Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  But the design quickly ran into trouble. The BRA liked it, but the Federal Housing Administration—which would have to insure the mortgage—regarded it as “unrealistic” and overly expensive. Months dragged by in administrative wrangling. A Boston construction company which had bid on the stacked duplexes pulled out, to be replaced by Bonwit Construction Company of New York, which scrapped Boles’s design and ordered him to come up with more conventional slabs. In the spring of 1968, Boles presented his new design to government officials and church representatives. The BRA didn’t care for the cold, austere result, preferring a “more esthetic approach.” Even Herman Boxer, Bonwit’s president, conceded, “I’d have liked a better-looking building, rather than a plain box, but I didn’t think it could be done with the money involved.” Indeed, nobody was particularly happy with the redesigned project.

  Less than a month later, Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. In the black anger which followed his death, one target was the city’s failure to complete housing for the poor displaced by the South End renewal program. Methunion Manor was still on the drawing boards more than three years after it had been conceived, and other projects lagged even further behind schedule. Kevin White and his BRA director, Hale Champion, had promised to speed up the program, and following King’s death, they put increasing pressure on Boston’s banks and insurance companies, seeking pledges of additional low-income housing. But black leaders were increasingly impatient. Reggie Eaves, a South End activist, warned, “Let’s start stacking brick on brick, not word on word.”

  On April 26, 1968, forty demonstrators blocked entrances to a South End parking lot. The activists—members of a group called Community Assembly for a United South End (CAUSE)—handed out notices reading: “Dear Car Parker: South End people want to live in decent homes at reasonable rents. No housing has been built. People have been moved, of course. Housing should be built on this land.” Sporadic clashes broke out during the day between the demonstrators and police. Five people were arrested.

  But, as City Hall sought to cool the confrontation, CAUSE was temporarily permitted to occupy the lot. The demonstrators pitched tents and erected crude shacks; as the occupying force swelled past two hundred, support grew. Martin Luther King, Sr., father of the murdered leader, took time from a memorial service in the city to visit the lot and pay tribute to its occupiers, who, he said, were acting in “my son’s spirit.” The Youth Alliance, which had helped restore peace after King’s death three weeks earlier, now provided security. Churches sent barbecued chicken, potato salad, and fruit salad. At times, the occupation took on a carnival air. As night fell, a saxophone wailed as dancers snaked through the lot, now known as “Tent City.”

  When the demonstrators voluntarily struck their tents on April 30, they had won at least a symbolic victory. The next day, Hale Champion issued a sweeping edict halting further demolition of homes in the South End and promising that a major low-income housing program would be launched within ninety days. The Mayor, trying to pacify the city’s black community, yet determined to show that he wasn’t caving in to pressure, denied that Tent City had forced any changes; it had merely “called attention again to some of the urgent problems we have been working on for four months.” But, whether power politics or guerrilla theater, Tent City publicly committed the city to a new sense of urgency on low-income housing.

  Even the new political imperatives couldn’t entirely break the Methunion logjam, for a new party had entered the dispute: the young white professionals, represented by the South End Project Area Committee (SEPAC), the committee elected by area residents to pass on the renewal program. Many of the newcomers were artists or architects; others had been drawn by the South End’s aesthetics. When SEPAC representatives first saw the revised designs for Methunion Manor, they exploded. “The ugliest housing I’ve ever seen,” said one architect. Objecting to the high density, minimal setbacks, lack of landscaping or adequate play space for children, the committee lobbied for revisions in the project design. City officials argued that it was too late, that a mortgage commitment had already been given on the basis of the current design; moreover, they warned, if the project was delayed again, or—God forbid—canceled, that could jeopardize the whole South End renewal program, from which the newcomers stood to benefit the most. Josh Young, the West Newton Street banker who had become one of SEPAC’s leaders, told his colleagues, “We may not like the way it looks. But there are thousands of people in our neighborhood who desperately need decent, reasonably priced housing.” Young’s arguments prevailed. In autumn 1969, SEPAC reluctantly endorsed Methunion.

  But the dispute left some of the newcomers with a sense of grievance against Union Methodist Church. On several occasions they had sought to discuss the project design with the Reverend William Bobby McClain, who, in mid-1968, succeeded Gil Caldwell as Union’s minister. An Alabamian, educated at Boston University’s School of Theology, McClain had worked for a time in Boston’s poverty program. Gil Caldwell was an angry man, but McClain practically seethed with rage at white society. “God help me,” he once told Rachel Twymon, “I hate white people so much!” Certainly he had no interest in debating architecture with them. When a delegation of whites called on him to talk about Methunion, he flatly refused to discuss the matter. “Those buildings will last a hundred years,” he snapped. Later he charged that several South End whites had been so determined to block the project that they had offered to buy the church.

  Bobby McClain was an electrifying preacher who mesmerized his congregation with the power of his language. To the quiet dignity of Union’s sanctuary, he brought the evangelical techniques of Southern revivalism, and his message had a new, cutting edge. Black Methodists, he said, were “like Jonah in the belly of a white whale. We are still like Ezekiel in a valley of dry bones. We, like the man in the Good Samaritan story, are still ‘fallen among thieves’—thieves of Jericho who have stolen our names, our heritage, our rights, our religion and robbed us of our culture and our self-concept.” If Gil Caldwell’s style had reflected the mid-sixties ascendancy of Martin Luther King, McClain’s mirrored post-King disenchantment and militance.

  During Caldwell’s ministry, fifteen or twenty whites regularly attended Union Methodist, but McClain’s denunciations made them deeply uneasy. Ultimately, Mary Holman, a prominent black parishioner, advised McClain to “go a little easy.” McClain dismissed her words of caution. “If they can’t take what I’m dishing out,” he said, “they shouldn’t come here anymore.” In the following months, most whites stopped attending Union’s services.

  Before blacks and whites could worship comfortably together, McClain believed, the former slaveholders had to expiate their sins. In mid-1969, he devoted his formidable energy to the crusade for “reparations” from white churches, a notion introduced that spring by James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he interrupted services at New York’s Riverside Church to demand $500 million—“fifteen dollars per nigger”—as reparations for past injuries suffered by blacks. As chairman of New England Black Methodists for Church Renewal, Bobby McClain led a fight for $1,500,000 in reparations for his area. When the New England Conference allocated only $235,000, and failed to pay all of that, McClain leveled a polemic at his church, warning the white New England Methodist that blacks were now “coming to him as assertive missionaries rather than as docile menials who once accommodated his paternalizing charitable benevolence by saying ‘please’ for the crumbs under his table.”

  As her new pastor confronted the church’s white leadership, Rachel Twymon looked on in astonishment. Still a devout integrationist, she would never permit herself to voice such open anger at white people. Yet she nursed her own quiet grievance at many white Methodists. As a board member of the Cooper Community Center, she resented the remote stance many white suburban church members adopted toward the needs of inner-city Methodists. They might send money, food, or secondhand clothing, much like the handouts they gave their mai
ds or gardeners, but they rarely came anywhere near the center. It was clear to Rachel that suburban whites didn’t mind blacks belonging to their church—indeed might even welcome them as a badge of virtue—so long as they didn’t get too close. Gradually Rachel found her way into Black Methodists for Church Renewal, eventually becoming secretary of the New England branch, hoping the organization would become “a thorn in the side of our white brothers and sisters, so they won’t forget we’re here.”

  His dramatic struggle for “reparations” diverted Bobby McClain’s attention from the technicalities of Methunion Manor. For many reasons negotiations dragged on. Not until April 7, 1970, did the FHA give its final mortgage commitment of $4,231,949. In only fifteen months, rising construction costs had added $1,275,100 to the project’s bill. Five weeks later, on May 17, 1970, ground was broken at last. Rachel and her mother, Helen, were among the church members who gathered in the abundant sunshine across the street from the church as McClain led them in a litany written for the occasion:

  MCCLAIN: Because we realize that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein”;

  CONGREGATION: We break this ground.

  MCCLAIN: To aid in removing blight of tenement, urban decay, needless want of shelter, and to provide comfortable surroundings and housing for those in search of a home;

  CONGREGATION: We break this ground.

  MCCLAIN: To create community and a sense of pride in living, in being a people sharing in the abundance of God’s earth;

  CONGREGATION: We break this ground.

  MCCLAIN: To participate with God and community in providing shelter for families, widows, children and people of all backgrounds, races, classes and creeds.

  MCCLAIN AND CONGREGATION: We break this ground this day as our hallowed task.

  Then McClain and Mayor Kevin White took turns digging spadefuls of earth from the construction site. Methunion Manor was finally underway.

  At the last moment, in yet another dispute over project design, Bonwit Construction Company was replaced by Starrett Brothers & Eken of New York. A large construction company, Starrett had built many of America’s best-known buildings—the Empire State, Pittsburgh’s Gateway Center—and such housing developments as New York’s Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. There could be no doubt about its qualifications. Yet rising construction costs soon squeezed the company’s profit margin. In such situations, many contractors reacted by omitting work required in the specifications, replacing designated materials with less expensive substitutes, scrimping on craftsmanship and finishing. Even the most competent companies, aware that such projects were designed for the poor, cut corners in a way they wouldn’t have dared had they been building private homes for the wealthy. Moreover, churches and other non-profit groups which sponsored so many 221 (d) 3 projects lacked the experience to ride herd on such buildings; this often resulted in shoddy, inferior, or defective work.

  Witness the battle of the bricks. In July 1970, with two Methunion Manor buildings more than half complete, the Kelsey-Ferguson Brick Company reported that because of a wildcat strike at its plant, it was running short of Concord Blend brick. In August, Henry Boles authorized use of Quaker Town brick, which was more orange in tone, “provided that black bricks were added to effect the transition.” But the black bricks were never added. In September, when the scaffolding was removed, passersby could easily detect a marked change in brick color. On September 28, Elliott Rothman, a South End architect, wrote Mayor White, “You would fight against such action in Back Bay, Beacon Hill or West Roxbury. The South End also requires enforcement of reasonable construction procedures.” The BRA fired off a letter to the Reverend McClain, noting, “The great variance of brick colors detracts immensely from the aesthetics of the buildings. Much adverse comment is being received from various residents of the South End … You are requested to take immediate action for the removal of all brick facing varying from that as approved.” But the two buildings were largely complete. The church decided the Quaker Town brick should be dyed to the color of Concord Blend. When officials contended that the dye would fade in sunlight, the contractors were compelled to set up a special escrow account to pay for further repairs.

  After the brick fiasco, the BRA inspectors grew more vigilant and soon discovered other glaring deficiencies. Concrete foundations were “in poor shape and present a bad aesthetic appearance with popr patchwork, non-matching mortar colors, very rough surfaces from worn-out or gouged forms.” Stairs and landings had a reverse pitch, so they were “puddling badly and will create hazardous conditions during cold weather.” Roofs leaked and created “stains and dampness on ceilings.” Light poles in the parking lot were “very wobbly and globes are not set securely.” Doors warped and sprang from their tracks. But by then it was too late for anything but minor repairs. The church had already opened a rental office and flooded the neighborhood with brochures announcing: “Convenience, Comfort and Safety in a New Community. 150 families will enjoy many fine facilities in the all new South End community developed by Union United Methodist Church. Methunion Manor is not only a new apartment complex, it is a new community. Convenient for Methunion residents will be many services offered in the 9,600 square feet of commercial space. All prospective tenants and their references are carefully reviewed.”

  By autumn 1970, Rachel Twymon was at work in the church’s rental office, answering the telephone and helping applicants fill out their forms. Using her access to survey the available apartments, she settled on a four-bedroom unit at Columbus Avenue and Yarmouth Street. Relatively spacious, it had plenty of light for her plants. More important, its first-floor location would spare her from using either the stairs or the elevator. With its ordinary interest-rate subsidy, the apartment rented for $222 a month, but Rachel qualified for the rent-supplement program, under which she would pay only one-quarter of her monthly income, or about $75 (utilities included), while the Department of Housing and Urban Development picked up the rest. It seemed like a bargain.

  Rachel was full of “great hopes” in June 1971 as she and her children left Orchard Park and began their new life at Methunion Manor. And for a time it seemed, indeed, like a new life. The buildings’ brick fronts glowed in the summer sunshine. Fresh linoleum and bright paint gleamed in the hallways. The kitchens and bathrooms shone with new enamel. Everybody was excited about the crisp, modern feel of the place. Neighbors chatted eagerly in the hallways, exchanging tales of the “pigpens” they had left behind.

  Rachel was happiest of all about Methunion’s location. At last she was out of that dreary public housing, away from that deteriorating, crime-ridden neighborhood. Here she felt near the center of things. She agreed entirely with another tenant, A. L. Wesley, Jr., who wrote in the tenant bulletin:

  I like the idea of knowing that I can walk down to the Common, or over to the Fenway and even to the banks of the Charles, all within the limits of an hour or less. I can look out my window and see the beauty of the Prudential Center, a colossus of steel, brick and concrete against the blue background of a sun-lit sky … I like to hear the ringing of the time from the belfry of the Christian Science Church. The chimes seem to make music, especially on a Sunday morning; chimes that rhyme filling the air with beautiful sounds. Langston Hughes epitomized it all in his poem “The City,” in which he says:

  In the morning the city

  spreads its wings

  making a song

  in stone that sings

  In the evening the city

  goes to bed

  hanging the lights

  above its head.

  But Rachel’s euphoria was short-lived. In midsummer, the toilets in both her bathrooms began backing up, flooding the apartment with water and causing extensive damage to rugs and furniture. A plumber would get them working only to have them back up again. It happened a dozen times that summer before engineers discovered that a four-inch sewer pipe had been installed where eight-
inch pipe had been specified.

  As winter arrived, Methunion’s tenants confronted another problem. Their heat was controlled by a thermostat outside each building, which triggered a gas-fired boiler when the temperature on the street dropped below 57 degrees. There was no way to adjust heat to the actual temperatures in apartments. The thermometer often reached 85 inside Rachel’s apartment, more than that on higher floors. The tenants could gain relief only by opening their windows. Some days the heat was so oppressive the Twymons streamed onto the sidewalk, panting for air. When her mother came to visit, she told Rachel, “They’re trying to cook you niggers and you ain’t got the message yet.”

  All kinds of little things went wrong: cracks opened in the plaster ceilings; when a heavy truck rattled by on Columbus Avenue, white dust sifted down, covering Rachel’s plants; the basements flooded whenever it rained; bathroom grouting cracked; shower heads wobbled.

  Some of Methunion’s deterioration was due to tenant negligence. Once there had been brave talk of a “multi-racial, multi-class project,” but no such balance was ever achieved. Of the 147 families who moved in that spring and summer of 1971, 130 were black, 7 Spanish-speaking, 4 Oriental, only 6 white. More important, the project never attracted middle-class tenants—there was a teacher, a nurse, and several salesmen, but many families were on some form of public assistance. Preference had gone to those displaced by urban renewal, most of them low-income. Thirty-eight families received rent supplements from HUD, twenty-two from the Boston Housing Authority. And the commitment to tenant screening had gone largely unfulfilled: most of those who met the income limits were automatically accepted.