The summons to come meet Boston’s newly elected mayor, John Collins, arrived in December 1959. Ed Logue knew from his well-tuned professional network that Collins’s people had been inquiring about him as a possible leader of Boston’s revitalization. He might also have known they were investigating other candidates, including his former deputy Ralph Taylor, familiar to Bostonians from his work in neighboring Somerville before he decamped for New Haven. Logue accepted the invitation to visit. He met with the mayor-elect Collins, he looked around a city he barely knew outside of Harvard-Yale games, and he posed two key questions: Where’s the comprehensive plan, and can an outsider do this job in a city notorious for its vicious political infighting?1
The answer to the first question was that there was no overall plan—only an inadequate and dated General Plan for Boston conceived back in 1950. Collins’s predecessor as mayor, John Hynes, had launched Boston’s urban renewal with two controversial and still-incomplete projects: redeveloping the West End and the New York Streets section of the South End. Hynes’s next two ambitious moves—to persuade the Prudential Insurance Company to build a New England headquarters in the Back Bay and to construct the Government Center in downtown Boston—had stalled.
Collins’s second answer was more encouraging: “Ed, only an outsider can do anything in this town. Around here they keep score on you from the time you’re in short pants.”2 Anyone local, Collins believed, would inevitably be identified with one side or the other in the decades-long political feuds that divided the city. After meeting Logue and consulting with his advisers, Collins decided that in fact Logue alone—with his established track record in New Haven and Midas touch for attracting federal dollars, and without any compromising local affiliations—could head the much-invigorated Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). And he would be worth his shockingly high price tag of $30,000 a year, which was $10,000 more than the mayor himself, or indeed the Massachusetts governor, was earning.
Logue, who was intrigued by the Boston opportunity, had taken a risk and said that no lesser salary would motivate him to give up his satisfying work and comfortable life in New Haven, even if his pay there was only $13,500.3 No one, including Logue, was exactly sure why he put such a high price on his own head, but the speculation of family members and colleagues ranged from a lifetime of insecurity about money traceable back to his fatherless youth to his high opinion of his own abilities to an ideological conviction that public service should not require financial sacrifice. Logue also knew from experience that federal urban renewal grants would cover most, if not all, of his salary. When he was asked by an intermediary for Collins, “What makes you think you’re worth that?” Logue shot back, “When I was in the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy during the War, I got combat pay, and when I served in New Delhi in the Foreign Service, I got hardship pay … From what I hear about your town, it qualifies on both counts.”4 John Collins and Ed Logue agreed that Logue would start as a per diem consultant that spring, learning about the city and developing a plan. They would see where it led.5
Where it would lead was to a seven-year run as the powerful development administrator of what became Boston’s more than $200 million federally funded urban renewal. In no time, Boston would move from seventeenth to fourth in per capita dollars received from Washington, making Boston by far the largest investment the Feds made in a city of its size. Those funds would underwrite multiple projects under way simultaneously in the city’s downtown and residential neighborhoods. This was an achievement greatly lauded by some and detested by others. Few kept their opinions to themselves. What became known as the “New Boston” provided almost daily front- and editorial-page copy for Boston’s newspapers and juicy material for in-depth features in the national press. Major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post; the newsweeklies Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, National Review, and U.S. News and World Report; business publications like Fortune, The Economist, and Business Week; and professional publications like Architectural Forum—all were fascinated by the question Newsweek aptly phrased as “What’s happening to proper Old Boston?”
Logue himself attracted an outsize amount of attention. Life’s profile, “Bold Boston Gladiator—Ed Logue: Planner Stirs Up a Ruckus and Battles Opposition to Build the Place of His Dreams,” proclaimed him “the most successful redevelopment boss in the country—and … the most controversial.” The Christian Science Monitor introduced readers to “Boston’s Mr. Urban Renewal, one of the top men in the renewal field.” The Washington Post tagged him “the master rebuilder” in 1967.6 Comparisons were frequently made with Christopher Wren’s remaking of London in the seventeenth century, Charles Bulfinch’s reenvisioning of Boston in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris later in the nineteenth century.7
It was thus no mystery why the Boston Herald described Logue in 1965 as “more controversial, more discussed, more fervently admired and feverishly hated than any personality since James Michael Curley,” referring to the Democratic Party machine boss who had dominated twentieth-century Boston politics.8 If small-scale New Haven was a controlled laboratory experiment in urban renewal, then bigger Boston became the national testing ground for how to turn around a major American city—the tenth largest in the nation in 1950 at its population peak. In that effort, Logue would make allies and enemies as he grappled with the major dilemma that still confronts urban planners and public officials today: how to balance improving a city’s economic profile as measured in the health of its tax base, its attractiveness to investors, and its success in providing jobs and services, against ensuring a decent—and equitable to the extent possible—quality of life for all its residents. In other words, how should a city’s viability be assessed? From the very start in the contentious cauldron that was Boston, Logue faced choices and criticisms that propelled him to confront this question in ways that he had not needed to in New Haven, where citizens did not raise substantial challenges to Logue and Lee’s agenda until the mid-1960s, several years after Logue had departed.
During that first spring and summer of 1960, Logue spent four days a week in Boston and weekends doing his New Haven work. He would walk from one end of this new city to another, scouting the territory around every Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, or “T,” stop and talking to anyone who was willing. Finally, after three months of observations and three days of intense work holed up in his basement study in New Haven, doing “the most effective writing I have ever done,” Logue was ready by June to present Mayor Collins with the first draft of an extensive plan. He did so at an intimate meeting in Collins’s Jamaica Plain home, with only Collins and a few of his closest advisers in attendance. Logue took it as a high compliment to his sleuthing that Collins’s first reaction was “Hell, I could have done that!”
By late September, his “$90 Million Development Program for Boston,” encompassing downtown and ten neighborhoods—and potentially affecting a quarter of the city’s acreage and half of its population over a ten-year period—was ready for public viewing. It was presented with great flourish at an evening meeting in the historic Old South Meeting House, “filled to the rafters,” Logue recalled, with seven hundred invited neighborhood representatives and business, civic, and professional leaders.9 Logue had taken the federal requirement of a “workable plan” to a whole new level of comprehensiveness, never doubting that his short, intense immersion in Boston and previous expertise in redevelopment were a sufficient-enough basis on which to recommend a massive reconfiguration of the city. He knew that public hearings and city and federal approvals would need to follow, but still, he (and Collins) considered it his job to launch the process with an ambitious vision for a New Boston.
That Boston was a city in crisis was obvious to everyone, even if they disagreed vehemently over what to do about it. The city was bleeding people and resources. Curley’s conflicts with the national Democratic Party had deprived the city of its fair share of New Deal handouts, and its already declining manufacturing base got very little lift out of World War II.10 Since 1950, Boston had lost 13 percent of its population, thinning out many of the city’s neighborhoods. Good jobs were disappearing as well, with the loss of forty-eight thousand in manufacturing and fourteen thousand downtown, contributing to an 8 percent drop in city employment. Meanwhile, suburban jobs increased by 22 percent. This job loss gave Boston the lowest median family income of the nation’s seven largest metropolitan areas. With slightly less than 10 percent of the city’s population being African American in 1960—smaller than in many other major American cities—whites made up most of the city’s poor.
Boston was also on the verge of bankruptcy. Its tax rate of $101 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, twice the rate in Chicago and New York and higher than in any other large American city, discouraged investors, who feared endlessly rising real estate taxes. As a result, only two new downtown office buildings had been constructed since 1930. The most dependable employer in town was city hall, bloating Boston’s civil service payrolls by 50 percent higher than what was average for the nation’s largest cities while draining Boston’s coffers. It was no wonder that in 1959 Moody’s had downgraded the city’s bond rating from A to Baa, near junk level, making it the only city with a population over half a million to carry that stigma and borrowing burden.11 WGBH, the local educational television station, regularly broadcast alarming programs like City in Crisis, a twenty-part series. While Logue was preparing to go public with his plan for a New Boston in August 1960, the Boston-based, politically progressive Christian Science Monitor wondered aloud, “Is Boston worth saving? The streets are choked with traffic, vast jungles of blighted housing, faded business districts … Is it all worth the effort to change this?”12
If anything became crystal clear to Logue from his initial, intense immersion in Boston, it was how the long arm of history had shaped the troubled city he now saw before him. Much of the current paralysis could be traced to the bitter, decades-long struggle between the Yankee Protestant (often referred to as “Brahmin”) elite and the immigrant workers and their descendants—many of them Catholics and Jews—who labored in the city’s once-flourishing ports, markets, shipyards, and manufacturing plants. It was “a confrontation,” Logue was convinced, “of a deep nature” that did great “harm … to the city.”13 The Yankees had dominated the city economically and politically from its earliest days as a center of local fishing and global trade. They continued overseeing its transformation in the nineteenth century into a regional marketplace and the commercial heart of a thriving textile empire that stretched into the river-rich hinterlands of New England, including such mill towns as Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire.
As the size of Boston’s immigrant working class swelled—at first predominantly with the Irish but during the first decades of the twentieth century broadened to include substantial numbers of Italians and Eastern Europeans—the Yankees found their Republican hegemony threatened. By 1905, savvy Democratic politicians like John F. Kennedy’s maternal grandfather John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, hailing from the city’s then Irish and later Italian enclave of the North End, managed to turn the exploding numbers of ethnic voters into an engine powering a potent Democratic Party machine. From 1913 to 1949, the machine’s undisputed leader, James Michael Curley, dominated Boston politics, serving multiple terms as mayor, governor, and congressman—as well as two terms in federal prison. Curley’s strategy was simple: milk downtown to feed the ethnic, working-class neighborhoods. With as much as 80 percent of the city’s revenue coming from real estate taxes, he kept tax assessments low in the neighborhoods and sky-high and unpredictable—and, it was rumored, in pencil—downtown, to maximize the possibility of making tax abatement deals with business, one of his many party- and self-aggrandizing corruption schemes. A commanding orator, Curley took great delight in lampooning the Yankees as the “codfish aristocracy,” who were “descended from rum runners and slave traders.” He boasted that “it took the Irish to make Massachusetts a fit place to live.”14
Not surprisingly with so fragile an economic base, citywide infrastructure and services—from sewers and streets to schools—deteriorated badly under Curley, while the Yankee elite retaliated with a roving eye. Some remained in the premier neighborhoods of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay, but many others left town. As Harvey Cox wrote in The Secular City in 1965, “The frontal collision between Yankees and Irish drove many people with money and civic interests to the suburbs. As Mr. Justice Brandeis reported, at the turn of the century the wealthy citizens of Boston told their sons: ‘Boston holds nothing for you except heavy taxes and political misrule. When you marry, pick out a suburb to build your house in, join the Country Club, and make your life center about your club, your home, and your children.’” Cox proceeded to note that by midcentury, “the advice was taken not just by the sons of the wealthy, but by everyone with enough savings to flee to Newton or Belmont” or, “the most ludicrous anomaly of all,” the town of Brookline, which, although “almost completely surrounded by the City of Boston,… nonetheless clings to its independent status, pretending to spurn all involvement with the corruption of The Hub.”15
Businessmen similarly invested their substantial financial capital elsewhere—whether in Boston’s suburbs, out west and down south, or halfway around the globe—leaving the city’s factories, company headquarters, department stores, banks, and law firms languishing more and more with every passing decade. Boston took shabby-genteel to new heights. In a public speech as early as April 1960, when Logue was still a consultant, he openly criticized this disinvestment in the city: “Boston capital is at work all over the world. We need to create effective ways of putting it to work at home, on a business, not a charity, basis.”16
The Yankee elite perhaps registered its greatest opposition by shifting its political ambitions from the city to the state, controlling the corruption at the Boston City Hall as much as possible from the Massachusetts State House only blocks away, in alliance with the state’s western and suburban legislators. State aid to Boston was kept at a minimum and essentially the state deprived the city of home rule. It granted it no authority over revenue, other than collecting property taxes, and empowered the governor-appointed Finance Commission to monitor all city finances.17 The controlling hand of the state even extended as far as the governor appointing the Boston police commissioner and overseeing his budget, a response spurred by the strike of the city’s Irish Catholic–dominated police force in 1919.18 Curley and his ilk might rule the Boston roost, but the Yankees were going to make damn sure they had few tools with which to do it.19
Whatever postwar prosperity Greater Boston enjoyed during the 1940s and 1950s took place outside the city’s limits, particularly along the newly opened Route 128, the first high-speed circumferential highway built around an American city. Here an entrepreneurial electronics boom took off, spawned by experiments at MIT and other university labs—so much so that the roadway was nicknamed “America’s Technology Highway” and then the “Space Highway,” as transistor and semiconductor development gave way to aerospace (and eventually to computers). It was there, in fact, in 1951 that Boston’s old-time Yankee real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes pioneered the industrial-park concept that guided its own local investing and created a national model. A few years later, the company vice president Robert H. Ryan likened Boston to “an apple with a shiny skin, rotten at the core.”20 Into the next decade, the local developer William Poorvu made sure to focus his own real estate investing on Harvard Square and Route 128, “markets [that] were outside the urban center.”21
Route 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike that followed it also opened up vast new suburban tracts for residential development, luring away the younger, more upwardly mobile of the city’s population. Many were ex-GIs well supplied with VA mortgage loans usable only in white, middle-class suburbs, not in the inner-city neighborhoods of their parents and grandparents, which were redlined by banks.22 They were also driven out by the city’s poor services and deteriorating, outdated housing. Collins’s deputy mayor, Henry Scagnoli, was not unusual for his generation in growing up during the 1920s and 1930s in a Jamaica Plain house without heat or hot water and with a toilet only in the cellar. A major goal when he returned from the war was to own a better house than his parents did.23 Soon, department stores and other businesses followed the money out of town. Downtown lost an estimated $500 million in retail trade during the 1950s alone; by 1964, city retail sales would amount to less than half of the metropolitan area’s total.24
The first break in the city’s paralyzing stalemate came with the election in 1949 of John Hynes, an Irish Catholic Democrat like Curley but of a very different breed. Rather than grease the wheels of Curley’s machine, Hynes challenged it—and won. Hynes had been Boston’s city clerk when, in 1947, he suddenly found himself named acting mayor as Curley headed off to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, on a mail fraud conviction. A modest, mild-mannered, hardworking man, Hynes was furious when, on his return, Curley pronounced, “I have accomplished more in one day than has been done in the five months of my absence.”25 At that moment, Hynes decided to challenge Curley in the 1949 election, taking him on with the slogan “Restore Boston’s Good Name” and the promise of honest government. He won by fifteen thousand votes in the highest election turnout ever. Hynes would get reelected handily in 1951 (required by a charter change) and again in 1955.
Hynes was supported by others who shared his deep concern about the city’s future. Some critics of the status quo joined an organization called the New Boston Committee, founded in 1950 by an ambitious young reformer named Jerome Lyle Rappaport, who had come from New York to attend Harvard College and Harvard Law School and decided to stay and clean up his adopted city. He had founded the group Youth for Hynes in the 1949 election and became the mayor’s chief assistant afterward. Others among the discontented responded to a bold move by Boston College to break the political and cultural deadlock by sponsoring the Boston College Citizen Seminars, aimed at bringing together Yankee businessmen, Irish politicians, and civic leaders of all stripes—“the people who owned Boston and those who ran it,” as U.S. News and World Report so bluntly put it.26 After a lively presentation and discussion on an urban problem, the assembled socialized. Logue was convinced that “a wide open bar” followed by dinner was “the key to the whole thing,” given that “the Yankees and the Irish did not speak to and did not even know each other on a personal basis.”27
Hynes’s victory in 1949 was accompanied by a structural change in Boston’s city government that would have a major impact on the urban renewal efforts of Collins and Logue a decade later. In an attempt to break the Curley machine’s iron grip on the city, the New Boston Committee and other reformers proposed changing the city’s charter to take authority away from the mayor and the city council and institute a professional city manager. The Curley machine responded with an alternate referendum, which passed, to strengthen the mayor’s power but shrink the city council from twenty-two district representatives to nine elected at large, ostensibly to encourage more of a citywide consciousness among city councillors. But what the machine imagined would safeguard the autonomy of its mayor in the end strengthened the hand of victorious opponents, Mayors Hynes and Collins. With so much authority given to the mayor, the city council had little independent power to push back against executive ambitions. The council’s input into the budget, for example, consisted only of the ability to delete items, not to add them, which kept the council from initiating programs.28 The city council’s influence on policy would mostly come through its efforts to shape public opinion, which invited obstreperous behavior aimed at attracting media attention. As it turned out, the new at-large city council may have been smaller, but its ethnic complexion and loyalties barely changed. It remained the mouthpiece of the neighborhoods, dominated by the Irish from South Boston and Charlestown and the Italians from the North End and East Boston.
Hynes recognized when he beat Curley that he had won a rather empty prize unless he solved the city’s fiscal crisis. He cautiously reached out to the estranged business community and began strategizing how he might tap the new pots of federal funding becoming available through urban renewal. These funds promised to inject capital investment into his struggling city and to generate higher tax valuations on repurposed land, while also improving Boston’s deteriorating physical face. Hynes took the initial step of creating a modest BRA operation, first as a division of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) and then in 1957 as an independent agency. He named as its head Kane Simonian, a reliable supporter and a typical Boston civil servant from West Roxbury, who had worked up the ladder from a low-level post in the BHA to executive director of the BRA. Simonian was unusual only for being a Harvard graduate and Armenian rather than Irish. He was still heading the BRA when the newly elected Collins undertook his national search for a new chief.29
Hynes tried hard to make a success of urban renewal, but a combination of the city’s limited resources; the top-down, clearance-oriented federal approach to urban renewal prevailing during the 1950s; and the long legacy of neighborhood suspicion of downtown conspired to make his record a mixed one that would haunt renewal initiatives far into the future. Hynes’s efforts focused on both downtown and the neighborhoods. Downtown redevelopment moved two transportation projects forward. The first was the construction of what proved to be the disastrous John F. Fitzgerald Expressway, known as the “Central Artery,” which sliced through downtown to whisk suburbanites in and out of the city. The other was a massive garage under the Boston Common where commuters could park upon arrival.30
Beyond that, Hynes’s downtown strategy revolved around two projects that never came to fruition during his mayoralty: convincing the Prudential Insurance Company to build its New England regional headquarters on the site of the abandoned Boston & Maine railroad yards in the Back Bay and corralling the city, state, and federal governments to join forces to build Government Center on the location of Scollay Square, Boston’s honky-tonk red-light district. When Hynes left office in 1960, having declined to run for another term, the Prudential Center was already designed—albeit in a corporate architectural style that was sized too large for its site and that garnered little praise—but the project was at an impasse because the city could not give Prudential sufficient assurances about its future tax liability.31 And despite Hynes’s shuttling between his own city hall, the Massachusetts State House, and the nation’s capital, Government Center remained more of a hope than a reality, with the federal government preferring a less risky Back Bay site near Copley Square.32
Most problematic, however, was how these two simmering projects fell two miles apart, thereby diluting any effort to revitalize Boston’s downtown economy with new offices, retail, and, in the case of Prudential, residences. The Washington Post architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt, who dismissed “the Pru” as “so big and so bad,” despaired at the “sad mistake of the Prudential [Center] and the Government Center going up at the same time and sort of tugging the city back and forth,” both vying to be central. Von Eckardt’s prediction would prove disturbingly true. Over time many fashionable stores would come to prefer the upscale Back Bay shopping area in and around Prudential to downtown locations, thereby contributing to the latter’s decline.33
Whereas Hynes’s legacy in downtown renewal held some promise on his departure from office, his neighborhood initiatives in the New York Streets area of the South End and in the West End were horrendous examples of 1950s-era demolition-style urban renewal. The New York Streets project bulldozed thirteen acres of run-down but still viable residences in the South End, home to a mixed ethnic and racial community of 850 families. They were replaced with light industry, such as a new headquarters and printing plant for the Boston Herald Traveler newspaper, intended to yield higher land values and tax revenues along with jobs. Melvin King, who would go on to become an important South End organizer and citywide activist, grew up happily as an African American in this diverse neighborhood and recalled his shock at hearing, while he was away at college, that the home territory he cherished was now branded a “skid row” and destined for replacement.34
A larger project to raze and rebuild the predominantly Italian and Jewish forty-eight-acre West End would reverberate locally and nationally as a symbol of urban renewal’s destructive and hubristic approach in the fifties.35 Hynes and Simonian’s scheme involved condemning what they labeled a blighted slum, close enough to downtown to attract more lucrative uses, and replacing it with luxury apartment buildings designed to entice middle-class residents back to the city. It may have been ruthless but, unfortunately, it was not so out of sync with what other cities were doing at the time, including New Haven. But three factors distinguished Hynes’s efforts. First, with a suspicious lack of transparency, the mayor gave the project to his former assistant Jerome Lyle Rappaport, who had spearheaded the New Boston Committee and was now a partner in a real estate development firm that also won the auction to develop the University Towers in New Haven.
Second, the atmosphere of distrust that had long divided neighborhoods and downtown in Boston was reinforced by the BRA’s lack of responsiveness to residents’ initial inquiries and growing protests. The project eventually became a cause célèbre for dislocating several thousand residents and dozens of small businesses. The BRA’s anemic relocation operation, partly due to the minimal federal funding available for it, and the Rappaport group’s reneging on its promise to include some low- and middle-income housing for former neighborhood residents in the new project, only made matters worse.36
Third, the West End became a textbook case, quite literally, of the toll urban renewal took on city residents, as social scientists such as the sociologist Herbert Gans, the psychologist Marc Fried, and the planner Chester Hartman launched important studies of the impact of West End redevelopment. They argued that where outsiders saw aging, substandard tenements on blighted blocks, those who called the West End home, even if poor, considered it a familiar and affordable neighborhood, interlaced with extensive familial, ethnic, and religious bonds whose destruction left them bereft. Gans’s The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans of 1962 would remain a touchstone for urban renewal opponents long thereafter, so much so that throughout his life, Logue went out of his way to deny involvement in the BRA’s West End urban renewal.37 The fact that the clearance was done by the time he arrived in Boston in 1960, however, did not spare Logue from the taint of this misconceived project. Its long shadow would color everything he tried to do in Boston’s neighborhoods. And Rappaport, who had already frustrated Logue in New Haven by cleverly beating out Yale, would continue to exasperate him over the many years it took to complete the Charles River Park project.38
For all the hope that Hynes’s election in 1949 had signaled for turning around Boston, he stepped down a decade later with only limited achievements, leaving it to his successor to run the next lap in revitalizing the city. The selection of Hynes’s replacement would prove a surprising chapter in the annals of Boston elections, as John Francis Collins won a legendary upset against the powerful, well-connected Massachusetts state senate president John Powers of South Boston. Powers had lost against Hynes in 1955, but he seemed such a sure bet in 1959 that everyone, including the Kennedys and the cardinal, lined up behind him.
The forty-year-old Collins was an even more independent candidate than Hynes had been in 1949. A blue-collar kid who had grown up in Irish Catholic Roxbury, he had odd-jobbed his way through the working man’s Suffolk Law School without pausing for a college degree he couldn’t afford, fought in the wartime army, and served in both houses of the state legislature and the Boston City Council. Now he was occupying the sinecure of register of probate for Suffolk County, a well-paying position that he could have relaxed in for the rest of his career.39 But that was not Collins’s idea of a life worth living, particularly since surviving a devastating, near-death case of polio in 1955 while nursing his infected children back to health. They recovered fully. Collins spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair or occasionally using crutches or a cane.
The determination it took Collins to resume a public career—he ran for city council from his hospital bed—gave him political grit.40 By making creative use of television—including plotting how best to present his disability—and by condemning Powers as a corrupt Curley rerun with the campaign slogan “Stop Power Politics,” underdog Collins shocked the Boston bookies by winning nearly 56 percent of the vote. All but four of the city’s twenty-two wards became his. Having made it to city hall with only the voters’ mandate, Collins was a dark horse who owed no one for the ride—which gave him a rare independence as mayor to do things such as recruit an outsider like Ed Logue and give him enormous power.41
Urban renewal had not been a major issue in the campaign. After the West End debacle, no one in his right mind would want to raise it publicly. But candidates Powers and Collins were both being tutored on urban renewal, and in fact, they had the same teacher in Joseph Slavet, executive secretary of the clean-government, business-leaning Boston Municipal Research Bureau (MRB). Slavet was officially supporting Powers along with the rest of the establishment, but at the behest of his mentor, the MRB board chair Henry Lee Shattuck—a rare Brahmin lawyer who backed Collins—he started meeting with Collins to explain how other cities were coping with crises similar to Boston’s.42 By the time Collins took office in early January 1960, he had decided to make urban renewal the major priority of his administration. He began by extending a hand to the Yankee business and professional elite, who remained angry that tax assessments were unfair and the city was sinking deeper into deficit and decrepitude. Collins recognized that despite some early success, “Hynes spent the last few years of his term on a very defensive basis with the business community … They felt much more comfortable with Hynes than with Curley, but it was not a partnership by any means.”43
The city’s leaders had recently, in fact, formed the sixteen-member Coordinating Committee with representatives from the major business and civic organizations—soon to be popularly known as the “Vault” for their regular meetings in a conference room adjacent to the basement vault of the Brahmin banker Ralph Lowell’s Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company.44 Soon after he was elected, Collins went to meet them, confident that they had no claims on him, and when they offered one—to pick up the tab on his $62,000 campaign debt—he unhesitatingly declined: “That’s my debt; I’ll take care of it.”45 But he also knew that he couldn’t turn the city around without their assistance. Holding the line on property taxes and cutting municipal expenses and the public payroll would help, but it wouldn’t be enough. Lobbying at the state house for other revenue-producing powers beyond the property tax, such as a long-sought sales tax, and other ways of loosening the noose that the state had tightened around Curley’s Boston would require bigger guns than Collins carried on his own.46
The situation Collins faced was dire. As a case in point, the State of Massachusetts covered only 8 percent of city school costs, when the national average was 40 percent, making Massachusetts forty-sixth in state contributions to education.47 It remained to be seen how generous Boston’s Yankees would be with their influence and their wallets, but the idea of recruiting a pro like Logue with urban renewal expertise and experience attracting federal dollars appealed to them. Collins’s inaugural address announcing Operation Revival to “restore, rebuild, and redevelop” generated much enthusiasm in downtown boardrooms, captured in a banner headline in The Boston Globe as “Business Leaders Hail Collins’ Program for Hub.”48
Such was the stage Logue entered when he began his work in Boston in March 1960, only a couple of months after Collins had gone public with Operation Revival. As Logue delved deeper that spring into Boston, he became more and more excited about the city’s potential, particularly what he would dramatically call the “walk to the sea” from the Charles River through the Common to Boston Harbor. But he also became less and less sanguine about how to make it happen: “I scoured just about every inch of the city—and came to love it. But it was also easy to see that the problems were tremendous.” Most disturbing, he felt, Boston was “a city without confidence in itself,” despite its potential to seed a new economy built around technology and ideas. Logue decided that he could do the job only under the right conditions: “If this was going to be my show, it had to be pretty much my way.”49 But as he wrote to a professional colleague, housing reformer Catherine Bauer Wurster, in mid-June, “At this point I am not the slightest bit optimistic that the right set of conditions can be created.”50 His most important demand was to replicate the authority over planning and redevelopment that Mayor Dick Lee had given to him in New Haven. Integration, he was convinced, kept planning practical and redevelopment robust.
Given the short leash on which the state held the city, such a fundamental change in BRA structure required an amendment to Chapter 121A, the legislation by which the state had designated the BRA as the city’s administrator of federal urban renewal funds. Logue made the passage of this amendment a nonnegotiable condition of accepting Collins’s offer, and while he waited for the slow wheels of the state legislature to turn, he worked from October to December 1960 under a ninety-day contract. “I made it clear to the mayor and everyone else that I would not renew that arrangement. Either I got to run the show or not. No more extensions.”51
When the amendment finally passed, Logue had orchestrated what Architectural Forum described as “the most massively centralized planning and renewal powers that any large city has ever voted to one man (other than New York’s Robert Moses).” Or as Fortune magazine more succinctly phrased it, Logue “cooks and serves.”52 As part of this same amendment that empowered him, Logue wanted a legislative change that would allow the abandoned railroad yards to be ruled blighted and thereby eligible for special tax treatment, moving the Prudential project forward.53 Logue also insisted on sufficient independence from the appointed BRA board, such as allowing them only up-or-down votes on projects, not the right to tinker with the details, “putting them in a straitjacket,” as he described it. He likewise sought a free hand to recruit nationally and hire outside of civil service.54 Logue wanted no part of what he jokingly called the “Irish social security system” for himself either. So he requested that the city pay $5,000 of his salary, instead of charging it all to federal urban renewal grants, to ensure that the mayor could fire him at will.55 Ever since civil service workers in Connecticut had obstructed Governor Chester Bowles’s reforms back in the late 1940s, Logue had taken a principled stand against tenure for high-level employees. He also hoped that a less protected status would “take care of any concern about a ‘czar,’” so “completely different was it from the arrangements Bob Moses had made for himself in New York.”56 With all his demands now met, Logue’s candidacy as development administrator was finally ready for approval by the BRA board, made up of five individuals charged with overseeing the city’s redevelopment activities and affiliated with different powerful local interests—the Catholic Church, the local press, real estate, and labor.
Like everything in Boston, Logue’s approval by this BRA board would surely be politically charged, no slam dunk. Rather, Logue predicted, “A Boston political battle royal loomed.”57 Collins had inherited the board from Hynes, who by law had appointed four members, with the governor naming the fifth. Collins’s contribution—and it was a constructive one—was to move BRA member Monsignor Francis “Frank” Lally, the liberal editor of the Catholic Church’s Pilot newspaper and a close confidant of Cardinal Richard Cushing’s, into the chairmanship. Lally would prove a loyal supporter and helpful partner to Logue throughout his Boston career.58 But there was only one other assured vote for Logue beyond Lally’s—the real estate executive’s—until some members of the Vault got wind of the board’s resistance. Worried about a loss of momentum for change and the new Kennedy administration scooping up Logue, they pressured the editor of the Record American newspaper to force his photo editor, who was a BRA board member, to vote for Logue.59
In contrast to the board, a wide cross-section of Bostonians expressed enthusiasm for Logue. The Cambridge architect Carl Koch conveyed a common sentiment when he sent Logue a telegram the day before the vote: “For Boston’s sake you must win.”60 The same day, Melnea Cass, the president of the NAACP’s Boston Branch, mailed a letter to each member of the BRA board endorsing Logue’s appointment “because of our basic interest in the improvement of our city, and because of the large number of Negroes living in deprived areas due to the discriminatory factors that tend to keep them there.” As it had in New Haven, the local NAACP was hopeful that urban renewal would bring Boston’s blacks long-awaited attention and was confident of Logue’s “ability to implement this program in the best interest of Boston and all the people therein.”61 In expressing the NAACP’s position so forthrightly and linking the fate of the black community to the larger city, Cass was claiming the NAACP’s rightful place in Boston’s pluralist democratic coalition, which Robert Dahl was describing for New Haven in his Who Governs? the very same year. On the morning of the vote, January 25, 1961, hundreds of people rallied outside the BRA offices to promote Logue’s candidacy as the rescuer of “our distressed and sick city,” as one advocate bluntly put it.62 The Christian Science Monitor, which watched the showdown closely, concluded that “the real persuader, the real push, came with the outpouring of demands—in letters and phone calls—from virtually every section of the city … The extraordinary community support became articulate almost overnight.”63
After meeting for nearly five hours, the BRA board begrudgingly voted 3 to 2 for Logue. It was hardly a mandate, but it was good enough for Logue, who by personality was more energized than undermined by a fight. One battle that would rage on was the Kane Simonian problem. With the encouragement of the BRA board member James Colbert, an influential newsman, the civil servant Simonian refused to accept Logue’s hiring. In fact, as soon as Logue’s appointment became official, Simonian brought suit, charging that he had been illegally demoted even though he retained the title of executive director. Although the case would be thrown out by the state’s highest court in May, a compromise was reached whereby Simonian remained secretary of the BRA board and was responsible for the BRA’s operations division—overseeing appraisals, land acquisition, site preparation, property maintenance, and the like. Simonian would also complete the already launched New York Streets and West End projects, from which Logue was more than happy to keep his distance.64
So began an unusual governance arrangement, where Simonian’s division and Logue’s much larger organization operated out of different offices a block apart and every BRA board meeting had two agendas, with the secretary and the development administrator taking turns presenting their business. John Ryan, a real estate man who joined the BRA board in 1961, recalled with amusement that Logue’s shrewd strategy for coping with his less-than-supportive board members was “to deluge everyone with paperwork,” giving them both everything and nothing.65 There was never any doubt, however, who was really in charge. When queried about why he hadn’t contented himself with the status of coordinator of redevelopment programs, Logue retorted, “That’s what you do when you don’t have authority. I don’t go into a job without power. Can you imagine [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara as coordinator of defense?”66 After the vote on January 25, Logue headed back to his office, but, he said, “I stopped briefly, I confess, at the traffic island at Scollay Square,” a spot that would soon become the centerpiece of the new Government Center. “I said to myself, ‘The program, the money, the power, it is all there. And thanks to the mayor, I have it all.’” Later he reflected, with his characteristic confidence, “I don’t remember any basic doubts on my part. I had been blessed with the opportunity to remake a rundown, somewhat dispirited city [and] had been given the resources to do the job.”67
Logue made one more request in his negotiations with the Collins administration that, although relatively minor, provides some insight into his mind-set as he settled into Boston. He asked that it arrange for his admission to the Tavern Club, a fairly prestigious, invitation-only men’s club that attracted the literary, artistic, and intellectual set among the city’s elite but was not the ultra-exclusive Brahmin Somerset or Algonquin Clubs.68 Here Logue got to know prominent local figures like the historian and Boston Athenaeum director Walter Muir Whitehill, a relationship that would prove useful to his work. When Collins heard this last demand of Logue’s, he reputedly told him, “Are you crazy? I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never even been invited to those places.”69
Logue had been staying at the Tavern Club while doing his consulting work and wanted to join. As in New Haven, he valued male sociability. Undoubtedly, he thought membership would help him integrate into insular and standoffish Boston, giving him a place in the inner circles to which he’d had easy access in New Haven, having lived there most of his adult life since arriving as a Yale freshman and having benefited from connections through his wife’s well-established family. An astute Logue had surely figured out that Boston was a clubby town. According to Cleveland Amory, a son of privileged Boston and the author of the satirical The Proper Bostonians in 1947, “The core of the Bostonian social system is clubdom; and here the status quo remains awe-inspiring.”70 Logue went on to join other clubs in Boston—the Thursday Evening Club, the Examiner Club, the Saturday Club, and the Union Boat Club. All expanded his networks. “That’s where he met the power players,” explained Robert Campbell, The Boston Globe’s architecture critic (and a fellow Tavern Club member).
It is possible, too, that these clubs helped Logue navigate the tricky terrain of being an Irishman in the upper echelons of Boston society. Wife Margaret recalled his discomfort early on in Boston when “Ed encountered slurs from Yankees who didn’t identify the name as Irish. He would let one remark go by but thereafter declare himself as Irish.” She joked at the time that Logue should write a book called “Passing in Boston.” Herbert Gleason, a mover and shaker in the city who befriended Logue early on, agreed that his Irishness mattered. “Tavern Club was status. Big status. I think he had … some Irish underdog element in his personality.”71 Perhaps, too, these clubs offered Logue new opportunities to perpetuate his old pattern of being a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast. It didn’t escape him that the 1962 edition of the Directory of Directors in the City of Boston and Vicinity—of banks, insurance companies, law firms, and the like—documented “the monolithic Yankee character of the Boston business establishment.” Not only were there no Irish, but “they didn’t know anything about women. Italians didn’t exist.”72 It had been a bruising battle to get named development administrator of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and Logue was determined to make a success of it—without compromising who he was and what he set out to do.
When Logue’s appointment finally became official in January 1961, he had seven years under his belt doing a similar job in New Haven. He was not quite forty years old, a young man to have just been given so much power. And it thrilled him to have this opportunity to move the practice of urban renewal to the next stage. Everyone in the business understood that cities like Boston were in desperate shape—and that the demolition-style urban renewal of the 1950s was not the answer. “The Cinderella dream of cities—to turn the old and shabby into the new and beautiful with the magic wand of Federal funds to live happily, urbanistically speaking, ever after,” lamented the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, had proved instead “a discouraging record of cross-country failures.” What could be more exciting, Logue thought, than figuring out how to do the job right in the backyard of one of the worst abuses of urban renewal, the infamous West End project, described by Huxtable as “a definitive demonstration of how to destroy a community with a bulldozer.”73
Logue’s allies in Washington—including Robert Weaver, incoming administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, and William Slayton, commissioner of the Urban Renewal Administration—were keeping a close eye on Logue’s progress and stood ready to grant his requests for funds and special privileges, such as permitting early land acquisitions and relocations before the full approval processes were complete. (It didn’t hurt that native son John F. Kennedy became president at the same time and that Boston’s John McCormack was the number-two Democrat in the House.)74 Long before Logue’s plan was publicly announced in late September 1960 and his position made official the following January, a personal visit by Logue and Collins to the regional Housing and Home Finance Agency office in New York City had clinched an advance of $28 million on the first federal grant of $60 million, pending the plan’s approval by local authorities.
Getting the required approval from the Boston City Council was not without its challenges. Weak in formal power, its members seized every opportunity to assert themselves, and they were no friend of urban renewal. City Councillors William F. “Bill” Foley, Jr., from South Boston, and Katherine “Kitty” Craven, from Hyde Park and a native of Charlestown, most visibly built their reputations during the 1960s around publicly drubbing Logue and Collins (who had given their man John Powers a thrashing in the 1959 mayoral race), but plenty of others joined in.75 Logue bore the abuse stoically, buoyed by the support he received from professional colleagues, his large staff, and even ordinary citizens who wrote to him frequently to apologize for “the insults you are forced to take in the line of duty,” as one city resident put it.76 Given this treatment, Logue and the mayor delighted in having this early money securely in hand in time for the city council’s hearing on the $90 Million Development Program. When Councilman Foley proclaimed dismissively, “John, the Feds will never approve it,” Collins took pleasure in retorting, “Bill, they already have.”77 That sealed the deal, as the city council was in no position to give back federal dollars.
Logue brought experience building a redevelopment agency from New Haven to Boston—recruiting professional talent nationally, developing an organizational structure, and creating a dynamic esprit de corps, even as some staff protested, as they had in New Haven, that he could at times be too arbitrary and hard-driving as a boss. The BRA staffer John Stainton recalled that “he had a lot of charm” but he could “also be very abrasive and aggressive. ‘Cruel’ is a little strong, maybe, but he could really put people down.” Logue was not oblivious to the charge. He claimed to have learned a lesson when his assistant, Janet Bowler, reported that Peter Riemer, whom he considered a “genius” as the Government Center project director, complained, “You know, I don’t mind if he chews me out but he shouldn’t chew me out in front of other people”—a reaction not unlike what Logue had expressed years earlier to Dick Lee.78
In time, Logue’s redevelopment agency became much larger than New Haven’s. When Logue arrived in 1960, Kane Simonian’s office had sixteen staff members. By the time Logue stepped down in 1967, his BRA employed somewhere between five hundred and six hundred. (Totals varied, probably given the different ways of counting part-timers and Simonian’s separate operations division. In any case, the payroll was huge, “probably the largest planning-renewal team in the nation,” according to Architectural Forum.)79 Many were young, idealistic, and well-educated at the nation’s best planning, architecture, and law schools. Students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) and MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning eagerly pursued the BRA’s plum jobs upon graduation.
In 1967, the average staff age was a young thirty-seven. The BRA was also known by African American professionals as a welcoming place to work. Black employment grew from 2 percent in 1961 to 13 percent by 1967 as a result of Logue’s explicit commitment to recruiting minority staff, which took substantial effort given the small number of nonwhite professionals living in Boston in the 1960s. “He looked very hard to find black people with credentials who could run programs,” recalled the BRA project director Robert Litke.80 Few women served in the higher ranks of the BRA, however, with most female staff working as assistants and secretaries, typical of offices in the era. Esther Maletz, the only woman at a high managerial level—first as a lawyer experienced in housing and urban development and then as Government Center project director—felt that she “was not treated differently in any meaningful way [from] my male colleagues” while working closely with Logue for five years.81 But Maletz’s having few female peers suggests not only the paucity of candidates but also the fact that Logue’s progressive hiring agenda during the 1960s put more emphasis on breaking down barriers of race than of gender. This was particularly striking because Logue’s wife, Margaret, held jobs outside the home throughout their marriage, albeit in the female-dominated field of education. Upon moving to Boston with young children—eight-year-old Kathy and four-year-old Billy—Margaret secured employment, first as acting director of the Beacon Hill Nursery School and then as a teacher at the Winsor School, an independent school for girls.82
Logue sought ways to distinguish the BRA from the sluggish business as usual practiced in most Boston city departments. To bring good modern design to the office, Logue got help from the firm of the dean of Harvard’s GSD, Josep Lluís Sert. When the elevator opened on the tenth and eleventh floors of City Hall Annex, observed a Fortune magazine writer, “suddenly the wall colors change” from the institutional green paint and bare bulbs below “to such vivid tones as mustard. Office doors are painted in bright primaries; lowered ceilings accommodate new lighting fixtures and acoustical surfaces,” though he failed to mention that Logue playfully flaunted Corbusier’s primary-colors palette with his Yale-blue door.
This journalist also admired the “zealous young multitude” that “walk[ed] swiftly in the halls.” An MIT graduate student who was a participant-observer at the BRA for five months confirmed that in contrast to the first nine floors “staffed by elderly paper shufflers,… the immediate impression one gets of the BRA staff is of youth and vitality.”83 They may not have had the job security of Boston civil servants, but they were paid much better.84 Not only were salaries higher, thanks to Uncle Sam picking up 90 percent of the payroll, but Christmas brought annual bonuses, creating, according to Fortune, “an envious shudder … through the other nine floors of City Hall Annex,” as regular city employees asked, “Was Santa trapped on the top floors?” Arthur Reilly, who landed a job at the BRA through his family’s political connections to Hynes and Collins, feared the consequences. Not only were other city employees resentful—“they’ve been working for the city for thirty years and were making $6,000 a year, and here’s … some kid from New York, who’s in upstairs, and he’s making $16,000”—but also, as he predicted (rightly), the affront would come back to haunt the BRA’s urban renewal efforts in a neighborhood like Charlestown, where many city workers lived.85
Organizationally, Logue developed an approach he liked to describe as “centralize in order to decentralize.”86 Much of the power was concentrated in the central BRA office and, in reality, in the charismatic if domineering Logue himself. By all reports, he was very hands-on and kept himself at the center of things, the sun around which all planets—divisions, departments, project teams—revolved. Even young staff members who did not know him well basked in the glow of his power. Years later, Reginald Griffith, an architect who had joined the BRA upon graduating from MIT, vividly recollected every major encounter with Logue. Boston native Frank Del Vecchio, hired right out of Harvard Law School, gloried in zipping Logue around town “at breakneck, white-knuckle speed” in his tiny Triumph TR4 sports car. Ted Liebman, a newly minted Harvard GSD grad, couldn’t believe his luck when Logue personally asked him to make large, complicated drawings with overlays to present the Government Center plan to the city council. Rather than resent the onerous assignment, Liebman felt privileged to be among those getting direct requests from the big boss: “Ed Logue had brought together a bright group of people that were working their behinds off and we thought that we were the best in the world.”87 An organizational specialist might have faulted Logue for running such a flat organization with a large number of people reporting directly to him and no fixed hierarchy. Recalled Stainton, “He didn’t … delegate specifically to different people. He sort of threw it out there … it ended up [that] everybody worked for Ed Logue.”88
Decentralization, on the other hand, was meant to take place by locating teams in site offices within the various renewal areas, each headed by a project manager who had considerable discretion but also reported directly to Logue. Team members—consisting of planners, architects, relocation experts, social workers, rehabilitation advisers, and so forth—were responsible to managers on-site as well as to supervisors in the relevant department within the central BRA, such as design, planning, legal, transportation, rehabilitation, and relocation.89 Logue hoped that embedding project teams in neighborhoods undergoing renewal would strengthen ties to residents, helping to carry out his trademark “planning with people.” He liked to say, “It’s a hell of a lot more fun to plan a neighborhood with the people who live in it than to plan for them as if you knew best.”90 But by many accounts, project managers often presented themselves as “mini Logues,” replicating a phenomenon that had emerged in New Haven where impressionable and ambitious young men so strongly identified with their boss and his mission that they styled themselves after him.91 Mini Logues adopted their boss’s contradictions along with his more clear-cut strengths, including letting Logue’s faith in professional expertise undermine his stated other goal of making the BRA collaborative with neighborhood residents.
As Logue threw himself into renewing Boston, he sought to replicate what had worked well in New Haven. Given that one of his top objectives was to expand on his success in Wooster Square promoting rehabilitation over demolition, the Logues’ choice of Boston residence was symbolic. Whereas in New Haven they had built a new, modern house, in Boston they bought a renovated early nineteenth-century rowhouse on West Cedar Street in Beacon Hill, a historic urban neighborhood that Logue fell in love with. “I think it took him back,” Margaret mused, to the golden part of his childhood when, before his father died, the family lived in an attached brick townhouse in central Philadelphia.92 The Logues’ most personal of decisions signaled greater flexibility in defining what it meant for a city to be modern.
More substantively, Logue knew he would need in Boston the same two foundations of his New Haven work: a committed mayor and federal funding. Logue frequently spoke admiringly of John Collins. He appreciated his intelligence (“one of the smartest guys I have ever known”) as well as his political astuteness, his self-confidence, his managerial competence, and his fighter’s commitment to turning around Boston.93 They had a good working rapport where Logue met with the mayor often to brief him on progress and problems, a necessity given the political combustibility of urban renewal. But theirs was neither the father-son relationship Logue had cherished with Chester Bowles nor the sibling-like partnership he had experienced with Dick Lee. These men also shared Logue’s political and cultural orientation as deeply committed Social Democrats and racial progressives. Collins was a reformer of a different stripe. He was culturally and morally conservative and a devout Catholic. After Collins stepped down as mayor, hot-button issues like abortion and Vietnam would push him further to the right and lead him to serve on the organizing committee of Texas governor John Connelly’s Democrats for Nixon effort against George McGovern in 1972 and to chair its Massachusetts chapter. But as collaborators from 1960 to 1967, Logue and Collins respected each other and got along well. Collins wasn’t threatened by Logue grabbing the headlines, and in fact he preferred to have Logue take the political heat as the public face of urban renewal at vicious city council hearings and contentious community meetings while he himself played “statesman-reformer,” as one observer put it.94
Despite Collins’s claims that he had brought Logue to Boston “for the purpose of doing the best possible professional job” and vowed “not [to] interfere in any political way whatsoever with the way he managed the department,” the mayor nonetheless instructed his team to keep a close watch on Logue. He went so far as to install a well-seasoned political minder in BRA headquarters—John P. McMorrow, a former state representative, two-time member of the school committee, and competitor in the 1959 mayoral race—to approve all hiring and cast an attentive eye from his office across the hall from Logue’s. Frank Del Vecchio, the recent Harvard Law School grad who had grown up in the West End, recalled McMorrow’s blunt words during his “clearance interview” before any Logue offer could be made official: “Frank, I checked you out—Boston Latin, English High, Tufts. My job is to protect the mayor … There are grumblings in city hall that we are bringing in too many outsiders. You will help—you’re a Bostonian and you have credentials.”95
Federal dollars provided the other essential support that Logue needed in Boston, just as it had in New Haven. By the end, Logue’s $90 million plan had grown to over $200 million—over $2 billion counting private investment. Once again, Logue proved a wizard in minimizing outright costs to the city—to do renewal “wholesale,” as he liked to say. He also moved fast, knocking on Washington’s door at a relentless pace. Logue believed that only high-speed momentum and a large-enough scale could pull Boston back from the physical and social brink, according to Langley Carleton Keyes, Jr., then a doctoral candidate in city and regional planning at MIT who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Boston’s urban renewal, published in 1969 as The Rehabilitation Planning Game: A Study in the Diversity of Neighborhood.96
Logue saw an opportunity in Boston, however, to leverage the federal government’s outlay to encourage greater private-sector investment. With potentially deeper corporate pockets here than in New Haven, Logue aimed not simply to attract real estate developers to a particular project by enticing them with the federal write-down of the land cost, as the housing acts intended. Even more ambitiously, he hoped to use publicly funded urban renewal to jump-start private-sector commitments in and around urban renewal areas. Logue’s ambition for Government Center, for example, went far beyond attracting the city, state, and federal governments to build new headquarters. He intended to use that government expenditure to pressure businesses—long unwilling to spend money in Boston—to step up in a wholly new way.
Beyond mayoral support and federal funding, Logue imported two other dimensions of his New Haven work to Boston. First, before he left New Haven, Logue secured Paul Ylvisaker’s commitment to make Boston one of the six sites of the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas pilot program so that here, as in New Haven, human renewal could accompany physical renewal. With the help of a $1.9 million Ford grant, enriched by additional federal and local funding, Logue established Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) along the same lines as New Haven’s Community Progress Inc. (CPI). He personally sat on its board and recruited Joe Slavet—who had tutored Collins on urban renewal, had helped recruit Logue to Boston, and was ready for a new job after fourteen years at the Municipal Research Bureau—to be its executive director, eagerly anticipating having another Mike Sviridoff at his side.97
ABCD would run into many of the same kinds of challenges that CPI eventually encountered in New Haven—but even earlier. Logue envisioned ABCD as the BRA’s social outreach into urban renewal areas, strengthening the agency’s ties to citizens by aiding displaced residents, combating juvenile delinquency and unemployment, providing legal and educational assistance, and coordinating existing Boston agencies to deliver social services more effectively. As Architectural Forum explained it, ABCD “initially was to run interference for Logue’s renewal program … Logue’s feeling was that if ABCD first tackled some of each community’s major social ills, physical renewal might be easier.”98 Logue hoped that ABCD could provide a viable pathway to engaging a neighborhood in planning and identifying local leadership for the BRA’s program.
Slavet soon figured out, however, that allying his anti-poverty agency too closely with the BRA could prove damaging to its success. As he recounted later, “I said to him, ‘There are things happening not only here but all over the country. There are trains leaving the station in connection with the anti-poverty program, you know, that I just can’t stick in the areas that you have designated as urban renewal areas. There’s a lot of pressure, particularly from the black community outside of urban renewal areas to get aboard.’”99
Logue and Slavet in time came to blows over the BRA-ABCD connection. When, for example, Logue urged Slavet to move ABCD’s headquarters into the new Center Plaza office building across from City Hall Plaza, as the BRA was desperate to prove Government Center’s success and no paying tenants had yet surfaced, Slavet responded, “For Christ’s sake, I’m running an anti-poverty program. For me to move into the most expensive place in Boston, they’re going to kill me. What is the matter with you?”100 Slavet’s frustration was understood by Clifford Campbell, hired by Ford to review ABCD in February 1963. He told Ylvisaker, “Ed is of the view that for the most part ABCD should accommodate itself to, and maybe become the tool of urban renewal, whereas Joe sees, and rightly so, the larger objectives set for ABCD.”101 A year later, Campbell returned to Boston for a second round of reviewing and got another earful from Logue: “We were totally unprepared for his double-barreled onslaught on ABCD … He holds tenaciously to the point of view that ABCD is his instrument, created solely for the purpose of serving the ends of BRA.” Campbell speculated that Logue’s growing adamance was related to “his recognition of the role on the Boston scene that ABDC will play, if and when the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 becomes a reality. You see, for the first time … the War on Poverty will provide a budget and program whose scope and depth will far exceed any program envisioned or executed under Urban Renewal. He is not about to give this up without a struggle.” He concluded, “This is a struggle for power between two men.”102
The same year, two other observers allied with Ford observed the same rift. Peter Marris and Martin Rein wrote that Logue believed so deeply that urban renewal was “an essential instrument of social justice” that he “felt increasingly betrayed. Gazing from the picture window of his office on the rising frame of Boston’s new government centre [sic], he brooded on the bad faith of those to whom he had once shown the way.”103 As Community Action Program funds became available upon the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, with its mandate of “maximum feasible participation,” ABCD would indeed benefit—and become more independent of the BRA, as Logue had feared.104
Even as Slavet managed to guard ABCD’s autonomy from the BRA for the sake of community credibility, he became personally embroiled in intense internal conflicts within the agency, not unlike Sviridoff’s experience in New Haven. Slavet faced charges of too few black staff and board members, too little community control, and too much research-oriented piloting rather than broader impact programs. Slavet finally resigned in 1966. These tensions between ABDC and the BRA, and within ABCD as the pressures for more participatory democracy increased, strained the relationship between Slavet and Logue. But, notably, Campbell’s candid reports to Ford did not undermine Paul Ylvisaker’s admiration for Logue. When in 1973 Ylvisaker, then dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, was asked to supply a list of “the most creative and extraordinary people you have personally known,” he provided twenty-nine names from his expansive career, of which “Ed Logue” was one.105
It didn’t take long for Logue to identify a second dilemma that Boston shared with New Haven: the city faced problems metropolitan in scope with only the resources of one municipality to address them. Although Logue had been frustrated with New Haven’s financial and political isolation from its flourishing suburban hinterlands, in Boston he became even more outspoken. He repeatedly proposed that the New Boston become the core of a metropolitan economy built around technological, scientific, and other knowledge-based innovation. This notion of the “City of Ideas,” which was fully articulated in the BRA’s 1965/1975 General Plan for the City of Boston and the Regional Core, sought to turn the burden of having 42 percent of the city’s land and buildings tax exempt as universities, hospitals, churches, and other public uses (the largest proportion of any major American city) into an economic advantage. Likewise, instead of viewing the research boom around Route 128 as a drain on the city, Logue argued that it should instead be welcomed—and cultivated—as nourishment for the growth of downtown lawyers, bankers, accountants, public relations firms, and the like.106
Logue’s hope for a metropolitan-oriented New Boston did not stop there. He also forthrightly called for metropolitan-level solutions to two of the city’s biggest social problems: the low-income housing crisis and the gross inequalities suffered by black children in Boston’s notoriously segregated schools. Specifically, he advocated a “fair share” housing program whereby Boston suburbs would each construct a small number of subsidized units, a program he called “scatteration” in contrast to the current “concentration” of nonwhites in segregated, resource-starved communities. He also proposed building “New Towns,” “planned for the whole income range spectrum and not for those who already have comfortable incomes.”107
To remedy appalling educational inequities, Logue went very public in 1965 with a controversial proposal for a government program to bus four thousand fifth- through eighth-graders from underfunded black schools in Boston to twenty-one suburban districts.108 As Logue testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights when it held a hearing in Boston in October 1966, “The federal government, which bears such a very heavy responsibility for seeing that the suburbs were all white in the first place [has] some responsibility to redress the balance.” Communities outside Boston have “some of the finest school systems in America and with insignificant numbers of nonwhite children [and] are not required to help.” To attempt to solve the problem only within the city’s limits was “unimaginative and cowardly.”109 Although Logue’s advocacy of large-scale compulsory busing went nowhere, he was credited by many with spurring the creation of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), a much smaller-scale voluntary busing program begun in 1966 that continues today to transport minority students from Boston to affluent suburban schools, making it the longest continually running voluntary busing program for school desegregation in the country. But it is worth noting that Logue’s liberal fix-it instinct to address what he considered an outrage with a top-down, mandatory remedy was not only resisted by white suburbanites; it was also resented by some black parents who felt it rendered them and their children passive victims in need of saving.110
Not until Logue’s next job as president of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, where he had the authority to operate on a statewide rather than mere city level, would he legally be in a position to implement metropolitan-level strategies intended to integrate communities and schools by race and class. Until then, the reality of urban responsibility and suburban retreat continued to frustrate Logue.111 It played no small part in fact in his deepening feud with Jane Jacobs. Logue published an appreciative but critical review of Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities in Architectural Forum in March 1962, predictably taking umbrage at a text that began, “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”
Around the same time, Logue and Jacobs met up at a debate organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he made many of the same points as in the review. While Logue claimed to share Jacobs’s faith in community participation and housing rehabilitation and her frustration with some architects and planners, “who care more about what their colleagues think of their plans than the public,” he rejected her primary message, which he phrased as “no more federal renewal aids; let the cities fend for themselves.” That directive he considered the indulgence of someone living in the safe, well-off neighborhood of the West Village, an option not available to slum dwellers. He also expressed some skepticism about her ideal of urbanity, having paid a clandestine visit to her block one evening around 8:00 p.m. and noticed very few “eyes on the street” and other qualities she celebrated. And then, going for the jugular, he continued sarcastically, “Not surprisingly, this approach has won her many new friends, particularly among comfortable suburbanites. They like to be told that neither their tax dollars nor their own time need be spent on the cities they leave behind them at the close of each work day.”112 Although Logue concluded his review with “We need Jane Jacobs … to keep on giving us the needle,” there was little doubt that in Logue’s mind, Jacobs had let suburban residents of the metropolis off the hook.
Apart from his frustrations making human renewal and metropolitan governance work as he hoped, the move to Boston offered Logue exhilarating opportunities to innovate beyond what he and Mayor Lee had been able to do in New Haven. He now had the chance to pioneer a new model for the nation of how to revitalize a major city. In Boston, Ed Logue was determined to show Jane Jacobs that urban renewal could be done right.