Organizationally, Logue developed an approach he liked to describe as “centralize in order to decentralize.”86 Much of the power was concentrated in the central BRA office and, in reality, in the charismatic if domineering Logue himself. By all reports, he was very hands-on and kept himself at the center of things, the sun around which all planets—divisions, departments, project teams—revolved. Even young staff members who did not know him well basked in the glow of his power. Years later, Reginald Griffith, an architect who had joined the BRA upon graduating from MIT, vividly recollected every major encounter with Logue. Boston native Frank Del Vecchio, hired right out of Harvard Law School, gloried in zipping Logue around town “at breakneck, white-knuckle speed” in his tiny Triumph TR4 sports car. Ted Liebman, a newly minted Harvard GSD grad, couldn’t believe his luck when Logue personally asked him to make large, complicated drawings with overlays to present the Government Center plan to the city council. Rather than resent the onerous assignment, Liebman felt privileged to be among those getting direct requests from the big boss: “Ed Logue had brought together a bright group of people that were working their behinds off and we thought that we were the best in the world.”87 An organizational specialist might have faulted Logue for running such a flat organization with a large number of people reporting directly to him and no fixed hierarchy. Recalled Stainton, “He didn’t … delegate specifically to different people. He sort of threw it out there … it ended up [that] everybody worked for Ed Logue.”88
Decentralization, on the other hand, was meant to take place by locating teams in site offices within the various renewal areas, each headed by a project manager who had considerable discretion but also reported directly to Logue. Team members—consisting of planners, architects, relocation experts, social workers, rehabilitation advisers, and so forth—were responsible to managers on-site as well as to supervisors in the relevant department within the central BRA, such as design, planning, legal, transportation, rehabilitation, and relocation.89 Logue hoped that embedding project teams in neighborhoods undergoing renewal would strengthen ties to residents, helping to carry out his trademark “planning with people.” He liked to say, “It’s a hell of a lot more fun to plan a neighborhood with the people who live in it than to plan for them as if you knew best.”90 But by many accounts, project managers often presented themselves as “mini Logues,” replicating a phenomenon that had emerged in New Haven where impressionable and ambitious young men so strongly identified with their boss and his mission that they styled themselves after him.91 Mini Logues adopted their boss’s contradictions along with his more clear-cut strengths, including letting Logue’s faith in professional expertise undermine his stated other goal of making the BRA collaborative with neighborhood residents.
MOVING BEYOND NEW HAVEN
As Logue threw himself into renewing Boston, he sought to replicate what had worked well in New Haven. Given that one of his top objectives was to expand on his success in Wooster Square promoting rehabilitation over demolition, the Logues’ choice of Boston residence was symbolic. Whereas in New Haven they had built a new, modern house, in Boston they bought a renovated early nineteenth-century rowhouse on West Cedar Street in Beacon Hill, a historic urban neighborhood that Logue fell in love with. “I think it took him back,” Margaret mused, to the golden part of his childhood when, before his father died, the family lived in an attached brick townhouse in central Philadelphia.92 The Logues’ most personal of decisions signaled greater flexibility in defining what it meant for a city to be modern.
More substantively, Logue knew he would need in Boston the same two foundations of his New Haven work: a committed mayor and federal funding. Logue frequently spoke admiringly of John Collins. He appreciated his intelligence (“one of the smartest guys I have ever known”) as well as his political astuteness, his self-confidence, his managerial competence, and his fighter’s commitment to turning around Boston.93 They had a good working rapport where Logue met with the mayor often to brief him on progress and problems, a necessity given the political combustibility of urban renewal. But theirs was neither the father-son relationship Logue had cherished with Chester Bowles nor the sibling-like partnership he had experienced with Dick Lee. These men also shared Logue’s political and cultural orientation as deeply committed Social Democrats and racial progressives. Collins was a reformer of a different stripe. He was culturally and morally conservative and a devout Catholic. After Collins stepped down as mayor, hot-button issues like abortion and Vietnam would push him further to the right and lead him to serve on the organizing committee of Texas governor John Connelly’s Democrats for Nixon effort against George McGovern in 1972 and to chair its Massachusetts chapter. But as collaborators from 1960 to 1967, Logue and Collins respected each other and got along well. Collins wasn’t threatened by Logue grabbing the headlines, and in fact he preferred to have Logue take the political heat as the public face of urban renewal at vicious city council hearings and contentious community meetings while he himself played “statesman-reformer,” as one observer put it.94
Despite Collins’s claims that he had brought Logue to Boston “for the purpose of doing the best possible professional job” and vowed “not [to] interfere in any political way whatsoever with the way he managed the department,” the mayor nonetheless instructed his team to keep a close watch on Logue. He went so far as to install a well-seasoned political minder in BRA headquarters—John P. McMorrow, a former state representative, two-time member of the school committee, and competitor in the 1959 mayoral race—to approve all hiring and cast an attentive eye from his office across the hall from Logue’s. Frank Del Vecchio, the recent Harvard Law School grad who had grown up in the West End, recalled McMorrow’s blunt words during his “clearance interview” before any Logue offer could be made official: “Frank, I checked you out—Boston Latin, English High, Tufts. My job is to protect the mayor … There are grumblings in city hall that we are bringing in too many outsiders. You will help—you’re a Bostonian and you have credentials.”95
Federal dollars provided the other essential support that Logue needed in Boston, just as it had in New Haven. By the end, Logue’s $90 million plan had grown to over $200 million—over $2 billion counting private investment. Once again, Logue proved a wizard in minimizing outright costs to the city—to do renewal “wholesale,” as he liked to say. He also moved fast, knocking on Washington’s door at a relentless pace. Logue believed that only high-speed momentum and a large-enough scale could pull Boston back from the physical and social brink, according to Langley Carleton Keyes, Jr., then a doctoral candidate in city and regional planning at MIT who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Boston’s urban renewal, published in 1969 as The Rehabilitation Planning Game: A Study in the Diversity of Neighborhood.96
Logue saw an opportunity in Boston, however, to leverage the federal government’s outlay to encourage greater private-sector investment. With potentially deeper corporate pockets here than in New Haven, Logue aimed not simply to attract real estate developers to a particular project by enticing them with the federal write-down of the land cost, as the housing acts intended. Even more ambitiously, he hoped to use publicly funded urban renewal to jump-start private-sector commitments in and around urban renewal areas. Logue’s ambition for Government Center, for example, went far beyond attracting the city, state, and federal governments to build new headquarters. He intended to use that government expenditure to pressure businesses—long unwilling to spend money in Boston—to step up in a wholly new way.
Beyond mayoral support and federal funding, Logue imported two other dimensions of his New Haven work to Boston. First, before he left New Haven, Logue secured Paul Ylvisaker’s commitment to make Boston one of the six sites of the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas pilot program so that here, as in New Haven, human renewal could accompany physical renewal. With the help of a $1.9 million Ford grant, enriched by additional federal and local funding, Logue established Action for Boston Community Devel
opment (ABCD) along the same lines as New Haven’s Community Progress Inc. (CPI). He personally sat on its board and recruited Joe Slavet—who had tutored Collins on urban renewal, had helped recruit Logue to Boston, and was ready for a new job after fourteen years at the Municipal Research Bureau—to be its executive director, eagerly anticipating having another Mike Sviridoff at his side.97
ABCD would run into many of the same kinds of challenges that CPI eventually encountered in New Haven—but even earlier. Logue envisioned ABCD as the BRA’s social outreach into urban renewal areas, strengthening the agency’s ties to citizens by aiding displaced residents, combating juvenile delinquency and unemployment, providing legal and educational assistance, and coordinating existing Boston agencies to deliver social services more effectively. As Architectural Forum explained it, ABCD “initially was to run interference for Logue’s renewal program … Logue’s feeling was that if ABCD first tackled some of each community’s major social ills, physical renewal might be easier.”98 Logue hoped that ABCD could provide a viable pathway to engaging a neighborhood in planning and identifying local leadership for the BRA’s program.
Slavet soon figured out, however, that allying his anti-poverty agency too closely with the BRA could prove damaging to its success. As he recounted later, “I said to him, ‘There are things happening not only here but all over the country. There are trains leaving the station in connection with the anti-poverty program, you know, that I just can’t stick in the areas that you have designated as urban renewal areas. There’s a lot of pressure, particularly from the black community outside of urban renewal areas to get aboard.’”99
Logue and Slavet in time came to blows over the BRA-ABCD connection. When, for example, Logue urged Slavet to move ABCD’s headquarters into the new Center Plaza office building across from City Hall Plaza, as the BRA was desperate to prove Government Center’s success and no paying tenants had yet surfaced, Slavet responded, “For Christ’s sake, I’m running an anti-poverty program. For me to move into the most expensive place in Boston, they’re going to kill me. What is the matter with you?”100 Slavet’s frustration was understood by Clifford Campbell, hired by Ford to review ABCD in February 1963. He told Ylvisaker, “Ed is of the view that for the most part ABCD should accommodate itself to, and maybe become the tool of urban renewal, whereas Joe sees, and rightly so, the larger objectives set for ABCD.”101 A year later, Campbell returned to Boston for a second round of reviewing and got another earful from Logue: “We were totally unprepared for his double-barreled onslaught on ABCD … He holds tenaciously to the point of view that ABCD is his instrument, created solely for the purpose of serving the ends of BRA.” Campbell speculated that Logue’s growing adamance was related to “his recognition of the role on the Boston scene that ABDC will play, if and when the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 becomes a reality. You see, for the first time … the War on Poverty will provide a budget and program whose scope and depth will far exceed any program envisioned or executed under Urban Renewal. He is not about to give this up without a struggle.” He concluded, “This is a struggle for power between two men.”102
The same year, two other observers allied with Ford observed the same rift. Peter Marris and Martin Rein wrote that Logue believed so deeply that urban renewal was “an essential instrument of social justice” that he “felt increasingly betrayed. Gazing from the picture window of his office on the rising frame of Boston’s new government centre [sic], he brooded on the bad faith of those to whom he had once shown the way.”103 As Community Action Program funds became available upon the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act, with its mandate of “maximum feasible participation,” ABCD would indeed benefit—and become more independent of the BRA, as Logue had feared.104
Even as Slavet managed to guard ABCD’s autonomy from the BRA for the sake of community credibility, he became personally embroiled in intense internal conflicts within the agency, not unlike Sviridoff’s experience in New Haven. Slavet faced charges of too few black staff and board members, too little community control, and too much research-oriented piloting rather than broader impact programs. Slavet finally resigned in 1966. These tensions between ABDC and the BRA, and within ABCD as the pressures for more participatory democracy increased, strained the relationship between Slavet and Logue. But, notably, Campbell’s candid reports to Ford did not undermine Paul Ylvisaker’s admiration for Logue. When in 1973 Ylvisaker, then dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, was asked to supply a list of “the most creative and extraordinary people you have personally known,” he provided twenty-nine names from his expansive career, of which “Ed Logue” was one.105
It didn’t take long for Logue to identify a second dilemma that Boston shared with New Haven: the city faced problems metropolitan in scope with only the resources of one municipality to address them. Although Logue had been frustrated with New Haven’s financial and political isolation from its flourishing suburban hinterlands, in Boston he became even more outspoken. He repeatedly proposed that the New Boston become the core of a metropolitan economy built around technological, scientific, and other knowledge-based innovation. This notion of the “City of Ideas,” which was fully articulated in the BRA’s 1965/1975 General Plan for the City of Boston and the Regional Core, sought to turn the burden of having 42 percent of the city’s land and buildings tax exempt as universities, hospitals, churches, and other public uses (the largest proportion of any major American city) into an economic advantage. Likewise, instead of viewing the research boom around Route 128 as a drain on the city, Logue argued that it should instead be welcomed—and cultivated—as nourishment for the growth of downtown lawyers, bankers, accountants, public relations firms, and the like.106
Logue’s hope for a metropolitan-oriented New Boston did not stop there. He also forthrightly called for metropolitan-level solutions to two of the city’s biggest social problems: the low-income housing crisis and the gross inequalities suffered by black children in Boston’s notoriously segregated schools. Specifically, he advocated a “fair share” housing program whereby Boston suburbs would each construct a small number of subsidized units, a program he called “scatteration” in contrast to the current “concentration” of nonwhites in segregated, resource-starved communities. He also proposed building “New Towns,” “planned for the whole income range spectrum and not for those who already have comfortable incomes.”107
To remedy appalling educational inequities, Logue went very public in 1965 with a controversial proposal for a government program to bus four thousand fifth- through eighth-graders from underfunded black schools in Boston to twenty-one suburban districts.108 As Logue testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights when it held a hearing in Boston in October 1966, “The federal government, which bears such a very heavy responsibility for seeing that the suburbs were all white in the first place [has] some responsibility to redress the balance.” Communities outside Boston have “some of the finest school systems in America and with insignificant numbers of nonwhite children [and] are not required to help.” To attempt to solve the problem only within the city’s limits was “unimaginative and cowardly.”109 Although Logue’s advocacy of large-scale compulsory busing went nowhere, he was credited by many with spurring the creation of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), a much smaller-scale voluntary busing program begun in 1966 that continues today to transport minority students from Boston to affluent suburban schools, making it the longest continually running voluntary busing program for school desegregation in the country. But it is worth noting that Logue’s liberal fix-it instinct to address what he considered an outrage with a top-down, mandatory remedy was not only resisted by white suburbanites; it was also resented by some black parents who felt it rendered them and their children passive victims in need of saving.110
Not until Logue’s next job as president of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, where he had the authority to operate on a statewide rat
her than mere city level, would he legally be in a position to implement metropolitan-level strategies intended to integrate communities and schools by race and class. Until then, the reality of urban responsibility and suburban retreat continued to frustrate Logue.111 It played no small part in fact in his deepening feud with Jane Jacobs. Logue published an appreciative but critical review of Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities in Architectural Forum in March 1962, predictably taking umbrage at a text that began, “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”
Around the same time, Logue and Jacobs met up at a debate organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he made many of the same points as in the review. While Logue claimed to share Jacobs’s faith in community participation and housing rehabilitation and her frustration with some architects and planners, “who care more about what their colleagues think of their plans than the public,” he rejected her primary message, which he phrased as “no more federal renewal aids; let the cities fend for themselves.” That directive he considered the indulgence of someone living in the safe, well-off neighborhood of the West Village, an option not available to slum dwellers. He also expressed some skepticism about her ideal of urbanity, having paid a clandestine visit to her block one evening around 8:00 p.m. and noticed very few “eyes on the street” and other qualities she celebrated. And then, going for the jugular, he continued sarcastically, “Not surprisingly, this approach has won her many new friends, particularly among comfortable suburbanites. They like to be told that neither their tax dollars nor their own time need be spent on the cities they leave behind them at the close of each work day.”112 Although Logue concluded his review with “We need Jane Jacobs … to keep on giving us the needle,” there was little doubt that in Logue’s mind, Jacobs had let suburban residents of the metropolis off the hook.
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