Remaking New Haven with bricks and mortar, ambitious though it was, played only a part in Lee and Logue’s approach to renewing their city. Three other commitments featured prominently. One they called “human renewal” for how it sought to attack the social problems of struggling New Haven residents caught in the city’s economic decline. The second revolved around defining an appropriate relationship between government officials and the public to engage citizens democratically in urban renewal. And the third was their establishment of a new kind of urban administrator to oversee the renewal process, armed with professional expertise that would also affect how planners, architects, and developers participated in redevelopment. All three innovations expanded into the postwar-era
commitments made during the New Deal and World War II to create a liberal welfare state suitable to the American context. As New Haven’s leaders experimented with these new strategies for remaking New Haven socially and politically, as they had done with physical renewal, they promoted their city as “a national showcase” to which people “make pilgrimages … to see how it’s done,” according to The New York Times.1
Not long into his redevelopment work in New Haven, Logue became frustrated that New Haven’s existing social agencies were not meeting the needs of the “multi-problem families,” often minorities, that the Redevelopment Agency was encountering on a daily basis. So he invited an old acquaintance, Paul Ylvisaker of the Ford Foundation, to visit New Haven. Logue, who was home ill that day, said, “We sat outside at my house. I teased him about the fact that the Ford Foundation didn’t know there were any blacks in America. He was somewhat startled and said that was absolutely not true. And I said, ‘Well, you haven’t got a single grant that has anything to do with black people in this report,’” referring to Ford’s latest annual report.
Ylvisaker purportedly committed himself at that moment to what became the Gray Areas Program, ultimately established in New Haven and five other places.2 This funding led to the creation in New Haven of a new social agency named Community Progress Inc., known locally as CPI, whose founding document, “Opening Opportunities,” made the case for the necessity of interweaving social programs with infrastructural improvement, what Logue had observed with community development in India and had strived to achieve through school building in New Haven: “More and more the central cities of the metropolitan complexes are becoming places where much of the deprivation of our society is concentrated.” It continued, “As New Haven has met the need for physical improvements in a manner as yet unequalled elsewhere, so also the city intends to tackle the social problems in a comprehensive manner.”3 Later, when some critics accused CPI of paternalism and ineffectiveness, in an effort to rid New Haven of poor people, CPI’s creators argued that, to the contrary, its very establishment testified to their commitment to improve poor New Haveners’ lives, not remove them from the city.
Logue’s version of the origins of CPI and Ford’s Gray Areas Program more broadly may have exaggerated his own and New Haven’s importance. In fact, Ylvisaker, a smart, charismatic, morally driven reformer, had been struggling for several years to figure out a way for Ford to intervene in the unfolding racial dimensions of the urban crisis despite the foundation board’s reticence to address race outright. Most likely, Logue’s clearly articulated desire for more comprehensive, better integrated social intervention into the lives of poor, often black, urban residents offered Ylvisaker a welcome opportunity.
New Haven’s CPI would eventually spend $22 million, $5 million of it from Ford, most of the rest from the federal government, a collaboration that pleased Ford as evidence that the foundation’s investment in “demonstration” was attracting additional support. At its peak, CPI would employ about three hundred workers. Experimenting with job training and placement, prekindergarten education, legal assistance, community schools and health centers, tutoring, adult literacy, juvenile delinquency prevention, and other programs, CPI was widely recognized as the incubator for many of the community action programs—such as the Job Corps, Head Start, and Neighborhood Legal Services—that would become signatures of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s (LBJ) national War on Poverty by the mid-1960s.
From its inception in 1962 until 1966, CPI was headed by Mitchell “Mike” Sviridoff, a pal of Logue’s going back to his union-organizing days at Yale.4 Born in the same working-class neighborhood of New Haven as Dick Lee, Sviridoff, like Lee, could not afford college upon graduating high school and so headed into the labor force, where he became a sheet metal worker on the assembly line of United Aircraft in Stratford, Connecticut. In no time, his reputation for being shrewd, pragmatic, and fair propelled him to head the United Auto Workers local. Within a few years he was president of the union statewide, and by age twenty-seven, president of the Connecticut Congress of Industrial Organizations, which in 1957 became a consolidated AFL-CIO. Logue met Sviridoff when organizing workers at Yale, continued to collaborate with him while labor secretary to Governor Bowles, worked on voter registration for him in fall 1951 as he awaited his security clearance for India, and remained his friend and colleague throughout their prominent careers in urban affairs—Logue on the physical planning side, Sviridoff on the human services side. When New Haven first received Ford money to launch CPI, Sviridoff was off working for the Alliance for Progress, the U.S. State Department’s new development program for Latin America. Convinced of Sviridoff’s talent and deep social commitment, Logue proposed him for the CPI executive directorship.5 Soon Sviridoff, like Logue and Rotival, was bringing experience in a third-world aid job to bear on solving the urban crisis in the first world.
Lee and Logue took great pride in the way CPI made New Haven’s total planning even more comprehensive. When Lee appointed Sviridoff to New Haven’s Board of Education, of which he soon became president, CPI became tied all the tighter to the mayor’s overall reform efforts, making use of the city’s community schools as outposts for delivering coordinated social services at the neighborhood level. Moreover, the renewers felt comfortable with CPI’s approach of developing programs that helped clients overcome their personal problems—whether unemployment, illiteracy, or legal jeopardy. It fit well with their liberal ideology of maximizing individual opportunity, rather than transforming larger societal or economic structures. When Logue headed to Boston in 1961, he secured a promise from Ylvisaker to name Boston as another of the six sites to receive Ford’s Gray Areas Program funding. Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) was born as a close cousin to CPI, as Logue again aspired to weave physical and social renewal together.
One of the greatest challenges New Haven urban renewers faced was finding a democratic way of implementing urban renewal that incorporated citizen input—valued by them as well as required by the federal government—without compromising the knowledge and authority of public officials. In New Haven, Logue would begin seeking what he considered an ideal balance, and it would remain a preoccupation throughout his career. Tellingly, by his next stop in Boston, he would arrive flaunting his signature slogan “planning with people.”
Logue felt confident that he had long demonstrated a deep commitment to advancing democracy, in the United States and the world. It was omnipresent in his language and his goals, whether he was unionizing low-level Yale workers, fighting in World War II as a bombardier, organizing veterans for greater rights and benefits, working as a labor lawyer and Connecticut’s labor secretary, helping a new Indian nation develop, promoting racial progress, or—now—redeveloping a city in crisis. All these efforts, he thought, fulfilled the political ideology that he had expressed to the State Department’s Loyalty Board when he sought its approval to serve in India. Here Logue wrote that “every nation should have as its primary aim the development of conditions of life which will make it possible for every person living in that nation to achieve the maximum human dignity and individual fulfillment.” He then described what he felt was the best route to achieving a democratic America: “I believe in a society which is pluralistic,… in which there are many centers of power.”6
What Logue intimated here, and elaborated on during his years in New Haven, was a view of the world as divided between public and private interests, where the achievement of a more democratic and egalitarian American society lay in strengthening the public sector to mediate between diverse but often conflicting private interests. He felt that a redevelopment official like himself—independent, impartial, and public-spirited—had the responsibility to protect the public interest from entrenched politicians motivated by favoritism or private-sector actors pursuing their own self-interest.7 Logue’s like-minded successor as development administrator of New Haven, L. Thomas Appleby, and New Haven alderman William Lee Miller coauthored a piece in The New York Times Magazine in which they explained the danger of officials not actively protecting the public good from what today we would call narrow NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”): “What happens when a neighborhood says it wants no Negroes, no low income public housing, no site for a public high school? Sometimes that’s exactly ‘what the people in the area themselves want,’ but it is … hard to work with on a community-wide basis.”8
During the 1950s, as money was flowing abundantly from Washington to New Haven for federal urban renewal, the Yale political science professor Robert Dahl and his students decided to turn their city into a laboratory for confronting a key question facing Cold War America: How well was democracy functioning in the United States as it met challenges from communism and socialism? The result was Dahl’s Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City, published in 1961, based on extensive interviews and other field study from 1957 to 1959. Two related works by Dahl’s graduate students, who helped him with the research, appeared subsequently: Nelson Polsby’s Community Power and Political Theory (1963) and Raymond Wolfinger’s The Politics of Progress (1974).9 Dahl and his students were engaged in a research project to test ideas about political elitism formulated by the Italian political theorists Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto as well as the claims of the American sociologists C. Wright Mills and Floyd Hunter. Mills and Hunter had published books a few years earlier provocatively arguing that a small, cohesive, interlocking group of social, economic, and political elites had come to dominate American society and to exercise disproportionate and self-interested influence in decision-making.10 They concluded that American democracy was not alive and well.
Dahl decided that the best way to investigate the validity of these arguments about the health of American democracy was to move beyond theory and observe practices on the ground—to track how decisions were made and who made them—in a high-stakes arena such as urban renewal, which was transforming his home base of New Haven at the time. He concluded that although clearly some people had more influence than others, the lack of a single homogeneous ruling elite undermined the claims of Mills and Hunter (and later G. William Domhoff, who would revive Hunter’s analysis through his own investigation of New Haven in Who Really Rules? New Haven and Community Power Reexamined).11 The dispersal of power through what Dahl labeled “pluralist democracy,” which he insisted could be observed empirically, ensured that no small political or economic faction was all-powerful. Who Governs? would win the American Political Science Association’s prestigious Woodrow Wilson Prize for the field’s best book in 1962 and remains a classic. When Dahl died at the age of ninety-eight in February 2014, his New York Times obituary still described him as “his profession’s most distinguished student of democratic government.”12
Dahl and his students requested and received thorough cooperation from Mayor Lee and the redevelopment administrator Logue. Not only did they interview both Lee and Logue extensively, but Wolfinger also spent a year in city hall as a participant observer. From July 1957 through January 1958, he worked for Logue’s agency. In February 1958, he moved next door to the mayor’s office and spent the next five months watching Lee do his job. Throughout this period Wolfinger wrote detailed memos to Dahl, minutely dissecting how decisions were made, who influenced them, and how power was exercised in New Haven. Meanwhile, Dahl and Polsby were busy interviewing everyone involved in the city’s activities, with particular attention to members of the Citizens Action Commission (CAC), the body the renewers created to engage a wide, bipartisan cross section of New Haven’s citizens in their ambitious redevelopment plans. This advisory commission was, in Wolfinger’s words, “designed to sell redevelopment to those groups that remained fairly aloof from redevelopment—professional men, middle-class do-gooders, liberals, and most important, big business—and to use their membership to lend an aura of prestige, nonpartisanship, and business community support to redevelopment.”13
Dahl’s pluralist analysis of urban renewal identified a complex collaboration between private and public interests. Private interests, he argued, were represented by the almost six hundred people involved in the CAC, including a high-powered executive committee and subsidiary action committees organized around problem areas: industrial and harbor development; the central business district; housing and slum clearance; health, welfare, recreation, and human relations; education; and the metropolitan New Haven region. Among these hundreds of participants were leading bankers and businessmen, but also representatives of labor unions, civic associations, ethnic and racial organizations, and charities. The public interest, in contrast, was embodied in the elected mayor and his administrators under Logue, who managed the process from plan to implementation in what Dahl labeled an “executive-centered order.”
As Dahl and his students explained the process, the CAC and its committees heard about the redevelopment plans as they progressed, but rarely if ever initiated, opposed, or altered proposals brought before them by Lee and Logue. They were too divided and uninformed for that. But they were plenty capable of expressing “vigorous opposition [that] might easily have blocked a proposal.” CAC members thus “represented and reflected the main sources of articulate opinion in the political spectrum of New Haven,” exposing the mayor and his redevelopment team to public attitudes. As a result, “members of the administration shaped their proposals according to what they expected would receive the full support of the CAC and therefore of the political spectrum.”14 A “litmus test,” was how Logue’s deputy H. Ralph Taylor described it to Dahl. Max Livingston, a well-respected member of the CAC who represented New Haven’s Jewish community, explained how he thought the process worked: ideas that “originate with the professionals” need to be “sold” to the CAC, and then the CAC “takes a very vital role in organizing the opinion of the community … so they have the political backing that they need in order to become reality.” Livingston gave an example of how he helped save a recreation budget for Dixwell from aldermanic cutting by “contacting every organization and every person we could think of … who would get up on their feet” and defend the program.15
To Dahl’s mind, this complex process proved that there was no power elite pulling the strings of New Haven’s government. Rather, Lee and Logue’s need to anticipate the diverse concerns of organized community interests represented on the CAC created a feedback loop that put a pluralist form of democracy in place as the city remade itself with federal assistance. The CAC’s Third Annual Report in 1957 described itself accordingly as a “grassroots organization” that included “a cross-section of community life with all its rich and varied character … These representative men and women are the democratic foundation on which the success of urban renewal in New Haven depends.”16 As a member of the CAC executive committee told Dahl, they aimed to embrace “every darn organization in the city, PTA, church, labor, whatever and build on that organizational structure which is the life blood of your community.”17 Time and again, the political scientists found the urban renewers consciously acting within a framework of representational democracy. Wolfinger, for example, quoted a “major city official” defending even backroom negotiations as democratic if a wide range of voices were at the table: “People say in a democracy that you should not be secretive in any of your public acts, but, you know,… you have to realize that if you talk about wholesale relocation and demolition, then the people … would be filled with fear and frustrations … So, all in all,… while we explore very carefully all the implications of every project, we have to be careful not to have any public discussion until we are absolutely satisfied that we are right.”18
In addition to the CAC, Logue often pointed to other democratic vehicles that provided crucial feedback from the community to the Lee administration. He cited proudly the appointed neighborhood renewal committees that vetted plans and the frequent public hearings, required by federal law, where opponents could raise objections. In addition, he claimed, the mayoral election every two years served as a kind of referendum on urban renewal, where the strength of Lee’s mandate usually fluctuated with the ups and downs of the program.19 As Logue told Dahl and Polsby in 1957, “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t make such a joke of the democratic process—debate and discuss and everything else and nothing gets accomplished … Two years is a hell of a short time and if people don’t like it, they can throw us out.”20
To gauge public opinion even more frequently, Logue and Lee commissioned Harris polls about every six months, with particular attention to urban renewal. They were pleased with a 1957 Harris survey that showed 71 percent of the sample approving of the Oak Street project and only 6 percent disapproving, and they expressed concern over a 1959 survey that showed Jewish support for Lee slipping slightly over the dislocation of downtown merchants—many of whom were Jews—despite the group’s generally strong support for redevelopment.21 Logue’s Redevelopment Agency also opened a temporary “Progress Pavilion” at the intersection of Church and Chapel Streets with scale models, wall panels, and a comment book that Lee famously scrutinized in search of public feedback.22 Whenever critics charged New Haven’s urban renewal with being undemocratic, its leaders argued that they had plenty of evidence to the contrary. The CAC gave input regularly; rarely was much opposition expressed at public meetings; Lee continued to get reelected, often in landslides; and urban renewal polled well.23
If the CAC and other mechanisms provided a way for private interests to influence New Haven’s urban renewal, then Lee and Logue meant for Logue’s powerful, well-endowed New Haven Redevelopment Agency—staffed by well-trained, impartial experts—to embody the public interest. And the responsibility to protect that general good began at the top, with the city’s leaders. The development administrator Logue and the mayor shared a common vision for what a rebuilt New Haven should look like and the self-confidence that they could make it happen, frequently contrasting themselves favorably to their predecessors, the redevelopment director Sam Spielvogel and Mayor William Celentano. Their conviction that they were on the right track was reinforced when someone of the stature of Hubert H. Humphrey—ex-mayor of Minneapolis, senator, and later vice president from 1965 to 1969—confided, “Dick, you son of a gun, what we really ought to do is let the other mayors spend a day with you and your staff. Then they’d understand what we mean by creative federalism.”24
Despite their shared ambition for New Haven, Lee and Logue played very different roles in its renewal. Lee was the “outside guy,” responsible for cultivating support on the streets of New Haven, in the Connecticut legislature, and in multiple arenas nationally. Amid his constant campaigning for mayor, he also flirted with seeking higher office, in particular a Senate seat that many thought was his for the asking. Labeled “the hottest piece of political real estate in Connecticut” by The Hartford Courant, Lee nonetheless decided that he couldn’t abandon New Haven’s renewal. Others speculated that he feared leaving the safe harbors of New Haven, where he had no worries about his lack of a college degree or being considered provincial.25 But even as he stuck close to home, Lee modeled himself after the era’s prototype of the young, liberal, charismatic, Irish Catholic politician: the senator and then, in 1961, president John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK), with whom he had a political friendship. Lee felt that he was making New Haven the testing ground for Kennedy’s national urban agenda.26
Ever the public relations man, Lee promoted New Haven’s renewal brazenly, labeling everything he did—as minor as installing a traffic light—as “another step in our city-wide renewal program.” Probably his most notorious sales job for urban renewal was widely disseminating photographs that documented the rooting out of some ten thousand rats he claimed had infested the Oak Street tenements. For a number of years Lee had his own local television show, where he discussed redevelopment plans, and he penned a regular Sunday column in the Bridgeport Herald. Lee testified in support of urban renewal before countless congressional committees, lobbied hard for changes in federal regulations to benefit cities, and turned his presidency of the U.S. Conference of Mayors into a bully pulpit for the cause.27 When President Johnson signed an act establishing the new cabinet-level agency of Housing and Urban Development, he respectfully sent Lee one of the pens he had used, with the note, “You deserve a lion’s share of the credit for efforts leading to the new department which will advance the progress of our cities.”28
Logue, as New Haven’s development administrator, was the “inside guy” whose job it was to make sure that their grand plans got formulated, funded, and implemented. With Lee providing political protection, Logue prided himself on being an innovative, tough-minded, effective administrator who ran an exemplary Redevelopment Agency. This included working his staff hard. Sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, with frequent evenings and weekends spent at the office, were de rigueur, leaving Margaret and other wives to complain at times about being redevelopment widows.29 Many staff responded well to Logue’s high expectations, throwing themselves into the work and learning how to handle his intense, demanding style. Harold “Hal” Grabino recalled his own quick learning curve. Soon after he started working as general counsel at the Redevelopment Agency, he was assigned to complete a form for the Feds outlining all the Connecticut statutes relevant to urban renewal. “I did a lousy job,” he said. When he handed it to Logue, Grabino recalled, “He lace[d] into me, like Logue always did … and he was right. So I took it back, and I redid it. And from that day on, I resolved that that is never going to happen again.”30 For young professionals like Grabino, Ed Logue became a mentor and a model of a self-assured, rigorous, and principled public servant who knew how to get results.
Some subordinates, however, chafed at Logue’s demanding management style. Soon after Allan Talbot arrived to work in the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, one of his first assignments was to prepare the annual report for the agency. “He looked at my script and kind of threw it away, and said some expletive, that this was totally inadequate, and [when] I began to question what was inadequate about it, he took the chair from behind his desk and threw it across the room,” Talbot said. “So the techniques were one of … intimidation … [to accomplish] what he wanted.”31 In time, Talbot came to admire Logue, but for some others, the dressing-downs still remained open wounds years later.
Logue worked best with thick-skinned employees who not only could tolerate a demanding boss but also were willing and able to challenge him. The Ed Logue who had styled himself a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast during Yale days responded well to other rebels in his midst, as long as they were smart, savvy, and hardworking. After Grabino’s humiliating lesson in the need for higher standards, he recognized, “If you were sure of yourself, and you held your ground, and you screamed back at him and didn’t let him get away with it, you became friends. And that’s the way it worked with Ed.”32 In fact, later, when Logue was building a new staff in Boston, he became frustrated with how deferential people seemed. He claimed to sorely miss his New Haven underling Tom Appleby’s “Goddammit, Logue, you’re wrong! Fucking wrong, WRONG, WRONG!”33 Logue’s deputy in New Haven, Ralph Taylor, said that Logue went so far as to tell him, “You son-of-a-bitch, if you lose the courage to tell me I’m wrong and I’m crazy, I’ll fire you.”34
Allan Talbot captured well the Jekyll-and-Hyde aspect of Ed Logue in his appreciative account of the Lee administration, written after working there for five years: “[Logue was] a man who over the years has been variously described as ‘a brilliant programmer,’ ‘the toughest man in the world,’ ‘a perfectly charming man,’ ‘an egotistical S.O.B.,’ [and] ‘one of the best friends I ever had.” Talbot concluded, “Logue’s drive has been his most salient characteristic in public service. It has given him the image of a tough, able, and often abrasive man of action.”35 Years later, Grabino still cherished Talbot’s imaginary myth about Logue: “Every summer, Logue goes up to the Vineyard, takes a shovel out of the house, and digs in the sand. And he pulls up something called self-doubt. And he looks at it for a few minutes, and he puts it back, and that’s the end of it for a year. And that’s Logue. No self-doubt whatsoever.”36
Over time, Lee and Logue developed a productive partnership as the politician and the redevelopment expert, where the mayor depended on Logue’s administrative talents to sustain his high national profile. In the late 1950s, when the Eisenhower White House threatened drastic cuts in urban renewal appropriations, Logue organized a delegation of mayors to meet with the president; Lee served as the spokesman and funds were restored. When Lee became chair of the Urban Renewal Committee of the American Municipal Association (now the National League of Cities), Logue became its secretary and expertly steered the committee. And in 1959–60, at the platform committee chair Chester Bowles’s bidding, Logue did much of the work on his and Lee’s jointly drafted urban platform for the 1960 Democratic Convention—“the first,” he boasted, “that any party ever had”—and organized a high-profile conference in Pittsburgh to showcase JFK’s urban agenda.37
Although Logue and Lee respected each other’s distinctive contributions and recognized that together they made a winning combination, they nonetheless could clash—at times harshly. Most of Lee and Logue’s spats were petty, quickly forgotten disturbances in their otherwise effective—often affectionate—teamwork. Occasionally, these disputes flared into larger confrontations. The major ones were usually rooted in their very different ways of operating. Logue, the brash, goal-oriented Yale lawyer, sometimes struck Lee as insufficiently concerned with process and the effect he was having on others, particularly people with votes, money, or influence. Lee was not alone in this view. Even Logue’s good friend Sviridoff, in a confidential interview with Yale’s Dahl, conveyed his own fear that should Lee run for the Senate, “This program is likely to fall flat on its face … Logue is a brilliant guy, in his field … but Logue primarily is a doer. And he has no feel for just getting along with people.”38 Deputy Taylor likewise noted the risks in his boss’s confrontational style. “I think he is doing it quite deliberately and I’m also not sure he needs to … This is my major criticism of Ed … I think he gets as far being tough as you possibly can get. Where he really overdoes it is with the outside public.” As a result, Taylor saw no obvious successor to Lee, should he seek higher office.39
But Lee deserved blame as well, in particular for sometimes banishing Logue to the back office without adequate authority and recognition. As Logue explained the occasional tension, “I was ready to be a behind-the-scenes fella. But there’s a difference between being a subordinate and a slave. Once Dick cut the ground under me in public … When he did that, I just got up and quit.”40 On another occasion, Logue made a public statement, informed by a secret Louis Harris survey of shoppers, that downtown New Haven was dying and required drastic life support, including a new department store. Although there was nothing surprising about that observation, Logue’s statement infuriated executives at Malley’s, who had no interest in attracting a competitor. Lee unleashed his wrath on Logue.41 A misstep like that only reinforced Lee’s conviction that he couldn’t trust Logue’s political judgment. “If given a free rein, in a week he would be run out of town,” Lee confided to Dahl’s graduate student researcher Wolfinger.42 Lee’s mistrust of Logue’s instincts fed his considerable, and by many accounts, annoying, micromanaging tendencies. In one instance, Lee insisted on spreading around the lucrative title-search business arising out of the property transfers frequent in urban renewal. When Logue resisted the mayor’s dictate, Lee responded tartly, “For God’s sake,… start to be a little political in your thinking!” Logue stood his ground, however, insisting, “Too much of you and too much of me has gone into this program, and too much more hard work lies ahead for both you or me[,] for either of us, or our wives, to be content with anything less than the best people or the best method.”43
Lee may have had periodic frustrations with his partner Logue, but he knew that New Haven’s—and his own—success in urban renewal rested on Logue’s assuming a new kind of administrative responsibility called for in the post–New Deal environment of expanding federal power. Success as this kind of expert depended not on mastery of a narrowly defined body of technical information, as had often been the case earlier in the twentieth century during the Progressive Era. Instead, it required broad skills to negotiate for the resources available to cities from Washington and to oversee a wide range of initiatives on the ground. That expansive portfolio included urban planning, real estate, design, construction, management, legal matters, public relations, community organizing, and lobbying. A lawyer like Logue, who emerged from legal training at Yale schooled in public interest law (long before the term became popular in the 1970s) with a focus on labor and legislation, was particularly well suited to engage with the growing government bureaucracy of postwar America. Moreover, Logue had gained valuable administrative experience working with Chester Bowles in Hartford and New Delhi.44
Ambassador Bowles, in writing his final evaluation of Logue before he departed India in March 1953, gave him the highest rating possible and predicted future success, praising him for just this kind of broad mastery: “By academic training and job experience, as well as by temperament and inclination, Mr. Logue is what is known as a ‘generalist’ rather than a ‘specialist’ … He is able to get into any new problem without specialized knowledge and sort out the difficulties and recommend solutions.”45 Three years later, after Logue was ensconced in his new role as development administrator in New Haven, he explained his new position to the Ford Foundation’s Doug Ensminger back in New Delhi—no stranger himself to the important role that experts were playing in Indian development: “Urban redevelopment and renewal in itself is a rapidly expanding career. Some of the leading people in it come from a public housing background and some from an administrative or planning background. In the course of time a new kind of ‘area generalist’ skill will be built up around this program.” He added, “My own work, which is coordinating that program with all the related activities, is an even newer field, and I think the most challenging of all.”46
Other observers at the time shared Bowles and Logue’s recognition that a new kind of “generalist” expert was needed to manage the growing investment the federal government was making in many realms of American society, the nation’s cities included. Although enthusiasm about statist solutions to economic and social problems ebbed and flowed with the party in power—with some retrenching, for example, when the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower took the reins from the Democrat Harry S. Truman—the trend was still upward, as Eisenhower expanded government authority more than popular stereotypes often have it.47 A New Deal agency like the Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933 to deliver hydroelectric power to the rural, multistate Tennessee River region, and the postwar Atomic Energy Commission, established in 1947 to manage atomic energy for military and civilian uses, required broadly trained managerial experts to oversee these pioneering activities of the federal government. That David Lilienthal, trained as a lawyer, headed both these innovative agencies testified to the increasing priority put on administrative skill rather than narrowly defined technical knowledge.48
Beyond the New Deal, World War II was pivotal in promoting more rational state planning and the greater administrative expertise needed to implement it. When Hubert Humphrey laid out a liberal social agenda for the United States in his 1964 book, War on Poverty, he urged a transfer of “our genius for planning and management,” which had successfully met wartime “attacks from both sides of the globe,” to “fight[ing] the war on poverty.”49 Logue shared Humphrey’s conviction. As early as 1948, in a speech to the American Veterans Committee, he said, “To some people, planning is a bogey; but all veterans are familiar with it; it operates on all levels, sometimes it is good and sometimes bad, but all of us would agree it is necessary.”50
Even as it became clear that a new kind of expert was emerging to oversee urban redevelopment, there was no common label for this budding role. Time magazine dubbed the new field of redevelopment “urbanology,” which the journalist Fred Powledge defined as dominated by “educated, articulate men, who had training or experience, or both, in … disciplines bordering on the behavioral sciences, along with an appreciation for and understanding of practical politics, [and] were able to accumulate and use power in rebuilding cities.”51
Dahl’s graduate student Wolfinger invented the term “cosmopolitan professionals” to describe the same group of urban administrators, stressing how a national mandate and professional standards protected them from local, sometimes provincial, and often resistant municipal authorities. Working “in policy areas where federal grants provide a substantial part of the budget and where skill and national connections are the most important factors in obtaining such aid,” these professionals enjoyed a remarkable degree of professional and political independence, Wolfinger argued. “Because these officials are oriented toward goals, norms, and publics beyond their city of current employment,… they can bring to bear resources of power somewhat independent of the contending local interests that often stymie progress.” Wolfinger optimistically predicted that the public, particularly the needy poor, would benefit from the emergence of this new, independent urban policy elite. “These officials have a vested interest in maximizing the programs for which they are responsible,” he hypothesized. “The likelihood is that such expansion will be in the direction of more services for the poor, improvement of the social and physical environment, and attempts to impose a greater degree of rationality and coordination on market processes.”52 Mike Sviridoff claimed that he was looking for just such staff members, whom he labeled “urban generalists,” when he hired for New Haven’s CPI. “There was no one professional road leading to this new program,” he explained.53
Logue was excited that in assembling his redevelopment staff in New Haven, he was helping to define a new profession. Without it, “slum-fighting,” he suggested, would be like “leaving firefighting in Times Square to a company of volunteer firemen.”54 But even if this new administrative role required general rather than narrow technical expertise, its authority must still be based in science. The Rotival plan had set out three stages of block development, three categories of roadways, and recommendations presented with color-coded and graphically patterned prescriptive maps. New Haven’s officials created additional measures of their own, such as categorizing all existing structures in New Haven as “Standard” or “Substandard” and identifying all “Families to be displaced by proposed improvements” as “Multi-member,” “Single-member,” or “Roomers.” The Redevelopment Agency also developed twelve criteria through which to concretize the amorphous category of blight, including population change and density, intermixture of land uses, room overcrowding, age of housing, dwelling-unit conditions, average monthly rent, welfare cases, and juvenile and tax delinquency. The presence of more than six characteristics, they calculated, indicated blight.55 Beyond providing intellectual ballast to their expertise, these quantifiable measurements had the benefit of helping Lee and Logue render potentially controversial determinations of blight—and any actions taken to remedy them—as based on indisputable facts.
Logue’s first rule in assembling his team of experts was to recruit nationally, not draw from the ranks of locals burdened with loyalties more personal than professional. One of New Haven’s top Democratic Party bosses in fact never forgave Logue for spurning his candidates. “Logue would infuriate us,” he recalled bitterly. “I’d send a guy over to Redevelopment for a job … The least I expected was that Logue would talk to him. Instead, the guy would come back to me complaining, ‘What the hell is this city coming to? That damned Logue just about threw me out of his office.’”56 Once qualified staff were recruited, Logue determined to keep them outside of civil service, which further aggravated local politicians. He wanted the freedom to set salaries competitive nationally, not locally, and to hire and fire at will. By origin, civil service had aimed at insulating public employees from the old patronage politics of party machines. But in most American cities by the post–World War II era, the job security offered through civil service employment had become integral to the reward structure of entrenched local politicians.57
By separating urban renewal staffing from the city’s business as usual, Logue was able to bring top talent into city employment. Many of his hires would continue working at this jurisdictional level, even as they jumped from one professional opportunity to another over their careers. None of Logue’s cosmopolitan and well-educated lieutenants arrived intending to spend his life in New Haven, and none in the end did.58 But in the Eisenhower era, when national politics seemed stodgy and uninspiring, ambitious young liberals like Logue and his staff felt that city-level government, under the guidance of a reform mayor like Lee and backed by federal bucks, held the most promise for progressive innovation.59 That urban renewal attracted this kind of professional redevelopment staff came in for attack by the politically conservative magazine Human Events in its special issue “The Case Against Urban Renewal.” The Republican challenger to Dick Lee in the 1961 mayoral election was approvingly quoted as saying, “A cult of planners and redevelopers has sprung up; they move from city to city, from one fat public job to another.”60
In recruiting nationally, Logue favored individuals broadly educated in public policy or law who took political science, economics, and philosophy seriously.61 Grabino recalled, “Logue liked lawyers. He liked the way they operated … Ed always thought that properly educated and trained lawyers were good people to move programs.”62 One account of Logue’s staff meetings captured what Grabino meant, with Logue described as a “brilliant synthesizer” who took stock of all the myriad issues in his agency’s complex projects and combined them seamlessly into a “brief” that he would dictate, leaving spaces for others to fill in details.63
It is worth noting that despite Jane Jacobs’s skepticism about top-down planning in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, she shared Logue’s embrace of an administrative structure for cities in which expert staff members had broad, general knowledge rather than narrowly defined and isolated responsibilities in what she called bureaucratic “labyrinths.” She even singled out New Haven as a knowable “little city” where “agency heads and their staff … can be experts … in their own responsibilities, and … on the subject of New Haven itself.” Having observed the operation in New Haven as she researched her book, Jacobs appreciated its staff’s avoidance of the “fractionated empires” that she complained dominated many larger cities.64
Logue’s second rule favored hiring individuals with a track record in the redevelopment field: “I wanted people who either had good experience on their own or had worked in organizations that were accomplishing something.”65 In the early years when urban renewal was a new frontier, people with experience drafting and implementing key national housing acts were particularly valuable to have on staff. They knew all the fine print in these complex laws as well as how best to negotiate with the Urban Renewal Administration bureaucracy. Speaking on the television news show Meet the Press in 1966, Lee attributed New Haven’s success to just this advantage: “I have an outstanding staff … We study the programs as they evolve in Washington. We help develop this, support the legislation, and in some cases write the legislation, and then when the money is passed out we are there with a bushel basket.”66 New Haven’s success at negotiating for Paul Rudolph’s garage and Yale’s payment for the site of two former high schools to count as noncash local contributions, thereby increasing the total federal allocation, resulted directly from the skillful maneuvering of Washington veterans in the New Haven Redevelopment Agency.67
Logue’s first major hire once he became the head honcho was for an executive director of the Redevelopment Agency, essentially his deputy. Ralph Taylor had trained at the Littauer School of Public Administration at Harvard, become a Massachusetts state housing administrator and an expert on the Housing Act of 1949, and then directed the redevelopment program in Somerville, Massachusetts, overseeing one of the first urban redevelopment projects in the nation.68 Dahl noted that Taylor “was considered a professional by his peers throughout the country,… including those in the federal agencies.” With that experience, Taylor “knew how to cut through the interminable delays … and he exploited statutes and rules to gain concessions for New Haven.”69
Another key appointment was Tom Appleby, also an experienced redevelopment professional. He had earned a master’s in public administration from the University of Minnesota, had previously worked in Washington, D.C., and at the local level in Norfolk, Virginia, and had a prominent administrative pedigree and contacts as the son of Paul Appleby, whom Logue had met in India when, as the dean of Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs (the nation’s first school of public administration, established in 1927), Appleby consulted on improving Indian administrative structures. Grabino likewise arrived that first year, having been drawn to New Haven, like Logue was, by Yale Law School. Grabino excelled as a law student and after a few years, bored in private practice, leapt at the opportunity to join the new adventure of urban renewal, to which he had first been introduced in law school by Myres McDougal and Maurice Rotival, much as Logue had.70
Requesting salary raises for Taylor, Appleby, and Grabino, Logue told Lee, “I consider them a team, and as such the finest in the country,… without which New Haven would not have the renewal reputation it now enjoys.”71 For Logue, high-performing experts deserved recognition in salary, a “price tag” that would register in a national professional market. The same day he wrote to Lee requesting raises for these staff, he was forthright in making a request for himself: “You know better than anyone else whether I have performed above and beyond the call of duty or not in the last two years since my last raise, and in particular in the last year. You also know how completely anonymous it has all been. If you stay [not run for the Senate], I want the recognition as well as the income that a salary of $15,000 provides. If you go, I want to go out not just with a lot of personal satisfaction in what has been accomplished and deep regret that the job will be left undone, but with a $15,000 price tag.” Mindful that Lee’s own salary was $15,000, Logue astutely proposed a raise for the mayor to $17,500 or $20,000.72
Logue expected his team of experts to participate in the emerging national community of urban renewers in other ways than the scale of their salaries: to network with peers in other cities, to attend professional meetings, and in time to move on to become part of the diaspora of New Haven veterans who for years populated the American urban renewal field. Later, he was proud that his staff “had gone on to bigger and better things.”73 Taylor was typical. He was first interviewed for the New Haven job at a national meeting, he introduced Logue and Lee to other specialists working in Washington and elsewhere, and although he left New Haven after four years to work for a private developer active in urban redevelopment, he soon returned to public service to head LBJ’s Model Cities Program, doling out federal money to former colleagues working in cities around the nation. Tom Appleby had a similar story. He took over Taylor’s position upon the latter’s departure from New Haven and then moved on to head the District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency, where he hired a number of veterans of New Haven as staff and consultants, Logue among the latter.
A CPI publication articulated well the renewers’ aspiration not simply to be expert but also to propagate experts: “The large number who have moved on to much higher-paying positions in the Northeast and elsewhere in the nation” made New Haven “one of the nation’s most important training grounds for leaders in antipoverty and urban-improvement programs.”74 For decades Logue kept in close contact with former colleagues, often hiring them back as consultants and staffers when he moved into a new position. Few people ever disappeared from Logue’s Rolodex. Most made repeated entrances and exits throughout his half-century-long career in urban redevelopment, members of a professional club with life membership.
Nationally networked urban renewers also took their expertise abroad, often back to the developing world, where many had gained crucial experience early in their careers. In a fascinating lap to the international circulation of planning ideas, in 1957 Ford’s Ensminger wrote from New Delhi requesting material on New Haven’s urban renewal and informed Logue, “We are as you might guess wanting to experiment … by transferring the community development experience to the Urban Community.” Ensminger announced that, partly inspired by American-style urban renewal, a team had begun to create a long-range plan for the redevelopment of the Delhi area. Seven months later, he reported, “We are making good progress on the Delhi Plan. It is hard, slow work. I’m more and more attracted to the importance of giving increasing attention to India’s worsening urban slums.”75 In February 1958, Ensminger sent Logue an overview of the master plan for New Delhi, to be carried out in collaboration with the local planning body responsible for the Delhi metropolitan area. And who should emerge as the “overall consultant on the project” but Albert Mayer, creator of the Etawah village demonstration project ten years earlier and currently engaged in urban renewal work in the United States.
Two years later, Logue received an update on the Delhi project, “Report of a Pilot Project in Urban Community Development,” which he circulated to his own staff in New Haven.76 Soon after that, in 1961–62, Logue was invited by Ensminger to join the Ford Foundation Advisory Committee on Community Development for Calcutta, working with the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organization. His colleagues in this undertaking included none other than Bernard Loshbough, his associate from the Delhi embassy who was now doing urban renewal in Pittsburgh, and Paul Ylvisaker, Logue’s Gray Areas partner. Ylvisaker later remarked on the usefulness of this Indian experience, as Calcutta was undergoing “simply an exaggerated version of the same thing our cities were going through.”77 Here, American practitioners like Logue and Ylvisaker were assuming the universality of their expertise in solving urban problems, one more piece of the modernization process that they also felt gave common shape to economic development, political democratization, and contemporary architecture worldwide.
The network of urban redevelopment experts that Logue took such pride in nurturing was reinforced by a powerful culture of masculinity. Of course, men dominated most white-collar work in the 1950s and 1960s and gave it a male character, even when a few women were thrown into the mix, as was always the case in Logue’s urban renewal agencies in New Haven, Boston, and New York. Mary Hommann, one of the few women working in the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, acknowledged the male dominance of the operation: “I will be forever grateful for his courage in taking a chance on me,” she wrote to Margaret after Ed’s death, “even though I was a woman, which in the days before the woman’s movement could be a decided handicap.”78 The great excitement and high stakes of this new venture only intensified powerful male bonds. Laboring long hours together in the trenches of urban renewal, Logue and his staff developed a workplace esprit de corps organized around being men with a common purpose—and sometimes common enemies. “We were like the Marines getting to Iwo Jima,” recalled Grabino. “We were fighting the battle. We were all committed.”79
Other forms of male camaraderie imbued Redevelopment Agency culture. The bottle of whiskey that came out of Logue’s bottom desk drawer at the end of the day lubricated relationships among those who were invited to linger.80 Lunch meetings, often spiced with martinis, took place at all-male clubs like Mory’s and the Graduate Club in New Haven (and later at the Tavern Club in Boston and the Century Association in New York City). Not only did these sociable lunches deepen relationships among colleagues; they also helped the urban renewers rub shoulders as peers with other powerful men—the lawyers, journalists, businessmen, and government officials who likewise lunched at these clubs, strengthening ties with other members of the city’s male elite.
When Logue negotiated the terms of his position in Boston in 1960–61, in fact, he made membership in the prestigious Tavern Club part of the package. Rooming at the club before his family relocated, he very quickly met up with a circle of well-connected young men who grew to admire him. Herbert Gleason, a lawyer active in civic affairs, remembered, “I was captivated by him. He was stylish, he was fun. If you could get him to come to your house for a party or a dinner, that was a coup.” Martin Nolan, a reporter with The Boston Globe, recalled that Logue “was such a dashing figure. He had dark Irish good looks and people thought he was very … impressive.”81 Years later, in the 1980s, Richard Kahan, an influential player in New York City’s public life, was shocked to find Ed Logue, whom he had long admired as a social progressive and considered his “affirmative action hero” for leadership in hiring minority contractors, outspokenly opposed to admitting women into New York’s Century Association—until he realized how important male collegiality had proved throughout Logue’s career.82
What weekend leisure existed in the pressure cooker of New Haven redevelopment also reinforced male bonds. The young couples whose husbands worked for Logue partied together frequently. In typical fifties fashion, the men and women tended to congregate separately, even though Margaret Logue was hardly the stereotypical housewife of the era. Despite giving birth to a second child in 1957, she continued to teach part-time and would go on to have a serious career in education, with the full support of her husband. The agency staff also played regular Saturday touch football games against the prominent New Haven law firm employed as outside counsel, which Logue was said to take “deadly seriously,” rarely missing a game.83
Logue’s competitiveness on the football field, as on tennis and squash courts, ruled the office as well, where he was convinced that a male-style combative culture improved the quality of performance. Talbot was not alone in recalling how Logue made work into a contest. He routinely gave the identical assignment to several staff at the same time. “The man coming up with the best answer got the prize of following through under the direct supervision of the boss.”84 Logue’s own competitive nature was rarely out of view. He loved boasting of the city’s redevelopment successes—saying that “New Haven received twice as much urban renewal funding per capita than any other American city” and that Church Street “is one of the boldest projects in the United States.”85 Harold “Harry” Wexler, an observant young staff member of the Redevelopment Agency in those years, noted that Ed and Mike Sviridoff were close, but at times rivals for Dick Lee’s affection and attention.86 Life, in a special issue on the American city in December 1965, appropriately titled its profile of Logue “Bold Boston Gladiator.” Newsweek that same year described Logue as a “vigorous, forceful man who glories in political brawls and has a temper as quick as his smile.” Logue’s defense: “I express positions rather strongly when people who have said they’re going to perform fail miserably … It’s my job to be impatient.”87
The template for many of Logue’s interactions at work was relations between men in families—as brothers, fathers, and sons. As the oldest of four boys in his own fatherless family, Ed was used to the easy mix of companionship, competition, and loyalty among brothers—as well as being the one who ruled the roost of a gaggle of guys. When Logue and Lee were asked about what Lee called their “awful, just plain ferocious fights,” where “I’d fire him once a week, sometimes twice,” they both independently asserted, “We fought like brothers.” They also schemed like brothers, observed by others as having “the air of two brothers talking of family affairs, even of family pranks, with Lee usually taking the position of the older boy who would be held responsible for whatever trouble they might get into.”88 They sulked like brothers, too. When Logue wanted the title of development administrator, considering it commensurate with his responsibilities, and Lee initially hesitated, Ed gave Dick the silent treatment until he relented.89 And they teased each other like brothers. Wolfinger reported to Dahl that Lee “calls Ed Logue ‘Fatty’ whenever Ed comes in. I don’t know if this is a friendly nickname or if it’s some kind of compensation for feelings of Ed’s intellectual superiority.”90 Margaret pointed out one more way that they behaved like brothers: “They’d defend each other against anybody.”91 Other relationships were similarly charged with expectations of fraternal loyalty. When Taylor announced that he was resigning to work for a private-sector housing developer, Logue was so hurt that he called Ralph a “traitor to the program” and barely talked to him before he departed.92
Logue aspired to be a paternal as well as fraternal presence. He called the young, idealistic men his agency attracted “my boys.”93 In his thirties during the New Haven years, he tended to hire males in their twenties, recently graduated from college, public policy, or law school and eager to save the endangered American city. The national prominence of New Haven’s program ensured that there was no shortage of applicants. Talbot observed that the “screening process was long and personal, much more like being looked over for a fraternity than being interviewed for a job.”94 Robert Hazen was widely recognized as Logue’s favorite “fair-haired boy,” whom he took under his wing and treated like a son. After working for two summers for the New Haven Redevelopment Agency while a student at nearby Wesleyan University and again while getting his master’s in public administration at the University of Michigan, Hazen was hired in an entry-level position. This assistant job seemed to bring with it the license to hang out a great deal at the Logues’ house—“like a son or a younger brother,” Margaret recalled.95 Following a stint in the army, Hazen would follow Logue to Boston, because, “for Christ’s sake,” Logue told an annoyed Lee, “he grew up with me.”96 Hazen would work alongside Logue again in New York. In Boston, Logue would hire a young architect right out of Harvard named Theodore Liebman, whom he would eventually make chief architect in New York. Liebman admired Logue as a mentor—“I did not want to disappoint him. And I thought we were doing god’s work”—but more than that, he came to love him as “a surrogate father.”97
The list could go on of impressionable young men attracted to the oftentimes gruff and demanding, but also inspiring and caring, Ed Logue. Taylor remembered with a chuckle how Ed’s boys “all modeled themselves after Logue.” He was particularly amused at Grabino, “this bright young guy,” who became a miniature Ed “without the maturity of judgment. Grabino is truculent for the sake of being truculent. Ed is truculent when he wants to achieve an objective.”98 Howard Moskof (Yale Law ’59) admitted his own susceptibility. He “caught the disease” of urban renewal after a lunch with Grabino and Logue—“two arrogant sons-of-bitches”—and before very long had joined the team, becoming “just like them—everyone became clones of Logue.”99
New Haven urban renewal was not exceptional in its masculine culture. Urban renewal in many cities was associated with a strong male figure, whether Pittsburgh’s David Lawrence, Newark’s Louis Danzig, San Francisco’s Justin Herman, Philadelphia’s Edmund Bacon, or, the most overbearing of them all, New York’s Robert Moses. This male culture of urban renewal contrasted sharply with Progressivism, which took on a strong female character through the imprint of social reformers and so-called urban housekeepers such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Lillian Wald, to name only the most prominent.100 Whereas the female Progressives lobbied for new protective legislation for workers, particularly women and children, and organized female consumers to boycott goods produced under exploitative conditions, the male urban renewers controlled large amounts of money and used it to rebuild cities on a massive scale. Some architectural critics have taken the analysis even further and argued that the aesthetics of urban renewal carried the stamp of this male-dominated culture, with urban renewers like Lee and Logue attracted to a hard-edged, high-rise, brutalist modernist architecture that celebrated Cold War virility.101 Even without taking that leap, it is possible to say that urban renewal was nourished in a male culture of expertise and sociability that encouraged big men to build big structures with big ambitions. This was not a world that welcomed women.
Mayor Lee appreciatively described his Citizens Action Commission, with its several hundred community members, in similar manly terms:
We’ve got the biggest muscles, the biggest set of muscles in New Haven on the top C.A.C.… They’re muscular because they control wealth, they’re muscular because they control industries, represent banks. They’re muscular because they head up labor. They’re muscular because they represent the intellectual portions of the community. They’re muscular because they’re articulate, because they’re respectable, because of their financial power, and because of the accumulation of prestige which they have built up over the years as individuals in all kinds of causes, whether United Fund, Red Cross, or whatever.102
As for Logue’s team of urban experts back at the office, the fraternal intensity of the workplace, when combined with their nationally oriented professional identity, served to set them apart from other New Haven municipal employees as well as from the ordinary citizens in the neighborhoods they set out to improve—a divide that would ultimately jeopardize their cause.
With Logue and his staff considering themselves generalist experts, more specialized tasks in urban renewal were left to technical experts with mastery of specific forms of knowledge, such as planners, architects, and real estate developers. Much the way community development administrators like Doug Ensminger and Bernard Loshbough had recruited skilled technicians to work at the village level in India, broadly trained urban renewal professionals looked to those with more focused expertise and experience for help. The rise of powerful development administrators in this new era of federal urban renewal would change the nature of these other professions, as well as how they related to one another, constructing a new hierarchy of practitioners.
The power struggle between Logue as redevelopment administrator and the planners, architects, and developers he depended on shaped the reconstruction of downtown New Haven. In 1957, Taylor explained bluntly to Dahl that in the planning of the all-important Church Street Project, “the power on this whole thing is Ed.”103 Logue’s assertion of authority over the centerpiece of New Haven’s urban renewal effort marginalized city planners most of all, including Rotival. Employed on contract, Rotival griped about being brought in “piece-meal, on ‘whistle-stop’ commitments, mostly as an ‘atelier’ working from day-to-day,” not doing the “general planning for which our firm is best known, and in which we have made the greatest contribution … both in the United States and abroad.”104 Logue had a ready answer. He sent Rotival a memorandum with the subject line “Your time and how you spend it?” which said bluntly, “It seems to me that your talents are not best employed in attending meetings and in concerning yourself with various administrative matters. We regard you as one of the greatest planners in all the world and one of the most experienced. That is why we are proud to have you working on this project. However, you are not an administrator skilled in the ins and outs of American bureaucracy at the local, state, and national levels and we did not retain you for this purpose.” With a final slash of his sword, Logue closed, “If you stick to your job of planning and designing and leave the red tape to the rest of us, we will all get farther faster.”105 Lee concurred. He told Architectural Forum that “too many communities have assumed that renewal is a job for planners alone.” Lee continued that the program is so “unbelievably complicated” that it calls for the most skilled administrators.”106
The planning profession had emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century when urban residents and their local governments wanted more control over how their mushrooming cities were developing. Planners’ role was strengthened when the crucial tool of zoning was upheld in 1926 by the United States Supreme Court in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, which confirmed localities’ constitutional authority to regulate private property in the broad public interest. The New Deal accelerated planning activity, but it was really the needs of World War II and the postwar boom that transformed a half-hearted, often Chamber of Commerce–dominated operation in most cities and towns into the responsibility of full-time professionals, employed in municipal government and armed with new zoning ordinances.107 In keeping with these trends, New Haven had established its City Plan Commission early, in 1913, but the body had neither funds nor a professional staff until 1941. Soon thereafter, at Alderman Lee’s encouragement, Rotival was hired to develop the city’s first comprehensive plan. By the time Lee and Logue took over in 1954, the city’s planning department had become a legitimate part of New Haven’s municipal government.108 But although its size grew under Lee’s administration, “it had a curiously subordinate place,” Wolfinger observed, as the new “cosmopolitan professionals” were “much more self-consciously pragmatic and accustomed to negotiation rather than subordination in their dealings with politicians and businessmen.”109
In the 1960s, some planners—unhappy with how their profession had become subservient to redevelopment—responded by reinventing themselves as advocates for ordinary residents in the urban renewal process, positioning themselves to explicitly challenge their cities’ redevelopment programs. “Advocacy planners,” they called themselves, adopting the language of Paul Davidoff, a professor of planning at the University of Pennsylvania and then Hunter College, who published a call to arms in the field’s major journal in 1965: “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning.”110 Although advocacy planners sought to salvage their profession from what they considered the taint of autocratic redevelopment, they in their own way, and quite intentionally, contributed to the decline in the planning profession’s authority as experts, as they aspired to become “value-driven” rather than “value-neutral” public advocates. Planners came out of the urban renewal era with more work than ever but with an altered professional standing—weaker politically in elite urban policy circles and with a radical wing that explicitly challenged practitioners’ claim to expertise.111 Logue summed it up with his characteristic bluntness: “Planners are losing ground. Responsibility for the replanning of cities is moving into the hands of administrators.” And he added, wishfully perhaps, “Surprisingly, the planners do not seem to mind.”112
Architects fared somewhat better in urban renewal’s new pecking order of professions. Rudolph’s Temple Street Parking Garage became one of Logue and Lee’s prime showplaces, and they put great effort into attracting other prominent architects to redesign downtown. These designers benefited from the new government patronage made possible with urban renewal, even as their work was constrained by strict federal regulations and cost limitations. Architects were partners in urban renewal, designing civic buildings and defining the aesthetics of this ambitious national program. The architect Ieoh Ming “I. M.” Pei, who worked as a staff architect on urban renewal projects for the developer William “Big Bill” Zeckendorf in the 1950s (and did the plan for Boston’s Government Center for Logue soon after forming his own firm in the early 1960s), explained that “after the war, there was a very difficult time. What little building other than that [urban renewal] was probably all captured by S.O.M. [Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a major American architecture firm] … Those of us who were outside had to pick up just these little things, you know, like urban redevelopment, low-cost housing.”113
The architect John Johansen, whose Florence Virtue Homes and neighboring school and church in the Dixwell section of New Haven were among his first civic commissions, poignantly recounted how getting the New Haven job changed his career. “Until I was forty years old [1956], only commissions for houses came my way. I may say for the solace of the young struggling architects of any generation that this was a long wait. I was filled with impatience and envy of established architects … I was bitter and in despair observing the inequities of my profession.” Johansen also recalled how competing for urban renewal work made him by necessity more innovative with materials: “In the desperate effort to gain commissions for public buildings, the young architect promises and somehow produces designs for buildings at dangerously low budgets. One inexpensive material with some substance is concrete block. In three early commissions in New Haven, Connecticut,… a community development was realized in concrete block.”114 Pei, too, claimed that he learned a lot from the ten years he spent doing urban renewal projects, particularly “how to work within the constraints of a budget and a lot of other design demands that were very concrete and specific.”115
Urban renewal work in New Haven changed the career trajectory of Paul Rudolph as well, giving him just the patronage he sought to design monumental civic buildings. An analysis of his oeuvre demonstrates that his publicly funded commissions clustered between 1956 and 1975, almost the exact bookends of government investment in urban renewal. Of Rudolph’s forty publicly funded commissions over this period, twelve occurred under the direct oversight of Logue and another five originated from officials with close ties to Logue, such as Dick Lee, Tom Appleby, and Ed Logue’s brother Frank, who became mayor of New Haven in the 1970s, together totaling 43 percent of Rudolph’s lifelong public work.116
But as much as architects may have benefited, they still found themselves subject to redevelopment administrators’ tight control. When Logue got wind that the developers of the University Towers project on the fringe of downtown had dropped the prominent modernist architect Hugh Stubbins of Cambridge and were substituting the New York firm of Kelly & Grutzen, he was furious and, in the words of eyewitness Wolfinger, “in violent, abusive and obscene language” he told them that K&G would never participate in any redevelopment program in New Haven. They finally compromised on another New York firm, Kahn & Jacobs.117 Not far from downtown, the architects of the Conté School in Wooster Square also had to contend with Logue’s strong views. Natalie de Blois, who as a young architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill worked with Gordon Bunshaft on the school, recalled a dispute with Logue over the siting of the building. Bunshaft’s original scheme, which set it back from the street, met with Logue’s “No way are we going to have a plaza in front of that building.” She went on, “So Gordon had to listen to him … Logue said there had to be a building right on the building line. It was very important. I certainly thought it was a valid criticism.”118
Although some architects would complain he was intrusive, working with architects remained one of Logue’s favorite activities throughout his long career in urban redevelopment. As Ted Liebman, a staff architect for Logue in Boston and New York, put it, “He loved them [the architects]. He loved the architectural meetings … The picture of him that I thought was the best [has him] looking at that model, [thinking] this is something that’s going to be a new idea. And you see the twinkle in his eye.”119 Logue would in fact work with many of the major architects and firms on the East Coast, most of them well-established second-generation modernists. And he would return repeatedly to proven architectural veterans of urban renewal, who accepted his authority as development administrator. He even prided himself on contributing to architects’ maturation. “There are many good architects who have talent, who have not had the opportunity to show it prominently enough. And there are other architects who haven’t been stretched enough, and we help to provide a little of that stretching.”120
Logue was not alone in arguing that architecture and urban renewal mutually benefited each other. Charles Abrams, chair of the City Planning Division at Columbia University and at times a critic of urban renewal, applauded “its serious effort … to make design a major factor,” citing in particular the “plazas and pedestrian malls, underground parking, and a better relationship between buildings.” He even singled out New Haven for incorporating “schools as part of the project” and successfully convincing factory owners “to employ architects” rather than depend “on stock plans pulled out of a file by an industrial engineer.” Delighted that prominent architects were working in urban renewal all over the country, Abrams concluded that redevelopment was teaching cities and developers “to add design to profit criteria.”121
Not everyone, however, praised the architectural legacy of urban renewal. Robert A. M. Stern, already embarked on his own path toward postmodernism, accused urban renewal’s architects of promoting “heroic” designs rigidly loyal to orthodox modernist principles rather than more flexibly responding to how people actually used a particular urban site. He singled out “piazza compulsion,” obsession with towers, and technologically innovative “mega-structures” as common mistakes.122 Even the Temple Street Parking Garage, designed by Stern’s Yale professor Paul Rudolph, came in for criticism, with its “arbitrary” and “unbending geometry of stacks of identically sized structural elements”—the aqueduct-inspired arches much beloved by Logue and Lee—and for an accommodation to the automobile that was “perhaps too expensive and too prominent.”123 Logue, Abrams, and many other patrons of the era’s urban architecture would not have agreed with Stern’s critique. But both champion Abrams and critic Stern recognized that architects played a major role in shaping the aesthetic vision behind the urban renewal program.
Downtown New Haven’s renewal also sheds light on how a third group—real estate developers—was affected by the federal government’s effort to incentivize them to invest time and treasure in American cities. Once an urban renewal agency had planned, cleared (using its powers of eminent domain if necessary), and prepared the site, it hired a developer to purchase the land at the much-reduced price made possible by government subsidies. From there the developer’s job involved arranging financing, overseeing design and construction, getting extensive approvals, and marketing the project. Many of the problems that Logue and Lee encountered with the Church Street Project—beyond the gross mismatch between their grand ambition and the declining appeal of downtown New Haven—could be traced to the inexperience of the developer Roger Stevens, with whom they began meeting in 1955 and employed in 1957. Stevens was a real estate investor who had bought the Empire State Building and “flipped” it for a hefty profit. He had also produced Broadway shows, was a bigwig in the national Democratic Party, and had close connections with Yale. From 1953 to 1955, Stevens had tried—and eventually failed—to develop a proposal for the Prudential site in Boston that shared with the Church Street Project the ambition to combine the shopping ease of the suburban mall with the appeal of the big city. That this New York sophisticate was interested in redeveloping downtown New Haven thrilled Lee and Logue—until they discovered, too late, that there was an enormous difference between being a successful real estate entrepreneur and having the kind of know-how required of a real estate developer working within the complex environment of urban renewal.
Logue acknowledged to Eugene Rostow, dean of Yale Law School, what a big mistake he had made with Stevens. “At every turn we have either had to club him or solve his problems for him.”124 Later, he reflected, “We overestimated his ability as a developer. Roger was a strong real estate man, and there were few who could match his ability to buy existing buildings, rearranging the financing, and turning a profit. But developing raw land…” Yale would temporarily bail Stevens out with a $4.5 million loan to the Church Street Project, but by early 1964, having concluded that he “just got tired of throwing money away,” Stevens recruited two construction companies to take over and bowed out.125 Two years later, in the pages of Fortune magazine, Logue and Stevens were still duking it out. Stevens complained of the excessive government bureaucracy. “All along the line you had to have five commissioners approving everything … I wouldn’t go into another urban-development deal for anything.” Logue retorted acidly, “That’s a very wise decision.”126
Other developers working in downtown New Haven proved more successful at figuring out how to make urban renewal work for them. The developers of the University Towers apartments—a partnership of Jerome Lyle Rappaport and Theodore Shoolman of Boston and Seon Pierre Bonan of Connecticut and New York—succeeded because they understood subtleties in the rules of federal urban renewal. (That sophistication would also help them in Boston, where they developed the controversial Charles River Park luxury apartment complex on the site of the city’s leveled West End neighborhood.) In New Haven, Rappaport, Shoolman, and Bonan made use of an esoteric provision allowing developers to lease with an option to buy rather than purchase the land outright. This stipulation limited the Rappaport group’s financial exposure and allowed it to outbid Yale for the University Towers site, upsetting Logue and Lee’s expectation that Yale and the developer Stevens would win the auction required by the federal government.127 On the morning of May 8, 1957, in the aldermanic chambers of New Haven’s city hall, the bidding mounted to $1.15 million—far above the $700,000 minimum bid set and squeaking past Yale’s authorized limit of $1.14 million. Logue described the startling turn of events as “an auction that would probably chill your soul.” It certainly chilled the friendship between Dick Lee and the Yale president Whitney Griswold for a long while.128
Excluding developers from early planning gave enormous power to redevelopment agencies, but it also increased the risks of embarking on unfeasible projects and not attracting capable developers down the line. As late as 1971, a third of the projects begun nationally between 1950 and 1959 had property still lying empty; more than half of those started between 1960 and 1964 contained unsold land.129 (These vacant plots, often left overgrown and strewn with junk, did little for urban renewal’s reputation.) Like architects, those developers who did take on projects needed great skill and long patience to work with government agencies—and within government regulations and restricted budgets.
Ralph Taylor’s decision to leave his job as executive director of redevelopment in New Haven to become CEO for the developer James H. Scheuer testified to the burgeoning opportunities urban renewal brought to those Taylor described as this “new breed of businessmen … concentrating on the redevelopment of areas cleared by the redevelopment process.” Scheuer’s impressive track record of promoting racial integration in housing attracted Taylor, and Taylor’s considerable experience as a redevelopment official appealed to Scheuer. During the next seven years Scheuer and Taylor sponsored over $100 million worth (almost $835 million today) of housing in redevelopment areas, including a huge 1,739-unit project in Southwest Washington called Capital Park.
In 1964, Scheuer was elected to his first of thirteen terms as a liberal congressman from the Bronx, thereby moving from being a developer astute about federal legislation to a federal legislator. A couple of years later, Taylor followed Scheuer into government, becoming assistant secretary for model cities and governmental relations.130 Scheuer’s and Taylor’s easy shuttling between the private and public sectors indicates how well integrated the realms of government and development became under federal urban renewal. Another developer, Pei’s boss Zeckendorf, embraced redevelopment work once he figured out in 1952 “the kind of financing you can get—city and state participation and the [federal underwriting] of real estate,” Pei recalled. “He told me that for the first time I don’t need bankers! Uncle Sam’s going to bank.”131
In the reshuffling of professional standing that resulted from urban renewal, planners, architects, and developers all continued to play crucial roles, and many benefited greatly from lucrative opportunities. If scoring, one might say that architects and developers were winners as direct recipients of government largesse, planners much less so. “In the days of urban renewal,” Pei confirmed, “the developer, the architect, and the city and state [were] really working together. I’m not saying all equal, but they are all important.”132 But there was no question that all three specialized experts became dependent on the favor of urban renewal administrators like Logue, who were empowered through federal funding, insulated from local politics as usual, and connected to peers nationally by strong professional ties.
Through the programs it initiated and the money it spent, federal urban renewal in cities like New Haven extended the liberal state-building of the Great Depression and World War II into the postwar era. In fact, one might say that, beginning as it did in the 1950s, urban renewal bridged the two great mid-twentieth-century reform movements of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. A former New Haven alderman explained the work of the optimistic, “young, ambitious men” who undertook to renew New Haven in just this way. “They’d New-Dealed themselves to peace and prosperity, and they thought, ‘Now we’ll New-Deal ourselves to urban renewal.’”133
In time, the consequences—both positive and negative—of Logue and Lee’s approach to physical planning, social services, citizen engagement, and administrative strategy would become evident. Despite acknowledging some rough patches—such as a long-stalled Church Street Project—the renewers felt optimistic. Macy’s finally signed on and the gaping big hole in downtown would soon open as the Chapel Square Mall. Neighborhood renewal was progressing in the Oak Street, Wooster Square, and Dixwell areas, and being planned elsewhere. Changes in the Housing Act of 1954 had enabled the renewal of Wooster Square to favor greater rehabilitation, not just demolition—proof, according to Logue, “that we could rebuild a neighborhood with a scalpel not a bulldozer.”134 As early as 1957, Logue wrote to Bowles, “Dick and I now believe that if the projected New Haven plan is carried through to completion, our position in 1976 will be stronger in every way than that of the suburbs around us.”135
Nonetheless, there were frustrations. Limitations in the federal programs that enabled their work were one kind. The seemingly unstoppable flow of people and resources to the suburbs was another. But probably the most serious challenge of all came from within the New Haven community and grew out of a paradox at the heart of the renewers’ own liberal agenda. Despite their conviction that what Dahl labeled pluralist democracy was a democratic mode of citizen engagement, their simultaneous championing of a new kind of urban professional to represent the public interest promoted a top-down structure that kept decision-making in the hands of experts. Although these experts may not have been the sort of dominating political elites whose existence Dahl set out to deny, they were elites of another sort. When Logue and his star staff, oriented toward the national stage, went to work, they inevitably measured their program’s success by how it fared in grant competitions in Washington and in the eyes of their professional peers. How ordinary New Haveners felt inevitably mattered less. While residents grumbled some discontent throughout the 1950s, it would take until the 1960s—after Logue had left for Boston—for them to register the full extent of their complaints. By May 1967, when LBJ’s National Commission on Urban Problems held hearings in New Haven, there was no mistaking the protests of at least some New Haveners.
Mayor Lee welcomed the commission hearings as a public relations opportunity for the city (and himself), a chance to show off spunky New Haven to a national audience. Logue would do the same in Boston when the commission visited there the next day. The commission members had put New Haven and Boston on their itinerary to pay homage to Lee and Logue’s reputation over a dozen years for innovation in urban renewal and anti-poverty programs. But despite New Haven’s finely tuned PR machinery, the commission hearings in New Haven developed in a way that the renewers hadn’t planned on, making it clear that all was not quite so well. In fact, there was “trouble right here in Model City,” to paraphrase the hit song “Ya Got Trouble,” from a popular musical of the era, The Music Man. Invited speakers and commission members alike may have expected to watch a well-rehearsed performance of “New Haven, the Incubator of Urban Innovation,” but they were in for a surprise. Uninvited speakers would demand the floor at those hearings to give voice to a very different perspective on New Haven’s great experiment. Race, which had always been an issue in New Haven, now took center stage.