four hundred workers went on strike—the first in Yale’s history. Finally, in February 1942, came a favorable contract between Yale University and Local 142 of the United Construction Workers, affiliated with the United Mine Workers–CIO. Logue threw himself into this yearlong roller-coaster ride of a unionization struggle, which he later recalled as “a time with a lot of idealism, a lot of ‘we’re going to do what we can to make the world better.’” He was rewarded upon graduation with a full-time job as general organizer for the local.13
As an activist on the New Haven labor scene, Logue had a clear political position: pro-labor and anti-communist. Although he wasn’t religious himself, Logue’s Catholic upbringing propelled his anti-communism, just as it helped inspire his commitment to social justice.14 But mostly, he was a New Dealer to the core, convinced that the best way to improve ordinary people’s lives was to empower the federal government to be a force for good.15 In New Haven, that approach meant much more than organizing workers. As Logue would have been aware, the New Haven Central Labor Council had advocated for the City-Wide Conference for Slum Clearance and Better Housing in 1937. After publicizing the poor conditions in which many New Haveners lived, the city’s labor leaders helped secure funding for Elm Haven Housing, New Haven’s first federally funded low-rise public housing project. Two more much-needed public housing projects would soon follow. The New Haven labor movement taught the budding-activist Logue that enlightened government could play a key role in delivering decent, affordable homes, along with good jobs, to its citizens.16
Knowing it was only a matter of time until he was drafted into World War II, Logue decided in November 1942 to enlist in the navy, hoping to become a combat flyer. To his surprise and dismay, he was turned down. Throughout his life he remained convinced that his labor activism had made him unacceptable to the navy. He even wrote to President Roosevelt in outrage: “The Navy seems to have a policy on organizers. Keep ’em out.” (The FBI found no evidence for Logue’s suspicion in its security investigation of him in 1952. Nor did I in my Freedom of Information Act inquiry of 2009. But the recruitment officer at the Philadelphia Naval Aviation Selection Board, who recorded “lack of interest in Naval Aviation” as the official grounds for rejection, might privately have deemed Logue too politically unreliable.)17 Logue then enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces, hoping to qualify as a pilot, and received orders to report for flight training in early 1943. His farewell message to Local 142’s membership conveyed how much he connected the union struggle at Yale with the democracy he would soon be defending abroad. “Unions are the greatest single force today in preserving and strengthening our democracy on the home front. Do your part in our fight for democracy by being an active, loyal union member and by practicing that tolerance of your fellow man regardless of race, creed or color which is the core of democracy and the American labor movement.”18
Before too long, Logue washed out of pilot training (not uncommon in this highly selective military division) and had to content himself with being a bombardier. He served in the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy from 1944 to 1945, flying seventeen missions, winning his share of medals and stars, and mustering out as a second lieutenant in summer 1945. On the ground, he was impressed with Florence, Siena, and Rome, but Logue most often mentioned how all that time in the “great glass bubble” gave him a valuable bird’s-eye view of European cities, teaching him to “read” the physical layout to “get a feeling for how a city is put together.” It was “the best possible city planning training I [could have] had.”19
Although Logue was not likely aware of it, the famed French modernist architect Le Corbusier (the professional name of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), whose dramatic schemes to remake cities would powerfully influence postwar urban renewers like Logue, also credited aerial views with inspiring him: “When one has taken a long flight over the city like a bird gliding, ideas attack you … everything became clear to me … I expressed the ideas of modern planning.” Le Corbusier’s signature linear radiant city, with its rational division of urban functions, towering skyscrapers, and lyrical flow of highways, apparently came to him while studying the problems of nineteenth-century cities from airplanes during the 1930s and 1940s. Likewise, Le Corbusier’s own bold interventions on the landscape were easily discernible from the air.20 This aerial perspective encouraged Logue, Le Corbusier, and other modernists, including the New Haven planner Maurice E. H. Rotival, to reimagine the city as made up of distinct, legible parts—residential neighborhoods, downtown cores, industrial and market districts, and connective roadways—that could be grasped from above and modernized in discrete sections as needed. Peering down on Europe, Logue learned “how a city’s functions separated themselves and how they worked together.”21 From these heights, a city was like a complex machine whose interconnected parts required frequent recalibration for the full urban mechanism to work properly.
Once the European war ended and Logue returned to the United States, he took up his life again in New Haven, using the GI Bill to matriculate at Yale Law School. He also went back to working part-time as an organizer for Local 142, which continued to unionize Yale workers, concentrating now on the university’s dining halls, library, and hospital.22 At Yale Law, Logue was drawn to an iconoclastic group of law professors known as legal realists. They condemned the Harvard-based, case-method style of legal education, with its orderly rules to explain judicial decisions. Instead, they argued that legal judgments were more idiosyncratic, more politically motivated, and more shaped by pressures from the larger society. Logue particularly admired a member of this group, Fred Rodell, whom he had met through the union struggle on campus before the war. Rodell became a mentor, father figure, and close friend.23
Rodell was an irreverent political progressive, affectionately known as “Fred the Red,” who had scorned the mainstream legal academic culture when at the age of twenty-nine he wrote an article published in the Virginia Law Review titled “Goodbye to Law Reviews,” denouncing the whole law review system as flawed and hypocritical. Three years later, in 1939, Rodell published a tract titled Woe unto You, Lawyers, which took aim at the law profession itself as no more than hired guns of the privileged, wielding legal jargon as ammunition. For decades Rodell annoyed the Yale University Corporation and administration by being a persistent gadfly, most infuriatingly when he canceled his classes during the Local 142 strike of November 1941.24
With the encouragement of Rodell and other leftists on the law school faculty, Logue and his friends worked energetically to challenge the university not only on its labor practices, but also for its racial and religious discrimination—through quotas in admissions and prejudices in faculty hiring—and for its weak defense of academic freedom in the increasingly anti-communist atmosphere of the 1940s. As its president Charles Seymour famously said, “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches. We do not intend to hire Communists.” Logue may have personally disliked communism, but he adamantly rejected red-baiting of any kind.25
On and off campus during these immediate postwar years, Logue developed a political identity as a pro-labor liberal and a committed racial integrationist. He founded a Yale chapter of the national American Veterans Committee (AVC), a progressive movement of veterans committed to challenging the conservative American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. When the AVC went through a bruising battle between its liberal and communist wings, Logue characteristically chose the anti-communist side.26 But opting for the more moderate path in the AVC did not stop Logue from bravely championing the cause of racial integration, raising havoc at the slightest hint of discrimination or injustice. In fact, Logue’s very first publication, in 1946, was a book review of Robert C. Weaver’s Negro Labor in the left-wing magazine The Progressive, in which Logue called for government pressure to deliver “social justice” to African American workers, “now, not soon.” That same year he shot off an angry letter of complaint to the editor of the left-leaning Catholic Commonweal magazine, protesting that the article “Veterans on Campus” did not adequately treat the special problems of black veterans.27
In Logue’s academic program at Yale Law School, which was condensed into two years to advance returning vets more quickly, he focused on labor and legislative law but also gained exposure to urban policy from two teachers, Myres McDougal and Maurice Rotival. McDougal taught a required first-year course on real property, which he introduced by saying, “If you are interested in deed transfers, if you are interested in mortgages, that’s not my course. You will learn that stuff in the first or second year at work out of law school. My interest is to convey how the law can achieve appropriate public policies in the utilization of real property.”28 McDougal, who also teamed up with the political scientist Harold Lasswell to train Yale Law School students to advocate for more democratic social policies, would himself become the first chair of the New Haven Redevelopment Authority when it was established in 1950 to enable the city to compete for funding newly available under the Federal Housing Act of 1949.29 From Rotival, a charismatic and prominent modernist planner who was on the faculty at the Yale School of Art and Architecture and had developed a renewal plan for New Haven in the early 1940s, Logue learned the latest thinking about urban redevelopment.
By the time Ed Logue left New Haven in late fall 1947, he had developed a political disposition best described as being a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast. At this stage, and arguably for the rest of his life, Logue thrived as an insider comfortable in the bastions of power who then fought hard to improve what he judged were damaging deficiencies. His combative stance did not always sit well with others. An unidentified Yale University official with whom Logue interacted over labor issues—possibly R. Carter Nyman, appointed as Yale’s first personnel director for service and clerical staff in 1939—admitted when interviewed by the FBI in 1951 that he had no grounds to doubt Logue’s loyalty to the United States but, back in 1941–42, he had been incensed that as a scholarship student Logue “was doing everything in his power to upset the administration of the school that was giving him the opportunity for an education.” When budget cuts had required the laying off of maids at Yale, Logue apparently thought, to this individual’s outrage, that “they should be continued on the pay roll because he, LOGUE, felt it was the University’s moral obligation to look after them.”30
Logue brought this reformist zeal to his personal life as well. He met his future wife, Margaret DeVane, daughter of the powerful Dean DeVane, soon after he returned to New Haven for law school. She was only a sophomore at Smith College at the time, though emotionally mature for her age and as politically liberal and idealistic as her future husband. They would marry in June 1947, when she still had a year of college to go, which did not please her parents. They were no happier when their future son-in-law called a strike of workers at Grace–New Haven Hospital (later renamed Yale–New Haven Hospital) in April 1947, while his future mother-in-law lay on an operating table inside undergoing a minor procedure.31 Marriage to Margaret, the dean’s daughter, may have ensconced Logue deeper in the Yale establishment, but it did little to suppress his appetite for rebellion. A favorite family story captured the armed truce on matters political between Ed Logue and Dean DeVane. One day when Logue was making calls to schedule a union meeting from the DeVanes’ living room, the dean walked in and said, “You know, Ed, I like you and I can respect what you’re doing, but please don’t do it from my telephone.”32
Logue would practice “tough love” throughout his life, holding the people and institutions he most valued to what he considered to be higher standards. This commitment to productive engagement, however contentious, made him increasingly impatient with the cynical aloofness often displayed by his mentor Fred Rodell and other political skeptics given more to critique than to action. Appropriately, one of Logue’s favorite sayings was “Keep the left hand high,” referring to the boxer’s training to be ever vigilant in fending off counterpunches. His longtime colleague Allan Talbot explained what Logue meant: “public service as a form of combat” was to be welcomed, not avoided.33
After graduating Yale Law in October 1947, Ed Logue pursued his ambition to practice labor law by moving back to his hometown of Philadelphia to apprentice with a well-respected practitioner, Morris H. Goldstein, who represented the International Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America–CIO and other CIO and AFL union locals in Philadelphia.34 It would turn out that returning to Philadelphia offered Logue much more than training in labor law. Most importantly, it helped direct his attention to city building as a cornerstone of progressive politics.
Logue had already visited and drawn inspiration from the influential “Better Philadelphia Exhibition,” which in 1947 the planners Edmund Bacon and Robert Mitchell and the architects Oskar Stonorov and Louis Kahn had installed downtown in the top two floors of Gimbels department store to engage the public in imagining what Philadelphia might look like by its three hundredth anniversary in 1982—“if you support city planning.”35 Logue had been one of almost four hundred thousand people to attend this exhibition, which aimed to be both educational and entertaining. Here he observed the “shadow of blight” spreading ominously over the heart of Philadelphia as a pendulum swung back and forth. He watched sections of Center City flip over on a huge thirty-by-fourteen-foot scale model, synchronized with a narration, to show proposed improvements by 1982. He walked around a life-size reconstruction of what the exhibition’s creators considered a “dingy and overcrowded” block in South Philadelphia badly in need of rehabilitation. Here, at the top of the Gimbels flagship store, Logue and many others were introduced—through novel, World’s Fair–type exhibits—to fundamental concepts that would underlie urban renewal for decades to come.36 “It was magic,” Logue still mused nostalgically five decades later.37
The political connections that Logue already had in Philadelphia made it easy for him to find organizations and individuals who shared his view of urban redevelopment as a promising new frontier for liberal experimentation. In no time, he was attending meetings of the Philadelphia Housing Association, the Citizens’ Council on City Planning (CCCP), the Philadelphia branch of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Here he served as a Democratic committeeman for his district and as a dedicated campaign worker in the exciting 1949 “revolution” in Philadelphia politics when the Democratic reformers Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth successfully wrestled the city out of the almost century-long stranglehold of the GOP machine.38 In the late 1940s, Logue’s Philadelphia became his schoolroom for early instruction in both physical and political renewal. And he was not alone in this regard. Many individuals were involved in both struggles, including Molly Yard, who was a leader of the Clark-Dilworth team, a board member of ADA, and the executive secretary of the CCCP. (She would cap her long career in progressive politics with the presidency of the National Organization for Women in 1987.) Housing low-income Philadelphians and redeveloping “blighted” neighborhoods stood high on the reformist Democratic Party agenda.
As Logue’s fascination with urban policy grew, so, too, did his impatience with the daily tedium of practicing law. As he wrote to Fred Rodell in July 1948, “The law is a whore’s trade. I don’t want a nice law practice for anything but the income, and I’m a son of a bitch if I’ll throw away ten or twenty years of my life building up an income.” Looking back a quarter century later, he also recalled becoming frustrated with the limited reach of a union attorney: “I discovered that being a labor lawyer was serving the interests of people who are in the labor unions and labor movement, but you weren’t going to run it … I knew … that that was not for me.”39
Casting about for alternatives, he came up with two job offers in politics. One was working for the recently elected U.S. senator Hubert H. Humphrey, who had made himself a liberal hero by proposing an enlightened civil rights plank for the 1948 Democratic Party platform. His passionate plea that “the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights” precipitated the walkout of infuriated Southern Dixiecrats from the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, which Logue had attended as a local Democratic committeeman. The other offer came from the new Democratic governor of Connecticut, Chester Bowles, an advertising tycoon who had brilliantly masterminded a national system of price controls during World War II for the Roosevelt administration.40 In accepting the Bowles offer, Logue, for the first but not the last time, chose a local or state position over a federal one, because he felt he could make a greater impact more quickly at this level.
Logue became Bowles’s labor secretary, part of a liberal administration that swept into office determined to create a “Little New Deal” to reform Connecticut state government after a long Republican reign. Here Logue first tested the waters of government service as a more rewarding way to improve the world than practicing law—and he liked it. He became involved in many of Governor Bowles’s socially progressive initiatives in civil rights and social welfare, including coping with an acute postwar housing shortage, which further awakened Logue to the looming urban crisis: “His housing program … was the most farsighted and the most effective in any state at that time,” Logue later recalled.41
Partners in a whirlwind pace of work in Hartford, Ed Logue and Chester Bowles forged a warm friendship that would last for four decades, with Bowles serving as another father figure whose political commitment, social compassion, and moral integrity won Logue’s admiration.42 The voters of Connecticut proved less smitten with Bowles and his liberal agenda, however, and they booted out the governor and his idealistic young crew after a two-year term. Soon thereafter, President Harry S. Truman appointed the defeated Bowles as ambassador to India and Nepal, the third American to serve since India had declared its independence from the British Empire in 1947. Bowles invited Logue to come along as his special assistant, and by January 1952, Ed and Margaret Logue were on their way to New Delhi for about eighteen months, until the newly elected Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, sent both Bowles and Logue packing in spring 1953.43
India beckoned as a great adventure to thirty-year-old Ed and twenty-five-year-old Margaret, the only damper being questions raised by the State Department under its Loyalty and Security Program that red-flagged Ed and his brother John’s political activities. Ed was singled out for his labor organizing; for signing petitions sponsored by suspected communist-front organizations, such as one protesting the threatened deportation of the radical longshoreman Harry Bridges; and for other political actions that the State Department deemed suspicious. Logue responded at length to the chair of the State Department’s Loyalty Board, infuriated to be charged with harboring communist sympathies. He defended himself not by citing his history of anti-communism but rather by taking the more principled position of claiming that all his actions were legal and proper exercises of his constitutional rights. He reserved his greatest anger for the “improper and offensive” attention to his brother John, a lifelong adherent of the idealistic, anti-fascist, antiwar World Federalist Movement, founded in 1947 to promote more effective world governance than the fledgling United Nations appeared to promise: “It seems to me that my brother should have a right to know that sort of malicious gossip not only exists but has been dignified with such notice as this by his government.”
Years later, Margaret would shudder at memories of the incident. “Ed was terribly upset by it. Our first taste of McCarthyism.”44 Logue would reflect at greater length on the damage wrought by McCarthyism as he journeyed back to the United States in summer 1953. He blamed President Truman and his secretary of state Dean Acheson’s loyalty program, “which includes every last janitor and was never able to focus on the problem—nor to separate treason, subversion and actual disloyalty from either fuzzy thinking or radical thinking, the first of which cannot be helped and the second of which is in my opinion, so long as it is not unreasonable, subversive or disloyal, a useful thing to have in government, on the campus and elsewhere.”45
Many aspects of Logue’s experience in India profoundly affected him. He and Bowles became only more committed to improving civil rights in the United States when faced with mounting Indian criticism of American racial discrimination, particularly from the influential Communist Party of India. “The number one question at any press conference or forum was, ‘What about America’s treatment of the Negro?’” bemoaned Ambassador Bowles.46 In early 1953, Logue composed and began circulating widely a proposal he called “Is One Hundred Years Long Enough?” in which he idealistically called for a vigorous national commitment over the next ten years, in anticipation of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, to acknowledging that “the Negro problem in America today is not a Negro problem. It is a white problem.” He urged “mak[ing] democracy meaningful for thirteen million Americans who are not yet full partners in our society,… an opportunity to show our friends abroad, particularly the darker-skinned peoples in Asia and Africa, that American democracy is genuine and not the hollow mockery it sometimes seems when the color line is drawn.” Logue tried—unsuccessfully—to interest liberal organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the United Auto Workers in sponsoring a national, community-based campaign aimed at white Americans, “to examine ourselves to see the way to progress and to move toward it.”47
Most important for Logue’s later career in city building were his observations of the community development work that the U.S. government and the Ford Foundation were supporting across India. Focused on modernizing rural villages, assumed to be the bedrock of traditional Indian society, the State Department’s Point Four Program promoted a holistic approach to improving a village’s built environment, social welfare, and technical knowledge. Named for the fourth point in President Truman’s inaugural address of 1949, the program was born out of the fires of the Cold War to, in Truman’s words, “make the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas,” so that the “free peoples of the world, through their own efforts” would be able to “lighten their burdens.”48 New physical infrastructure such as wells, roads, schools, clinics, and community centers were to accompany reforms in land ownership and tenancy, public health, and education in everything from literacy to improved farming methods. Thirty-five thousand “village workers” trained by the Ford Foundation provided expertise on the ground. The goal was a more modern, self-sufficient, and, not least, democratic India—an India that could be counted on as a solid anti-communist American ally in Asia.49
Soon after Bowles and Logue arrived in New Delhi, they became intrigued with a demonstration project already under way at Etawah, in the nearby state of Uttar Pradesh. Originally conceived by the American architect and planner Albert Mayer in 1948 at the encouragement of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, this model site, covering ninety-seven villages, combined an anti-colonial Gandhian commitment to village survival with the extension service techniques (improved seeds, tools, fertilizer, livestock, irrigation) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In just three years, food production had increased by 50 percent and the project’s reach had extended to over three hundred villages. A more urban pilot project—the Indian government’s new cities of Faridabad and Nilokheri, intended for refugees of the partition of British India into the separate nations of Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India—likewise practiced an integrated approach, combining construction of new infrastructure with improved economic and social programs. Every family received a house with running water, factory jobs, and access to a modern hospital and schools.50
Bowles immediately went to work encouraging Prime Minister Nehru’s government and his own to partner in a much more ambitious, national-level undertaking. On the anniversary of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, 1952, Nehru proclaimed the launch of a nationwide program of community development with fifty-five projects, covering sixteen thousand villages and more than eleven million people. Although Nehru famously adhered to a policy of nonalignment in the raging Cold War, he framed this approach to eradicating village poverty through individual and community self-help as the next step in India’s democratic revolution. Nehru’s linkage of development and democracy pleased the Americans, who were themselves operating with assumptions rooted in the modernization theory popular at the time that economic progress would yield political democratization. Nehru’s American partner hoped that the result of its investment in community development would be not only more plentiful harvests and higher living standards but also an India that would serve as a bulwark of the “free Asia” it sought against the threat of communism. Looming over the American agenda was the recent “loss of China” to the communists, who had built their political base among the suffering peasants of China’s villages.51
While analysts now may debate the virtues and effectiveness of the massive American-supported efforts in rural development, there is little doubt that Bowles, Logue, and their colleagues felt that they were successfully applying modern Western science and democratic values to previously “backward” and exploitative rural conditions. But they also recognized the need to proceed cautiously. Bowles took special care to argue—particularly within his own State Department—that community development must be viewed as an Indian program that relied on a “grassroots, village-by-village attack upon poverty, directed by and participated in by the Indian people themselves.” It could not be a top-down, colonial-style American imposition, despite the reliance on expert advisers. As he warned his Republican successor as ambassador, George Allen, “Any effort by the Administration or Congress to tie political strings to Indian Aid or to force us to go out to ‘claim credit’ which really belongs to the Indians, will be disastrous.” Bowles was right to worry. For many reasons—including the Indian government’s reticence to enforce true land reform and wrest control from the landholding rural elites, and Point Four’s failure to adequately engage ordinary Indians in decision-making—community development was never as popular among villagers as Bowles had hoped.52
This Indian experience would stay with Logue for many years. By 1955, when he was working in New Haven, Point Four would provide a model for the kind of integrated physical and social reconstruction he was promoting at home. “As you may have heard, I am busy in a New England version of community development,” he wrote to Douglas Ensminger, the Ford Foundation’s representative in New Delhi. The following year, he tried to recruit Ensminger to speak to a seminar on urban renewal that he was co-teaching at Yale, convinced of the relevance of the community development experience in India. And in 1957, Logue was still claiming that his Indian community development work remained “very pertinent to the work I am now doing,” including its pitfalls. When he sought to give Bowles a balanced view of New Haven’s progress in urban renewal, he honestly admitted, without detailed elaboration, “New Haven has a good program. If our present plans mature by the end of the year, we will be one of the half dozen best in the country. However, you remember Nilokheri and Faridabad and Etawah. Their problems reappear here in other forms. We certainly have not found the panacea.”53
The community development work in India that so inspired Logue was the brainchild of a very distinctive—and politically progressive—group of social scientists and agricultural experts, which helped convince Logue of the worthiness of the undertaking. They had been agrarian Social Democrats within the New Deal’s Department of Agriculture, supported by its reformist secretary Henry Wallace and clustered in its Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Farm Security Administration, and land-grant college training programs. There they promoted all kinds of innovative projects to help family farmers—and even in some cases sharecroppers and farm workers—cope with the Great Depression and the growing threat from corporate agriculture. During World War II and its immediate aftermath, they found their cooperative county planning committees, state agricultural extension services, and other grassroots participatory schemes—what they called a “cultural approach to extension” for valorizing farmers’ long-standing customs and traditions—suddenly under attack in an increasingly anti-communist Congress. Despite the fact that most of them, like Logue and Bowles, condemned communism, they were pushed out of government service as too radical. The growth of international rural development work in the late 1940s and 1950s in what was then called “the third world”—sponsored by Point Four, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—provided these agricultural reformers with an opportunity to practice their integrated program of agricultural modernization and agrarian democratization overseas.54
Among this group, Logue particularly admired Wolf Ladejinsky, a Russian Jew who had immigrated to the United States, studied at Columbia, worked in the Department of Agriculture in Washington, and after World War II became a skilled strategist for pushing reluctant Asian governments to widen land ownership as the best defense against communism. The Logues met Ladejinsky when he came to India to advise on land reform, and they then visited him in Japan for three weeks as the last stop on their return trek through India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Singapore, and Hong Kong. As the architect of sweeping land redistribution under the American Occupation, Ladejinsky surely conveyed to the Logues how the reconstruction of Japan was successfully integrating a reeducation in democracy with the physical rebuilding of a nation devastated in war. At the end of the trip Logue enthused in a letter to Ford’s Ensminger back in New Delhi: “This country could be the proving ground for democracy in all of Asia.”55
Later, in 1954 and again in 1956, Logue rallied to Ladejinsky’s defense when he was red-baited. First, Ladejinsky was forced to leave Japan when the Republican secretary of agriculture deemed his Russian origins a security risk. Then, two years later, when he was working on land reform in South Vietnam, the State Department dismissed him for a technical conflict of interest, as he had bought stock in a Taiwanese company that had a contract with the U.S. government. Logue was convinced that Ladejinsky was being politically targeted and was outraged. As he wrote to another associate from his India days, “Wolf is the leading democratic expert in the world on land reform. There is a certain irony in the fact that his resignation was forced because he was the only American publicly known to have invested a private dollar in private enterprise in Chiang Kai-Shek’s Formosa.” Logue tried to get the Ford Foundation to hire Ladejinsky, but it wouldn’t touch him. Nor would other American organizations fearful of a communist taint. From 1956 to 1961 Ladejinsky worked directly for the South Vietnamese government, until the Ford Foundation and later the World Bank finally took him on as a consultant.56 Historians have recognized that New Deal agricultural reformers carried many of their domestically tested ideas abroad to the developing world as the United States expanded its sphere of influence during the Cold War. But they have barely begun to track individuals like Ed Logue—or his American embassy colleague Bernard Loshbough, who helped direct development programs in India and then returned to the United States to work in housing and redevelopment in Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. They brought many of those ideas back home again and applied them to America’s urban problems in the 1950s and 1960s. “It is ironic—perhaps shocking,” Loshbough mused in 1962, “that an urbanite like myself had to travel 10,000 miles to India to learn that a homegrown product like agricultural extension can likely be adapted for effective use in urban centers.” Loshbough would launch a highly regarded, Ford-funded “urban extension” program in Pittsburgh that mimicked its model in India, deploying “urban agents” to organize “self-help renewal” projects in four neighborhoods.57 The roots of Logue’s lifelong concern with improving America’s urban environment likewise grew deep in the soil of rural India, where, in the early 1950s, a complex alliance of different sorts of modernizing progressives—nonaligned Indian leaders, reformist agricultural experts, and a New Deal–inspired American embassy staff serving under a committed liberal ambassador—all embraced village renewal as the key to India’s success with democracy.
Logue brought the excitement of helping to build a new India to his work in New Haven. When the opportunity arose to join Lee in creating a model of urban renewal for the nation, he felt that he was undertaking his own version of Etawah, Faridabad, and Nilokheri. His urban upbringing in Philadelphia, his years as a rebel at Yale, his commitment to labor organizing, his aerial perspective as a bombardier, his civil rights activism, his legal training, his government service, and, most recently, his nurturing of a more modern and democratic India—each of these experiences shaped the Ed Logue who in January 1954 threw himself into the challenge of addressing the urban crisis in America through remaking his adopted hometown of New Haven.58 In the years ahead, Logue and his partner Mayor Dick Lee devoted themselves to what became an enormously ambitious, expensive—and ultimately controversial—undertaking. Redeveloping New Haven would be one of the most important testing grounds for federal urban policy in the 1950s and 1960s, and it would catapult Lee and his first lieutenant Logue into national prominence.
The city that Ed and Margaret Logue returned to from New Delhi was actually made up of at least four distinct New Havens—and none were faring well. First, there was Yankee New Haven, centered on the city’s impressive Green, dating back to the Puritan colony’s seventeenth-century settlement and originally containing its marketplace, burying ground, and meetinghouse. Later, it provided an anchor for Yale College’s development directly to the west after its founding in 1701. By the Federal Period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Green had become one of the finest public squares in the country, graced with three venerable Protestant churches built between 1812 and 1815 and lined with majestic elm trees that gave New Haven the moniker of “Elm City.” But by the time of Lee’s ascension to the mayoralty in 1954, the neighboring, private Yale University was dwarfing the public Green in size and national prestige, the picturesque site where town and gown converged barely masking the growing tension between them.59 There were numerous fault lines, but the widest was the financial burden the city bore from having so much of nonprofit Yale’s property off the municipal tax rolls. As the university’s ambitions grew after World War II, so, too, had its real estate holdings. Every new building constructed on a previously occupied site increased the tax load on nonexempt taxpayers. This problem had already become obvious to Logue as a law student years earlier. In 1946, he wrote to his future wife, Margaret, “While it is true that Yale does wonders for New Haven, it still uses up a lot of tax-free land. Aside from the med school, Yale seems to have had a pretty casual attitude toward the government and the welfare of New Haven.”60
At the Green’s southern border sat a busy downtown commercial district, choked with local as well as long-distance traffic in the days before the Connecticut Turnpike (I-95) bypassed the city in 1958. The intersection of Chapel and Church Streets was its heart: there stood two major department stores, Malley’s and Shartenberg’s. For years, New Haveners met up “at the clock at Malley’s.” A third department store, Gamble-Desmond, had closed in September 1953, right before Lee’s election as mayor, a disturbing sign of the city’s growing commercial troubles. Surrounding these department stores, which had anchored downtown since the nineteenth century, were a dozen blocks of theaters, offices, and storefronts in conditions ranging from modestly modernized to comfortably dowdy to downright dilapidated. They housed pharmacies, luncheonettes, barbershops, and haberdasheries; jewelry, camera, and novelty stores; bowling alleys and billiard halls; and smoke, hat, and dress shops. Inexpensive office space—a worrisome amount of it empty—was for rent upstairs. Almost all these downtown businesses were locally owned, many by ethnic New Haveners, particularly Jews, for whom opening a store offered a promising route to upward mobility. For decades, downtown New Haven had served as the commercial center not just of the city but also for the surrounding Southern Connecticut region. More and more, however, brand-new suburban shopping centers were encroaching on New Haven’s retail dominance, with their easier car access and acres of free parking.
New Haven as a political and administrative headquarters dominated a third side of the Green. Here were impressive structures—a Victorian Gothic city hall, a colonnaded neoclassical post office, and courthouses, law offices, and banks associated with the city’s status as the seat of New Haven County. Not far away, in the city’s better-off neighborhoods, bankers and lawyers from prestigious local firms, many of them Yale Law graduates, occupied stately homes and supported exclusive social institutions such as the Graduate Club and the New Haven Lawn Club. Gradually, though, counties were declining in importance in Connecticut—their governments would be officially abolished in 1960. And the city’s elite were increasingly becoming New Haveners by day and residents of leafy, prosperous suburban communities like Woodbridge, Orange, Madison, North Haven, Branford, Guilford, and Hamden by night, thereby shifting their identities and allegiances from city to suburb.
By the mid-1950s, New Haven’s fourth dimension of factory districts and working-class communities was showing the greatest fragility of all. New Haven had thrived as a manufacturing center for many kinds of goods in the nineteenth century—carriages, hardware, clocks, rubber boots, garments, and munitions. Since 1870, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, maker of military and sporting weaponry, had been the city’s largest employer, operating a mammoth plant not far from Yale’s gates. But now its declining payroll was causing alarm. Although 21,000 had worked there during World War I and 13,700 during World War II, by the 1950s the plant employed just 5,000.61
For over a century, immigrants had poured into New Haven to take up plentiful jobs in factories and with the city’s important railroad and telephone networks. First came the Irish and Germans, followed by the Italians and Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. They crowded initially into immigrant districts like the Oak Street tenement neighborhood bordering downtown, and then, once established, moved on to stable working-class communities such as Wooster Square, Dixwell, and Fair Haven, settling on streets lined with modest but respectable brick rowhouses and clapboarded three-deckers. By 1953, African Americans from the South made up the latest stream of migrants looking for high-wage manufacturing jobs. Unfortunately, they were arriving just as the city’s industries drastically retrenched. The consolidation of corporations nationally made New Haven’s factories less valued outposts of major firms, their dated physical plants too hemmed in to allow expansion, and cheaper nonunion labor more easily found elsewhere. Moreover, as flexible trucking transport replaced domestic rail and water shipping, New Haven’s superb access to both mattered less. With more and more New Haveners struggling to make a living, housing and neighborhoods deteriorated, as landlords were less willing to invest in their properties. These and other changes over the course of the twentieth century destabilized industrial New Haven and increased the number of city residents—old and new—searching for good jobs and decent homes.
Dick Lee’s victory in 1953 over the Italian Republican mayor William Celentano, after two failed challenges in 1949 and 1951, validated his decision to make the city’s creeping decline his poster cause. In the previous two elections, Lee had charged Celentano, a successful funeral home operator, with the usual failure to deliver quality services. Both candidates had worried about the city’s deterioration, but their proposed remedies had skirted the larger structural problems with quick fixes—more parking here, a traffic light there, better street paving everywhere. The Yale Law School professor Eugene Rostow, who recruited Logue to help with Independents for Lee in 1953, said that despite Lee’s Yale connections, “very few of us at the university took any interest in Dick’s first two attempts to become mayor … They were really ordinary affairs with Dick hitting conventional themes of efficiency and honesty.”62 What made 1953 so different was that after his second defeat in 1951, Lee said, “I began to tie in all these ideas we’d been practicing in city planning for years in terms of the human benefits that a program like this could reap for a city … And I began to realize that while we had lots of people interested in doing something for the city they were all working at cross purposes. There was no unity of approach.”63
The excitement generated by Lee’s third campaign was palpable, even among the usually blasé and locally disinterested Yale community, who were more invested in electing the nationally prominent fellow “egghead” Adlai Stevenson as president than a provincial politician named Dick Lee as mayor. “When he campaigned to rebuild the city in 1953, he struck a responsive chord,” Rostow continued. “He was attacking fundamental ills of our time, the moral, economic, and social injustice of the slum … I believe the reason he finally won in 1953 is that he abandoned the stock clichés of electioneering and allowed his morality to come through. Voters sense this in a candidate. From 1953 … the people have understood that Dick means it when he says that slums are evil and the city must be rebuilt. They sense his commitment.”64 Ed Logue was only one of many idealistic liberals who signed up to work for Lee.
Logue and his ilk had good reason to believe that Lee might be just the one to pull off an audacious plan to revitalize the city. Lee was born in New Haven to a working-class English and Irish family (though he played up the Irish side for its greater political rewards), attended local public schools, and soon after graduating high school in 1934 found jobs locally, first as a reporter for the New Haven Journal-Courier, then as a staff member of the Chamber of Commerce, and, beginning in 1944, as the head of Yale’s news bureau. Each job embedded lower-class Lee in another bastion of elite power in the city—the Republican newspapers of the locally powerful Jackson family, the organized business community, and Yale University. By 1953, Lee had already served for fourteen years as a New Haven alderman representing the Irish Democratic Seventeenth Ward, where he had grown up. With a foot in both town and gown and with a new, potentially more civic-minded Yale president, A. Whitney Griswold, at the university’s helm, Lee seemed well positioned to overcome the difficult relations of the past and lead a collaborative effort to turn around New Haven.
Conservatively dressed in tweeds, button-down collars, and bow ties from Fenn-Feinstein and J. Press—New Haven men’s clothiers selling a newfangled Ivy look—townie Lee appeared as Ivy as the bluest of Yalies as he ran from wake to bar mitzvah to League of Women Voters tea, solidifying his ties with the city’s many communities.65 Explained one of his aides,
When he is with the Irish, his ethnic background comes out and he looks like he grew up in Dublin. When he is at the university, he is a wise old man. Over at the Chamber he is a shrewd capitalist. With the unions he is a cigar-chomping tough guy. He’s not just “acting” either. He really knows how to talk the language of each of those groups.66
Lee’s aide might have added that in the 1953 election, Lee even gained the trust of the local chapter of the NAACP, to which he promised more blacks on the police force and an end to police brutality.67 Logue, too, noted how broadly Lee could communicate: “Dick was a marvel … There wasn’t anything or anyone in that town he didn’t know or couldn’t get a read on in five minutes—a good natural politician.”68 It was Lee’s commitment to bringing multiple New Haven voices to the table, in fact, that would later propel him to work closely with Logue to design an innovative structure of community consultation for urban renewal, the Citizens Action Commission (CAC).
Lee was the first of three elected officials to partner with Logue in his career of rebuilding cities, providing the political cover that made Logue’s work possible. Mayor John Collins of Boston and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York would follow. All shared Logue’s conviction that rebuilding a city physically was a necessary part of revitalizing its economy and offering greater opportunity to its residents. The partnership that Lee and Logue forged in New Haven thus became the template for the kind of collaboration that Logue would repeatedly seek in his career: a committed elected official to run political interference while he, the administrative expert supported by a nationally recruited professional staff, determined what to do and how to pay for it.
Within weeks of Lee’s inauguration in January 1954, the mayor and Logue began scheming how to structure their redevelopment agenda to take the greatest possible advantage of new federal programs aimed at revitalizing cities. They were also determined that the mayor’s office would fully control the effort—and not leave it to the appointed Redevelopment Agency Board, with its ties to party regulars, or the city’s current staff, whom they considered ineffective.69
Logue and Lee’s ability to use federal funding for New Haven’s urban renewal was made possible by the Housing Acts of 1937, 1949, and 1954 and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The programs those acts created—put most simply as public housing in 1937, urban redevelopment in 1949, urban renewal in 1954, and massive interstate-highway construction in 1956, for the first time prioritizing urban rather than rural roads—made federal dollars available to cities to address the deteriorated housing, economic disinvestment, and suburban competition that cities like New Haven faced all over the country.70 Historians have emphasized how federal actions like the Homeowners Loan Corporation of the New Deal era, designed to help people hold on to their homes during the Depression, and the GI Bill of Rights of 1944, which created many new homeowners after World War II, encouraged the exodus of people and capital from cities to suburbs. Both made mortgage money available only in areas deemed sound investments for banks, essentially redlining urban areas considered poor risks because their populations were too immigrant, black, or poor. The Highway Act, with its forty-one-thousand-mile network, similarly channeled the white middle class into suburbia.
Often missing in this telling, however, is the extent to which the U.S. government, pressured by city leaders, also supported urban revitalization, albeit in careful consultation with powerful real estate interests. In “writing down”—in other words, subsidizing—the costs of demolishing or rehabilitating areas deemed “blighted” (assumed to be unredeemable), they hoped to attract a reluctant private sector to invest in city rebuilding. Money was also made available to address the serious shortage of decent housing resulting from the cumulative deprivations wrought by years of depression and war.
It came naturally to Logue and Lee, as committed New Deal Democrats, to turn to the federal government to foot the bill for much of New Haven’s redevelopment. They saw urban decline as no different from many other social problems—such as unemployment, labor strife, or security in old age—that the federal government had proved itself capable of tackling. Sure, the private sector would ultimately have to step up and invest in projects for the long-term health of a city. But public authorities should be firmly in control. As Logue said often, “[You] can’t trust the private sector to protect the public interest.”71 Logue despaired of the self-interest he saw rampant around him in New Haven. “One of the freedoms Americans seem to value most is the freedom to use or abuse their privately owned property as they see fit,… regardless of its impact on … neighbors, or the whole neighborhood, or indeed the whole city.” The result: “The public interest is a lonely, unattended, silent spinster.”72
The approach that the New Haven leaders crafted put Logue’s redevelopment operation squarely in charge of making renewal plans and applying for government assistance, which was doled out with a required one-third local match to two-thirds federal funds. Logue and his team’s genius became minimizing the city’s outright cash contribution to the required local one-third by counting already funded capital expenditures for schools, roads, and parking garages.73 During Lee’s years in office, New Haven would attract more than $130 million in federal aid (more than $1 billion in today’s dollars), which in 1965 put it sixth among the twelve cities receiving the largest federal renewal grants, the smallest city by far on that list. New Haven easily ranked first among the twelve for grant money per capita: $745.38 for each of its 152,000 people—almost three times what the next highest, Newark, received. While John Lindsay’s New York City was enjoying the moniker “Fun City” in the 1960s, its smaller, northern neighbor would become known in some circles as “Fund City.”74
Logue and Lee’s early enthusiasm for federally funded urban renewal gave them an advantage over many other cities. By the mid-1950s, when they got started, Congress had authorized $500 million but only $74 million had as yet been claimed. Meanwhile, New Haven’s leaders were already geared up, according to Allan Talbot, who worked in New Haven’s redevelopment operation. “They would unroll their maps, gesture magnificently, argue persuasively, and feign a professional assurance that created the impression they were direct descendants of Baron Von Haussmann,” the master builder of Paris in the 1860s.75
Lee and Logue were able to move so quickly because they had no problem meeting the federal government’s requirement that a general redevelopment plan be made and approved before funds would be authorized. New Haven’s leaders themselves favored having what they called a “total plan.” Lee had campaigned on the idea. Logue elaborated the concept in an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine titled “Urban Ruin—or Urban Renewal?” Here he rejected the old-style “master plan” that, he argued, was nothing more than a theoretical exercise by planners who “dream[ed] what the good city ought to be … and never seemed to have a section on how they were to be carried out.”76 Logue scolded, “Too many theoretical planners preferred the applause of elegant critics to the earthier appreciation of politicians who had to try to carry out the plans and get re-elected, too.” New Haven had already endured that fate. In 1910 the New Haven Civic Improvement Association had hired the nationally prominent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and the architect Cass Gilbert to prepare an elaborate plan for the future of the city. It sat ignored for forty years. By contrast, the new approach advocated by Lee and Logue required pragmatic and comprehensive planning that “focuses on the city as a whole and treats all urban problems as interrelated.”77 The resulting “total plan” would ensure a rational coherence unachievable through the all-too-common small, scattered projects initiated by individuals, private enterprise, real estate developers, and government.
Lee and Logue felt that while all cities would benefit from more ambitious planning, New Haven especially needed it, given its double jeopardy of a steep economic decline and a long history of political paralysis that stymied effective action. From the start, Lee was constrained by a difficult political structure: a weak mayor facing reelection every two years; an unwieldy board of thirty-three elected aldermen, one of the largest of such boards in the country; and a “hodgepodge of boards and commissions which made efficiency impossible,” as The Saturday Evening Post put it in 1949.78 Twice over his sixteen years as mayor, Lee mounted a campaign to revise the city’s charter, and twice he failed. Frustration with New Haven politics more than anything else propelled him to set up Logue in early 1955 as an independent, powerful development administrator reporting directly to the mayor and insulated from New Haven’s calcified politics as usual by the enormous amount of federal money underwriting urban renewal.
Lee’s move now gave Logue official oversight of all departments concerned with physical development, which long had operated independently or antagonistically toward one another. These included the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, the City Plan Department, the Housing Authority, the Building Inspector, Traffic and Parking, and relevant aspects of the Health Department.79 Under Logue, the now supreme New Haven Redevelopment Agency became so powerful that locals jokingly referred to it, in this height of the Cold War, as the “Kremlin,” with Logue as “czar.” Frank O’Brion, the banker who chaired the New Haven Redevelopment Authority, endorsed the importance of having someone like Logue at the helm: “We learned—and all cities doing this will learn—that it is essential to have a co-ordinator with power to get things done.”80
The plan for physically redeveloping New Haven that Lee and Logue embraced had originally been commissioned from Logue’s former professor at Yale, the planner Maurice Rotival, in 1941. A version had been distributed publicly in 1944 as a thirty-four-page pamphlet titled Tomorrow Is Here (cleverly referencing Le Corbusier’s 1929 classic, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning) and then had been updated by Rotival several times, most recently in 1953. Rotival’s plan called for reversing the city’s declining fortunes by substantially remaking its physical face. Such a call for dramatic action fit well with the times. After all, a herculean full-blown American effort had recently won World War II for the United States’ floundering allies, and now, after the war, the nation was helping reconstruct severely damaged European cities. Logue made the analogy explicit when he urged that “the Marshall Plan has much to teach us about how to approach slums and blight.”81
Logue’s admiration for Rotival as his Yale Law School teacher contributed to his enthusiasm for utilizing Tomorrow Is Here as the basis for the city’s required general plan. Back then, Margaret Logue had even tagged along to watch Rotival’s fabled performances. “He would say, ‘You’ve got this going up the coast, and then you’ve this going up the river valley, and they all converge here, and’—drawing with different colored markers—‘see what could be done if you could do this?’”82 The Logues often brought home the large paper sketches that Rotival dashed off in his lectures to adorn their student-apartment walls. Lee and Logue had dismissed other planners as useless theoreticians, but they trusted Rotival, who, Logue explained, “was unusual,… a planner who had seen his plans happen.”83
Rotival’s vision for a new New Haven that inspired Lee and Logue was heavily influenced by the sensibilities of Le Corbusier, with whom he had collaborated in the 1930s in Algeria. The French-born planner and engineer Rotival went on to work extensively in the developing world, including in such cities as Baghdad and Caracas, giving him a shared experience with Logue.84 A basic principle that Rotival drew from this background, and which he applied to New Haven, was that the modern city must be oriented around the car. Accordingly, Rotival’s plan for New Haven tied the city’s future to updating its historic role as a distribution center: whereas once ships and rails had dispersed New Haven’s industrial products, now highways must serve as the lifeblood of the city’s future development as a trade and service center for the entire southern New England region. “Fresh, healthy arteries,” Rotival told Architectural Forum in 1958, “encourage all kinds of tissue to grow around them,” conveying optimism about the future with the same bodily metaphors that at the time commonly portrayed slums as “diseased” and cities as “dying.”85
From his first 1941 plan, Rotival had proposed positioning New Haven at the crossroads of highways, many of which became realities: a shoreline interstate that would eventually be I-95; the Connector (Route 34) that would transport people from there to a reinvigorated downtown and link the harbor to the Green; a north-south roadway (Route 91) that would tie New Haven to points northward; and a “circumferential route” to move traffic efficiently around the city, which would inspire much discussion but never be built. When the dramatic swirls of blue ink on his plans became new highways, Rotival promised, office buildings and retail stores would follow as the engine rooms for the city’s new postindustrial economy. And classic Corbusian “towers in the park” would replace blighted neighborhoods, housing residents in more modern and sanitary homes surrounded by green space.86
New Haven’s urban renewers unambivalently embraced Rotival’s recommendation to improve road access. In a 1959 article published in Traffic Quarterly Logue asked, “Is it possible for a city, any city, to make its peace with the automobile and to provide an environment where car and man can get along together?” He answered by arguing that highways were the only way to protect cities from being destroyed or abandoned by the large quantity of cars flooding the nation. Highway planning had been in the works in Connecticut since the 1930s, and after the interruption of depression and war, massive construction—like it or not—was remaking the landscape. By 1950, this tiny state had more roads per square mile than any other.87 The hugely expensive Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 only further fed the state’s appetite for roads, providing as it did federal subsidies covering 90 percent of construction costs. Lee, Logue, and Rotival concurred that New Haven’s future health would depend on shrewdly locating the city in Connecticut’s emerging highway grid. Staff worked hard negotiating with state road planners in Hartford to place I-95, Route 91, and the Connector in locations that they felt would best serve the city.
The urban renewers also pinned their hopes on improving car mobility within New Haven. They had inherited a city laid out in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with narrow streets for horses and carriages, later adapted to electric streetcars. New Haven had only recently given up its trolleys, the last city in Connecticut to do so.88 When automobiles had arrived on the scene in the first decades of the twentieth century, congestion mounted. Motivated by Rotival’s plan, Lee and Logue called for wider, straighter, faster-moving main streets; abundant—preferably off-street—parking; and secondary streets dead-ended to discourage drivers from threading their way through residential neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs, critic though she was of urban renewal, praised New Haven’s traffic commissioner William McGrath in her Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961 as “brilliant” for schemes that she felt would ultimately favor more efficient bus and truck service over automobiles.89 Lee and Logue had no doubts that New Haven would have to be more motor-friendly to survive. Lee promised his constituents, “We are taking the town out of the eighteenth century and projecting it into the twenty-first.”90
Adjusting New Haven to the automobile shaped new residential projects as well, in hopes that mimicking aspects of car-oriented suburbia would increase their appeal. New luxury apartment towers in the Oak Street area close to downtown were publicized as “town living in the modern manner,” which meant plenty of parking on the landscaped grounds.91 John Johansen designed the Florence Virtue Homes in the African American neighborhood of Dixwell as a modernist, concrete-block, garden apartment–type complex with buildings occupying only 16 percent of its landscaped site. Front and back yards for each townhouse, curvy roads, and off-street parking contributed to a suburban feel.92 The adjacent Dixwell Plaza extended the anti-urban, village-like concept with a new K–4 school topped by a bell tower, a church, a library, and a community center. A shopping arcade that resembled a suburban-strip shopping center with parking was intended to serve as the new commercial heart of the Dixwell neighborhood.
Improving automobile access to downtown New Haven became the linchpin of the strategy. Although retaining and recruiting manufacturers who offered good jobs to New Haven’s large working class were top priorities for the urban renewers, they recognized that they must simultaneously nurture a postindustrial economy. Businesses specializing in communications, television, hospitals, and medical research, they hoped, would eventually put down roots alongside the Connector, with its easy access to downtown, Yale, and the world outside via I-95. For now, their best hope lay with capitalizing on the city’s traditional importance as a market town for the region and reinvigorating its retail appeal. If mass consumption was driving prosperity in postwar America, then it should work in New Haven as well.93
Before the 1940s, New Haven had faced little commercial competition from the surrounding area. In fact, since the early twentieth century, Malley’s department store had promoted itself as “the Metropolitan Store of Connecticut.” A manager of a large downtown clothing store, J. Johnson & Sons, remembered back to the 1920s, when “New Haven was the leading city in the state for shopping” and “we used to wait for the buses to bring people in from [the] towns.”94 But times were changing: Gamble-Desmond department store shut its doors in 1953, Sears Roebuck left its cramped downtown New Haven home for a spacious new branch store in suburban Hamden in 1956, Stanley Dry Goods Co. and Shartenberg’s department store closed in 1962, and shopping centers popped up one after another in suburbs surrounding the city. Downtown’s share of all retail sales in the New Haven metropolitan area plunged from 88 percent in 1948 to only 48 percent by 1963. In the first year after the twenty-nine-store Hamden Plaza Shopping Center opened in 1955, it did $33 million in sales, most of it diverted from New Haven stores. By 1960, a new ninety-store complex, the Connecticut Post Shopping Center, opened in Milford a few miles southwest of New Haven, convenient to both the new Connecticut Turnpike and the Merritt Parkway. A smaller development would soon follow to the east. And Hamden Plaza to the north was doubling in size.95 The City of New Haven was fast losing shoppers to fierce competition from its own suburbs.
But what really set off alarm bells was learning from a Louis Harris survey that Logue secretly commissioned in 1956 that not only were a growing number of suburbanites shunning downtown New Haven, but also city residents were increasingly patronizing the new suburban shopping centers. Forty percent of the respondents said they visited the central business district (CBD) less often than they used to, while only 12 percent claimed to go more frequently. Fifty-six percent testified to doing more shopping in nearby Hamden. They cited congested streets, inadequate parking, and old-fashioned stores as their reasons for heading out of town—not downtown—to shop.96 A decline in downtown customers meant both lower profits for retailers and fewer tax dollars for the city, whether from falling downtown property values or, even worse, empty stores. By the mid-1950s, 17 percent of the floor space in the area that would become the Church Street Project, a modern retail center, was already vacant. Although the CBD made up less than 1 percent of the city’s total land area, it contributed a quarter of all tax revenues. Continued retail deterioration, on top of the steady departure of manufacturing, would prove devastating to the city’s coffers.97
Faced with this impending disaster, Lee and Logue hatched plans to demolish the three square blocks at the heart of downtown New Haven and replace them with the Church Street Project, consisting of new Malley’s and Macy’s department stores, the Chapel Square Mall with smaller specialty shops, and a huge attached parking garage. In many ways, it was an effort to beat the suburbs at their own game, to build a bigger, better “regional shopping center in the heart of the city,” as Logue’s office put it. The Redevelopment Agency carefully studied suburban shopping centers for models, going so far as taking staff on a field trip to Shoppers World in Framingham, Massachusetts. The goal was to introduce features into the Church Street Project, such as interior walkways between the parking garage and stores, that made shopping in the city as comfortable—and safe—as shopping in the suburbs, particularly for women. One promotional brochure claimed that the shopper would be “protected from the elements wherever she may walk within the New Haven Center.” Multiple images of a blond, middle-class consumer with shopping bag and purse in hand were superimposed on a baseball diamond–shape map of the New Haven metropolitan area, with all roads heading toward home plate.98
Prospective retail tenants confirmed that access to parking and the Connector mattered significantly in their decisions. Malley’s, in fact, chose to move from its historic home facing the Green to a new location closer to the Connector and the new massive Temple Street Parking Garage. Macy’s made it clear that it would use New Haven as a foothold for its planned expansion into the New England market only if its store enjoyed proximity to highways and parking. Soon after the garage was completed in 1963, Macy’s officials congratulated Mayor Lee and acknowledged “the chief reason we are coming to New Haven is to tie into that structure.” They also lauded the “spur connect[ing] the Connecticut Turnpike to the downtown section of New Haven” and “the ramps which lead directly to Macy’s parking facilities.” Jack I. Straus, chair of Macy’s board, could not have been blunter: Macy’s will go “where there is good ingress and egress to a city, plus inexpensive parking provided by municipally operated setups … We at Macy’s will not build any store without this assurance.”99 Pressure was on closer to home as well. In a survey Lee commissioned of New Haven’s voters before the November 1959 election, parking downtown emerged as their greatest concern.100
The importance that New Haven’s postwar planners gave to the automobile was hardly surprising. Since the 1920s, depictions of what the city of the future would look like—in architectural circles as well as popular magazines and movies—centered on the wonders of the car. Le Corbusier famously imagined future urbanity as nodes on superhighways; drivers would speed from one “auto-port” of high-rise office towers or residential skyscrapers to another.101 In the late 1930s, another prominent European modernist, Sigfried Giedion, argued that highways were “the new form of the city,” requiring that “the actual structure of the city … be changed” to better suit the automobile. When, in the late 1950s—just as Lee and Logue were reinventing New Haven—the modernist architects Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer had the opportunity to construct a new futurist city from scratch for Brazil’s new capital of Brasilia, they designed it around two “radial arteries” to facilitate traffic flow that were lined with separate superblock sectors designated for civic life, commerce, and residences.102 Even the utopian urbanism of homegrown American modernist Frank Lloyd Wright, Broadacre City, revolved around the automobile.103
Ordinary Americans encountered the same message that the future belonged to the car everywhere, but particularly at the enormously influential world’s fairs mounted frequently during the interwar period in Chicago, San Diego, Dallas, and New York. These fairs introduced visitors to all forms of modernism—in architecture, industry, and domestic life—but the automobile took pride of place. Exhibitions, many sponsored by auto manufacturers eager to sell cars and, even more importantly, to sell Americans on the nation’s need to invest heavily in massive highway construction, hammered home that the automobile was the key to social and economic progress. At the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40, with its theme of “Building the World of Tomorrow,” the biggest hit was the General Motors “Highways and Horizons” pavilion, featuring a sixteen-minute “Futurama” conveyor-belt ride. Twenty-eight thousand visitors a day peered down from moving armchairs onto a thirty-six-thousand-square-foot miniaturized model of the United States as imagined in 1960. In this America of tomorrow, multilane “Magic Motorways” traversed the landscape, safely accommodating automobile speeds up to a hundred miles an hour as they shot across elevated overpasses and wide-span suspension bridges, through rugged mountain passes, and around dramatic cloverleafs. Just to make sure they got the point, visitors received buttons reading “I Have Seen the Future” upon disembarking.104 Given the persistent linkage of the car with progress, it was no wonder that a promotional brochure for Malley’s new downtown New Haven store celebrated its proximity to the futuristic Connector with “We’re a real Turnpike head-turner!”105
Rotival’s proposal for the physical renewal of New Haven introduced Lee and Logue to several other modernist planning principles, beyond the importance of accommodating the automobile. Among the most fundamental was the concept of separation of functions. As Rotival put it in Tomorrow Is Here, “Each section of the city would be defined so that housing will not interfere with industry, nor industry with the market, nor transportation with parks and playgrounds. Yet all are tied together so that each section operates efficiently.”106 Here was the city made up of parts of a well-calibrated machine that Logue had appreciated from his aerial perspective as a bombardier during World War II. With this ideal of separated functions in mind, the renewers targeted areas of mixed use—where residential, commercial, and light industrial overlapped—for renewal activity. In the immigrant gateway of Oak Street, the largely Italian Wooster Square, and the predominantly African American Dixwell, garment sweatshops or machine shops were often cheek by jowl with grocery stores or rows of tenement flats.
In these neighborhoods, Lee and Logue determined to separate uses, convinced that their proximity contributed to disorderly, run-down residential areas and overlooking how that mix might have kept them affordable. A disastrous fire in a Wooster Square garment factory in 1957, which killed fifteen people, helped the renewers make their case for the necessity of separating functions. When the developer of University Towers, the first high-rise apartment building slated for the Oak Street redevelopment area, tried to convince Lee and Logue to permit a supermarket and restaurant on-site, going so far as forwarding a newspaper article praising a Parisian-style eatery in a similar project in New York, Logue shot back, “Dear Pete, We love Paris, but we are not interested in a banquet facility for the University Towers area.” They feared that any deviation from the purely residential character of this project could undermine the challenging task of selling apartments to middle-class New Haven residents already tempted by comfortable suburban living.107
The same commitment to dividing functions guided the relocation of the proposed north-south Route 91 so that it divided Wooster Square into a more purely residential quarter and an industrial district, which then was expanded to include a new 350-acre area named Long Wharf, built on reclaimed land along the harbor.108 Long Wharf housed a new wholesale food distribution center, a modern reinvention of the outdoor street market that planners relocated from downtown. In the old market, just minutes from the stately Green, vendors had hawked fruits and vegetables from the open backs of trucks; butchers had weighed squawking poultry on open-air scales; and cars, trucks, handcarts, and shoppers all had competed for space on refuse-filled streets.109 To those like Rotival, Lee, and Logue, who dreamed of a gleaming downtown New Haven, this market was an unfortunate vestige of a bygone era—inefficient, unsanitary, inaccessible to transportation, and an impediment to the retail and office development they considered more appropriate for an up-to-date CBD. Refrigerated units, well-ordered wholesalers’ stalls, and ample parking away from downtown in Long Wharf seemed much more appealing.
Logue hoped that by consolidating industry and wholesale commerce at Long Wharf—convenient to I-95 and rail and water transport—the city’s new industrial center would serve as a beacon attracting further investment and jobs. As a former labor man, Logue knew how dependent the city and its workers still were on industry. He watched with alarm how the proportion of New Haveners employed in manufacturing jobs was plummeting: 50 percent in 1950 and 31 percent in 1960; by 1971, it would be only 25 percent. If cities were to remain “the best sites for industry,” Logue wrote in The New York Times, then their traditional attractions of “skilled workers” and “variety of suppliers and networks of communications and transportation” would not suffice. Cities must also encourage the replacement of “factory buildings which are obsolescent, or worse” with new-style, horizontally sprawling plants in proper industrial corridors, and not simply allow them to flee to the open stretches of suburbia. So it was considered a great victory when the Armstrong Rubber Company, Gant Shirtmakers, and C. W. Blakeslee, a longtime local manufacturer of pre-stressed concrete, all opened substantial new factories in the city’s new Long Wharf industrial area.110
Although remaking the city to welcome cars and separate functions followed the rule book of modernist planning precepts, the third major goal of Lee and Logue’s physical renewal of New Haven came more from their own inclinations than from Rotival’s instruction. They decided that constructing architecturally modern buildings would send just the right message that New Haven was reinventing itself. Vincent Scully, a Yale architectural historian who was a native New Havener and later an apostle of postmodernism and a harsh critic of the city’s urban renewal, recalled how around 1950 even he embraced modernism. “We wanted Modern Architecture. What did we mean by that? On the whole we meant that we wanted forms nobody had ever seen before … Somehow we wanted to wipe the present clean of the past, to sweep it pure of contaminating objects. Everything had to begin anew and be closed anew. We would brook no compromise.”111
Modernism of the 1950s era fulfilled this ambition well, as one of its central tenets was that new standards of design were universally appropriate and superior to indigenous and historical styles. With their “curtain walls” of glass, shunning of ornament and other inessentials for a more austere “functionalism,” and innovative use of steel, reinforced concrete, and other alternatives to the traditional building materials of wood, brick, and stone, modern structures worldwide would have more in common with one another than with their own particular local and national architectural traditions.112 Scully connected New Haven’s renewal to this larger modernist design project when he recalled, cynically in retrospect, that after Rotival returned to Yale from Caracas around 1950, he regularly encountered him at the college where they both were fellows: “He would often reappear in the common room after a long absence, rotund, genial, and well turned out, with the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole. I would normally say something like ‘Ah, Maurice, where have you been?’ and he would reply ‘I have been planning—[pause]—Madagascar.’ It was all very impressive and utterly destructive of places, and it achieved its full scope in the Redevelopment of New Haven.”113
Making decisions about New Haven’s architecture might well have reminded Logue of debates that had raged in India. Architects, employing an almost utopian, physical determinism, felt they could modernize the developing world through imposing “advanced” aesthetic concepts that would erase a more “primitive” or colonial past. So, for example, Le Corbusier’s design for the new Punjabi capital of Chandigarh in India rejected Albert Mayer’s original plan, which valorized indigenous materials and styles. Backed by the modernizer Nehru, who sought a city that expressed the nation’s faith in the future, Le Corbusier insisted on “brut concrete” rather than local brick and stone and set out to expunge all references to Indian tradition, which Mayer had promoted as a way of being modern “without robbing the Indians of what is distinctly theirs.”114 Likewise, modern building in New Haven, the urban renewers thought, could help New Haven transcend its architectural—and thereby other sorts of—provincialism, so evident in the dreary, old-fashioned Victorian buildings and shabby storefronts downtown. Cutting-edge modern architecture would signal New Haven’s embrace of the future as well as differentiate cosmopolitan New Haven from both middle-brow suburban Connecticut, overrun with ersatz colonial-style home building, and its rusting urban neighbor of Bridgeport.115
Lee and Logue also hoped that showcasing the work of prominent architects would lend prestige to New Haven’s rebirth, particularly when combined with what was happening on Yale’s campus, where President Griswold commissioned no fewer than twenty-six new buildings between 1951 and 1963.116 As Time magazine noted, “In the past few years more advanced architecture has risen on Yale’s 150 acres in New Haven, Conn., than in all of Manhattan.” Rejecting traditional collegiate Gothic, Time continued, Griswold “turned to a number of the most lustrous and far-out contemporary master builders” who “adhered to no single style, only to the modern mood.”117 In particular, Griswold used modern architecture to mark Yale’s newfound commitment to the future-oriented sciences, long an underfunded and underappreciated stepchild at a university with historic strength in the humanities.118 Scully concurred that Griswold became “one of the greatest of architectural patrons” because “he built out of his own integral and long-standing passion to be modern.”119 Town and gown working together, the renewers thought, might put New Haven on the world’s architectural map.
Lee and Logue came to their posts in 1954 already primed for modernist design because it fit well with their progressive cultural and political identities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ed and Margaret Logue had been attracted to modern styles when they fantasized in spring 1948 about furnishing their first apartment once Margaret graduated from Smith and joined Ed in Philadelphia. Margaret wrote to him excitedly about a feature she had read in Life magazine about homes by a modernist architect—“I want an Alden Dow house”—and a couple of weeks later, enthused, “I’m dying to be spending all our money getting some good furniture I can call ours. I want to go to the Museum of Modern Art before I get anything, ’cause I might get some good ideas there.” A few days later she wrote that she was eager to “look into the all-modern furniture store.” Margaret’s keenness for modern design was interspersed in her letters with political commentary condemning racial segregation and endorsing liberal candidates in Smith’s mock Democratic Party convention, indicating that all were a part of a consistent worldview. A year later, as Margaret contemplated their next move to Hartford, she wrote, “I’d love a Lustron home,” referring to the innovative, prefabricated, porcelain-enameled steel houses developed to meet the housing crisis after World War II.120
Soon after the Logues returned to New Haven in 1953, they decided to build a new house in the modern style. They hired Chester Bowles’s son Ches, who had recently graduated from the Yale School of Architecture, to design it. “We live in the only modern house in our part of town,” Logue proudly reported to his Yale class secretary. A local paper described it as a “red-beamed, glass-walled house of somewhat Japanese design,” and in fact many of its features were inspired by a Japanese home designed by the modernist architect Junzo Yoshimura that was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953.121 This was the first of three modern houses Ches Bowles would design for the Logues, the latter two built on Martha’s Vineyard.
Lee brought a similar passion for modern design with him to the mayor’s job. While working at Yale in the late 1940s, he did a part-time public relations stint for the Connecticut branch of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).122 One of Lee’s first symbolic acts upon becoming mayor was to redecorate his office in the modern style. He later urged the New Haven fire chief to put Danish modern furniture in purple and orange and bare concrete walls into his office in the new central fire station. The fire chief resisted, with, “Damn it, Mayor, the men will think I’m a fairy.”123
Logue and Lee used modern design to make a cultural statement about themselves, and also about the city they were deeply engaged in revitalizing. Lee often bragged about the “panorama of greatest architects” who were remaking New Haven: “As we began to replace and rebuild after we had the blitz of demolition, I felt we were going to … rebuild our city once. We should build it [in] as beautiful a fashion as we could. And the answer to that was that we should get the best architects.”124 And indeed the New Haven lineup became a who’s who of modernist designers, among them Edward Larrabee Barnes, Marcel Breuer, Gordon Bunshaft, John M. Johansen, Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Kevin Roche, Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, Chloethiel Woodard Smith, and Mies van der Rohe.125
Despite their proclivity toward modernism, it took time for Lee and Logue to figure out how to incorporate good modern design into their urban renewal plans. Much of that learning happened on the job, often through disappointment. Their colleague Allan Talbot recalled how unhappy Lee and Logue were with the first buildings to go up alongside the Connector, particularly the prosaic, squat, ten-story, five-hundred-thousand-square-foot Southern New England Telephone Company headquarters. “During the construction phase, the project was a source of pride to the administration, but when the buildings were finished, their drab design and the generally sterile appearance of the new Oak Street [convinced] Lee and his staff … that more attention would have to be paid to design.”126 It was particularly humiliating to have the editor of Architectural Forum describe the telephone company building as “that great green hulk of a building which looks like it was designed by the janitor.”127 Lee also confided to close associates that the first two apartment towers on Oak Street were “the most God awful-looking things I ever laid eyes on.”128
For his part, Logue was having deep reservations about the design of the Chapel Square Mall by summer 1958. He wrote to the developer Roger Stevens rather grandiosely that “the final reputation of the Stevens project as well as its commercial success will depend a good deal on the architectural quality of the finished product. The project will have a much greater impact on New Haven than even Rockefeller Center has on New York.” When by mid-September he saw little improvement and had received a rebuke from the project’s architects “that my staff was not competent to review and criticize their work,” Logue insisted on hiring a design consultant for the city “who would assist with our review and who would be a man of such outstanding reputation that the question of our competence [to critique design work] could not be raised again.”
After considering a wide range of prominent architects, including Norman Fletcher, Carl Koch, Eero Saarinen, Hugh Stubbins, Harry Weese, and Minoru Yamasaki, Logue settled on Paul Rudolph, whom he described as “young (39) and of a very flexible and practical temperament.” This new chair of the Department of Architecture at Yale, Logue asserted, was not only “the best man in New Haven, but the best man in the United States.”129 It did not hurt that hiring Yale’s Rudolph helped address—on paper if not in spirit, given Rudolph’s national reputation—Lee’s constant refrain, reinforced by pressure from Democratic Party regulars, to hire local (what he called “insiders”) while still offering Logue the expertise of a prominent “outsider.” Before Rudolph was chosen, Lee had instructed Logue: “I want you to employ a local architect as an associate on those Temple Street garages. I will not have it any other way … We are going to hire outside architectural firms—and I do approve this approach—to do the important architectural work on our projects, but we must have local firms.”130
As design consultant to the Church Street Project, Rudolph made extensive plans and elevations, some of which influenced the final design.131 The greatest prize he walked away with, however, was the commission to design the two-block-long, 1,300-car Temple Street Parking Garage, which has probably become his best-known urban renewal project. Margaret Logue recalled how excited Ed was about the distinctive—to his eye, almost sensual—modernism of the garage. “He loved the line created and was excited by the beauty used in such a utilitarian way. That sort of structure was very unusual then.”132 Architectural Forum gave Rudolph’s garage the imprimatur that Logue had hoped for when it devoted a six-page spread to its opening and proclaimed it “an enormous, unabashed piece of sculpture.”133 Similarly, Vogue’s feature on the garage and its architect—illustrated with a bird’s-eye view of Rudolph standing confidently at military ease alongside a sports car on the garage’s top deck—recognized the architectural sophistication the redevelopers sought.134 Logue’s experience in New Haven, working with Rudolph in particular, would encourage him to institutionalize professional design review by prominent architects thereafter in Boston and New York. Almost twenty years later, in 1972, Logue admitted, “I cringe every time I see it [the telephone company building]. But the memory of it has led me, over the years since its completion, to be appropriately demanding of good design when it hurts. That is the real test. Everybody … is for good design—until it hurts. It counts only when you insist on it all the way.”135
Logue would develop strong relationships with many architects over his years in city building, some of whom—like Rudolph and Johansen from his New Haven days—he would employ repeatedly. But Ed Logue retained for life a special feeling for his first design partner, Paul Rudolph. Margaret Logue attributed their connection to “the chance occurrence of the two living in the same university community and sharing a focus on urban problems early in their careers and early in the recognition of urban decay.”136 Both Logue’s and Rudolph’s personal papers contained clippings about the other, suggesting that they kept track of their respective careers. At their last known public meeting, a conference at the New School in New York City titled “Rethinking Designs of the 60s,” Logue acknowledged Rudolph with warm affection. “I had a long interest in design, but when I realized how ignorant I was, I called a friend, head of the Yale Architecture School, one Paul Rudolph. He is responsible for a lot of the sins I’ve committed I guess ever since.”137
One of Rudolph’s most important lessons for Logue was that modern structures should be of sufficient quality, scale, and grandeur to be considered monumental. Logue felt that Rudolph’s garage qualified: “My friends like to rib me from time to time over my ‘architectural monument’ … dominating the Church Street project.”138 Rudolph himself considered his Temple Street Parking Garage a worthy civic gateway to a city being recalibrated to suit the automobile, a transformation he approved of.139 The urban renewers also strove to give the full downtown an élan of monumentality. “The centers of our great cities are too often uninteresting,” Logue lamented. “They lack the magic appeal of the western European cities. A city … must have a focus; it must have something that lifts the spirit.”140 Superblocks provided one common tool urban renewers used to achieve modernist monumentality. In merging small pieces of real estate into larger parcels conducive to big projects, planners encouraged long and broad avenues and large, open plazas for public space. Although critics would ultimately—and often rightfully—condemn superblocks for decreasing density and creating vacant and alienating urban space, in the 1950s they appealed to many planners as a way to break out of what they considered the confining grid of the nineteenth-century city and introduce more light, air, and grand scale into modern urbanity.141
Logue’s dispute with the developer Roger Stevens over the Chapel Square Mall design partly revolved around Logue’s desire to place monumental public space, not simply profitable commerce, at the heart of the rebuilt downtown. He wanted a setback at the corner of Church and Chapel and a pedestrian promenade with fountains, whereas Stevens resisted reducing rentable space, arguing that he needed every inch to make a profit on the city’s high, at almost nineteen dollars per square foot, land cost. Ultimately, they compromised, and the city considered open spaces as non-income-producing public use, relieving Stevens of taxes and maintenance for them.142 Creating impressive civic space would remain a top priority for Logue, evident a few years later when he put Government Center at the core of his downtown Boston renewal.
Modernist design also offered Logue a way of achieving the integration of new infrastructure and social improvement that had impressed him in the community development work he’d observed in India. This ambition can best be seen in the assault that Lee and Logue made on New Haven’s poor-quality schools. Whenever Lee and Logue strategized about how best to thwart the suburban threat to New Haven, they fixed on the importance of improving the city’s schools, which long had been underfunded, overcrowded, and physically deteriorated. Only two schools had been built in New Haven between 1920 and 1950, and many of the others bore the telltale signs of neglect.
A mounting exodus from the city’s public schools had resulted. In 1959, one child out of five in New Haven attended private school—the wealthy in nonsectarian independent schools, the less-well-off in Catholic parochial schools. By 1964, one in four students was opting out.143 Meanwhile, New Haven’s suburbs were spending extravagantly on their schools, particularly for new construction, at a rate even faster than their enrollments were growing. In a period when Branford’s pupil population increased by 57 percent, its education expenditures went up by 291 percent; Milford’s student enrollment soared by 115 percent, and its school budget by 440 percent.144 Logue and Lee responded by launching a New Schools for New Haven initiative, which managed to construct twelve new schools, including two high schools, a replacement of about a third of the city’s thirty-seven schools.145 Logue’s clever use of federal urban renewal funds made this massive overhaul possible, as capital expenditures for school construction were counted as a non-cash credit toward fulfilling the required local contribution.
Most telling, however, was how the renewers used the opportunity to build new schools to innovate socially. For example, the Conté School in Wooster Square and the Hélène Grant School in Dixwell were experimental “community schools” intended to serve neighborhood residents as well as schoolchildren during the long day and evening hours they stayed open. Both were designed by well-known architects—Conté by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; and Grant by John Johansen. The Conté School, which Logue considered “as fine as anything in the suburbs will offer,” housed programs designed to benefit the entire Italian working-class community. In addition to the school, it included a senior citizens’ center with card rooms and bocce courts, a branch library, social service offices, community meeting rooms, a swimming pool, and an auditorium. The K–4 Grant School in Johansen’s Florence Virtue project received acclaim for its state-of-the-art design, with clusters of classrooms surrounding internal courts and a gardenlike central courtyard providing light to much of the school’s interior. But the Grant School also had a social mandate to become a racially integrated school in a city that had few of them, an opening wedge into creating the racially mixed neighborhoods that Lee and Logue desired. An article in Architectural Forum in 1966, a year after the school opened, reported that the school “is as advanced in program as in design … The entire school has an atmosphere of experimentation.” City officials considered the true test of its success that the white families moving into the neighboring Florence Virtue houses, who as a minority of residents had previously “talked about sending their children to private schools,” were “now all enrolled at Grant for next fall.”146 In the years ahead, Logue would carry this awareness of the potential of school building for architectural and social innovation with him to Boston and then on to New York.
As early as 1958, thirty-four official delegations from cities all over the United States had trooped through New Haven to learn from its efforts in urban renewal. By 1966 that stream had become a “constant flow of engineers, planners, city officials, citizens and sociologists” from home and abroad who visited New Haven—more than any other city—“to see what can be accomplished when a full-scale attack on blight and poverty is undertaken,” according to the newly created U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).147 That same year, WNBC-TV broadcast a documentary titled Connecticut Illustrated: A City Reborn, celebrating “the spirit of New Haven,” whose commitment to solving difficult urban problems has transformed it over the last ten years from one “choked with slums into a model modern city.”148
Luminaries likewise gave their blessings. “New Haven is the greatest success story in the history of the world,” proclaimed the U.S. secretary of labor Willard Wirtz rather hyperbolically. “I think New Haven is coming closest to our dream of a slumless city,” echoed Robert C. Weaver, who was the first secretary of HUD—and the first African American presidential cabinet member in the United States.149 Popular national magazines like Time, Harper’s, Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post carried major features about how New Haven was miraculously reinventing itself—and these were only a small portion of the estimated 242 magazine articles and 8 books documenting the city’s urban renewal by the late 1960s.150 Awards mounted and praise reverberated everywhere, as the small, troubled city of New Haven, Connecticut, was touted as a significant site for innovation. Lee and Logue were particularly proud that when New Haven’s example was acclaimed far beyond its borders, their achievements were understood to be much greater than the physical urban renewal visible to the eye.