Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  The winners of each neighborhood’s rehabilitation planning game were often surprising and not nearly as predictable as the simple class analyses offered by many observers of urban renewal at the time. One school argued that urban renewal agencies consistently partnered with middle-class residents, wherever possible white, and excluded the lower-class and minority residents.28 Others dismissed urban renewal’s opponents in neighborhoods as “working-class authoritarians,” tradition-bound and xenophobic. One particularly descriptive journalist portrayed them as “unsuccessful ethnic recidivists,” a “calcified white proletariat,” and “tribalists” who are “injured and aggrieved.”29 In truth, the victorious players varied from match to match, though, Keyes insisted, “in every case, the local [winning] team is composed of the neighborhood powerful—those local people who are able to negotiate for the future of their neighborhood.”30 Keyes’s account provides insight into who won, how much, and why in each of Boston’s major communities facing urban renewal.

  PLANNING WITH WHICH PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON PARK?

  Roxbury’s Washington Park was the first neighborhood renewal project to get off the ground and the one in which Logue took the greatest pride. Given his long-standing concern with improving American race relations, he was pleased to be partnering with leaders in Boston’s African American community and, most importantly, to know that they were enthusiastic supporters of his neighborhood revitalization program. In fact, Muriel and Otto Snowden, the founding directors of the Freedom House Community Center, had reached out to Logue soon after he arrived, hoping to make their area a top priority in the BRA’s new neighborhood urban renewal program—and to establish their Freedom House as a key player.31 The day after Collins and Logue went public with the $90 Million Development Program in September 1960, the Snowdens—nervous that years of working to attract the city’s attention to their neighborhood would now be neglected in grand plans for the New Boston—sent the mayor a telegram “urging that full consideration be given to our community in light of [your] recent announcement of broad scale neighborhood improvement.”32

  The Washington Park Urban Renewal Project turned out to be the BRA’s largest single redevelopment initiative, encompassing 502 acres straddling Middle and Upper Roxbury. A hilly community of single-, two-, and three-family wooden houses centered on Washington Park, it had begun life as an upper-class Yankee area in the 1830s, become increasingly Irish in the 1870s and 1880s, and then for many decades served as the heart of Jewish Boston, home to many important Jewish institutions. (Irish Roxbury lingered, as John Collins grew up here in the 1920s and 1930s.) After World War II, Washington Park entered a new phase. Between 1950 and 1960, as Boston’s black population grew larger with an influx of migrants from the rural South (though at 10 percent still small compared with that of other northern cities), Washington Park’s population flipped dramatically from 70 percent white to 70 percent black. As Jews increasingly left for Boston neighborhoods farther south and western suburbs like Brookline and Newton, the Washington Park area remained one of the few parts of Boston where middle-class African Americans could buy homes. It became the mainstay of the Boston black elite.33

  The Snowdens were prominent leaders of that community. Muriel Sutherland grew up as the daughter of a black dentist in the upper-middle-class, all-white suburb of Glen Ridge, New Jersey (where their home was purchased through a white “straw man”), and came to Boston to attend Radcliffe College, graduating in 1938. Otto, raised in Boston after his career army officer father retired, attended Howard University, where he graduated in 1937. Both Snowdens went into social work, married in 1944, and in 1949 founded Freedom House, soon to be located on the site of Hebrew Teachers College, to be a force for good and stability in Washington Park. That meant neighborhood improvement, social services, education, and keeping the neighborhood racially integrated.34

  By the time Logue arrived in 1960, the dream of a mixed-race Washington Park was appearing increasingly doubtful, but the Snowdens and their neighbors looked to federal urban renewal to help them preserve as much integration as possible and to sustain a viable black middle-class community.35 Eradicating “blight”—the goal of urban renewal agencies like the BRA—became their obsession as well, as did seizing other opportunities made possible by urban renewal, such as good BRA and ABCD jobs for blacks both downtown and on-site in Roxbury, where more than eighty were employed.36 With their enthusiasm for urban renewal and a vision of an integrated Washington Park well aligned with Logue’s, the Snowdens and Freedom House became the BRA’s local clearinghouse for urban renewal from 1961 to 1968 and the pillar of the twenty-five member Washington Park Steering Committee that the Snowdens assembled. As Otto Snowden told The Boston Globe in 1962, “[The residents’] feeling has been that if the plans do not go through there will be no Roxbury. Many of them see this renewal program as the last chance to save the area.”37 When the architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt visited the neighborhood a year later while writing a six-part series on urban renewal for The New Republic, he met hopeful homeowners who told him, “We are going to have a beautiful new neighborhood” when the charming old houses are renovated, the more hopeless ones replaced, streets and parks spruced up, and new schools and community facilities built.38

  With little opposition expressed to the Washington Park urban renewal plan in the early to mid-1960s, the BRA felt confident that the Snowdens and their followers, working through a block-based organization called Washington Park Citizens Urban Renewal Action Committee (CURAC), were accepted as a legitimate voice of the community and a worthy BRA negotiating partner. One of Logue’s favorite stories to tell was what happened when the Washington Park plan was presented at a big public meeting on January 14, 1963. Over twelve hundred Roxbury residents crowded into the auditorium at Boston Technical High School. One speaker after another praised the plan until finally the weary moderator, asked, “Look, isn’t there anybody in this room opposed to this project?” Six people stood up.39 In his remarks that evening, Logue praised in rather grandiose terms the momentous collaboration between “the people who live in the area and the BRA staff.” Referencing two years of work and “countless meetings throughout the neighborhood,” he said that “on December 18 the final plan was presented to his Honor the Mayor by more than forty citizens of Roxbury who, as individuals and through their organizations, had helped put the plan together. This has never happened before in the United States.”40 Beyond CURAC, a major help in rallying supporters was the Roxbury Clergy Committee on Renewal, though religious leaders kept a concerned eye on dislocations and were likely spurred to sponsor 221(d)(3) projects out of worry about retaining residents near their churches.41

  Despite what seemed like overwhelming support for urban renewal, there were opponents to the plan for Washington Park, and their numbers grew over time. Generally these critics resented the ambition of urban renewal’s neighborhood proponents to protect the middle-class character of Washington Park from poorer blacks spilling south into the neighborhood from Lower Roxbury and the South End. In the words of one letter to the editor in The Boston Globe, the urban renewers were failing “to meet their responsibilities to the city’s low-income families … Those whose needs are the greatest, the community’s low-income deprived segment, were never part of the planning process, only its victims.”42 Others cynically stated that the BRA planned with the “tea-drinking Negroes” in a Freedom House they caricatured as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The community organizer Chuck Turner went further and charged that the Snowdens “ran cover for the BRA.”43

  But Washington Park’s urban renewal leaders were pursuing their own agenda as much as the BRA’s. Alarmed at the swift pace at which run-down houses were being carved into small apartments to house poor black newcomers to the neighborhood, they looked to the BRA’s program for protection. Specifically, they tried to expand the urban renewal area to Franklin Park, more than doubling its size. They sought as much clearance of dilapidated buildings as they coul
d get, not trusting owners of badly neglected structures to rehabilitate them. And they hoped that poor displaced residents would settle as far away from Washington Park as possible. To discourage them from sticking close, they fought construction of low-income housing. Instead, they hoped to attract whites to integrate new 221(d)(3) projects.

  According to Keyes, when Logue presented the neighborhood steering committee with the usual three relocation options, “much to Logue’s dismay the Committee was favorably impressed by the option that showed 60 percent relocation of residents. When the BRA at the next meeting … produced a plan that included all the same community facilities but only 40 percent relocation of residents [later reduced further to 35 percent, still higher than the BRA preferred],… the committee felt this plan represented a ‘glorified ghetto.’”44 Logue recounted another meeting where he tried to persuade the Urban Renewal Committee to put thirty-four units of public housing for large families on a site where churches were originally slated to go but none had stepped up. “We had a strenuous community debate … I was an ardent advocate for it and I lost. The Freedom House people, who had been accused in today’s bitter parlance of being ‘Uncle Toms’ wound up against it. The NAACP was split.”45

  But from Muriel Snowden’s point of view, more low-income and public housing “would lock the Negro community into Washington Park for the next forty years” and put “all responsibility for the serious social problems of the poor Negro” on this neighborhood alone rather than sharing it across the city. Moreover, the middle-class black property owners, the source of the community’s stability, “had the most to lose,” particularly since they had many fewer avenues of escape than the Irish and Jews who had been able to move on to other neighborhoods as their fortunes improved.46 Even Fred Salvucci, at the time a BRA transportation planner who was becoming increasingly disenchanted with how Boston’s urban renewal was unfolding, acknowledged the Washington Park situation as a tough call: “I mean those were the only home-owning blacks in the region. Shouldn’t you support them … trying to make some stability?”47

  The Snowdens remained the mediator between the BRA and the Washington Park neighborhood through Logue’s era, albeit feeling increasingly challenged by more diverse voices in their community. Muriel Snowden had optimistically told a Boston College Citizen Seminar in 1963 that “the formula for the successful planning with people in Washington Park … is the personal commitment of the Mayor, the determination and dedication of the BRA, the Development Administrator and his staff, and the experience … which gives us, the citizens of the area, the sense that we are truly partners and not pawns in urban renewal.”48 By the time she testified in front of Senator Paul Douglas’s National Commission on Urban Problems four years later, she was clearly feeling less confident and more bruised as the BRA’s partner. After proudly reciting the many achievements of urban renewal, including a new shopping center, YMCA, Boys and Girls Club, police station, courthouse, branch library, refurbished parks, improved housing, and the recently approved Trotter Elementary School, she acknowledged that “nobody but a bloody idiot would claim that all of this has happened without pain, without struggle, without conflict, without error and without gaps.”49 The BRA likewise received mounting criticism for doing business with the elite of Washington Park.

  The Snowdens’ position would get only more difficult the next month when Roxbury experienced Boston’s comparatively tame, but still troubling, race rebellion, escalating racial tensions in the city. On June 2, 1967—a month before the major riots in Newark and Detroit and two months before New Haven’s—more than fifty members of Mothers for Adequate Welfare (MAW) occupied the Grove Hall Welfare Office in Roxbury. They called for welfare reform and an end to what they charged was insulting treatment by social workers and welfare department staff. For three days angry sympathizers carried the protests into the streets—looting, torching, and throwing stones at riot-geared, fiercely retaliating police. The rioters “vented their anger on … anything that represented an intrusion into the community,” according to an editorial in The Bay State Banner, the major African American newspaper in Boston.50 After the protests ended, some of MAW’s original demands were met. Although urban renewal was not an issue in the protests per se, three state representatives presented a nine-point program that included physical improvements such as demolishing abandoned buildings; constructing playgrounds, swimming pools, and a skating rink; and removing trash from streets and vacant lots. A new generation of assertive black activists would gain greater prominence after these June days, though their demands would mostly be faced by Boston’s next mayor, Kevin White. John Collins publicly announced that he would not seek reelection only days after the Roxbury riots ended, encouraging speculation that the revolt had spurred his decision, though insiders knew he had made up his mind months earlier.51

  The November election would also bring the first African American into the city council since it had become an at-large body in 1951. Roxbury’s Thomas I. Atkins, a Harvard Law School student and the executive director of Boston’s NAACP, not only became a city councillor but also assumed the leadership of the council’s Urban Renewal Committee, providing a friendly platform for grassroots groups to get a hearing at city hall.52 This generational and political changing of the guard within Roxbury coincided with Logue’s departure from the BRA, breaking the negotiated pact between the Washington Park elite and the BRA from both sides. As neighborhood redevelopment went in other directions under Mayor White and federal dollars became scarcer, Otto Snowden despairingly told a Globe reporter in 1976 that from his point of view, “it’s just a matter of time until all the money spent here will have gone down the drain … It will fail because it was never finished … and we never received the necessary city and social services [that were promised].” The reporter concluded, “Fifteen years and 70.4 million dollars later, the renewal of Washington Park is considered a failure by many of those involved.”53 Although the passage of time had altered prospects for the Snowdens and their neighbors, in their heyday they had been able to marshal substantial community support for the urban renewal plan of their choice, making them the winners of the Washington Park rehabilitation planning game.

  A VERY DIFFERENT LOWER ROXBURY

  Middle-class individuals like the Snowdens did not always become the BRA’s negotiating partner in the city’s major black community of Roxbury. In Madison Park, a neighborhood much poorer and more deteriorated than Washington Park, which was about one and a half miles south, low-income residents were the ones to gain recognition as community spokespersons and to fight for changes in the BRA’s plan to build the new Campus High School, later renamed Madison Park High School. Over the course of a year, the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation (LRCC), the organizational voice of low-income residents, managed to win favor as the bargaining agent for the neighborhood, including gaining prominence over mostly white, middle-class advocacy planners who had volunteered to help them. Organizers from Urban Planning Aid had originally been invited by the LRCC to represent it to the BRA. But when a memorandum of agreement was finally signed in January 1967, adding more than four hundred units of new housing to the high school plan, its parties were only the LRCC and the BRA, judged by each side to be its best negotiating option, even as tension persisted between them.

  The community’s engagement with the BRA grew out of the Boston School Committee and BRA’s joint plan to build a large integrated high school in the low-income neighborhood of Madison Park.54 The issue was not that local residents objected to a new high school. Roxbury’s schools were in desperate shape, as the Boston School Committee’s failure to conform with Massachusetts’s Racial Imbalance Act of 1965 was blocking all efforts to construct vitally needed new schools throughout the city—and what was bad in white Boston was worse in black Roxbury. The state feared the creation of more segregated schools and wanted to keep the pressure on the Boston School Committee to integrate. A 1962 Ford Foundation study had found conditions so
appalling that it recommended tearing down at least seventy-one aged elementary schools, constructing fifty-five new schools and twelve additions, and building a city-wide high school for fifty-five hundred pupils, all to the tune of $132 million.55 The BRA decided to move forward with the high school, whose diverse geographical enrollment would exempt it from the building ban.

  Residents of the Madison Park neighborhood had already begun to organize when they learned about the BRA’s plans for the new high school in spring 1966. Their action was first prompted by mounting garbage in Madison Park, which had become an unsupervised dumping ground for individuals and even construction company trucks from all over Greater Boston seeking to avoid paying proper waste disposal fees. In March 1966, fed-up residents, aided by clever community organizers, took matters into their own hands, loading a truck with trash and depositing it on the steps of city hall. A few months later, they gathered more refuse and lit a big bonfire in the park. When summoned firemen turned their hoses on protesters as well as flames, they stoked the neighborhood’s anger by invoking emotional images of the high-pressure hoses used on civil rights marchers in the American South.56

  When the BRA presented plans that required using fifty-seven acres of the Madison Park area for a high school and athletic fields, dislocating an estimated 385 families, the stage was set for residents to demand that affordable replacement housing be built—and be ready in time—for the displaced. The LRCC, created in May 1966, became the neighborhood’s voice of opposition. It involved many of Roxbury’s most important community organizers—Andrea Ballard, Daniel Richardson, Alex Rodriguez, Byron Rushing, and Chuck Turner—but meetings also attracted many concerned citizens who elected the local residents Ralph Smith and Shirley Smolinsky as leaders. Smith was an African American night-shift baker who was about to lose the two-family red-brick rowhouse he had bought in 1946. Smolinsky was a Polish American homemaker whose family was among the shrinking number of whites still living in the neighborhood.57