Saving America's Cities
Page 23
Faith in the power of government was also captured architecturally in another Government Center building, the Massachusetts State Service Center.58 Only in 1953 had the federal government’s disparate but expanding activities in the realm of social provision been reorganized into the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), the first cabinet department to be added since the Department of Labor was created in 1913. By the early 1960s, Kennedy and then Johnson’s ambitious social agenda had fostered growing welfare activity at the state and national levels. The State Service Center complex began as three separate state buildings—for employment and social security; outpatient mental health services; and health, education, and welfare—each assigned to a different architectural firm. To Logue’s frustration, the project “was poking along with a collection of architects who were sort of sniffing around at each other,” making little progress on a plan “which looked like an Italian town, full of small buildings,” in one critic’s words.
The architect Paul Rudolph, brought in by one firm as a consultant, came to the rescue. He soon determined that the scheme was “too small for the site,” the “manipulation of scale [being] the most important tool in the hands of the architect.”59 Logue had come to respect Rudolph greatly from their work together in New Haven, where Rudolph advised him on downtown renewal and designed one of the first buildings to go up, the huge Temple Street Parking Garage. So Logue seized Rudolph’s entry into the project and named him coordinating architect for the whole State Service Center. Rudolph brilliantly figured out a way of integrating three fragmented, uninspiring designs into one cohesive, triangular, and sculptural complex enclosing a bowl-like central courtyard intended as a counterpoint to the convex dome on the Massachusetts State House several blocks away.60 He gave the megastructure the massiveness he felt its social importance required, prescribed ambitious design standards for all three units, planned a grand serpentine stairway entrance, and faced the entire surface with his distinctive corrugated concrete, originally developed for the Yale Art and Architecture Building. Much as social services were united in one all-encompassing HEW in Washington, D.C., so the Massachusetts State Service Center unified them in one monumental-scale building in Boston.
Logue and Collins aimed from the start to use Boston’s Government Center to leverage private economic activity. They instructed Pei’s firm to mark adjacent parcels for private development on all sides of Government Center. The final plan provided sites for four—later increased to five—major public buildings and at least ten private or other commercial structures, making it clear that the business of government was intended to stimulate the business of the private sector.61 That was easier said than done, however, in tightfisted Boston. The first private project to go up—the Center Plaza office building across from City Hall Plaza—attracted only one bidder, the Leventhal brothers’ Beacon Construction Company (later Beacon Companies), which was brand new to the Boston development game. With little capital to play with and facing weak demand for new downtown office space, the firm could afford to construct the long, low, crescent-shaped building only in stages, famously mounting “To Be Continued” signs at the completion of the first two out of three parts.62
The effort to have Government Center jump-start private development also led to a serious crisis: disputes and then legal suits over the BRA’s taking by eminent domain of two buildings occupying Parcel 8 at the corner of State and New Congress Streets. Logue, following Pei’s plan, wanted to create a gateway from the business district to Government Center, more breathing space around Charles Bulfinch’s landmark Old State House, and a larger lot on which to place a thirty- to forty-story office tower to rehouse the New England Merchants National Bank headquarters, which would bring in twice the tax dollars that the current building did. Logue’s city council enemies made the suit into a cause célèbre, charging him with striking a “sweetheart deal” with the local real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, whose newfound interest in building downtown rather than in the Route 128 corridor Logue hoped to encourage. Although the battle over Parcel 8 substantially delayed city council approval of Government Center until May 1965, ultimately the BRA prevailed in the state’s highest court and a blue-ribbon panel appointed by the mayor to run a competition for the site ended up giving the project to Cabot, Cabot & Forbes anyway.63 Not surprisingly, when the BRA laid out its major objectives in the 1965/1975 General Plan for the City of Boston and the Regional Core, a top one was “Public Action for Private Change,” meaning using government spending to “prime the pump.”64
A very direct way of priming the pump involved instructing all designers of Government Center to push staff and the general public as much as possible out into the larger city to spend money as consumers. City hall, for example, was not to have a major cafeteria so that workers would patronize luncheonettes in the neighborhood; the subsidized dining rooms of Baltimore’s Charles Center were known to have depressed pedestrian traffic nearby.65 The city hall architects’ original hope of animating the building and its plaza with a rathskeller restaurant, common in city hall basements in Kallmann’s native Germany, thus came to naught. They were repeatedly told to exclude any commercial activity. McKinnell’s understanding was that “a deal was struck with the local businessmen that … there would be no competition with the immediate area.”66
The Government Center strategy worked. Despite all the nontaxable public buildings that went up in Government Center, the assessed valuation of taxed properties in the area jumped from about $17.5 million to $28 million upon completion. A district that had once employed six thousand soon had twenty-five thousand workers, who supported local businesses as consumers as well.67 And as hoped, when Government Center became more of a concrete reality, the private investors who had once been so difficult to attract to downtown Boston started stepping up. First was the State Street Bank Building in 1966; then, after the release of the CCBD’s plan to improve downtown retail in 1967, a spate of other buildings followed: the New England Merchants National Bank Building, the Boston Company Building, the First National Bank Tower, the National Shawmut Bank, and adaptive use of Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market.68 Symbolically, the former, ornate French Second Empire City Hall was repurposed as a French restaurant.69 Logue thus fulfilled his prediction to the Boston City Council’s Urban Renewal Committee in June 1962 that “private construction will follow rather than lead public building in the renewal of Scollay Square.” Ironically, however, the crucial role that public investment had played in turning around Boston’s flagging downtown economy in the 1960s has often been forgotten amid assumptions that credit for the city’s dynamic twenty-first-century economy belongs to the risk-taking private entrepreneurs of more recent decades.
Although Logue and Collins encountered little organized opposition to Government Center other than the Parcel 8 kerfuffle—nostalgia for Scollay Square’s honky-tonk charms arriving later—the major challenge to their plans came from defenders of the historic city who fought removal of old buildings they felt bore the imprint of the city’s important past.70 Logue was not insensitive to Boston’s historical legacy. He chose to live in a nineteenth-century rowhouse on well-preserved Beacon Hill. He savored the old-world character of the North End. He worked hard to save the granite wharves, as well as Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. And he loved much about the way Boston’s history was woven into the contemporary city.71 But when it came to turning around the deteriorating downtown with Government Center, Logue focused laser-like on constructing the new and the modern, going back on his promise to rehab, not demolish, by arguing that clearance in this case was unavoidable and would surely not happen at this scale again.
It didn’t take long, however, before Logue was confronted by preservationists like the eminent Boston historian and fellow Tavern Club member Walter Muir Whitehill. He was horrified that Pei and Cobb’s plan for Government Center called for removing the Sears Crescent, a curved, six-story, red-brick building constructed by Yankee mer
chant David Sears on Cornhill Street in 1816, and the Sears Block, its four-story granite neighbor dating from 1848. Cornhill had an important abolitionist history as the location of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator newspaper and had remained the heart of antiquarian bookselling in Boston. When Whitehill learned the fate planned for the “Cornhill Curve,” he burst into Kane Simonian’s office, demanding, “How dare you tear down the Sears Crescent!” When Simonian explained—gleefully, one can only imagine—that a decision like that rested solely with Ed Logue, Whitehill replaced his hat, stormed out, and headed for Logue’s office. After letter-writing campaigns flooded city hall and delegations descended upon the mayor and the BRA, the decision was finally made—though not without a fight—to revise the original plan and incorporate the Sears Crescent and Block into Government Center.72 Henry Scagnoli, Collins’s deputy mayor, who sat on the Government Center commission officially responsible for the project, later recalled, “We wanted that thing down. We thought it was junk.” But “Logue fought for it … And thank the Lord he didn’t tear it down.”73 In 1964, Logue would get a personal thanks from George J. Gloss, owner of the Brattle Book Shop on Cornhill, for being “a certain man of integrity” who helped the shop “rise like a phoenix from the ashes.”74
Over time, other historic buildings on the fringes of Government Center would also become part of the BRA’s planning: the Old State House, Dock Square, the Blackstone Block, the Custom House and Tower, Quincy Market, and Faneuil Hall, which, as the site of Boston’s first town meeting, was symbolically framed in a huge window in the new mayor’s office.75 Logue even agreed, under pressure, to save the Old Howard Theater in Scollay Square, which “had been closed for many years but had a sentimental hold on an older generation of Bostonians,” and to explore turning it into a performing arts center—until a fire destroyed it. Logue pled innocent to preservationists’ charges of arson.76
Logue summed up the status of historic preservation at an American Society of Planning Officials meeting in Boston in 1964. After “a wrestling match” over “what buildings we were going to save,… wherever possible we decided to try to keep them and work our new plans around them.” And now, he pronounced proudly, the BRA has a “Historic Preservation Committee which examines every project area before the project plan is finished and makes recommendations to us about what kinds of buildings should be saved—where and how.”77 Not coincidentally, this was just the moment when the historic preservation movement was taking off nationally, with many advocates having been mobilized by the shocking destruction of New York’s iconic Penn Station in 1964 as well as other losses resulting from overly aggressive urban renewal. The National Historic Preservation Act would follow in 1966, providing a way of inventorying significant historic buildings, protecting them from harm by federally funded projects, and making loans, grants, and tax incentives available to preserve worthy structures.78
Angry resistance to a thoroughly modern downtown city core had succeeded in forcing Logue and his BRA to begin negotiating with preservationists over acceptable compromises in their original downtown plans. It should be said that not everyone approved of this concession to history. Some, like Scagnoli, felt it would detract from Government Center’s message that Boston was finally up-to-date. Others, like Logue’s archenemy City Councillor Bill Foley, regretted the tax income that would be lost with less lucrative development.79 But what resulted from this negotiation was a distinctive downtown cityscape—a vibrant collage of old and new buildings—that distinguished Boston from many other renewing cities and from cities defined by stringent architectural uniformity. In 1964, the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable expressed optimism that Boston, having “the only major urban renewal agency with an official architectural historian on its staff,” was embracing “preservation and rehabilitation” with “specific plans and policy rather than pious announcements,” “well aware of the sensitive problems of combining the old city with essential new construction.”80
A dozen years later, soon after the restored Quincy Market reopened in August 1976, Huxtable would pronounce the experiment a success. “Twenty years is a short time to see a dream of a renewed city realized,” she wrote, recalling how she “fell in love with Quincy Market” some two decades earlier, despite its “obvious state of terminal decline.” Now, “exactly 150 years to the day after it originally opened, it reopened triumphantly. The restoration is one of the stellar features of Boston’s exemplary downtown renewal, a remarkably sensitive synthesis of new and old, from Faneuil Hall to City Hall.” With this proof that “there is no impossible dream,” she credited Logue, assisted by Whitehill and other local historians, with determining “that the market complex was not expendable—one of his many bold, risky stands that paid off in Boston’s brilliant downtown renewal.”81
Although Logue at first only begrudgingly accommodated challenges from determined champions of the Old Boston, he eventually came to appreciate their perspective and even to advocate negotiating a cityscape that blended the historic and the modern. In a volume paying tribute to the first hundred years of the Boston Society of Architects, Logue wrote in 1967 of the necessity of “preserving our rich heritage” while also “bring[ing] Boston up to date,” of having “a sensitivity to the relationship between the new and the old … that is all-important in maintaining the fabric of the city.” He concluded, “While we must acknowledge history, we must avoid becoming enslaved by it.”82 By 1972 he went even further. At a symposium at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he reflected in a speech, “The Education of an Urban Administrator,” on how he had learned to value the scale and intimacy of historic urban spaces and buildings, his own thinking evolving along with the broader society’s greater embrace of historic preservation.83
Eventually, Logue would become so invested in the mix of modern and historic that distinguished downtown Boston’s revitalization that in the 1980s he expressed concern about the impact of the decade-long economic boom that was decreasing the BRA’s authority and increasing the influence of the private sector. Logue feared that too many massive “glass boxes” were undermining the visually exciting, delicate balance the city had previously struck between old and new.84 He lamented how poorly the John Hancock Tower interfaced on the ground with “Henry Richardson’s magnificently monumental Trinity Church” on nearby Copley Square. Logue even regretted that in the 1960s he had not used more red brick or stipulated more use of red “to echo and strengthen the original patina of the city.”85
Boston’s Government Center was far from perfect. Even the passage of time failed to blend this enormous development fully into the surrounding city, rendering the historic buildings saved on its periphery as quaint relics—too few, too small, and too precious. Crescent-shaped Cornhill was one thing as a two-sided street, quite another “with its nose exposed to this huge space … So we saved the building but we didn’t save the experience,” Cobb lamented.86 Warnings about the danger of decontextualizing the Sears buildings had come early, in fact, through a notable exchange between Logue and his Design Advisory Committee. It recommended saving the Ames Building (1892), diagonally across from the Old State House, and the Sears Block, urging that if the latter could be “put in decent shape” and you do “not make it too unattractively clean but keep much of its dinginess as one of the historical second-hand bookshops of the City, we believe much interest would be added to the New City Hall setting.” Logue agreed with their conclusions, but added, “If I may say so, I am somewhat dismayed at the way in which you choose to express your interest in the Sears Block. I doubt it will be helpful in achieving the objective.”87 Logue himself later recognized another limitation to Government Center, noting that it would have benefited from more mixed use—particularly the inclusion of housing to animate downtown during more hours of the day and days of the week than the offices did. But implementing that insight would have required abandoning faith in the modernist orthodoxy of separating functions, which the Logue
of the 1960s was not yet ready to do.
Although the American Institute of Architects would name Boston City Hall the sixth greatest American building at the nation’s bicentennial in 1976, many ordinary Bostonians and city workers came to hate it, culminating in a failed proposal from the former mayor Thomas M. Menino in 2006 to sell or tear it down and build a new city hall on his own redevelopment frontier of the South Boston Seaport.88 Other criticisms mounted. The nine-acre brick-paved plaza proved windswept and inhospitable to the vibrant public life that its architects and planners had imagined. They had in mind St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Piazza del Campo in Siena, and St. Peter’s Square in Rome. Although Huxtable pronounced in 1972 that, thanks to the plaza, Boston’s Government Center “can take its place among the world’s great city spaces,” her enthusiasm was not widely shared. Even the city hall architect McKinnell recognized the plaza’s flaws, identifying it as a space that was too big, too uncontained at the edges, and too hard-surfaced, growing out of a “misplaced idealism that … there must be this civic place, this is where the crowds will meet. This is where the revolution will begin.”89 I. M. Pei shared McKinnell’s regret that his and Cobb’s original plan had specified too large a plaza, though they did call for grass rather than paving.90 Over the years, endless schemes have been proposed to make City Hall Plaza less sterile.91 In terms of the building itself, concrete turned out to be a material that in Boston’s harsh climate required more maintenance than an increasingly cash-strapped city and state were willing or able to fund. Adding to the bill were cavernous interior spaces, designed in the energy-guzzling 1960s without attention to efficiency and cost.92