Already committed to many of its goals, Cushing and his Boston church used Vatican II to legitimate their partnering with other influential forces, such as the BRA, the Yankee Protestant business elite, and interfaith and interracial organizations. Without Rome’s blessing, the Boston Archdiocese might have found it harder to defy internal and external pressures to define church business narrowly. Vatican II helped Cushing’s archdiocese resist the call from parishioners who lived in some of the targeted neighborhoods to challenge urban renewal. Charlestown was a prime example. As the battle lines were drawn there from 1961 to 1965 and the Catholic Church took the BRA’s side, Lally moved into the rectory of Saint Catherine’s and parish priests at the other two Charlestown churches were instructed to sermonize about the benefits of urban renewal and how it would save their dwindling flocks. Logue also brought in as the BRA’s Charlestown point person a Lithuanian Catholic from Chicago, Joe Vilimas, who had learned from the prominent community organizer Saul Alinsky how to tap into progressive elements in the Catholic Church. When, after two years of acrimony, the BRA triumphed at a raucous public hearing in March 1965, it was because a local priest brought hours of furious debate to an abrupt halt by suddenly calling for a vote, leading to a very close count. The Catholic Church would pay for advocating for urban renewal over the opposition of many parishioners, however, when a decade later these same communities became the heart of the opposition to mandatory busing for school integration. As the Church again took a more progressive stance than many of its congregants and endorsed the busing order of 1974, civil war broke out across the archdiocese, fueling a resistance that built on habits of protest born in the fight against urban renewal.27
GETTING URBAN RENEWAL INTO PRINT
Another crucial ally with a mass constituency was the media, which in this era mainly meant daily newspapers, the most important being The Boston Globe. Logue recounted, “[Editor] Tom [Winship] and the Globe became our strongest supporters and that became more and more important, as the Globe itself did under Tom’s leadership.”28 To the likely surprise of twenty-first-century Bostonians who know only two major city papers—The Boston Globe and Boston Herald—Boston in the 1960s had five newspapers, of which the Globe, today’s premier city paper, was not the largest in circulation. Because newspapers depended on a thriving city economy for revenue—retail advertising and classified ads providing their major source of income—it followed that they were invested in efforts to revitalize Boston. Some papers that depended on readers in Curley’s Democratic, ethnic, working-class neighborhoods, such as Hearst’s Record American, in fact struggled to balance supporting reforms that might make Boston more economically viable and alienating their readers.29
The Globe had been an independent paper, family-owned by several generations of Taylors and edited even more unusually by two generations of father-son Winships. Long a liberal voice in the city, it was now in the 1960s successfully reinventing itself as a metropolitan paper, with a substantial and like-minded readership residing in prospering middle-class suburbs. These customers provided the Globe with a base for what were considered progressive causes, including improving the condition of downtown Boston, where many suburban readers worked.30 By chance, Logue had met Tom Winship casually in Washington, D.C., almost a decade earlier, when he was visiting Yale classmates and Winship was a Globe correspondent in the capital. By the time Logue arrived in Boston, the younger Winship had returned to the city, first as metropolitan editor and then as managing editor. In 1965 he succeeded his father as editor in chief.
Logue encountered Winship again soon after he began consulting in Boston: “I walked into the Globe city room and Winship greeted me warmly, as if I were a long lost friend, which, in fact, was the way it worked out. Tom wanted action. I seemed to promise that.”31 The Logues and the Winships became close socially, sharing a liberal perspective on a constellation of issues—renewing the city, but also civil rights and in time opposition to the Vietnam War.32 The Globe so obviously promoted Logue and Collins’s urban renewal agenda, starting with endorsing Logue’s appointment in January 1961 and continuing with huge, positive coverage of the BRA’s activities, that critics cynically referred to it as the “Boston Logue.”33 Logue freely admitted that “Winship was the next person after the mayor to know of our plans,” as they met frequently at their offices and homes.34 On at least one occasion, Logue’s nemesis on the city council, Bill Foley, angrily told him off with “You’re gone! You’re dead! You’re beyond the reach of your newspaper friends to help you.”35
Part of the reason the Globe could showcase Logue’s New Boston so prominently was that at this time it had a structure rare among newspapers, where Winship oversaw both the news and the editorial pages of the paper.36 Christopher Lydon, then a Globe reporter, remembers alerting Winship in 1966 to a critical report by Michael Appleby about Logue’s Boston activities, commissioned by Jane Jacobs, Herbert Gans, and other determined opponents of the effort by the newly elected mayor, John Lindsay, to recruit Logue to New York City. To Lydon’s dismay, Winship buried the tip, and no mention of the report ever made it into the Globe.37
Needless to say, the support of a newspaper as prominent and ambitious as The Boston Globe was a huge asset to Logue personally and to the larger BRA agenda. The Boston Herald Traveler and The Christian Science Monitor also enthusiastically promoted the city’s urban renewal—and benefited directly from it, the Herald Traveler with a new plant in the South End’s New York Streets renewal district, The Christian Science Monitor when a huge new Christian Science World Headquarters, designed by I. M. Pei’s firm, rose in a cleared area of the South End.
REVIEW BY DESIGNERS
Logue actively cultivated a fourth ally for his renewal plans, Boston area architects, less for strategic political reasons and more to help him achieve the high-quality, forward-looking modernist design he eagerly sought. Logue’s commitment to good architecture went back to his days in New Haven, where modern buildings served as a crucial marker of progressive change in that antiquated city. But the earliest structures had proved disappointing. Logue was determined to do better in Boston.38 He developed a powerhouse design and planning department within the BRA under the direction of David A. Crane, a former professor of architecture and city planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Crane was headed for a position in Chicago in 1961 with a team of mostly recent Penn graduates to “enlarge upon Daniel H. Burnham’s grand design” and get some “real world” experience when Mayor Richard Daley withdrew the offer to such a large group. As they were casting about for another option, a Penn colleague thought of an idea: “Ed Logue is the only urban development executive in this country with the scope of operation and personal moxy to feel secure hiring this much talent,” is how Crane remembered it. Logue was also conveniently building a staff. Logue was called, Crane flew to Boston, and within a week Crane was appointed director of comprehensive planning and design and the whole team had BRA offers—to the consternation of some Boston locals who decried the invasion of “foreigners and academics.” Crane thoroughly enjoyed informing City Councilman Foley that the “Chinaman” he was railing against was Tunney Lee, who, though trained as an architect at the University of Michigan, had grown up in Boston’s Chinatown–South Cove neighborhood and had graduated from Boston Latin High School.
Crane and his colleagues brought high professional standards to the BRA’s design work, introducing innovative—if not always practical—concepts like the “capital web,” where government-sponsored public investments would create a spine from which residential growth and private development could branch, and “broken seams,” empty areas between established settlements ripe for new initiatives. Crane’s contribution found full expression in the BRA’s 1965/1975 General Plan for the City of Boston and the Regional Core.39 When Jonathan Barnett went to work for the New York City Planning Department and was asked to set up an urban design capability within the staff, he looked to Boston as a rare model.40
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br /> This internal BRA design operation was complemented by an external design-review process that Logue enthusiastically implemented, with BRA board approval, for all major projects. Soon after he arrived, Logue institutionalized a volunteer Design Advisory Committee led by Hugh Stubbins, chair of Harvard’s Architecture Department, and composed of the deans of Harvard and MIT—Josep Lluís Sert and Pietro Belluschi—and other well-respected local architects, including over time Nelson Aldrich, Henry Shepley, and Lawrence B. Anderson.41 Additional architects with national reputations were paid to review specific projects, such as Vincent Kling and Harry Weese on a large commercial office building, Oskar Stonorov and Chloethiel Woodard Smith on moderate-income relocation housing, and Morris Ketchum and Dan Kiley on a neighborhood shopping center.42 Although implementing the design review process was not always easy, Tunney Lee was convinced that “it raised the level of taste.” It may not have worked in every case, “but just having it meant that developers would hire better architects to avoid having problems.”43 Serving as an architectural adviser to the BRA could also pay off, as Logue continued in the years ahead to hire architects he knew and respected.
Logue sought other ways of engaging with the Boston design community. He and his staff participated actively in major area architectural events such as the Harvard GSD’s annual Urban Design Conference, most notably in May 1964 when the theme was “The Role of Government in the Form and Animation of the Urban Core.”44 And Logue supported experimentation with new technologies like prefabricated housing, which MIT’s Carl Koch brought—not totally successfully—to Academy Homes in Roxbury. The design review panel for this project commended the BRA for “its initiative in sponsoring this research,” as “precast concrete techniques are a promising direction for new low cost housing,” but “industry is reluctant to experiment.”45 Figuring out how prefab housing might potentially solve the nation’s affordable housing crisis remained a career-long pursuit for Logue.
With these allies and his initial $90 Million Development Program of 1960 in hand, Logue launched his two-prong renewal plan for Boston. He would soon learn, however, that having friends in high and low places and a comprehensive blueprint on paper was not sufficient to achieve his ambitions. Although Logue frequently spouted a commitment to “planning with people,” the kind of cooperative process that he imagined rarely occurred. Instead, the result was more often a combative negotiation between renewer and renewed. Rarely was any side fully satisfied, but the new urban environment created in Boston long bore the visual imprint of intense contestation followed by compromise.
PUBLIC BUILDING TO SPUR PRIVATE SPENDING
Talk of creating Government Center had been in the air for decades, and early conceptual plans had even been drawn up under Mayor Hynes. But when Logue began investigating Boston as a consultant in March 1960, commitments were not yet firm and the city’s preferred site of Scollay Square was still functioning as a dense, scruffy red-light district that spread over sixty prime downtown acres. Its small-scale eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings housed bars and nightclubs, burlesque theaters and striptease joints, pawnshops and tattoo parlors, flophouses and amusement arcades. A bustling destination for sailors reveling on shore leave during the war, it was by 1960 barely making it with out-of-town tourists, partying Harvard students, and local teenagers like Frank Del Vecchio, who snuck into the Old Howard to gawk at a classic striptease act.46 But Scollay Square’s location seemed too promising to ignore, lying as it did between the retail CBD and the financial district, easy walking distance from both the Common and the waterfront, and in proximity to three subway lines and the Central Artery. Logue hoped that, if revitalized, the site could provide a missing focal point badly needed in downtown Boston.47
Even if Boston’s substantial residential suburbanization could not be reversed, a thriving downtown that drew workers and shoppers would keep the city commercially viable. Logue laid out the strategy to Senator Abraham Ribicoff’s subcommittee hearings in December 1966: “After thirty years [of] our suburban oriented national housing policy … weaken[ing] cities,” leaving them “starving for revenue,” and “with the much talked about federal cupboard fast emptying,… we are at work downtown trying to restore our economic and employment base and encourage private enterprise to participate in the renewal of the city downtown.” He saw no choice. “We must create the jobs downtown. We must expand the tax base downtown, not to mention keeping it from eroding.”48
When Logue stepped down as the BRA’s development administrator eight months after testifying, the centerpiece of his strategy was almost complete. Scollay Square’s maze of twenty-two narrow, crooked streets had been transformed into six superblocks on which the massive Government Center was rising, laid out by I. M. Pei and Associates and consisting of large-scale modernist buildings by major architectural firms, among them the John F. Kennedy Federal Building by Walter Gropius’s the Architects Collaborative (1961–66); a new Boston City Hall by Kallmann, McKinnell, and Knowles (1962–68); Massachusetts’s State Service Center by Paul Rudolph (1962–71); the Government Center Parking Garage, also by Kallmann, McKinnell, and Knowles (1962–71); and an expansive plaza binding these buildings together to ensure that Boston’s new civic center became more than the sum of its parts.
Traditionally, public administrative buildings like these were constructed in brick and stone and decorated with classical motifs—columns, carvings, and other ornamentation—meant to invoke the grandeur and long legacy of republican government.49 In contrast, in more prosperous American cities than Boston in the 1950s and 1960s, a Miesian-inspired International Style of steel and glass made corporate office towers modern symbols of power. Unlike the classical and the curtain wall, Boston’s new Government Center was constructed mostly in concrete in a monumental modernist style, labeled by some as “brutalist” and—more recently—by others as “heroic,” that aimed to convey through architecture the ambition, authority, and impact of the public sector.50 A Boston Globe review of the city hall design in 1962 described it as “nothing but a whole-hearted affirmation of a new time, new social needs and the new technology and new aesthetics to declare faith in the civic instrument of government.”51
From the start, the way that Logue and Collins planned and implemented Government Center signaled a new way of doing business in Boston. Once the federal government’s commitment to build was finally locked in during November 1960, making the project feasible, Mayor Collins himself suggested to Logue hiring I. M. Pei’s New York firm to rework the locally produced Adams, Howard & Greeley plan of 1950 to ensure that Government Center embodied the latest in urban design and avoided any taint of provinciality.52 That the project was overseen by a transplanted Boston native, the Pei partner Henry N. “Harry” Cobb, was an added bonus.
Collins also urged holding an architectural competition for the centerpiece of the project, a new Boston City Hall, which would be the first one held for a major U.S. public building in more than fifty years. Initially, Logue resisted the suggestion as unnecessary, time-consuming, and possibly counterproductive to getting the best design.53 But Collins persisted. Not only did he want city hall to be, as the BRA director of design Charles Hilgenhurst, put it, “the jewel of the Government Center” and an object of national attention, but also he was determined to remove the selection of architect from the culture of cronyism that he felt prevailed too often in Boston. Collins’s commitment to selection by an impartial architectural jury held even when it was tested in front of an excited audience of four hundred assembled at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston at 4:00 p.m. on May 3, 1962. At that moment Collins lifted the sheet covering the model of the winning city hall design by Gerhard Kallmann, N. Michael McKinnell, and Edward Knowles, three young unknown architects from New York who had never built a major building before. What he saw shocked this man of conventional tastes.54 Harold Hodgkinson, the head of Filene’s department store and a member of the jury, later recalled “the surprise … evide
nt in every line of his face, then amazement, and then executive composure” and finally the appropriate statement: “It is exciting and monumental. I believe in this century it is a really historic event, a design that will live for many years.” Logue, as usual, cut right to the chase: “I could almost hear him thinking to himself, ‘My God, what’s that?’ But he didn’t blink, because he believed in the process.”55
As The Boston Globe’s reviewer of the city hall design had understood, Logue and Collins wanted to use their Government Center project to send a message about the importance and integrity of government. McKinnell, one of the architects of city hall, remembered many years later that he and his partners too had a “tremendous feeling … that government was not just a benevolent institution, but was the institution for … social change,” and they embedded that ideal in their design: “It should be the people’s palace, and it should engage the people. It should be an open building, the symbol of open government.” One way the architects conveyed this democratic vision was by placing the city council chamber in an open, easily accessible space where the public could come and go at will, not shutting it behind heavy closed doors. The amphitheater design of the chamber, with the councillors seated in the pit and the public assembled above them, sent a clear message, put succinctly by Deputy Mayor Henry Scagnoli as “you’re working for me.”56
The choice of brut concrete also embodied the architects’ democratic ideals. “Brut concrete was an article of faith for us,” McKinnell explained, as “Le Corbusier was our god” (and indeed his Sainte Marie de la Tourette Dominican monastery in France of a few years earlier clearly inspired them). But beyond that, he said, “We were absolutely opposed to the developer glass box” of New York’s Park Avenue. We wanted to declare a resistance to that.” In contrast, concrete seemed authentic and honest: “One material could do so much … It could be the structure. It could be the cladding. It could be the floors, it could be the walls. There’s a kind of all-through-ness about it.”57 At Collins’s insistence, Boston City Hall was built as designed—not always the case with competitions—to avoid any tampering with the jury’s decision. Although opinion was divided, the avant-garde city hall was received with more enthusiastic praise than criticism, in contrast to Gropius’s John F. Kennedy Federal Building, which was almost universally declared a disappointment.
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