Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Requesting salary raises for Taylor, Appleby, and Grabino, Logue told Lee, “I consider them a team, and as such the finest in the country,… without which New Haven would not have the renewal reputation it now enjoys.”71 For Logue, high-performing experts deserved recognition in salary, a “price tag” that would register in a national professional market. The same day he wrote to Lee requesting raises for these staff, he was forthright in making a request for himself: “You know better than anyone else whether I have performed above and beyond the call of duty or not in the last two years since my last raise, and in particular in the last year. You also know how completely anonymous it has all been. If you stay [not run for the Senate], I want the recognition as well as the income that a salary of $15,000 provides. If you go, I want to go out not just with a lot of personal satisfaction in what has been accomplished and deep regret that the job will be left undone, but with a $15,000 price tag.” Mindful that Lee’s own salary was $15,000, Logue astutely proposed a raise for the mayor to $17,500 or $20,000.72

  Logue expected his team of experts to participate in the emerging national community of urban renewers in other ways than the scale of their salaries: to network with peers in other cities, to attend professional meetings, and in time to move on to become part of the diaspora of New Haven veterans who for years populated the American urban renewal field. Later, he was proud that his staff “had gone on to bigger and better things.”73 Taylor was typical. He was first interviewed for the New Haven job at a national meeting, he introduced Logue and Lee to other specialists working in Washington and elsewhere, and although he left New Haven after four years to work for a private developer active in urban redevelopment, he soon returned to public service to head LBJ’s Model Cities Program, doling out federal money to former colleagues working in cities around the nation. Tom Appleby had a similar story. He took over Taylor’s position upon the latter’s departure from New Haven and then moved on to head the District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency, where he hired a number of veterans of New Haven as staff and consultants, Logue among the latter.

  A CPI publication articulated well the renewers’ aspiration not simply to be expert but also to propagate experts: “The large number who have moved on to much higher-paying positions in the Northeast and elsewhere in the nation” made New Haven “one of the nation’s most important training grounds for leaders in antipoverty and urban-improvement programs.”74 For decades Logue kept in close contact with former colleagues, often hiring them back as consultants and staffers when he moved into a new position. Few people ever disappeared from Logue’s Rolodex. Most made repeated entrances and exits throughout his half-century-long career in urban redevelopment, members of a professional club with life membership.

  Nationally networked urban renewers also took their expertise abroad, often back to the developing world, where many had gained crucial experience early in their careers. In a fascinating lap to the international circulation of planning ideas, in 1957 Ford’s Ensminger wrote from New Delhi requesting material on New Haven’s urban renewal and informed Logue, “We are as you might guess wanting to experiment … by transferring the community development experience to the Urban Community.” Ensminger announced that, partly inspired by American-style urban renewal, a team had begun to create a long-range plan for the redevelopment of the Delhi area. Seven months later, he reported, “We are making good progress on the Delhi Plan. It is hard, slow work. I’m more and more attracted to the importance of giving increasing attention to India’s worsening urban slums.”75 In February 1958, Ensminger sent Logue an overview of the master plan for New Delhi, to be carried out in collaboration with the local planning body responsible for the Delhi metropolitan area. And who should emerge as the “overall consultant on the project” but Albert Mayer, creator of the Etawah village demonstration project ten years earlier and currently engaged in urban renewal work in the United States.

  Two years later, Logue received an update on the Delhi project, “Report of a Pilot Project in Urban Community Development,” which he circulated to his own staff in New Haven.76 Soon after that, in 1961–62, Logue was invited by Ensminger to join the Ford Foundation Advisory Committee on Community Development for Calcutta, working with the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organization. His colleagues in this undertaking included none other than Bernard Loshbough, his associate from the Delhi embassy who was now doing urban renewal in Pittsburgh, and Paul Ylvisaker, Logue’s Gray Areas partner. Ylvisaker later remarked on the usefulness of this Indian experience, as Calcutta was undergoing “simply an exaggerated version of the same thing our cities were going through.”77 Here, American practitioners like Logue and Ylvisaker were assuming the universality of their expertise in solving urban problems, one more piece of the modernization process that they also felt gave common shape to economic development, political democratization, and contemporary architecture worldwide.

  THE MASCULINITY OF EXPERTISE

  The network of urban redevelopment experts that Logue took such pride in nurturing was reinforced by a powerful culture of masculinity. Of course, men dominated most white-collar work in the 1950s and 1960s and gave it a male character, even when a few women were thrown into the mix, as was always the case in Logue’s urban renewal agencies in New Haven, Boston, and New York. Mary Hommann, one of the few women working in the New Haven Redevelopment Agency, acknowledged the male dominance of the operation: “I will be forever grateful for his courage in taking a chance on me,” she wrote to Margaret after Ed’s death, “even though I was a woman, which in the days before the woman’s movement could be a decided handicap.”78 The great excitement and high stakes of this new venture only intensified powerful male bonds. Laboring long hours together in the trenches of urban renewal, Logue and his staff developed a workplace esprit de corps organized around being men with a common purpose—and sometimes common enemies. “We were like the Marines getting to Iwo Jima,” recalled Grabino. “We were fighting the battle. We were all committed.”79

  Other forms of male camaraderie imbued Redevelopment Agency culture. The bottle of whiskey that came out of Logue’s bottom desk drawer at the end of the day lubricated relationships among those who were invited to linger.80 Lunch meetings, often spiced with martinis, took place at all-male clubs like Mory’s and the Graduate Club in New Haven (and later at the Tavern Club in Boston and the Century Association in New York City). Not only did these sociable lunches deepen relationships among colleagues; they also helped the urban renewers rub shoulders as peers with other powerful men—the lawyers, journalists, businessmen, and government officials who likewise lunched at these clubs, strengthening ties with other members of the city’s male elite.

  When Logue negotiated the terms of his position in Boston in 1960–61, in fact, he made membership in the prestigious Tavern Club part of the package. Rooming at the club before his family relocated, he very quickly met up with a circle of well-connected young men who grew to admire him. Herbert Gleason, a lawyer active in civic affairs, remembered, “I was captivated by him. He was stylish, he was fun. If you could get him to come to your house for a party or a dinner, that was a coup.” Martin Nolan, a reporter with The Boston Globe, recalled that Logue “was such a dashing figure. He had dark Irish good looks and people thought he was very … impressive.”81 Years later, in the 1980s, Richard Kahan, an influential player in New York City’s public life, was shocked to find Ed Logue, whom he had long admired as a social progressive and considered his “affirmative action hero” for leadership in hiring minority contractors, outspokenly opposed to admitting women into New York’s Century Association—until he realized how important male collegiality had proved throughout Logue’s career.82

  What weekend leisure existed in the pressure cooker of New Haven redevelopment also reinforced male bonds. The young couples whose husbands worked for Logue partied together frequently. In typical fifties fashion, the men and women tended to congregate separately, even though Margaret Logue was
hardly the stereotypical housewife of the era. Despite giving birth to a second child in 1957, she continued to teach part-time and would go on to have a serious career in education, with the full support of her husband. The agency staff also played regular Saturday touch football games against the prominent New Haven law firm employed as outside counsel, which Logue was said to take “deadly seriously,” rarely missing a game.83

  Logue’s competitiveness on the football field, as on tennis and squash courts, ruled the office as well, where he was convinced that a male-style combative culture improved the quality of performance. Talbot was not alone in recalling how Logue made work into a contest. He routinely gave the identical assignment to several staff at the same time. “The man coming up with the best answer got the prize of following through under the direct supervision of the boss.”84 Logue’s own competitive nature was rarely out of view. He loved boasting of the city’s redevelopment successes—saying that “New Haven received twice as much urban renewal funding per capita than any other American city” and that Church Street “is one of the boldest projects in the United States.”85 Harold “Harry” Wexler, an observant young staff member of the Redevelopment Agency in those years, noted that Ed and Mike Sviridoff were close, but at times rivals for Dick Lee’s affection and attention.86 Life, in a special issue on the American city in December 1965, appropriately titled its profile of Logue “Bold Boston Gladiator.” Newsweek that same year described Logue as a “vigorous, forceful man who glories in political brawls and has a temper as quick as his smile.” Logue’s defense: “I express positions rather strongly when people who have said they’re going to perform fail miserably … It’s my job to be impatient.”87

  The template for many of Logue’s interactions at work was relations between men in families—as brothers, fathers, and sons. As the oldest of four boys in his own fatherless family, Ed was used to the easy mix of companionship, competition, and loyalty among brothers—as well as being the one who ruled the roost of a gaggle of guys. When Logue and Lee were asked about what Lee called their “awful, just plain ferocious fights,” where “I’d fire him once a week, sometimes twice,” they both independently asserted, “We fought like brothers.” They also schemed like brothers, observed by others as having “the air of two brothers talking of family affairs, even of family pranks, with Lee usually taking the position of the older boy who would be held responsible for whatever trouble they might get into.”88 They sulked like brothers, too. When Logue wanted the title of development administrator, considering it commensurate with his responsibilities, and Lee initially hesitated, Ed gave Dick the silent treatment until he relented.89 And they teased each other like brothers. Wolfinger reported to Dahl that Lee “calls Ed Logue ‘Fatty’ whenever Ed comes in. I don’t know if this is a friendly nickname or if it’s some kind of compensation for feelings of Ed’s intellectual superiority.”90 Margaret pointed out one more way that they behaved like brothers: “They’d defend each other against anybody.”91 Other relationships were similarly charged with expectations of fraternal loyalty. When Taylor announced that he was resigning to work for a private-sector housing developer, Logue was so hurt that he called Ralph a “traitor to the program” and barely talked to him before he departed.92

  Logue aspired to be a paternal as well as fraternal presence. He called the young, idealistic men his agency attracted “my boys.”93 In his thirties during the New Haven years, he tended to hire males in their twenties, recently graduated from college, public policy, or law school and eager to save the endangered American city. The national prominence of New Haven’s program ensured that there was no shortage of applicants. Talbot observed that the “screening process was long and personal, much more like being looked over for a fraternity than being interviewed for a job.”94 Robert Hazen was widely recognized as Logue’s favorite “fair-haired boy,” whom he took under his wing and treated like a son. After working for two summers for the New Haven Redevelopment Agency while a student at nearby Wesleyan University and again while getting his master’s in public administration at the University of Michigan, Hazen was hired in an entry-level position. This assistant job seemed to bring with it the license to hang out a great deal at the Logues’ house—“like a son or a younger brother,” Margaret recalled.95 Following a stint in the army, Hazen would follow Logue to Boston, because, “for Christ’s sake,” Logue told an annoyed Lee, “he grew up with me.”96 Hazen would work alongside Logue again in New York. In Boston, Logue would hire a young architect right out of Harvard named Theodore Liebman, whom he would eventually make chief architect in New York. Liebman admired Logue as a mentor—“I did not want to disappoint him. And I thought we were doing god’s work”—but more than that, he came to love him as “a surrogate father.”97

  The list could go on of impressionable young men attracted to the oftentimes gruff and demanding, but also inspiring and caring, Ed Logue. Taylor remembered with a chuckle how Ed’s boys “all modeled themselves after Logue.” He was particularly amused at Grabino, “this bright young guy,” who became a miniature Ed “without the maturity of judgment. Grabino is truculent for the sake of being truculent. Ed is truculent when he wants to achieve an objective.”98 Howard Moskof (Yale Law ’59) admitted his own susceptibility. He “caught the disease” of urban renewal after a lunch with Grabino and Logue—“two arrogant sons-of-bitches”—and before very long had joined the team, becoming “just like them—everyone became clones of Logue.”99

  New Haven urban renewal was not exceptional in its masculine culture. Urban renewal in many cities was associated with a strong male figure, whether Pittsburgh’s David Lawrence, Newark’s Louis Danzig, San Francisco’s Justin Herman, Philadelphia’s Edmund Bacon, or, the most overbearing of them all, New York’s Robert Moses. This male culture of urban renewal contrasted sharply with Progressivism, which took on a strong female character through the imprint of social reformers and so-called urban housekeepers such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Lillian Wald, to name only the most prominent.100 Whereas the female Progressives lobbied for new protective legislation for workers, particularly women and children, and organized female consumers to boycott goods produced under exploitative conditions, the male urban renewers controlled large amounts of money and used it to rebuild cities on a massive scale. Some architectural critics have taken the analysis even further and argued that the aesthetics of urban renewal carried the stamp of this male-dominated culture, with urban renewers like Lee and Logue attracted to a hard-edged, high-rise, brutalist modernist architecture that celebrated Cold War virility.101 Even without taking that leap, it is possible to say that urban renewal was nourished in a male culture of expertise and sociability that encouraged big men to build big structures with big ambitions. This was not a world that welcomed women.

  Mayor Lee appreciatively described his Citizens Action Commission, with its several hundred community members, in similar manly terms:

  We’ve got the biggest muscles, the biggest set of muscles in New Haven on the top C.A.C.… They’re muscular because they control wealth, they’re muscular because they control industries, represent banks. They’re muscular because they head up labor. They’re muscular because they represent the intellectual portions of the community. They’re muscular because they’re articulate, because they’re respectable, because of their financial power, and because of the accumulation of prestige which they have built up over the years as individuals in all kinds of causes, whether United Fund, Red Cross, or whatever.102

  As for Logue’s team of urban experts back at the office, the fraternal intensity of the workplace, when combined with their nationally oriented professional identity, served to set them apart from other New Haven municipal employees as well as from the ordinary citizens in the neighborhoods they set out to improve—a divide that would ultimately jeopardize their cause.

  THE CHANGING ROLE OF SPECIALIZED EXPERTS

  With Logue and his staff considering themselves generalist experts
, more specialized tasks in urban renewal were left to technical experts with mastery of specific forms of knowledge, such as planners, architects, and real estate developers. Much the way community development administrators like Doug Ensminger and Bernard Loshbough had recruited skilled technicians to work at the village level in India, broadly trained urban renewal professionals looked to those with more focused expertise and experience for help. The rise of powerful development administrators in this new era of federal urban renewal would change the nature of these other professions, as well as how they related to one another, constructing a new hierarchy of practitioners.

  The power struggle between Logue as redevelopment administrator and the planners, architects, and developers he depended on shaped the reconstruction of downtown New Haven. In 1957, Taylor explained bluntly to Dahl that in the planning of the all-important Church Street Project, “the power on this whole thing is Ed.”103 Logue’s assertion of authority over the centerpiece of New Haven’s urban renewal effort marginalized city planners most of all, including Rotival. Employed on contract, Rotival griped about being brought in “piece-meal, on ‘whistle-stop’ commitments, mostly as an ‘atelier’ working from day-to-day,” not doing the “general planning for which our firm is best known, and in which we have made the greatest contribution … both in the United States and abroad.”104 Logue had a ready answer. He sent Rotival a memorandum with the subject line “Your time and how you spend it?” which said bluntly, “It seems to me that your talents are not best employed in attending meetings and in concerning yourself with various administrative matters. We regard you as one of the greatest planners in all the world and one of the most experienced. That is why we are proud to have you working on this project. However, you are not an administrator skilled in the ins and outs of American bureaucracy at the local, state, and national levels and we did not retain you for this purpose.” With a final slash of his sword, Logue closed, “If you stick to your job of planning and designing and leave the red tape to the rest of us, we will all get farther faster.”105 Lee concurred. He told Architectural Forum that “too many communities have assumed that renewal is a job for planners alone.” Lee continued that the program is so “unbelievably complicated” that it calls for the most skilled administrators.”106