When Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller surprised Ed Logue with his phone call in January 1968, he expected an immediate response: “Can you come down tomorrow to take a look at a bill?” The next day, Logue was in Rockefeller’s New York City office, meeting first with members of Rockefeller’s inner circle, particularly his top legislative aide Stephen Lefkowitz, and then alone with the governor. Rockefeller’s goal was to persuade Logue to come to New York to serve as president and CEO of a soon-to-be-announced, $6 billion ($44.1 billion in 2019 dollars), powerful state-level urban renewal agency, the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC).1 For many years, this long-serving liberal Republican governor had been trying to revive depressed urban areas and build new subsidized housing in New York State; the urban riots of the mid-1960s had made that goal seem only more urgent. But state bond issues, the tool to fund such initiatives, required voter approval, according to the state’s constitution, and in frustration Rockefeller had watched five of them go down to defeat.2 Now he and his team had come up with a new scheme to skirt the referendum problem: a state-level public benefit corporation (the legal term for public authority) with the ability to self-finance through issuing its own tax-exempt bonds. Special state appropriations and federal housing programs would supplement private-sector funding.
Rockefeller was attracted to Logue’s deep experience and outsize reputation, though the two men had never met. Rockefeller was pushing hard for his UDC in the New York state legislature, and Logue was a free agent since being defeated in Boston’s mayoral contest. Rockefeller, used to getting his way, turned his famous charms on Logue to woo him to New York. As Logue later remembered the courting at a commemorative event for Rockefeller, “He just pours it on. Remember the way? I suspect each of us has never been more flattered by anybody, including our spouses, in our whole lives. So he tells me I’m the greatest thing since whatever.”3
But Rockefeller had met his match in Logue. After carefully reviewing the draft legislation Rockefeller intended to submit to the New York state legislature, Logue congratulated the governor for his ambition (“This is the greatest development bill that I’ve ever seen”) and then told him bluntly, “But it won’t work.” “What the hell do you mean?” the governor shot back. Logue proceeded to explain that without the ability to acquire property through eminent domain, to reduce or exempt projects from local real estate taxes, and, most radically, to override exclusionary local zoning and outdated building codes, he doubted the UDC would get anywhere. Then, in a strategy to hammer home his point, which Logue later admitted may have taken unfair advantage of the infamous rivalry between Rockefeller and New York City’s mayor John V. Lindsay, he added, “If Mayor Lindsay doesn’t like what you want to do, he won’t do it. It will get stuck in his building department or zoning board, and it will never come out.” Logue continued, “You’ll never know why you’re not getting it, but you won’t get it.” “You’ve got a point,” admitted Rockefeller.4 By day’s end, Logue was heading back to Boston, Rockefeller’s staff had begun revising the legislation to Logue’s specifications, and the two men agreed to keep talking. Logue was truly reluctant at first to accept the governor’s offer. He and his family were happy in Boston, and their beloved Martha’s Vineyard, where the Logues had summered for many years, was nearby. But in time, Logue was seduced by Rockefeller’s persuasive powers as well as the unique professional opportunity that the UDC offered: to create on a grand scale an extraordinary “one-stop service” that could acquire project sites and then develop, finance, design, build, and sell or own the resulting structures.5
By the end of April, Logue and Rockefeller had come to an agreement, and by summer, Logue was installed as the UDC’s president and CEO. He lived at the Yale Club and commuted back to Boston until the Logues found an apartment the next spring, moving in time for the children—Kathy now fifteen, Billy eleven—to begin at a new school in the fall. Once the family settled in, Margaret would restart her career as a teacher and then middle-school principal at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights. These two men—one, a fifty-nine-year-old privileged heir to the greatest of American family fortunes, who had been serving as Republican governor of mighty New York State for nine years; the other, a forty-seven-year-old Irish Catholic Democrat from Philadelphia who was a self-made pioneer of postwar urban redevelopment—soon discovered that they had a great deal in common. Both were socially committed promoters of monumental projects who believed that the troubles of their time—poverty, poor housing, unemployment, inferior education—could be solved by major interventions in the physical environment. And they were both doers, ambitious and confident executives impatient to turn big, innovative plans quickly into even bigger realities.6 Logue had undertaken large-scale rebuilding of a New Haven and Boston in steep decline. For his part, Rockefeller had aimed to enhance the state’s much neglected capital city of Albany by constructing a massive civic center, the Empire State Plaza; to improve health care delivery by adding thousands of new hospital and nursing home beds; and to strengthen higher education by vastly expanding the multi-campus State University of New York (SUNY) system.7 Rockefeller’s penchant for building was so great that his critics had a field day satirizing his “edifice complex” and “whim of iron,” to which Rockefeller retorted, “All they see is steel and concrete … I see jobs. Not only construction jobs, but clerical jobs, service jobs, all kinds of jobs for all kinds of people.”8
Together Logue and Rockefeller forged a potent partnership that would last until Rockefeller stepped down as governor of New York in December 1973. Although Rockefeller left office voluntarily to better position himself to secure the Republican nomination for president in 1976—perhaps this liberal Republican’s last shot at the long-coveted prize that had eluded him in 1960, 1964, and 1968—the UDC would forever be credited to him. For almost six years, Rockefeller and Logue collaborated to build much-needed new housing, a great deal of it subsidized for low- and moderate-income tenants; to revitalize crumbling downtowns; and to jump-start the state’s sputtering industries to create new jobs, as New York’s economic growth seriously lagged behind the nation’s. Rockefeller and Logue had a symbiotic relationship. Margaret Logue described it as not so much a friendship as a mutual respect, closer to the kind of partnership Ed had experienced with John Collins than with father-figure Chester Bowles or brother-like Dick Lee.9
Rockefeller put his distinctive ideological stamp on the new agency’s structure, combining a deeply held social liberalism with an embrace of Republican orthodoxy that states should play a larger part in governance and that enlightened capitalists should assume a significant role in addressing public needs.10 Empowering states and private capital presented a stark alternative to President Lyndon Johnson’s urban policy, in which federal funding and grassroots engagement (labeled “maximum feasible participation”) expanded under his Great Society initiatives. Moreover, urging more public-private sector collaboration aligned Nelson with his banker brother David, president and soon the CEO and chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. In a Washington speech in early 1967, David had proposed a plan whereby every dollar of government money would be matched by four dollars of private capital, after which Nelson picked up the phone to say, “David, I’ve got the twenty cents if you’ve got the eighty cents.”11
Nelson Rockefeller’s description of himself as having “a Democratic heart with a Republican head” was never more apt than when it came to his urban strategy.12 His liberal profile would later be overshadowed by repressive policies in the last years of his governorship, such as the storming of the Attica Prison in 1971 that left forty-three dead and the passage of tough mandatory sentencing laws for drug sale and possession—which became known as the “Rockefeller Drug Laws”—in 1973. But for much of his administration, Rockefeller advocated for state government to play a progressive role in American society, including directing private capital to socially worthy causes.13
The UDC also grew out of Nelson Rockefeller’s long-standing interest in architecture, a passion he shared with Logue.14 As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Rockefeller had seriously considered becoming an architect until discouraged by his family. “With the responsibilities the family had,” Nelson concluded, “I didn’t see how I could justify giving way to a personal whim.” He also feared that he could never have an independent practice: “I thought what would happen would be I’d get projects that the family was doing. It wouldn’t be a genuine operation. I wanted to get out on my own.”15 Although he did not pursue professional training as an architect, much of what Rockefeller did in later life reflected his twin passions for building and artistic expression. Soon after graduating from Dartmouth, Nelson supervised the construction and leasing of his family’s Rockefeller Center in New York City. He then went on to oversee development projects in Latin America first as watchdog for the family’s Standard Oil Company and then as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs.16 Throughout his adult life, Rockefeller remained a devoted art collector and an aficionado of architecture.
Figuring out how to implement a public benefit corporation to work around taxpayers’ opposition to bonds for subsidized housing required another kind of creativity. State-created public authorities with the powers to spend, borrow, collect rent, enter contracts, and sue or be sued had a history going back to the early twentieth century. Some considered them a fourth branch of government beyond the tripartite executive, legislature, and judiciary. These independent quasi-public, quasi-private authorities grew in national importance during the 1930s, when bodies like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Public Works Administration, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, with their autonomous powers, offered a new, welcome tool to navigate the ravages of the Great Depression. After World War II, the use of authorities mushroomed. Defenders praised their administrative flexibility, especially their potential to insulate important public services from political roadblocks, while giving the municipalities and states that created them freedom from annual budget cycles, debt ceilings, and archaic regulations. With their ability to borrow against anticipated future revenues, they made possible more effective long-term planning than public agencies typically enjoyed. Detractors complained that self-financing authorities were less accountable than a normal government agency was, subjecting public needs to the vagaries of the private sector and to governance by independently appointed boards of directors rather than democratically elected officials.17 The UDC was in fact unusual among New York’s public benefit corporations for having its president appointed by and reporting to the governor, not the board, which tied its agenda more closely to Rockefeller’s, while also reducing Logue’s dependence on his directors.18
Rockefeller enthusiastically embraced the public authority structure as a way of delivering on his grand ambitions for New York State—and not incidentally the national attention he sought for himself—without the need for voter approval or deep state coffers. He began by expanding authorities already in existence. When brother David and his Downtown–Lower Manhattan Association pushed hard for the World Trade Center to bolster lower Manhattan’s attractiveness to finance, Nelson convinced the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the nation’s first modern independent authority, created in 1921, to take on this new ambitious building project in return for a covenant that the Port Authority would never be asked to invest in deficit-heavy mass transit.19 He went on to create a staggering number of new authorities. By the time he stepped down as governor, there were forty-one semiautonomous statewide authorities in operation—twenty-three created under his watch—each empowered to raise its own funds through bond sales.20 Typical was the State University Construction Fund to expedite building of the state’s public university system.
Even before creating the UDC, Rockefeller had used the authority structure to encourage more housing construction when he established the state’s Housing Finance Agency (HFA) in 1960, essentially a bank charged with attracting private developers to build below-market-rate, limited-profit projects. Making use of the powers granted by the state’s almost-moribund Mitchell-Lama program, created in 1955 to incentivize the construction of low- and middle-income housing, the HFA acquired sites by eminent domain, provided low-cost financing, and granted tax abatements. The resulting lower-cost rentals or cooperatives were protected for up to thirty years and available only to tenants and purchasers who qualified under an income cap. Large-scale, high-density middle-income projects like Co-op City and Lincoln Towers aimed at keeping middle-class New Yorkers in the city.21 The HFA—deeply invested in upholding the legal requirement that all its projects be self-supporting to pay off revenue bonds and proud of its reputation for financial prudence—strictly focused on housing for the middle class and avoided the greater uncertainties involved in building for low-income and elderly tenants. When the UDC’s treasurer compared his own bolder organization with the HFA, where “social purposes never override financial considerations,” he concluded dismissively, “Taking risks is our mode. Avoiding them is theirs.”22 Once Rockefeller’s team committed to building a wider range of subsidized housing than was possible under the restrained HFA and to revitalizing the state’s industry and infrastructure, the question became how to do it.
The solution they came up with was to give the UDC the independence of an authority but to structure it financially to maximize nimbleness and minimize caution. That commitment led to two key decisions. Like the HFA, the UDC would be funded with “moral obligation bonds” that the state assured private investors had its backing, even if not the state’s official “full faith and credit,” which required voter approval as part of the state’s legal debt. In the case of any revenue shortfall, the state pledged to meet its moral obligation by replenishing the UDC’s reserve fund. This bonding strategy was sanctioned by the prominent Wall Street municipal bond lawyer John Mitchell (later Richard Nixon’s ill-fated attorney general during Watergate), who assured Rockefeller in 1960 that investors would be satisfied with the state’s declaration of good intentions. Rockefeller hoped this unsecured moral obligation would suffice to lure large amounts of private money into the subsidized housing market. As Rockefeller told the readers of his 1968 self-promotional book, Unity, Freedom and Peace, “government can[not] do it alone.” We must have “faith in and commitment to the private enterprise system.”23
The second crucial decision was proposed by George Woods, former chair of First Boston Corporation and the World Bank, who was Rockefeller’s choice to head the nine-member UDC board. To make the UDC as agile as possible, Woods argued for the unusual step of issuing its bonds as “general purpose,” not tied to specific projects as those of the HFA and most other authorities were. The logic was that bonds backing the UDC as a whole rather than individual projects would make funds available for ordinary operating expenses, could be issued when market conditions were advantageous, and, most importantly, would allow for more variation and less scrutiny of particular ventures, “pooling the risk,” so to speak. With an aggressive UDC, Woods predicted, “you’re going to have good ones and bad ones.”24 Logue agreed: “The UDC spread-of-risk factor is one of its great financial strengths.”25 He thus barely focused on the danger that too many bad projects in a bond’s bundle could bring down the good ones, now under pressure to produce extra profits, or that careless budgeting on an individual project could cause the full general-purpose bond to come up short. “We were funding as we went, in effect,” Lefkowitz later admitted. “And so when we ran out of money,… we had forty projects that were not finished,” awaiting the next general-purpose bond issue.26
Although Logue was not a Republican, inclined toward the virtues of federalism and private sector investment for public purposes, and in fact had long put his greatest trust in federal programs, he had his own reasons for embracing Rockefeller’s new UDC. Logue had watched in frustration as federal budgets for housing and urban redevelopment were slashed, mostly as a result of the high costs of the Vietnam War. He like other critics never tired of pointing out that the entire 1970 budget request of $2 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was less than one month’s expenditure for the war.27 As Logue searched for alternatives, he welcomed Rockefeller’s promise of untapped sources of funding that could become forever self-sustaining through revolving bond funds, sales of projects to private developers or nonprofit sponsors, and retention of some properties for a dependable rental-income stream.
The opportunity to work at the state level greatly intrigued Logue. As he told a Boston University audience in spring 1968, “Although by now it should be clear that I do not expect miracles, I continue to seek for them. My newest hope is that our state governments will respond to the challenge presented by the urban crisis.” This crisis had stubbornly persisted. No less than three major government reports detailing it would appear that year.28 In March, the Kerner Commission warned of dangerous racial divides in America rooted in persistent segregation and economic inequality. In early December, the Kaiser Committee on Urban Housing called for twenty-six million new units by 1978, a quarter federally subsidized for low-income residents. And in late December, Paul Douglas’s National Commission on Urban Problems—to which Logue had testified in Boston in May 1967—concurred, arguing for a minimum of two million new units of housing annually, with at least a quarter targeted at low- and moderate-income tenants. Logue acknowledged that states had been “in relative eclipse as an urban problem solver,” content to be the “junior partners of the federal government,” but he urged them now to play a new role. Cities “which I have put fifteen years of my life into rebuilding … cannot solve this problem by themselves.”29
Although Logue had encountered a Boston hamstrung for lack of home rule by its controlling Massachusetts legislature, he now argued that excessive home rule could deprive a city of a valuable helping hand from state government. While the Republican Rockefeller ideologically applauded the devolution of authority and funding from the federal government to the state level, the Democrat Logue found more alluring the opportunity provided by a state-level program to operate beyond the boundaries of any one locality to achieve the kind of ambitious metropolitan solutions to urban problems that had eluded him in New Haven and Boston. From the earliest days of the UDC, Logue expressed hope that small-scale residential projects in suburbia would “create opportunities for low-income families to share in the good schools, the safe streets, the fresh air and open space other Americans like so well without unsettling or unbalancing the suburban communities.”30
Logue’s willingness to support Rockefeller’s plan to tap private-sector funding was likewise a pragmatic choice as federal domestic budgets declined and bureaucracy grew. Although he remained a staunch defender of government at all levels, Logue was never a lover of cumbersome red tape. Perhaps private-market bond sales and rent revenues would come with fewer strings attached and lesser bureaucratic demands. Logue viewed the UDC’s public-private partnership more as a marriage of convenience than as a revolution in how to do the public’s business. He recognized that the private sector had always played a role in conventional urban renewal, as federal grants that wrote down the cost of urban land had aimed at attracting private developers. But then and still now, Logue considered private investors more a font of finance than an agent of authority. He fully intended to run the show, whether the money came from Washington, D.C., Albany, or Wall Street.31
Once Rockefeller decided that Logue was the right man to lead his UDC, he pulled out all the stops to make it happen. He promised Logue a substantial salary of $50,000 a year ($65,000 by 1972), and in a private deal that became public only in autumn 1974, when Rockefeller was up for confirmation as Gerald Ford’s vice president, he offered Logue what, it turned out, he had extended to many other high-level associates and friends, including Henry Kissinger: monetary gifts and loans. To help Logue repay his mayoral campaign debt, which would have been much harder to do if Logue left Boston, Rockefeller made him a gift of $31,389. So that the Logues could buy a co-op apartment in the high-priced real estate market of Manhattan, Logue received a loan of $145,000, of which $100,000 remained unpaid in 1974. (That apartment, at 1 East End Avenue, turned out to be conveniently located for Ed and Margaret to pin their binoculars on one of the UDC’s most important projects, the development of Roosevelt Island in the East River.) Logue never publicly expressed regret at having availed himself of Rockefeller’s financial favors, insisting to the Senate Rules Committee holding hearings on Rockefeller’s nomination that no New York State statutes had been violated and that without the governor’s assistance, “I would not have been able to leave Boston to accept the appointment he offered.”32 But Margaret acknowledged that privately he was embarrassed and worried that some might perceive Rockefeller’s assistance as unethical.33
Luring Logue to head the UDC proved a lot easier for Rockefeller than getting it past leery New York State legislators who understood only too well the substantial, independent powers being granted to this well-funded state superagency. They complained that it threatened home rule and would impose unwanted physical changes on their legislative districts. Despite the governor’s agreement to add further safeguards for localities, such as requiring that the UDC work closely with community advisory committees and leaders, the fate of the UDC did not look promising until Rockefeller shrewdly transformed tragedy into opportunity.34 On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while supporting the city’s striking sanitation workers. Soon, riots erupted in black neighborhoods all over America. Rockefeller, long a promoter of civil rights and a trusted ally of King’s, quickly offered his personal support to the King family. His staff helped organize—and he paid for—much of the funeral, and he chartered a plane to fly eighteen leading black legislators with him from New York to Atlanta to attend. While still in Atlanta, Rockefeller called on state legislators to pass the UDC as a tribute to King that would improve the lives of poor black New Yorkers, insisting that “the true memorial to Martin Luther King cannot be made of stone. It must be made of action.”35
Even with this pressure, the first vote on the UDC passed the state senate but failed in the assembly, as conservative upstate Republicans allied with liberal New York City Democrats, both fearing growing state power.36 Rockefeller was furious and took to the phones. With a dazzling display of arm-twisting and threats to withhold favors, the governor turned an 86-to-54 defeat into a decisive 86-to-45 victory close to midnight on April 9.37 One Rockland County legislator was told by a close Rockefeller aide, “I know you don’t like the bill, but you’re on the list of guys who are going to vote for it.” The alternative, he promised, “was to wake up one morning to find the runway of Stewart Air Force base extended right through your goddamn district.”38 The UDC was thus born in an emotional time of racial anxiety and political urgency, but many of its backers in Albany remained deeply skeptical. This approval under duress would shadow the UDC throughout its existence. Years later Logue would candidly acknowledge, “I didn’t get a mandate, but I did get the legislation.”39
Another kind of suspicion more of Logue’s making than Rockefeller’s would accompany his entry into New York. Logue had had two major involvements in New York City while he was running the Boston Redevelopment Authority. In 1966, soon after Logue’s college and law school classmate John Lindsay was elected mayor of New York, Lindsay asked him to head a task force—funded, like so many other urban initiatives of the era, by the Ford Foundation—to study the enormous housing challenges facing New York City and make recommendations for addressing them. Logue threw himself into the assignment, assembling a blue-ribbon panel of national urban leaders and a staff drawn mostly from the BRA, headed by Logue’s right-hand man Bob Hazen. Seven months later, Logue’s commission delivered a report titled Let There Be Commitment, which was highly critical of the status quo in New York City. It called for a $1.5 billion attack on the city’s slums, and urged, among many proposals, the construction on scattered sites of fifteen thousand new public housing units a year, in addition to many more thousands of subsidized ones. Lindsay’s next move was to try to hire Logue to implement the ambitious program, a proposal that met opposition from Logue skeptics in New York, such as the planning critic Jane Jacobs and the Columbia sociologist Herbert Gans, author of the 1962 book The Urban Villagers about Boston’s West End.40
But the real obstacle to Logue accepting Lindsay’s job proved to be the mayor’s inability or unwillingness to grant Logue the same extensive, consolidated powers over planning and redevelopment that he considered so fundamental to his Boston success.41 Without this commitment, Logue refused Lindsay’s offer. The mayor was unhappy to be turned down by Logue, but the disappointment turned to outright fury when in 1968 Lindsay learned that his archrival Nelson Rockefeller had succeeded where he had failed. Logue would never forget Lindsay’s raving-mad late-night call upon learning of Logue’s hiring—“You’ll never do anything in New York if I don’t tell you exactly where, when, and why”—or the disastrous press conference in May 1969 to announce the signing of a general memorandum of understanding between New York State and New York City over the UDC. Held at the mayor’s Gracie Mansion residence, it took an embarrassing turn when Rockefeller insulted Lindsay by saying he would support for mayor whichever candidate won the Republican Party’s primary, abandoning Lindsay if he received only the Liberal Party’s endorsement. Logue vowed never again to bring these bickering foes together in the same room.42 Logue was thus greeted in New York City by distrustful urban activists and a mayor already on the defensive against the UDC, which he considered a trespasser sent into his backyard by his meddling adversary in Albany. Lindsay officially made Rockefeller his opponent when he changed his party affiliation to Democrat in 1971.43
Another New York experience prior to the UDC burdened Logue with unhelpful notoriety. This was the work he did in 1967 with the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), the pet project of New York senator Robert F. Kennedy that is generally considered the nation’s first federally funded community development corporation.44 The Bedford-Stuyvesant experience introduced Logue to a new structure of urban development also beginning to emerge in Boston’s Roxbury and South End neighborhoods. Bedford-Stuyvesant was a huge six-hundred-block area with over four hundred thousand residents, 90 percent of whom were black or Puerto Rican. Activists had been organizing in the community already for a number of years and political consciousness ran high. Logue was selected as a part-time consultant—the Ford Foundation once again paying—by Kennedy, who boldly set out to promote his own alternative to President Johnson’s War on Poverty and Model Cities Program that would combine employment, job training, community economic development, and neighborhood rehabilitation. Public and private parties ranging from neighborhood residents to philanthropic foundations to corporate executives were all expected to play a role. Federal dollars would be tapped as well. Logue’s assignment was to establish a comprehensive plan for the physical rebuilding of this impoverished community.
Logue made several miscalculations. He brought in a team including two veterans of Boston redevelopment, the architects I. M. Pei and David A. Crane, and the equally high-profile planner George M. Raymond, who together proposed a “macro-scale” concept that resembled Crane’s “capital web” proposal for Boston, a linear spine punctuated with clusters of commercial and community development. Undeniably, Logue received ambiguous and conflicting guidance from the CDC’s leaders, but his proposal still proved too big, too long-term, too top-down, and too far from the incremental, consultative approach that the local community, itself quite factionalized, demanded.45 One community-oriented board member, Judge Thomas R. Jones, complained, “We were supposed to accept the Gospel According to St. Logue, and we weren’t ready to do that.” In the end, the call of Boston’s mayoral primary gave Logue a convenient way to bow out of the increasingly fraught project, but he drew the disapproval of the same kind of participatory democrats in New York as he had alienated in New Haven and Boston.
Despite the shadow cast by these previous New York involvements, Logue arrived in New York City on July 1, 1968, eager to make a success of this new, thrilling, well-funded opportunity.46 He expected New York’s UDC to become a model that other states would emulate, the first statewide semiautonomous urban renewal agency supported by two underutilized sponsors—state government and private capital. According to the well-respected planner Louis K. Loewenstein, who was funded by the Ford Foundation to assess the UDC, officials in the other forty-nine states were indeed watching closely what Loewenstein judged to be “the boldest effort of any state to match the size of its housing and urban problems with an agency of comparable authority.”47 The other major chronicler of the UDC during its lifetime, Dr. Eleanor Brilliant, concurred, claiming that few new public authorities since the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s “have aroused more interest among social reformers and planners … After a decade of immobilisme in urban affairs, the UDC presented a welcome possibility for authoritative decision making and action.” Brilliant, publishing in the midst of the UDC’s unraveling in 1975, was not blind to the enormous risks involved as well.48 She understood that the scale of Logue’s ambitions for the UDC and a worsening economic and political environment in New York State and nationally were converging to bring the UDC to a spectacular downfall. An urban renewal superagency that its founders conceived to be forever self-renewing would in the end last only seven years.
Once Logue arrived in New York, he lost little time getting the UDC’s operation up and running. Both Logue and Rockefeller understood how important it was for the UDC’s shaky political fortunes to disperse its riches widely upstate and downstate. A letter soon went out under Governor Rockefeller’s signature to each of the more than sixty mayors and city managers in New York State, urging them to take advantage of this “new instrument to help you” and requesting a list of possible projects. Logue and top staff then traveled the state, often by helicopter, meeting local officials and checking out potential sites. Barely a month in, during August 1968, Logue reported having visited nineteen towns in ten days.49 The requests for UDC help—and money—started rolling in fast, from all over the state. By the end of the UDC’s first year, Logue was well on his way to identifying most of the locations for its future projects.50
Between 1968 and 1975, the UDC produced nothing short of a whirlwind of building in the state. As a result of an IRS ruling early on that only 10 percent of the UDC’s tax-free bonds could go toward the industrial and commercial development that had been central to the UDC’s original mandate, most of the UDC’s building ended up being residential, along with schools, parks, and other civic projects.51 The score sheet was still impressive. Over seven years the UDC launched 117 separate housing developments in forty-nine cities and towns, comprising more than 33,000 dwelling units for 100,000 people, about a third low-income, the rest subsidized for moderate- and middle-income residents. In addition, the UDC developed sixty-nine commercial, industrial, and civic projects and three brand-new communities. Armed with an authorization to sell $1 billion in bonds (eventually increased to $2 billion), as well as start-up funds and interest-free loans from New York State, the UDC by early 1975 had launched $1.5 billion worth of projects (over $7 billion in 2019 dollars), with more in the works.52 Logue and his team were confident that the combined revenue streams of bond and property sales, state and federal government funding, and rental income would cover all costs.53 Moreover, the UDC expected its own investments to catalyze even greater private development in New York State. In the case of Utica, for example, the city’s downtown renewal had been abandoned seven years earlier by a developer, leaving the city in 1969 with not only vacant land but also “the lack of confidence of developers and real estate investors.” Now with the UDC, a city official hoped for renewed interest: “It’s a wonderful thing … where you have New York State behind you like that.”54
During its lifetime, the UDC’s handprints could be found on an extraordinarily wide range of projects throughout the state, varying in location, scale, and type. A very partial list includes a major $60 million facelift to the old, depressed Hudson River town of Newburgh; construction of six thousand units of housing in metropolitan Rochester, half of them low income and on scattered sites in the suburbs; an expansive low-and-moderate-income residential project, the Shoreline Apartments, with a school and shops along Buffalo’s Lake Erie, designed by Paul Rudolph; Schomburg Plaza, located at 5th Avenue between West 110th and 111th Streets in Harlem, consisting of two award-winning thirty-five-story octagonal apartment towers with six hundred mixed-income units, stores, and a day care center, developed in collaboration with the prominent black psychologist and UDC board member Kenneth Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark; new housing and a convention-tourism complex to help buoy the off-season economy of Niagara Falls; remediation and future planning for six upstate communities in the Chemung River Valley devastated by Hurricane Agnes in June 1972; and the replacement of dilapidated shacks without indoor plumbing in a migrant labor camp in Kent, Orleans County, with the townhouse apartments of Carlken Manor.55 The UDC’s most ambitious and innovative undertaking was the creation of three New Towns on undeveloped land—Audubon, in Amherst, near the new campus of SUNY Buffalo; Lysander, renamed Radisson, twelve miles north of Syracuse; and the transformation of Welfare Island into Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River. These New Towns were intended to increase the state’s supply of decent housing; to create model, socially integrated communities; and to address an anticipated population increase of five to eight million between 1970 and 2000 (which turned out to be overly optimistic, as New York State’s population barely grew by one million).56
It looked for a while like New York City would stubbornly refuse help from the UDC. Mayor Lindsay’s contentious rivalry with Governor Rockefeller was a factor, but the city also had a long tradition of jealously guarding its home rule from Albany, convinced that the state rarely compensated the city fully and fairly for burdens on transportation, education, or the environment. Snapped Lindsay, “Our cities cannot be renewed by state-operated bulldozers which move into local communities without their consent and without knowledge and concern about the increasing need for supportive services connected with all development.”57 But once Logue “sent word to Lindsay, through an intermediary, that, you know, at the rate we’re going, we’re going to have all our funds committed upstate and there won’t be anything left for New York,” the Lindsay administration buried its pride in favor of addressing its huge need.58 New York’s housing supply was shrinking, with new construction at a standstill and landlord abandonment growing. One hundred thirty thousand were on the waiting lists for public housing. And the severe cuts in federal funding that had alarmed Logue were hitting New York hard. According to a despairing Jason R. Nathan, the New York City housing and development administrator, “‘Crisis’ is an understatement. ‘Disaster’ may be more appropriate.”59 After tough negotiations, where Nathan pressured Lindsay “to lock arms, not horns, with the UDC … to harness UDC’s talents and powers … to make them work for the city,” the UDC and New York City struck a deal in May 1969. The UDC would agree not to launch any projects in New York City without the mayor’s prior approval but would pledge to build at least twelve thousand units.60 In return, the city would protect the UDC by promising to clear the sites and handle any required relocations.
By 1971, half the UDC’s total housing starts would be located in New York City, encompassing 30 percent of the city’s publicly assisted housing construction that year.61 What Logue valued most in the deal was securing the land for what became the UDC’s crown jewel: the development of two-mile-long Welfare Island in the middle of the East River between Manhattan and Queens as the mixed-income, pedestrian-only New Town of Roosevelt Island. In return for this prize, Logue agreed to take on building sites in the South Bronx and Coney Island that the city found too difficult to develop. Logue was willing to live with that. As he gleefully exclaimed, “I got the goat sites but I got the island.”62
The UDC established an infrastructure statewide to support its ambitious program. At the start, in July 1968, there were only three staff: Logue; his personal assistant Janet Murphy, who moved with him from Boston University and acted, Lefkowitz joked, as “the interpreter of the words of God to man”; and Lefkowitz himself, who officially became the UDC’s general counsel but unofficially served as Rockefeller’s eyes and ears, put there by the governor, Lefkowitz readily acknowledged, “to watch Ed!”63 But very quickly new staff were added. At its height, the UDC employed over 550 personnel in seventeen offices, with central functions like executive, design, construction, finance, and legal located in its New York City headquarters, and project-oriented regional and field offices fanning out across the state in a more expansive version of the decentralized organization in Logue’s BRA.
In New York, even more so than in New Haven and Boston, the work attracted young and idealistic professionals. Many were trusted veterans of past Logue projects who flocked to the UDC like homing pigeons once the word was out that he was launching an ambitious new venture. The architect Ted Liebman recalled Logue presenting him with a copy of the UDC Act of 1968 and saying, “‘Read it. This is where I’m going. I think I’m going to want you to come … This is going to be really important.’”64 New blood soon arrived as well. Lawrence Goldman was twenty-eight in 1973, with an almost-completed Princeton Ph.D. dissertation on a planned town outside London, when he jumped at the chance to become Logue’s special assistant and join a “veritable children’s brigade of smart—and sometimes smart-assed—uncontainable young professionals…, the best and the brightest.”65 Richard Kahan was a Columbia law student in 1971 when he started working at the UDC: “There was this great sense of momentum and everybody feeling they were part of something historic and wanting to kill for this guy … He was a two-fisted, roll-up-your-sleeves, let’s-get-down-in-the-dirt-and-make-things-happen kind of progressive.”66 Paul Byard, a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law, was hungry for a job with more social value than his current one at a prestigious New York law firm. “It was thrilling—hours, risks, adventures—but above all, the conviction of the worth of what we were doing. We thought of it as the public business—I think of that as Ed’s phrase—not because it was so businesslike but because the phrase made clear … the public good we sought to do.”67 Christine Flynn, who began as a staff attorney at the UDC and later served as the executive vice president of Roosevelt Island, summed it up this way: “It was like no other place I’ve ever worked. Logue had a genius for motivating people.”68 Flynn was one of the few women in a position of authority at the UDC. Urban redevelopment had emerged as a new profession more than a decade earlier, but it was still a male club into which few women gained entry, other than as staff assistants. Janet Murphy exerted substantial influence and kept track of everything and everyone at the UDC, but she did so from a traditional role.
As in Boston, Logue invested in a headquarters intended to convey the stature and ambition of his new superagency. The UDC took over a full floor (later expanding onto two others) of a new skyscraper, the Burlington House, at 1345 6th Avenue, between 54th and 55th Streets. The Burlington Company had re-created a full-scale working textile mill for visitors to its lobby, celebrating the company’s loyalty to its industrial roots even as it inserted itself in the postindustrial economy of midtown Manhattan—a mix reflected in the UDC’s own economic development activities in New York State. Higher up, the UDC’s offices on the forty-sixth floor afforded spectacular views of the vast land awaiting the UDC’s imprint. “I could look out my window and see Central Park … and see the mountains up in the Catskills,” said Logue. And lest he forget less-visible upstate areas, a giant relief map of New York State sat opposite his desk.69 As in Boston, Logue spared no expense decorating these offices. Though critics condemned them as “Logue’s Lush Lair,” he defended the modern décor as “well-designed, but not luxurious.”70 To further inspire his staff aesthetically, the Museum of Modern Art, with its well-respected architecture and design department, was just down the block. The UDC found it the perfect venue for its fifth anniversary celebration in 1973.71
With the aid of big money, the Rockefellers’ well-flexed political muscle, a powerful new toolkit, and a gung-ho staff, Logue took off on a tear to make a big difference in New York State and beyond. Never one to be modest in his self-confidence or his goals, Logue aimed not only to change the physical face of New York but also to pioneer new solutions to the nation’s severe housing shortage and its ailing cities. This was the opportunity that Logue had been waiting for his whole career.72
The UDC’s power to take a project all the way from land acquisition, finance, and construction to its opening as a home, school, police station, library, or factory made it possible to avoid what had long troubled many in the redevelopment business: the frustratingly slow completion of projects due to time-consuming coordination among multiple parties. Rockefeller and Logue both frequently lamented that it could take five to seven years under normal conditions to build a new residential project. Urban renewal ventures took even longer—an average of eight years in the state and thirteen in New York City.73 The thicket of funding and regulatory requirements from different levels of government slowed down progress to the point of discouraging private developers from even trying to work in New York State. When a group of major builders were queried about why they hadn’t constructed more affordable housing in New York City despite the enormous demand, they uniformly complained about lack of subsidies but even more passionately about horrific delays from red tape.74 The developer of a project in New York City, for example, had to obtain official approvals from ten separate departments or agencies of the city, state, and federal governments, seven serially.75 Logue despaired at the problem. “This is hurting us. Some of the builders and developers are [instead] going to Florida.”76
The UDC was equipped with extensive capabilities in part to address this logjam in housing construction, but even within the UDC’s comprehensive operation Logue felt the need to institute a practice he called “fast-tracking.” This meant avoiding delays by moving ahead with projects before all the final funding, permitting, designing, and bidding were securely in place. Logue had confidence that they would all come through in the end, and rather than lose valuable time, he began construction using funds already in hand. Interestingly, even Logue’s harshest critics, who would later fault the UDC for many abuses, admired what fast-tracking made possible: substantial cost-savings given the constant escalation in construction prices, a reduction in red tape, avoidance of panic selling by project neighbors, and quicker availability of construction jobs.77 The real estate developer Richard Ravitch, no fan of Logue’s UDC and the person Logue most blamed for its downfall, agreed that “he was right to do that. Time is money. If you delay the start of construction, it’s going to cost you more.” Ravitch stressed, however, that this approach worked only if projects were held tightly to budget, which was not always the case at the UDC.78 Years later Logue took pride in the boldness of his fast-tracking strategy, which could shorten the time to construction to eighteen months: “Since we had the power of eminent domain, had the resources to hire plans, and to build it ourselves if necessary, I would start a project on land we didn’t yet own, with subsidies that were not yet tied up in contract … But I had commitments, and I relied on that.”79
Fast-tracking made it possible for the UDC not only to undertake steps simultaneously rather than sequentially on any one project, but also to launch a multitude of projects concurrently, which Logue felt was crucial to the agency’s success. As he once put it: “I wouldn’t want to make the people of Harlem think we can solve their problems by nibbling at them, nor would I go to Bedford-Stuyvesant and say, ‘Look, you nice people, we’ll be working over in the South Bronx for the next ten years, but we’ll get to you eventually.’ You either do them all at once and on a large scale, or you don’t bother.”80 To make fast-tracking work, the UDC operated with a system perhaps best described as “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” utilizing funds raised from general-purpose bonds and government grants secured for one set of projects to jump-start others and complete unfinished ones. So long as the faucet kept flowing—and there was no reason to suspect it would not—the UDC could continue to set construction records.
Fast-tracking worked as well as it did because Logue once again proved himself a wizard at securing federal dollars. Although the UDC created great fanfare around tapping into state and private sources of capital, funding from HUD in fact remained key. While the resources available to him were by no means sufficient—Logue constantly called for greater federal funding to write down the price of land and to provide more rent supplements to low-income tenants—he made extensive use of the Section 236 subsidy program created by the 1968 Housing Act, which replaced the Section 221(d)(3) mortgages that he had relied on so heavily in Boston. This Section 236 program, available to state as well as municipal agencies, reduced the interest on mortgages for new or rehabilitated multi-unit dwellings from the conventional market rate down to 1 percent, making the construction of low- and moderate-income housing more feasible. Used for more than 90 percent of the UDC’s construction, Section 236 subsidies could reduce the cost per room from $78 to $43.81 The UDC managed remarkably to get over 60 percent of all Section 236 funding available nationally, receiving at least 90 percent of New York State’s share. Logue’s shrewd strategy was to come in at the end of the year with fully completed forms to claim uncommitted Section 236 money, counting on the fact that HUD would not want to return unused appropriations to Congress. One could even say that a mutual dependency developed between HUD and the UDC, where Logue brought to New York State $2.7 billion in federal subsidies from write-downs and direct 236 grants and HUD in turn benefited from the high visibility of the UDC.82
Fifteen years in the redevelopment business in New Haven and Boston had taught Logue that urban renewal’s reputation suffered its greatest damage from the criticism that it too aggressively demolished existing buildings and displaced current residents. Logue’s own thinking had evolved over time from advocating massive clearance during his early years in New Haven to rehabilitating older structures in Wooster Square by the time he left that city. In Boston, he had carefully distanced himself from the old-style leveling of the West End and sought greater balance, coming to value the preservation of historic buildings downtown as well as in neighborhoods like Charlestown and the South End. But still Logue had battled justifiable, and growing, popular disapproval of urban renewal. He now hoped that the UDC, operating on the much larger terrain of a whole state, might find new ways to meet the huge need for decent housing without requiring excessive clearance. As he told a conference of colleagues in 1970, “We cannot repeat the mistake of the Housing Act of 1949,” which “put all of the emphasis on rebuilding, tearing down and rehabilitating in the inner city … And city solutions alone will not work.”83
Logue’s desire to build big—and without controversy—drove him to seek out two new sources of land for UDC projects. The first were languishing former urban renewal sites that existed in many cities, where clearing had taken place but no developer had come forward with a project. Eleanor Brilliant estimated that by 1967 more sites had remained leveled for urban renewal in New York State than had been rebuilt.84 As Logue explained it, “We were not, at UDC, seriously in the relocation business,” which had taken so much time and effort in New Haven and Boston, “because we either took open land outside the cities, or we took urban renewal sites, which had long since been cleared and nothing had ever happened to them.”85 This salvaging of sites that had been eyesores in New York’s cities for years, “collecting garbage and defeating incumbents while awaiting a developer with cash in hand,” as one journalist evocatively put it, meant the UDC was often received with open arms rather than local opposition.86
When the UDC did target an occupied urban site, Logue insisted that the city involved clear it first. So, for example, low- and moderate-income housing projects that the UDC undertook early on in New York City—in Coney Island, at Twin Parks in the Bronx, and at Harlem River Park—were on parcels already scheduled for clearance by the city. As Brilliant explained the strategy: “He could therefore hardly be accused of tearing down the homes of poor people to build projects that would benefit the white upper classes, as had been the case in Boston,” referring here to the notorious West End.87 There was irony, of course, in the UDC adopting a tactic for avoiding conflict with communities that took advantage of the glaring scars left behind from an earlier, more disruptive era of urban renewal.
The other major source of UDC land—more conducive to large-scale projects than abandoned inner-city urban renewal lots—consisted of sizable tracts of open land outside major cities that could be turned into New Towns. What soon became the UDC’s most distinctive program had been percolating in Logue’s mind for quite a while. Decentralizing people and jobs from crowded, poorly serviced urban neighborhoods had long made sense to him. He had promoted it unsuccessfully in Boston when he argued for building subsidized housing in suburbia and even carving the city into multiple New Towns. Once in New York, he had seized every opportunity to encourage investment in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, even at the expense of developing midtown.88 But the New Town concept involved dispersal at a much larger scale, promising plentiful new housing, community amenities, and jobs in self-contained communities touted as more satisfying social environments than typical suburbs. Particularly appealing to Logue, a New Town could be built on undeveloped land: “I don’t have to condemn it. I don’t have to relocate any families. I don’t have to demolish any buildings.”89 New Towns also marked another kind of break with ideas that Logue had once enthusiastically embraced: a turn away from the modernist orthodoxy of separating functions, promulgated by Le Corbusier and his followers. New Towns aimed instead to integrate living, working, schooling, shopping, and recreating all in one planned community, with each activity placed in close proximity to, not apart from, the others.
New Towns historically had been rare in the United States. The British Garden City Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had led to only a handful of American replicas in the United States, such as Radburn, New Jersey, and Sunnyside Gardens and Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York. Under the auspices of the New Deal during the 1930s, a few more ambitious New Towns had emerged—Greenbelt, Maryland, and Roosevelt (originally Jersey Homesteads), New Jersey, most prominently. And in the postwar years before Logue arrived at the UDC, three privately planned communities were founded by prominent commercial developers: Reston, Virginia, by Robert E. Simon; Columbia, Maryland, by James W. Rouse; and Irvine, California, by the Irvine Company.90 The real action had occurred in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, where governments looked to New Towns to replace heavily damaged infrastructure and provide desperately needed new housing. New Towns, combining residences, public buildings, and work sites in a totally new planned environment, offered an ideal solution. Prime examples were the twenty-eight New Towns built in postwar Britain, the most well-known being Stevenage and Milton Keynes; Tapiola in Finland; Vällingby and Farsta outside Stockholm; Cergy-Pontoise in France; and Nordweststadt near Frankfurt, Germany. (The concept spread to developing countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia as well.)91 Logue had carefully tracked these New Towns worldwide and visited many of them, most recently in spring 1968 when he had stopped in Sweden and Finland on his Ford-funded travels during his stint as Visiting Maxwell Professor of Government at Boston University.92
Not long before, after his electoral defeat in fall 1967, Logue had gained hands-on experience with the New Town concept when he accepted a consulting job at the invitation of his old New Haven Redevelopment Agency deputy Tom Appleby, now executive director of the District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency. Here Logue, as principal development consultant, helped plan a new community to be built on a 335-acre federally owned parcel in northeast Washington, formerly the site of a fort protecting the city during the Civil War and more recently a youth detention center run by the Department of Justice, soon to be vacated. President Lyndon Johnson himself had initiated this project, hoping it would serve as a prototype for the nation of a well-designed, “balanced” urban community, integrating residents of different economic and racial groups. Here they would interact as neighbors and share local amenities such as new schools, a mini-rail transportation system, recreational facilities, and open space. Although the project faltered over conflicts with neighbors and Johnson’s departure from office, the Fort Lincoln New Town project, as it was called, remained a touchstone for Logue when he moved to the UDC.93 Johnson’s interest in the mixed-income New Town idea, moreover, led to the New Communities Act of 1968, which provided modest amounts of federal money that Logue would later tap at the UDC.
Logue began implementing his New Town strategy soon after arriving in New York. Within a year, progress on three New Towns was under way. Although they had much in common with European models, which Logue sent senior staff to visit, the UDC’s New Towns struggled with distinctly American challenges.94 All three were built on unoccupied land, though legally they existed within the jurisdiction of a larger town or city, a fraught relationship given the power of localities in the United States. The UDC’s dealings with New York City over Welfare Island were part of its larger agreement with the city. But in upstate New York, both the town of Amherst, future home of Audubon, and the village of Baldwinsville, future home of Radisson, initially resisted the UDC’s plan, mostly out of fear that such a large population increase would encumber local services and require higher property taxes. Lawsuits were brought, and ultimately dismissed, in both cases, but it remained difficult to convince current residents that these New Towns within their boundaries would be a boon, not a burden. Inhabitants were also anxious about the new residents who would be flooding their semirural, white communities. The Syracuse Herald-Journal editorialized that local residents of Baldwinsville “feel put upon by the plans for 20 percent of the projected rental housing to go to low income individuals and families … some of whom might be clients of the social services department.” The Buffalo Evening News put it even more bluntly. Homeowners, it claimed, feared “moving the ghetto to Amherst.”95
Despite common challenges, each New Town was unique. The New Town of Radisson (at first named Lysander) was located twelve miles northwest of Syracuse, on 2,800 acres (4.5 square miles) purchased from the old Baldwinsville Army Ordnance Depot, which had been used for manufacturing explosives in World War II and then abandoned. As he so often did, Logue brought in a familiar face to plan the project: David Crane, his former director of planning and design in Boston, who had also consulted on the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Fort Lincoln projects and was now practicing and teaching in Philadelphia. Crane’s plan, to be implemented over ten years, called for five thousand units of mixed-type housing, intended to accommodate sixteen thousand to eighteen thousand residents, with a town center featuring offices, retail stores, a medical center, and recreational facilities, including parks, a golf course, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Eight hundred acres were reserved for industrial use, testament to the “jobs first” commitment of the project and intended to provide ten thousand to fifteen thousand jobs. Although Radisson, when completed, did not fulfill all of Crane’s plan, one of its major successes was attracting the Schlitz Brewing Company to build a $100 million regional brewery, employing almost a thousand workers. UDC staff joked about “Schlitz—the beer that made Radisson feasible.” In time, State Farm Insurance also opened a regional headquarters, which employed another thousand.96
The other upstate New York New Town was Audubon, in Amherst, four miles east of Buffalo near where the $650 million, one-thousand-acre SUNY Buffalo campus was under construction. This branch of the state university was expected to eventually enroll tens of thousands of students and increase the area’s overall population by two hundred thousand. To plan Audubon—smaller in area but larger in anticipated residents than Radisson—the UDC hired the British planner Richard Llewelyn-Davies, whose firm was developing the second-generation British New Town of Milton Keynes north of London. With twenty-four hundred acres to work with, Llewelyn-Davies called for nine thousand units to house around twenty-five thousand people of diverse incomes—a third reserved for low-income families and university students and staff—along with shops, offices, light industry, research facilities connected to the university, community recreational facilities, and substantial open space.97
The third and quite different New Town—in that it integrated residential, commercial, civic, and recreational buildings but less so work sites—was Roosevelt Island, the UDC’s largest project statewide.98 Dubbed a “New-Town-in-Town” for its location in the middle of New York City, this community was the latest use of the 147-acre semi-abandoned Welfare Island, which beginning in the 1820s—when the city acquired it from the Blackwell family—had housed institutions mainstream society sought to keep at a distance: prisons, almshouses, workhouses, insane asylums, and chronic disease hospitals. By the late 1960s, only two hospitals remained operative, along with a training facility for the New York Fire Department. The island—stretching for two miles from 50th to 86th Streets in Manhattan and eight hundred feet at its widest—had long attracted development interest, including twice by Robert Moses. That attention grew now that the city struggled with a housing crisis; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), newly under state control, pledged to expand the subway connections between Manhattan and Queens with a new tunnel under Welfare Island; and Logue’s UDC was flush with ambition and capital. On December 23, 1969, New York City gave Logue just the Christmas gift he most wanted: a ninety-nine-year lease to develop Welfare Island. Planning had already begun under the auspices of a Lindsay-appointed citizens group, the Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee, on which Logue sat as the likely developer. Earlier that fall, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled The Island Nobody Knows and its accompanying catalog unveiled a master plan commissioned by the committee from the well-known architect Philip Johnson and his then partner John Burgee.99
Johnson and Burgee’s plan took advantage of Welfare Island’s natural strengths—plentiful waterfront and impressive panoramas of Manhattan and Queens—in proposing a mixed-use, urban-style, car-free community of five thousand apartments to house approximately eighteen thousand residents of diverse economic status. Not far from the bright lights of Manhattan by subway, it offered New Yorkers a quieter, more spacious living environment. Flats ranged in size from efficiencies to four-bedrooms for large families. Johnson and Burgee’s plan called for a town square facing the waterfront with shops in a glass-roofed arcade, a three-hundred-room hotel, offices, restaurants, and a marina. Apartment buildings with retail, schools, a library, community rooms, and fire and police services embedded in them were to be located along a Main Street spine, which was curved for aesthetics and built densely to leave large areas of the island free for parks, playing fields, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Buildings were taller along the street, stepping down in height as they grew closer to the river. U-shaped buildings with grassy courtyards preserved water views for all residents, as did promenades circumnavigating the island to give low- and moderate-income tenants access to the stunning skylines of Manhattan, since their buildings faced grittier Long Island City, Queens. The island was to be served by a new subway stop on a line that traveled between Manhattan and Queens.
Philip Johnson had often been dismissed as an uninspiring establishment modernist, so his Roosevelt Island plan surprised the major architectural critics in New York City.100 Ada Louise Huxtable considered the project the UDC’s “showpiece and star performance,” and Johnson himself “a late-blooming urbanist of notable sensibilities” who had created “a genuine urban environment.” The critic Peter Blake concluded, “I can’t think of a more exciting site for a new town anywhere in this country. If we botch this one, we might as well give up on urban design altogether.” Paul Goldberger praised the island as “exhilarating … Finally … an urban space of real quality in New York … Main Street has the potential of becoming one of the city’s most pleasurable, if briefest, urban experiences. Its bends and curves are just enough to provide interest, but not so much to be cute.” As others chimed in with similar enthusiasm, even Johnson himself acknowledged how much his plan for an intimate, walkable, mixed-use community differed from his former work and from the typical modernist emphasis on isolated towers, superblocks, and car-dependent residences and commerce. He proclaimed wryly, “This is my Jane Jacobs period.”101
Roosevelt Island became Logue’s pride and joy, the ultimate fulfillment of his utopian vision for a socially diverse and architecturally distinctive New Town. He could barely keep away from it during construction. As a New York Times reporter told it, “Logue is to be seen at least once a week plunging in his bearlike way around the site—old corduroys, green Shetland sweater, shirttail hanging out and no hard hat covering his stack of grey hair; slow-speaking, fast-thinking, an interesting mixture of charm and combativeness; fussing about the color of tiles and asking awkward, probing questions of his staff. He is proud of what he is doing on the island.”102
Logue brought to this project a sensibility honed in Boston to value a negotiated cityscape that both conserved the historic and showcased the modern. As Johnson and Burgee said in The Island Nobody Knows: “It is an integral part of the plan for this island that its important landmarks be saved … [so that] any new community that may rise on this island will have tangible symbols of the past upon which to build its future … Wherever possible, we have tried to juxtapose the old and the new—historic landmarks and new housing.”103 Although some original island buildings were in fact lost, the Gothic-style Chapel of the Good Shepherd (1889) became a meeting space and interfaith religious home; the restored clapboard Blackwell House (1796) served as a community center for small social events; the James Renwick–designed lighthouse (1876), on the northernmost tip of the island, was repaired; the Strecker Memorial Laboratory (1892) was adapted by the MTA as a power-conversion center for the subway; and the Octagonal Tower (1840s), once the entrance to the country’s first municipal lunatic asylum, was integrated into a new apartment building.104
The decision to rename Welfare Island for the former New York governor and later president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who surprisingly had no other major monument in the state, similarly embedded the new project in the state’s past and particularly in the nation’s history of progressive government. Logue commissioned the prominent modernist architect—and fellow Roosevelt admirer—Louis I. Kahn to design an FDR memorial for the southern tip of the island in 1972. It was long delayed by an unfortunate series of events. Kahn flouted the project’s $4 million budget (to Logue’s great annoyance) and then died suddenly in 1974. A search followed for a colleague to finish the drawings. Mitchell Giurgola Architects agreed, but their work was further postponed by a shortage of funds and litigation brought by foundation donors over public crediting. The Four Freedoms Park finally opened in 2012. One of Kahn’s last designs, it is a four-acre memorial park consisting of a garden and a roofless roomlike space enclosing a sculpted Franklin Roosevelt.105
Roosevelt Island’s nod to the past was well matched by its embrace of futuristic, environmentally friendly new technology. A Swedish-inspired automated vacuum sanitation system (known as AVAC) whisked all domestic trash through giant pneumatic vacuum tubes buried under the street to a central refuse disposal site for compacting. Free, quiet, nonpolluting, battery-powered electric minibuses transported residents around the car-free island to and from the central thousand-car Motorgate garage, near the only bridge access, from Queens. This complimentary public transit and plentiful pedestrian pathways eliminated any social distinctions based on automobile ownership, putting all residents on an equal footing. When it became clear that the subway would be delayed beyond the opening of the first apartments (it didn’t actually operate until 1989), Logue’s team came up with the clever idea of installing a gondola-style aerial tramway—which soon became the island’s icon—from there to Manhattan’s East 60th Street, its first use in an urban environment worldwide. This $7 million innovation created a 3,100-foot-long, three-and-a-half-minute soaring ride.
As with the other UDC New Towns, Roosevelt Island as built did not fully realize its visionary plan. Some found the architecture too forbidding, constructed as it was in the austere concrete and brick typical of the 1960s and 1970s, not unlike the brutalist buildings of Boston’s Government Center. Completion was also slow. By the end of 1978, three years after the UDC’s downfall, only 2,139 of the anticipated 5,000 dwelling units were available, about half of them low- and moderate-income units built with Section 236 funds, with three hundred of those offering additional rent supplements. The other half consisted of 761 middle-income units with Mitchell-Lama state funding and 375 upper-middle-income cooperative apartments. Five schools with a total capacity of 850 children in grades kindergarten through ninth were open, falling short of Logue’s goal of thirteen. Nonetheless, they were operating, which Logue later considered “one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life.” And although the marina was never built and the lack of a subway limited retail and offices, by late 1978, the 5,500 Roosevelt Island residents had a U.S. post office, bank, supermarket, drugstore, stationery and liquor stores, an Italian restaurant, and a delicatessen. The two remaining hospitals merged to become Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility, with room for almost two thousand patients and long-term-care residents.106
Despite its incompleteness, Roosevelt Island in name, conception, and planned memorial paid homage to the ideal of Roosevelt’s New Deal and its successor, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, that government could help improve lives and make the nation more just. Ironically, however, just as Roosevelt Island underwent construction, President Nixon began unraveling the federal programs needed to realize it. Cuts in funding necessitated compromises in the Johnson-Burgee plan, which had already miscalculated in providing for only four thousand rather than the five thousand units of housing needed to balance the books.107 To ensure that the project’s finances still worked out despite this mistake, the height of the buildings along narrow Main Street was increased, which gave it a more cavernous feel, and a fourth side was added to some apartment courtyards along the river, blocking views. Amenities like air-conditioning were also scaled back in the lower-income housing, which widened the gulf in accommodations between social classes.
Logue complained bitterly about the impact of the Nixon White House’s urban policies on Roosevelt Island in June 1973: “I think they are trying to make clear, in a variety of ways, that the idea of government as a solver of social problems is an idea that has been around long enough … This Administration does not really feel that the users of low and moderate income housing are a part of its constituency.”108 Logue’s New Town utopia on the East River may have pioneered a new model of an urban neighborhood—being both a part of and apart from a great city—but its survival as originally conceived faced mounting challenges.
Logue looked to New Towns to achieve his long-standing ambition of creating communities integrated along the lines of income, age, and race. Over the years, Logue had become convinced that a mix of residents was the key to ensuring more stable and better-resourced urban communities. Efforts to implement this goal in previous redevelopment efforts, however, had gotten Logue into trouble. Too often, integrating centrally located, predominantly low-income black communities like Dixwell in New Haven or the South End in Boston had meant that more white, middle-class residents moved in, understandably antagonizing current inhabitants. In contrast, Logue hoped, constructing new socially mixed communities from scratch would achieve greater residential diversity without displacement or gentrification. As he wrote for the large readership of the popular Saturday Review magazine, the danger of “destructive confrontations with opponents already on the turf” would thus be much diminished, “since all the occupants of the new community are, so to speak, volunteers,” meaning “no outside force is imposing a change in the character of an already existing community.” Logue further dismissed his critics with, “And if they don’t like our mix, well don’t bother to come.”109
Roosevelt Island held the greatest promise. Describing it during construction in characteristically immodest, even grandiose, terms, Logue told an interviewer, “It is perhaps our last chance to demonstrate that people of different incomes, races, and ethnic origins can live together … and that they can send their children to the same public schools, and that two things are possible—racial and economic integration and the public schools can be a magnet.”110 The original plan had called for day care centers and mini-schools to be scattered throughout the various residential buildings, each containing only a few grades to encourage family-teacher interaction and to draw children of different incomes and races together. As he had in his Boston work, Logue put faith in schooling to create more socially integrated New York communities.
After a great deal of internal discussion and debate, the UDC decided on its ideal social mix for residential projects, an allocation formula of 70-20-10: 70 percent subsidized moderate and middle income, 20 percent low income, and 10 percent elderly, who usually were also low-income. Their rationale was to ensure that only about a third of the residents were at the lowest end of the income scale while the other two thirds fell at different points along the spectrum. All needed assistance, but in differing amounts. Eligibility requirements for the various categories were left to local housing authorities to set, with federal monitoring.111
Primarily focused on filling the gap in affordable housing, the UDC built only a very small number of market-rate units. Those were in the most desirable locations, such as on Roosevelt Island, where spectacular vistas of the Manhattan skyline made it possible to stretch the income span further. Everywhere the UDC worked, it promoted some version of socially and economically heterogeneous residential communities for what it argued was broad mutual benefit. As Logue explained the philosophy in a UDC prospectus in July 1972, although “our lowest income families have the greatest need for housing, in today’s market an acute need also exists for families with moderate and middle incomes.” Moreover, “It is our view, based on long American experience, that developments which cater exclusively to low-income families are undesirable. They will likely produce large-scale, institutionalized, apartheid projects of questionable value either to society as a whole or to the low-income families so housed.”112
Creating diverse communities was easier said than done, however. Roosevelt Island, for example, was plagued by a major dispute over how best to sequence the construction and rental of low-income versus middle-income units. Logue had hired an old American Veterans Committee pal from Yale, Adam Yarmolinsky, as executive director of the Welfare Island Development Corporation, the UDC subsidiary established to oversee the project. Yarmolinsky brought little experience with urban development, but had impeccable liberal credentials. Logue also believed that he had gained administrative and technological know-how from having spent the last several years working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, most recently for the Department of Defense under secretary Robert McNamara, where he had pushed for the desegregation of military bases. Yarmolinsky had worked as well with Sargent Shriver on drafting LBJ’s signature anti-poverty programs, until anti-communist smears by southern congressmen whose support Johnson sought booted him out.113 Once in place overseeing Roosevelt Island, Yarmolinsky hired as his construction consultant an experienced developer in New York City, Richard Ravitch, whose family-owned HRH Construction was already well established as a builder of affordable housing. Ravitch insisted that the only way to make Roosevelt Island succeed financially was to construct upper-income housing first and recruit a satellite branch of a prestigious New York private school like Dalton. Otherwise, he argued, upper-income residents would resist moving into a low-income community and enrolling their children in public school.
Logue minced few words when he angrily rejected Ravitch’s approach and dismissed him as a consultant, insisting, “Dick, this is my island, not your island. I’m sorry this had to come to that, but as far as I’m concerned one of my basic goals in this project is to prove that I can get people in that income level to go to these public schools, and for you to deny that destroys one of the basic reasons for my wanting to do this project.” In forcing out Ravitch for attacking “the heart of my social engineering,” Logue took a political risk that would later contribute to the UDC’s and Logue’s own downfall when Ravitch took his revenge. Soon after the departure of Ravitch, Logue fired Yarmolinsky as well, on the ostensible grounds that he was “junketing off,” more focused on advancing his career in international affairs than on developing Roosevelt Island, and for insulting their boss, Governor Rockefeller, by publicly endorsing his opponent, Arthur Goldberg, in the 1970 gubernatorial race. With his opponents out of the way, Logue went forward with his plan to start with the subsidized buildings, convinced that if the well-to-do arrived first they would never permit the low-income renters to follow. Robert Litke, Logue’s trusted lieutenant back to their Boston days, took over management of the project, resigned to having a deeply invested and sometimes intrusive Logue “looking over his shoulder,… driv[ing] him crazy,” Logue only half joked.114
On Roosevelt Island, Logue broadened his definition of desirable diversity to include people with disabilities. This breakthrough, twenty years before passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, was likely inspired by the presence of patients in the island’s long-term-care hospitals who had remained there only because they couldn’t otherwise get around the city. The UDC not only built apartments for the disabled but also made their mobility around and off this pedestrian-oriented island possible with accessible transportation. Logue explained that he had learned a lot about the challenges of managing in a wheelchair from his former boss, the Boston mayor John Collins.115
Logue’s notion of a diverse community included fostering “a cross-section of age groups … where the elderly are not isolated from the young.”116 Incorporating the elderly into UDC projects also became a strategy for expanding the low-income population to a third without burdening local schools and antagonizing middle-class residents. Roosevelt Island’s Eastwood building, for instance, had low- and moderate-income units, including specially equipped apartments for the elderly and a senior citizens’ center.117 Although mixing elderly tenants with families at first seemed to UDC planners an uncontroversial benefit to both groups, it turned out to be problematic in some locations. In Coney Island, “the old people were largely Jewish and the young people were largely black and the kids harassed the bejesus out of the elderly Jews,” recounted Logue. The UDC ultimately decided they had to separate these populations in different buildings.118
Although the UDC paid most attention to income and age diversity, it carefully considered race as well, to a more explicit extent than is common today in an era of greater caution about racial quotas since the landmark Regents of the University of California v. Bakke Supreme Court decision of 1978. According to Louis Loewenstein’s assessment: “The UDC also sought to establish guidelines to preclude a project’s becoming identified with only one race or color. As a consequence of the policy, UDC attempted to have about 70 percent of each project rented to whites in the belief that if the figures were less, then it would be exceedingly difficult to rent units to white families and, therefore, the projects would quickly rent to minorities which would fill them completely. UDC was not able to adhere to either the racial or financial guidelines in every instance and it was criticized whenever it deviated from the policy.” Roosevelt Island did, in fact, manage to meet this goal of 30 percent minorities.119 Worried that its search for racial balance might be misunderstood as a lack of commitment to minorities, the UDC sought to publicly associate its projects with high-profile black celebrities such as jazz musician Lionel Hampton and baseball star Jackie Robinson, who was now a developer. Hampton, for example, not only lent his name and fame to a UDC apartment complex in Harlem; he willingly participated in a parade up 8th Avenue celebrating the ribbon cutting.120
But the UDC policy of creating racially integrated communities was not always welcomed. In minority neighborhoods, Logue encountered the same kind of criticism as he had in Boston: that not enough housing was going to needy low-income residents of color. So, for example, the dedication of the Cathedral Parkway Houses in Harlem in 1972 attracted a picket line of neighborhood residents wielding signs reading “Logue Must Go” and “Down with Rockefeller” to protest that an inadequate number of units had been reserved for local people who had been removed from urban renewal areas.121 Nor did whites always cooperate. When the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark idealistically tried to create a racially integrated UDC project at Schomburg Plaza at the southern edge of Harlem, they could not find enough low- and moderate-income whites willing to move in and were forced to settle for balancing African American and Puerto Rican tenants.122
The UDC’s dedication to social mixing could also exacerbate racial tensions. A notorious case was Twin Parks in the Bronx, where a cluster of architecturally distinguished buildings by major designers (Richard Meier, James Stewart Polshek, Giovanni Pasanella, and Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen) became the site of racial strife so intense that tenants hesitated to move in despite their desire for better housing. This UDC project of more than two thousand apartments aimed to attract low- and moderate-income residents—divided, it was hoped, into a third each of whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans—to a neutral oasis sitting on the boundary between Italian and black neighborhoods. Instead, open central plazas designed to encourage interaction became war zones for teenage gangs, forcing the UDC to install gates and other physical barriers to separate groups from one another and to make other residents feel more secure. By mid-1973, Logue opted for simply filling the vacancies rather than trying to socially integrate Twin Parks, and he became much more wary of including large public spaces in future housing designs.123
Not surprisingly, the social engineering required to integrate UDC projects like New Towns by income and race offended Jane Jacobs and her followers, even when they sympathized with Logue’s goal. Jacobs explained her critique this way: “You take a clean slate and you make a new world. That’s basically artificial. There is no new world you can make without the old world … The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.”124 Counterbalancing Jacobs, however, was enthusiasm from one of the era’s most prominent anthropologists, Margaret Mead. In an epilogue that Mead wrote to a 1976 book on New Towns, she argued, “New Towns are necessary to a society that has lost its way.” Lamenting segregated suburbs, disrupted old neighborhoods, and other forms of social isolation, she considered New Towns a welcome corrective, “a kind of light that beckons us ahead … that can tell us how to … bring a slum to life, how to turn a suburb from a bedroom town where people are alienated and separated from their neighbors into a place where people work and meet and know each other.”125
Despite these many challenges, the UDC nevertheless exceeded its goals for diversifying communities. By 1975, 33 percent of UDC residents statewide were low income and 42 percent were minority.126 For many residents of a place like Roosevelt Island—white and nonwhite—this social mix was part of the attraction. The journalist Mark Lamster recalled visiting his uncle, “a liberal among liberals [who] was one of the first to move in. He loved it there, as did my aunt. I think they felt they were part of a new and more egalitarian society.”127 And when the feedback was less favorable, Logue and his idealistic, determined staff learned to take the hits in stride. Concluded Logue, “If you think you are going to be warmly welcomed and enthusiastically supported by all elements of the community which you are seeking to change, don’t bother. That is not how it works.”128
Logue recognized the limitations in what the UDC could do to counter the inequities of American society. For one thing, HUD rules required that units with different modes of financing be put in separate buildings. But Logue didn’t disagree. He told an interviewer when discussing Roosevelt Island, “To an extent I believe you can mix moderate and low income families, but the price of housing is such that you can’t mix low income and middle income in the same building because I, for one, can’t justify giving lower income families the same quality of accommodations that people get who pay two or three times as much for it. On the other hand, you can’t work it the other way. You can’t get the upper income families, who have the widest range of housing choices, to take less than they otherwise deserve.”129 Faced with these obstacles, Logue believed that well-designed and commonly shared neighborhood schools and public spaces, like sidewalks, parks, libraries, transit, and the like, would have to do much of the work. In its physical planning, as with its financing structure, the UDC had to content itself with pushing a socially liberal agenda within the constraints of the capitalist marketplace.
“Negro removal” had long been a major criticism of urban renewal and one that Logue was particularly sensitive to. In an interview in 1985, he acknowledged honestly that “many black leaders believe that urban renewal was primarily ‘Negro removal,’ and sometimes it was.”130 Logue hoped that the UDC would act and be perceived differently. After all, it was born in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and promoted by its midwives, Rockefeller and Logue, as an innovative way to redress racial and class disparities. In explaining why he had accepted the UDC job, in fact, Logue pointed to the Kerner Commission Report, released in late February 1968 while he was in negotiations with Rockefeller. The report had motivated him to “get involved again in solving various urban problems,” he told a journalist, continuing, “New concepts must be tried, instead of the same old approaches snarled in red tape as are most of the federal urban-aid programs.”131
Despite Logue’s conviction that the UDC had a key role to play in improving New York State’s troubled racial landscape—both material and attitudinal—figuring out how to navigate this politically charged terrain was not easy. Black communities everywhere in the state, but particularly in the capital of black America, Harlem, were the opposite of the blank slate Logue had sought with his New Towns. Not only were the late 1960s a time when urban residents were encouraged to participate actively—and often did combatively—in shaping federal programs like Model Cities or to weigh in on urban renewal schemes through now-mandatory community advisory committees, but African American neighborhoods like Harlem were becoming politicized in another way. Younger, more militant activists were challenging the integrationist black political elite, along with the white power structure, by calling for Black Power and community control. Harlem in fact had been the site of the first struggle for community control of New York City’s schools two years before the more infamous months-long confrontation in 1968 between the community board of Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville and the United Federation of Teachers. In spring 1968, tensions exploded in Harlem with an angry response to King’s assassination and protests over Columbia’s encroachment into city-owned Morningside Park to build a new gymnasium. The growing polarization of racial politics in the late 1960s forced Logue, who in Boston had been more comfortable with the established black middle class of Washington Park than with Roxbury’s radicals, to revisit his expectation that the UDC could promote a liberal, integrationist civil rights agenda.
Tensions would explode dramatically in Harlem during 1969.132 Three years earlier, the Urban League president Whitney Young had proposed that Governor Rockefeller locate the new World Trade Center, where all state offices in New York City were to be consolidated, in Harlem. Though the state declined to give up the downtown site—key to its ambitions for Lower Manhattan—pressure from Young and other Harlem leaders won the concession of a smaller building for state offices uptown. In time, officials chose 125th Street and 7th Avenue for a combined office tower and community cultural center. The project was welcomed by establishment interests like Harlem’s major newspaper, The Amsterdam News, which proclaimed the State Office Building “the herald of Harlem’s economic revival.”133 Clearing of the site began during the summer of 1967, with efforts made to hire black firms for everything from design to demolition. When it came to approving the construction budget, however, the state legislature dragged its feet, appropriating funding for the twenty-three-story office building only under pressure in 1969 and withholding it from the community building. The state’s abandonment of the locally oriented part of the project not only was an affront but also played into the political conflicts raging within Harlem.
Opponents calling themselves the Harlem Committee for Self-Defense and the Ad Hoc Committee for a Better Harlem decried the project as an act of colonization by exploitative outside interests. They charged that the building neither reflected a community decision-making process nor responded to what the neighborhood actually needed, which they identified as a high school, low-income housing, and a day care center. Just as construction was about to begin in July 1969, protesters, now united as the Harlem Community Coalition, shut down the project, establishing a tent city on the cleared lot—which they labeled “Reclamation Site #1,” a warning of more to come—in an act of defiance against the state as well as the many establishment leaders who still backed the State Office Building as a valuable public investment in Harlem. The squatters also allied with a community design group known as the Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem, which had opposed Lindsay’s hiring of Logue back in 1966. Together, they developed a more neighborhood-oriented alternative to the state project, now dubbed the “SOB.” Faced with the occupation of the site, Rockefeller called a halt to construction. After three months of standoff and with the Harlem community’s leadership deeply divided, Rockefeller finally decided in September 1969 that there was enough support to go forward and he sent in police to oust the protesters.
Meanwhile, Logue had offered the governor his and the UDC’s services to mediate the dispute and oversee the construction of a community-oriented structure next to the State Office Building, which he unsubtly named the Harlem State Service Center to emphasize its potential contributions to the neighborhood.134 For months, Logue and a few widely trusted local leaders met privately with the various sides in a sincere search for a consensus or at least a compromise. Highlighting the intractability of this highly factionalized conflict, The New York Times’s Ada Louise Huxtable called the crisis “Rockefeller’s Vietnam” and compared Logue’s negotiations to the Paris peace talks, which were going on—unproductively—at the same time.135 Resolution proved as difficult in Harlem as in Paris. No broad-based agreement was ever reached, and Logue’s UDC gained little of the local credibility it had hoped for. By the time the State Office Building opened in 1974, however, militance had receded, and the project was widely praised for at least showcasing the work of African Americans in many professions.
Logue’s longer-term answer to the challenge raised by the State Office Building controversy was to propose in December 1969 the creation of a new subsidiary of the UDC, not unlike what existed for Welfare Island, to provide for more community self-determination in the redevelopment of Harlem. The protesters had sent a blunt message when they posted a sign at their occupied site: “Stop the colonizer … Don’t let Harlem be invaded.”136 But in the months that followed, Logue found it difficult if not impossible to implement the kind of negotiations with neighborhoods that he had become accustomed to in Boston, because he could not identify a partner to speak for all parts of the community. He had hoped that the Harlem Urban Development Corporation (HUDC) would become that representative group, but it soon became clear that the board and top staff he recruited—individuals he thought could both work with the UDC and be broadly accepted in Harlem—gave much greater voice to the business, professional, political, and church leaders who had supported the State Office Building than to their opponents. They were establishment figures. The seasoned civil rights leader John “Jack” E. Wood, Jr., formerly the director of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing and not from Harlem, became president and chief executive officer; Percy E. Sutton, a civil rights activist and the first African American to serve as Manhattan borough president, was named honorary chair; and Judge Herbert Evans, director of the Freedom National Bank, took on the leadership of the thirty-one-member board.137 Confronted with a fractious political landscape and convinced that he had given a fair chance to critics calling for more participatory democracy, Logue grew exasperated and fell back on the pluralist democrats who represented traditionally organized interests in the community.
Over the years, the HUDC racked up a mixed record. On the positive side, it did give local black leaders an unprecedented degree of control over state redevelopment in Harlem. And it gave the UDC a partner on the ground to work with in a politically fragmented community starved for resources. By the end of 1974, the HUDC had overseen UDC investments of $150 million in nine residential projects delivering more than three thousand dwelling units and a fourteen-hundred-seat elementary school.138 On the other hand, the HUDC hardly challenged mainstream planning and development. Despite Logue’s encouragement, he couldn’t even get his subsidiary to take the lead on planning a community facility for the State Office Building site. And in its worst moments, particularly in the years after the UDC collapsed and the HUDC continued to exist as an autonomous community development corporation, it made reckless decisions and often operated as a patronage machine for board members pursuing their own self-interest, taking advantage of HUDC’s access to public and private investment dollars.139
The UDC’s effort to mount a robust affirmative action program proved less controversial and brought more acclaim than the Harlem project. Not only did it fit better with Logue’s integrationist orientation, but he could control it fully through his power as UDC president rather than having to negotiate with a politically complex set of actors, as in Harlem. Governor Rockefeller had sent a strong message that New York State was committed to affirmative action, but Logue—more than most agency heads—took that charge to heart. Of the UDC’s 500 employees, 23 percent were minority, including 15 percent of the 330 professional and technical staffers.140 As early as 1970, nine of the UDC’s fifty-four projects had been designed by minority architects, although only 1 percent of New York State’s architects were black or Puerto Rican.141 By 1973, 16 percent of the UDC’s total construction contracts, worth more than $55.5 million, had gone to minority builders. The rate was much higher in New York City, where more firms were located.142 That same year, in a detailed discussion of affirmative action, which had become a regular feature of the UDC’s annual reports, Logue claimed that 26 percent of construction workers on projects statewide were minorities.143
At the same time as he trumpeted these successes, Logue lamented the persistent obstacles to minority entrance into the skilled trades. The UDC did what it could to work around discriminatory labor unions, with the goal of having at least the same percentage of minority workers on a project as were present in the local municipality. In the case of the State Office Building, for example, 60 percent of the workforce was black or other minority, along with the architects, the civil engineering firm, one of the construction companies, an electrical subcontractor, and the construction superintendent, The Amsterdam News proudly reported.144 To reach that number of construction workers, training was provided on the job. This wasn’t unusual. The UDC contracted with a minority-run operation called the Recruitment and Training Program (R-T-P, formerly the Workers Defense League) to offer technical assistance and job counseling to minority workers on many project sites and with the Contractors’ Training and Development Office to help minority-owned contracting firms acquire skills including bookkeeping, writing proposals, and securing bank loans, all required when working with a state agency like the UDC.145
That Logue made affirmative action a UDC priority was clear in his instructions to Donald Cogsville, the UDC’s African American affirmative action officer. “I want you to go out and look at those sites and make a judgment about whether there are enough minorities on these jobs. If there aren’t, complain … tell him you’ll be back in four weeks more and if you don’t see improvement, the contractor’s not going to get paid.”146 Cogsville indeed credited the agency’s well-recognized success with affirmative action to having “a guy at the head of the organization who says ‘God damn, it’s going to be done,’ and then gives the freedom to do whatever is necessary to get things done.”147 Other developers and even a black activist in fact complained that the UDC was monopolizing the state’s very small number of minority subcontractors and black construction workers. One white-owned electrical company, Public Improvement Inc., brought a suit against the UDC, claiming that an electrical contract went to a higher bidder who was a minority.148 Aggressively implementing affirmative action practices on UDC sites, much like setting quotas to ensure diversity in residential projects, was the kind of progressive racial policy that suited Logue’s top-down management style. He found much harder the messy negotiations and uncertain outcomes that accompanied a more participatory decision-making process demanded by challengers in Harlem, as had their counterparts in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven and Boston’s Lower Roxbury.
During Logue’s time in New Haven and Boston, architects had benefited greatly from the federal government’s investment in urban renewal. Now, with the visibility and resources of the UDC at his disposal, Logue felt he had an even greater opportunity to engage architects in design innovation. At the top of his list stood finding viable alternatives to the high-rise public housing that for years he had dismissed as dehumanizing and ghettoizing. Although he estimated that it might cost 5 to 10 percent more to hire better architects to do good design, Logue said, “I thought it was worth it. And when you look at the public housing that Bob Moses built as against the parks he built, for example, it’s outrageous … He set a [disastrous] national model.”149 Quality design, Logue was confident, could also help “remove the stigma attached to housing built under public assistance programs.”150
The architect Werner Seligmann—architecture professor at Cornell and Harvard in the era of the UDC, later dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, and the designer of a prominent, moderate-income UDC project, Elm Street Housing, in Ithaca—described the dire situation in 1974: “Less than 10 years ago most schools of architecture considered the topic of housing hardly worthy of investigation … This lack of concern explains the few significant housing innovations and dearth of housing models in the United States.” Seligmann went on to argue that “improvement of housing can only be accomplished by a persistent and thoroughly informed effort,” and he commended the UDC for being “remarkable in giving opportunities to talented and responsive architects and in encouraging their contribution.” While Seligmann acknowledged that “this has not been a bed of roses for either the UDC or the architects,” he concluded that “the results speak for themselves: each project addresses a particular set of issues, and collectively they produce a backlog of solutions and models to build on.”151 Seligmann’s endorsement of the UDC’s housing program drew attention to one of its chief features: developing prototypes in housing design and construction for broader adoption.
The first challenge Logue faced in creating prototypes of subsidized housing that were attractive, livable, and economical was identifying architects to design them. He often lamented that “if you let architects alone they will make a statement,” rather than address the social concerns he felt were so crucial. Logue pursued a number of other goals as well. He wanted a balance of high-profile architects and young up-and-coming talent. Conveniently, soon after the UDC launched, Philip Johnson invited Logue and some of his top staff to a party he threw at his glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut, to introduce them to the young crowd of architects in New York.152 Over time Logue’s roster came to include an eclectic mix of the Architects Collaborative; Max Bond; Davis, Brody & Associates; Kenneth Frampton; Ulrich Franzen; Gwathmey Siegel; Lawrence Halprin; Philip Johnson; Dan Kiley; Richard Meier; James Stewart Polshek; Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen; and Edward Durell Stone, among many others. Having a large stable of architects was important if the UDC was to avoid a cookie-cutter look to its buildings and any resemblance to typical public housing.153
Logue valued architects who had already proved themselves good partners, which brought him back time and again to some of the same designers. John Johansen and Paul Rudolph were veterans of New Haven, while numerous architects had helped in Boston (in such numbers that I. M. Pei and his partner Harry Cobb felt shut out by “so many Boston architects!”): Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, Carl Koch, Josep Lluís Sert, Chloethiel Woodard Smith, Don Stull, and Ben Thompson, among others.154 McKinnell recalled that every working architect was well aware of the “big, big schemes” of this “incredible powerhouse” that was the UDC, though to keep getting work you had to prove that you were “an architect with a social conscience.”155 Rolf Ohlhausen concurred that membership in organizations like Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility was a ticket to the UDC.156 But even the best architects, the UDC felt, required coaching from the agency’s inside design team. Tony Pangaro, who worked closely with the UDC’s chief architect, Ted Liebman, recalled the challenge of collaborating with “all of these fancy architects that Ed decided he wanted to hire,” when few of them “had ever done a shred of housing in their lives.”157
Relations between the UDC and its architects were not always easy. When the UDC told John Johansen that his buildings on Roosevelt Island were designed with too many entrances, complicating security and increasing operating expenses, Johansen threatened to walk off the job.158 Sert and his partner Huson Jackson complained that the UDC’s fees, dictated by HUD guidelines, were frustratingly low.159 When James Stewart Polshek specified alternating black and white stripes on the facade of his Twin Parks building in the Bronx, Logue wrote in anger that they would give it “the design distinction of the Bronx Hall of Detention” and demonstrated “the failure of a designer to deliver what was promised and accepted.”160 Charles Hoyt, writing in the Architectural Record in 1975, complained that Logue’s interventions “infringed upon architects’ designs.”161 Many of these conflicts were common to the frequently fraught architect-client relationship. But often the problems stemmed from unique pressures the UDC exerted on architects to keep quality high, budgets low, and the pace fast, while still demonstrating innovation in design and materials.162
In the search for ideal prototypes, the UDC “spent a lot of time … analyzing what had already been built, figuring out where it succeeded and where it was not fulfilling the goal,” Pangaro remembered. Their early efforts became “guidelines for future projects, where we had a great deal more control over what the architect was producing than in the first round.”163 Some improvements were as simple as incorporating common spaces—meeting rooms, medical services, schools, senior centers, and day care—into housing to enhance community vitality.164 But often the goal was more ambitious, such as developing a new approach to elderly housing.165 The UDC surely benefited from its controversial power to ignore the local building codes that often blocked housing innovation. Sert was able to use skip-stop elevators in the low-income Eastview on Roosevelt Island, for example, only because the UDC overrode the city’s building code. With skip-stop, the elevator stopped only on every third floor, permitting the apartments above and below to run as “floor-throughs” with windows at each end providing natural cross-ventilation. Private corridors on the elevator floor and internal staircases leading up and down to the apartments on the other two floors provided residents with unusual amounts of privacy.166
In its effort to keep improving the quality of its housing, the UDC in 1972 introduced an unusual process for gaining feedback: requiring UDC staff as well as architects to live in the buildings with their families for one or two weeks as projects neared completion. Insights gained from “live-ins” complemented surveys of residents as well as an in-depth study of tenant satisfaction in eight projects that the UDC commissioned in 1973 from the Cornell sociologist Franklin D. Becker. “Design aids” gathered through all these evaluation tools were then compiled into a set of “livability criteria,” arranged in a loose-leaf notebook handed to each architect at the outset of a new project.167 The UDC also used the evidence behind these design aids to bolster its requests to the FHA and HUD to revise standards when existing ones, such as for room sizes and amenities, proved overly stringent.168
Logue believed strongly that those planning housing for others should experience it for themselves. Design changes inspired by the architects’ live-ins included adding more telephone booths to building lobbies, providing better screening between residences and streets, improving noise insulation between apartments, and making bedrooms larger. Liebman remembered asking his secretary to order the kind of bedroom set that she would choose for her own home—“not the modern stuff.” Lo and behold, the headboards didn’t fit. Ed and Margaret set an example by living in three projects—in the Bronx, Coney Island, and Yonkers. After one of these stays, Margaret argued for a larger second bedroom and a pass-through between the kitchen and living room.169 Live-ins and other evaluation mechanisms did not cure all the problems with UDC projects. Complaints remained, but the UDC tried to balance the often-competing demands of architects, tenants, budget watchers, and the Feds.
The UDC’s prototypes frequently used new technology to make housing construction easier, quicker, and cheaper. Applying the methods of mass production to creating “industrial housing” had long been a dream of prominent modernists including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Jean Prouvé, R. Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, Moshe Safdie, and Paul Rudolph. But supply and demand for the concept had been weak in the United States, except for occasional bursts like the short-lived Lustron homes experiment immediately after World War II.170 Logue nonetheless remained intrigued, particularly in efforts to shift prefab production from single-family houses to multi-family dwellings. In Boston, he had worked with Carl Koch, a pioneer anointed by Progressive Architecture as “the Grandfather of Prefab,” to utilize precast wall panels and long-span, prestressed floor planks in Roxbury’s Academy Homes.171
In New York State, technological innovation became fundamental to the UDC’s agenda. The UDC even launched its own state-level Operation Breakthrough, thereby cashing in on the HUD secretary George Romney’s pet project launched in May 1969. A former American Motors Corporation executive, Romney, too, was eager to apply state-of-the-art mass production methods to a recalcitrant housing industry.172 A columnist for Harper’s expressed cautious optimism a year into the UDC’s existence that Logue had “started to lay the groundwork for a revolution in the building industry, notoriously the most backward of industries,… still us[ing] handicraft methods essentially unchanged since the time of the Pharaohs, and … still organized (if one can use that word) in thousands of small, inefficient firms.”173
The UDC established the Housing Technology Office in its headquarters in New York City with a mission to expand the use of industrialized methods. The UDC also developed a factory to produce precast concrete components such as hollow-core floor slabs, load-bearing and non-load-bearing wall panels, and stairs, landings, and balconies. Other technological experiments, in addition to the AVAC refuse system on Roosevelt Island, included various kinds of modular construction; high-bond mortar to allow pre-assembly of brick walls; plumbing improvements such as single-stack plumbing systems to avoid vent piping, low-flow fixtures that reduced water consumption, and premade “plumbing walls” complete with all fittings and pipes; spray-on painting; solar-power systems; and even the application to housing of electrical wiring panels developed by NASA.174 In publicizing their Roosevelt Island work, Johansen and his partner Ashok Bhavnani boasted about using, for the first time in the United States, a three-inch extruded cement-asbestos panel erected from within the building that, they claimed, required one-tenth of the labor force to erect than conventional brick and block, needed no scaffolding, and came very cheap.175
But despite Logue and his staff’s enthusiasm for technical innovation, there were many obstacles to achieving it, including finding manufacturers that could stay in business with a limited volume of orders and the resistance of contractors and building trades unions to changes that might undermine their long-established practices.176 It also proved time-consuming and expensive to develop these new approaches, which was disappointing, given that a major motive for them was to combat the spiraling costs of construction. Logue even became exasperated with his friend Paul Rudolph when Rudolph’s effort to use prefabricated twelve-by-sixty-foot modular units in his Buffalo waterfront housing led to long delays: “My report on your first design for Phase III Buffalo Waterfront is that it will win a P.A. [Progressive Architecture] award and that is about it. After the length of time you have been working on this job, it seems to me that we ought to be able to get down to the real world without a waste of time, money, and your own unique talents.”177 These frustrations aside, Logue would remain committed to the holy grail of industrializing housing construction into his next job in the South Bronx during the 1980s.
Probably the most important prototype that the UDC undertook was aimed at developing an alternative to the much-maligned high-rise public housing. In 1973, the UDC’s own inside designers Liebman and Pangaro joined Michael Kirkland, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Eisenman, Arthur Baker, Lee Taliaferro, and Peter Wolf of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), a recently founded nonprofit organization of theoretically inclined young New York architects, to invent a new kind of low-income housing: “low-rise, high-density.” Together they designed Marcus Garvey Park Village, a 626-unit project of four-story, four-unit buildings spread across six devastated city blocks in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn, part of a larger Model Cities area. Resembling traditional rowhouses in scale but more modern aesthetically, they achieved the same density of fifty-five units per acre as a high-rise tower, but without the drawbacks. The units, intended particularly for families, featured mostly two- and three-bedroom (with fewer one-, four-, or five-bedroom) duplex apartments, some facing the street and others a public mews, with each household having its own private stoop, entrance, and outdoor space.
The designers were influenced by the architect and planner Oscar Newman’s recently published book Defensible Space (1972), which attributed the high crime rate in housing projects to residents’ feeling that they had little control over, or personal responsibility for, the space. In response, Marcus Garvey’s designers strove for greater clarity in distinguishing private, semi-private, semi-public, and public spaces to make tenants feel more secure as families and more invested as community members. The high density on this 2.5-acre site was achieved by eliminating the large setbacks from the street common in public housing towers, instead respecting the urban grid and increasing the number of bedrooms per unit. A second version of the prototype was planned for the more suburban location of Fox Hills, Staten Island, but was never built. Nor were the seven other low-rise, high-density projects on the UDC’s docket when it collapsed.
It was important to Logue not simply to build prototypes like Marcus Garvey, but also to draw public and professional attention to them. One of the reasons he chose the IAUS as a partner was that he knew its architects had close connections with Arthur Drexler, director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Just as Logue hoped, on the day of the ground breaking for Marcus Garvey—June 11, 1973—an exhibition showcasing the project opened at MoMA, titled “Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives,” with an accompanying catalog. From MoMA it traveled to the U.S. embassy in London.178 Opinions varied on Marcus Garvey Park Village. Upon its completion, eager tenants flocked to move in, delighted at the unique design features, despite the elimination of some due to budget; chain-link fences had replaced walls between gardens, and the promised day care was never built. Over time, some tenant enthusiasm dimmed in response to management’s neglect of community spaces, poor maintenance, and security problems like drug dealing, which sadly thrived in the off-street areas originally intended for protected gathering and play. But an observer who decades later visited the village noted that residents still were “pretty amazed … at the quality of the housing they were living in,” particularly that as relatively poor people “they lived in a duplex,” usually a privilege reserved for the middle class.179
With this celebrated low-rise, high-density experiment behind him, Logue moved on to an even greater challenge: seeking high-rise alternatives to the public housing towers that so often failed their residents. Still committed to the prototype strategy, Logue took the unusual step in 1974 of launching a major architectural competition for the design of a mixed-income, high-rise project that would complete the north end of Roosevelt Island. He knew that a competition would garner a great deal of attention. It had certainly worked for Boston City Hall a decade earlier. Logue turned out to be right. The competition attracted more than 700 entrants, of whom 250 made final submissions.
This competition for a thousand units of housing on a 9.2-acre site opposite the Motorgate garage was planned to proceed in two stages, first winnowing the large pool down to eight finalists who would then compete for first, second, and third prizes. Logue explained in the call for proposals that despite success with the low-rise, high-density concept, the UDC wanted a new prototype, because “if we can be convinced that elevator dependent housing can serve families, as well as elderly and childless households, with maximum livability, it will give us much more flexibility in our housing program.”180 Calling on prominent figures to bring wise counsel and public attention to the competition, Logue appointed a jury chaired by Josep Lluís Sert that included fellow architects Paul Rudolph, Joseph Wasserman, and Alexander Cooper; Sharon Lee Ryder, the interior design editor at Progressive Architecture; the Cornell sociologist Franklin D. Becker, who had analyzed tenant responses to UDC projects; and the prominent New York real estate developer and philanthropist Frederick Rose.
All the bases were covered, except the most important one: the survival of the UDC. It crashed a couple of months before the competition was completed. Liebman became so concerned the prize money would be canceled that he threatened to go to The New York Times. Instead he was kept on for three additional months at the UDC to see the competition through. The planned two stages were telescoped into one, but after all that, the jury divided, splitting the prize among four young firms rather than declaring one winner.181 The day after the results were announced, Liebman left his post as chief architect of the UDC, and the competition’s contribution to high-rise subsidized housing remained more theoretical than real. A design innovation that Liebman had once believed “in his mind’s eye that every magazine on earth would say is the future of high-density housing” instead definitively marked the end of the UDC’s prototype program.182
Despite UDC successes in developing prototypes to improve the quality and quantity of housing in New York State, the strategy had its pitfalls. Some critics argued that the UDC’s commitment to developing universal prototypes downplayed the importance of context. The topographical challenges of a particular building site were impossible to ignore, of course, but promoting ideal housing types minimized the importance of each project’s unique social and aesthetic setting. In a discussion many years later, with the distance of time, Robert Campbell and Tony Pangaro acknowledged this weakness in the UDC projects that they personally had worked on as young architects. “I don’t think they were conceived as parts of something larger. They were conceived as prototypes that could stand alone and could be on one site or perhaps on another site and perhaps on another site,” admitted Campbell, who had worked with Sert on several UDC projects. Pangaro agreed, referencing his own work on Marcus Garvey: “We were a bunch of kamikaze architects, you know dropping this project into Brownsville, in the best way we could.”183
The New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger may have offered the most balanced assessment when he took stock of the UDC’s impact on housing design as the agency came under fire in 1975. He wrote that although the UDC’s architectural record was “far from unblemished, and there are some notable failures,” over seven years the corporation “built nothing that resembles the banal oppressive buildings customarily considered suitable for public housing.” With the UDC’s aspiration for architectural quality, “it managed to produce some of the finest housing New York State has seen in recent times.”184 Goldberger might have added that the UDC managed to use its unusual powers, plentiful resources, and public visibility to inspire an atmosphere of experimentation greatly needed in a field that had become stultified, too often content to build either conventional market-rate single-family homes or formulaic high-rise public housing.
The UDC provided Logue with new tools for combating the most serious charges brought against federally funded and locally implemented urban renewal as it was practiced from the late 1940s through the 1960s. He invented a fast track to push projects to completion more quickly. He experimented with ways of avoiding clearance and displacement, utilizing previously leveled urban renewal sites and building New Towns on open land. He tried to make the UDC’s urban redevelopment program one that advanced rather than set back the nation’s civil rights agenda through creating more diverse residential communities, establishing a semiautonomous UDC subsidiary in Harlem, and wielding the UDC’s contracts as a weapon to promote affirmative-action hiring. He worked to accelerate the nation’s slow progress in building more and better housing for all Americans by encouraging design innovations and construction efficiencies, many made possible by adopting the latest technology. And he never gave up on the search for alternatives to failing high-rise public housing. Logue achieved some of these goals more successfully than others, but he made headway on all of them, even as he struggled with participatory democracy’s calls for greater grassroots involvement in the planning process.
There was one goal of Logue’s, however, that towered above all others in the importance he attached to it and the potential he felt it held to change how American cities were developing. This was Logue’s long-standing ambition to solve urban problems at the metropolitan level. In New Haven and Boston, Logue had felt frustrated that his authority stopped at the city’s borders when, he judged, so many of its challenges—and certainly the best solutions—were metropolitan-wide. And still now, “The day seems no closer when the New York metropolitan area, covering three states, will take a unified approach to the problems of housing, jobs, transportation, recreation, pollution, and even taxation,” he lamented in 1972. Finding this effort “unquestionably the most difficult part of our work,” he went on to complain that “despite repeated studies demonstrating substantial needs for new housing for families with low and moderate incomes in all the counties making up the New York metropolitan region, there is great resistance to facing this reality.”185
Over time, Logue had watched with growing dismay as suburbs provided safety valves for escaping middle-class urban residents, who then raised the ramparts behind them to prevent others from following and disinvested from the cities whose economies made their own lives so comfortable. Finally, he thought, the UDC’s statewide mandate and extraordinary powers would make possible an assault on the barriers dividing city and suburb and open up new housing options for people with low incomes. As Logue looked north out the huge windows of his forty-sixth-floor UDC office, his eyes inevitably fixed on Westchester, the wealthiest of New York’s suburban counties and, not coincidentally, the historic seat of the Rockefeller family.186 What became known—and notorious—as the UDC’s Fair Share Housing program would soon emerge as its greatest and most controversial challenge to the socioeconomic status quo in New York State. Logue would risk a great deal in making this high-stakes bet, and the outcome would have repercussions far outside this one county’s borders, deciding the fate of both the UDC and its tenacious leader, Ed Logue.