Efforts had been made to secure tenant cooperation. The Codman Company, a management firm hired by the church to administer Methunion, put up large, brightly colored posters which called cheerily for the tenants’ help: “Here at Methunion Manor we have an opportunity. The opportunity starts with a beautiful new building. We set the example we want our children to follow by taking care of our apartment. That’s why we cooperate in keeping the halls and elevators clean and free of bicycles, baby carriages and children’s toys…. That’s why we realize that it’s up to us to prevent an insect and rodent problem. If we take our garbage and trash to the trash chute in the hall every day this problem will not happen.”
But such cooperation wasn’t always forthcoming. In March 1972, Roland Peters, Methunion’s manager, issued eviction notices to two tenants, both welfare recipients receiving rent supplements. Mrs. M.’s estranged husband had stabbed her nephew in her apartment the previous December. Since her separation, Mrs. M. had received numerous male visitors, with whom she could be found drinking and playing cards at all hours. “It would appear that Mrs. M. exercises little control over the behavior of her children. They write profane statements on the hall walls, in lobbies and commit other acts of vandalism.” Peters described the other tenant, Mrs. K., as a “psychopath” because of “her speech impediment, her dermatology condition and her obnoxiousness, all of which subject her to ridicule from people who come in contact with her; her affinity for minding everyone else’s business—which is further cause for rejection by other tenants; her antagonism to anyone, including a landlord, who suggests conformity to rules and regulations; her refusal to sign a lease; her refusal to pay rent.”
In a letter to the Welfare Department reporting his action, an exasperated Peters said the cases illustrated “the problems we are encountering in attempting to make low and moderate income housing work…. Many tenants have asked where we get these families. Recently you asked me if we screen applicants. We try, but how is it possible for us to determine in any screening process how these human beings will behave in our units?” Some months later, another manager warned more bluntly that Methunion was becoming a “dumping ground for troubled families.”
But many tenants held management largely responsible for conditions in the project. In June 1972, a group met with the board of the Columbus Avenue Housing Corporation to complain that the corporation and its management company had failed to maintain the buildings or enforce minimum standards among residents. The board promised to investigate, but barely two months later several dozen tenants signed a petition renewing their charges. “Leases have not been enforced,” it alleged. “Tenants sit on the front steps, littering the steps and entrance…. Halls are not kept washed and waxed. Tenants too often play stereos at night, too loud. Children play out of windows. Light bulbs have been removed from the back of the building…. These are the same things that were brought before the Board at the mass meeting when the majority of tenants met at the church. It seems nobody cares.” When the petition achieved nothing, twelve of the signers formed the Methunion Concerns Committee to work for an alleviation of tenant grievances.
Among the founders was Rachel Twymon. By now Rachel was deeply disappointed in Methunion. Gil Caldwell’s dream had soured. Not only had the project failed to bring Union Methodist closer to the community, it had deepened the gulf between Union’s members, mostly suburban and middle-class, and Methunion’s tenants, mostly working-class or welfare clients. When the tenants complained, the Housing Corporation was deeply aggrieved. They had tried to do the right thing, they had devoted endless time and energy to Methunion, they had provided badly needed housing, and now the very people they had done all this for were raising all sorts of ridiculous objections. The complainers were “ungrateful” malcontents.
Only a handful of Methunion’s tenants belonged to the church. As one tenant with a foot in both camps, Rachel found the mutual antagonism intolerable. At church she heard people complain about the “riffraff” at the project; in tenant meetings she heard people complain about the “uppity boogies” in the church. This conflict echoed the old tension within her own family, a conflict she had never fully resolved. She wasn’t altogether certain on which side she belonged.
But by late 1972, the conflict between tenants and church was submerged in a larger issue. Methunion Manor was out of money. To insiders, this came as no surprise. Like many 221 (d) 3 projects across the country, Methunion had been in financial trouble long before it accepted its first tenant, for its rents had been determined less on economic than on political grounds. Under heavy pressure from South End community groups, the Mayor and the BRA desperately needed housing which would be perceived as replacements for the demolished units. In setting rents for these projects, HUD had shown little concern for the project’s financial viability. And Gil Caldwell had his own agenda: the church’s search for credibility with inner-city blacks. Eager to build, Union had allowed itself to underestimate Methunion’s operating costs to ensure that the FHA would approve its mortgage application. And, of course, the FHA—which shared HUD’s emphasis on housing production—could be counted on not to scrutinize the figures too closely. For there was a tacit understanding among all parties that the first priority was to get the buildings up and occupied; then, if expenses outran revenues, an appeal could be made to the nation’s conscience, and the federal government would presumably ride to the rescue, as it had so often in the sixties.
Indeed, this might well have happened had the deficits been as modest as originally expected. What nobody could have anticipated was the inflation of the early seventies. Most devastating of all was the extraordinary surge in the cost of utilities. Natural-gas prices skyrocketed—a particular problem for Methunion due to its wasteful gas-fired heating plant. Electric rates went up as well. Boston’s water and sewer rates increased 67 percent in April 1972 alone. Inflation affected virtually every operating cost: insurance, taxes, salaries, rubbish collection, and maintenance.
In 1972, its first full year of occupancy, Methunion’s operating expenses ($182,024) were more than double those projected in its budget ($90,526). These deficits were further aggravated when some expected revenues failed to materialize. For more than three years, as Bobby McClain sought to develop a black-owned shopping center on the ground floor of one building, he turned away other potential commercial tenants; 9,260 square feet of space remained vacant and the project lost $30,000 a year in budgeted income. No wonder that a HUD internal memorandum finally conceded that Methunion’s original budget was “too low.” An official of the Codman Company put it more bluntly when he wrote in 1973 that “the amount of dollars allocated for operations [was] absolutely ridiculous even three years ago…. the project was doomed to failure at the drawing board.” Yet despite its financial crisis, the board made remarkably little effort to get HUD to raise its “political rents.” The deficits deepened. By May 1972, barely a year after the first tenants moved in, Methunion could no longer meet its mortgage payments. It staggered along for several months on extensions from the mortgage holder, the Government National Mortgage Association, but in December 1972—owing $97,000 in debt service and $60,000 in back taxes—the project went into default. In May 1973, HUD honored its pledge to buy the bad loan.
By then, with Richard Nixon triumphantly launching his second term, benevolence had gone out of fashion in Washington. While Methunion’s tenants were preoccupied with leaking roofs and backed-up toilets, HUD was deciding to “dispose of all acquired multi-family properties at the earliest possible date at the highest price obtainable in the current market.” Even Rachel Twymon, with her close ties to Union Methodist Church, did not yet realize that this could mean foreclosure and sale of the property to the highest bidder. If that happened it would eliminate government subsidies, sharply raise rents, and force all but Methunion’s most affluent tenants onto the street.
13
Diver
Some called it a “chicken coop,” a “May
an cistern,” or “Disneyland East,” but to Colin it was a symbol of the bold, imaginative Boston they were trying to build. It was different all right—a striking departure from the traditional school of municipal architecture and particularly from the old City Hall, that Second Empire pile of columns, pilasters, and arcades in which Colin had labored all that sweltering summer and through the fall. The old Hall, Boston’s seat of government for 103 years, was redolent of the inflated rhetoric, ethnic warfare, and outright corruption that had been the stock ingredients of Boston politics during much of that era. In The Last Hurrah, his fictional account of the city’s political combat in the age of James Michael Curley, Edwin O’Connor wrote of the old Hall: “… this inefficient tangled warren [was] the perfect symbol of municipal administration…. In its old, high-ceilinged chambers, the elected and appointed officials of government slumbered, mused or conducted the affairs of the city; in this they were guided by the opportunities afforded them and, to a somewhat lesser degree, by the strictures of conscience.”
The new City Hall had risen from the rubble of Boston’s sleaziest quarter—Scollay Square—with its cheap saloons, penny arcades, shooting galleries, pool halls, and “girlie shows.” For generations the matrons of the Watch and Ward Society had inveighed against this “sinkhole of depravity,” but not until the city planners added their weight did the Square finally give way to the gleaming new Government Center.
As conceived by its architect, I. M. Pei, the Center focused on a broad, fan-shaped plaza, flanked by the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building, two state towers, three private office buildings, a new police station, and a parking garage. But its highlight was the new City Hall which loomed like an inverted Aztec pyramid at the plaza’s southeast corner. Built around a huge interior court—“a great agora, a place that proclaims the majesty of government by the people”—the Hall was divided into three levels reflecting the separate functions of city government. At its base was the public square, symbolized by the red brick floors which carried the pedestrian plaza inside. There, around the central court, were brick walkways lined by counters and offices where the public could purchase licenses, pay assessments, and make inquiries. On the top level, behind a massive, stepped cornice, the architects placed the agencies which dealt least with the public, the faceless bureaucracy. In between lay the “ceremonial” functions—the monumental City Council chambers and the elegant Mayor’s office. As the base was rooted in the red brick of old Boston, so the upper reaches soared in shafts of gray precast concrete and exposed, roughly textured cement walls. Although the design was received with some skepticism in Boston, it was applauded by international critics. Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times pronounced it “a structure of dignity, humanism and power [which] will outlast the last hurrah.”
The Hall aroused such expectations of immortality that in December 1967 outgoing Mayor John Collins moved into the still incomplete structure for his few remaining days so that he could be the first mayor to occupy it—and promptly contracted pneumonia from the chill winds that blew through his ill-heated office. Kevin White prudently remained in the cluttered jumble of the old Hall for another year. Only in February 1969, when the new Hall had been in use for a month, did the Mayor schedule a week-long inauguration of the edifice, which he plainly hoped to appropriate as a symbol of his new administration.
On the eve of the inaugural ceremony, the heaviest snowstorm in years swept through New England, forcing a twenty-four-hour postponement. The next day, February 10, huge drifts concealed the plaza as five hundred guests took their seats in the great central court, decorated for the occasion with Oriental rugs and tubs of greenery. From the first landing, Senator Edward M. Kennedy addressed the assemblage, deliberately evoking memories of his brother’s time in a speech touched with urgency. “Urban life in the United States has come to a critical point of decision,” he said, “caught between the narrowing walls of change and decay on one hand and, on the other, priorities created for another age…. If the city of Boston becomes a city filled with crime, if it becomes a city lived in only by the very rich and the very poor, if over the next fifty years it gradually becomes an all-black city rather than an integrated city, then our problems will overcome us.”
Kevin White struck a more hopeful note. “It is not just an architectural event which we celebrate this morning,” he said. “For, if you believe, as I do, that architecture both portrays and shapes men’s lives, then you will agree that this building’s major significance will be its effect on the people who use it…. Today, though our cities are beset with incredible problems, this building exhorts all of us to do better than we thought we could in dealing with them—to be hospitable to change, to try new ideas, to bring people closer to government.”
Gazing up at the Mayor, who stood there in his tailored suit and blue-and-gold tie, his head thrown back, his blue eyes crackling in that beaming Irish pol’s face, Colin was proud to be working for the man. The speech itself came as no surprise—Colin had contributed some ideas for it—but he found himself swept along by the lofty phrases. For Colin believed—as the Mayor had put it to Robert Coles the previous summer—that there was “no more time for politics as usual, not in 1968, not in our cities.” He believed that, with strength and compassion, government could do something about the cities’ problems. And he believed that Kevin White had the qualities necessary to lead the most successful assault ever launched by an American city on racial discrimination, poverty, and decay. As the Mayor concluded his remarks, Colin joined in the applause, and thought to himself, God, I’m glad to be here at this moment, doing what I’m doing, instead of showing some corporation how to save money on its taxes.
But then Colin checked his enthusiasm. He thought back to that other speech of the Mayor’s, the one which had brought him to City Hall in the first place. He and Joan had laughed about that many times. A few days after he started work, he’d encountered the Mayor in a corridor of the old City Hall.
“Hey, Colin,” White had said. “Is it true that you’re here because you took my speech at the Law Review banquet as a personal invitation?”
“Well,” Colin stuttered, “yes, I suppose I did.”
The Mayor chuckled. “I don’t think I really intended it that way. But it brought you here, and we’re damn lucky to have you.”
The place they had found for him was anomalous, not quite fitting any table of organization. His title was assistant to the Mayor; in fact he was assistant to an assistant—specifically to Sam Merrick, the Mayor’s Special Counsel. At fifty-four the oldest of White’s aides, Merrick was a Main Line Philadelphia lawyer who had spent most of his life in government labor relations, first with the National Labor Relations Board and then as the Labor Department’s man on Capitol Hill. In September 1967, he had left for a year of “decompression” studying urban policy at Harvard, and late that fall he remarked casually that “it would be fun to work for the city of Boston” (in much the same tone as “it would be fun to go slide in the snow”), but when Barney Frank heard of his remark he called Sam’s bluff. Soon Merrick was handling a package of special responsibilities for the Mayor: making sure the city was getting all the federal funds it was entitled to, dealing with the Labor Department and the Office of Economic Opportunity, and overseeing collective bargaining with city employees.
Colin was assigned a desk in the corner of Merrick’s cramped office and set to work accumulating a library on federal funding so that he could advise city agencies on available resources. But there wasn’t much to do. Merrick was an independent operator, keeping his own counsel, requiring little staff assistance.
Gradually, Colin began working for others in the Mayor’s office. His study of federal funding led him into a general brief on the city’s fiscal problems. Except for Budget Director Dave Davis, he became the mayoral staffer most familiar with state aid, federal aid, new forms of taxation, any source of funds the city might tap to narrow its budget deficit. He devised plans for
getting revenues out of the staggering array of tax-exempt institutions—universities, hospitals, churches—which owned nearly a fifth of the city’s real estate. He examined increased fees for municipal services. As a lawyer, he was a natural resource for legal work in the office. Although the Mayor had a separate Law Department, Colin was soon overseeing preparation of the Mayor’s annual legislative package.
Despite his increasing responsibilities, for the first year or so he had little direct contact with the Mayor. He wasn’t in the inner circle, which included Barney Frank; Sam Merrick; Bill Cowin; Hale Champion, Ed Logue’s replacement as director of Redevelopment; and Corporation Counsel Herb Gleason. Colin was at the next level together with other young assistants like Jeff Steingarten, Rick Borten, and Paul Oosterhuis. When the Mayor’s staff moved into the new City Hall in December, Colin and Steingarten shared a small suite just down the marble corridor from the Mayor’s office where they were available to receive assignments from the Mayor himself or from Barney Frank, who was not only Kevin White’s chief of staff and principal policy adviser, but his alter ego and, in many technical areas, de facto mayor. Frank had achieved his preeminence at age twenty-seven through a combination of intelligence, energy, and a caustic wit which, though it alienated some, lashed others on to prodigies of accomplishment. In a City Hall still populated principally by amiable Irishmen, Barney was an anachronism: a Jew from Bayonne, New Jersey, who delivered his stinging wisecracks in a thick “Joisy” accent, through billows of smoke from a cigar which looked like one of Hoboken’s belching smokestacks. With his massive belly draped in perpetually rumpled suits, Barney did not look impressive, but few people could skip so nimbly through the corridors of Massachusetts politics.
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