Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  With NBC’s cameras rolling at the armory meeting, gathering footage later included in the Chet Huntley television documentary titled America the Beautiful on the urban crisis in Detroit and Boston, a national audience would soon see what some would consider American democracy in action and others another urban renewal travesty like Boston’s West End.81 Members of SHOC would nurse grudges against urban renewers as the latest in a litany of outside threats and land takers—the Boston Elevated in the early 1900s, the Boston Housing Authority in the 1940s, and the Mystic Bridge builders in the 1950s—and carry them into the anti-busing battles of the next decade.82 Logue and Collins, on the other hand, were both convinced that as a result of pressure exerted by vocal opponents, Charlestown in the end got the best urban renewal deal of all Boston neighborhoods, winning more concessions from the BRA than anywhere else. The biggest one was the BRA’s abandonment of Logue’s hope for a more socially mixed neighborhood, as Irish working-class Charlestown sought assurances that new housing would not encourage African American newcomers beyond those few families already living in public housing, which now by law required a modicum of integration. In the mid-1960s, there were only about one hundred blacks among the approximately seventeen thousand living in Charlestown, and many Townies were determined to keep it that way. It was hard to say who won the rehabilitation planning game in Charlestown. But all involved would have agreed that the New Charlestown resulted from a complex negotiation among many parties and not the adoption of any one side’s agenda, certainly not the BRA’s.

  MULTIPLE SOUTH ENDS

  The South End could not have been more different from Charlestown. Where Charlestown had clearly defined boundaries and a strongly identified, homogenous Irish Catholic population, the South End hardly functioned as a coherent neighborhood. Rather, it was a large, amorphous six-hundred-acre area bounded by downtown to the north, the Back Bay on the west, Lower Roxbury to the south, and rail yards, highways, and warehouses to the east. Moreover, within the South End dwelled many kinds of South Enders. The status-seeking newly wealthy Bostonians who built handsome bow-front houses in the 1850s and 1860s on filled land had quickly moved on to the more impressive Back Bay, a saga well captured in William Dean Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). But they left behind blocks of substantial homes that, by the turn of the twentieth century, had mostly been converted into tiny apartments and lodging houses, resided in by wave upon wave of new, poor immigrants to Boston. In 1960 almost 28 percent of the once-grand homes and more modest rowhouses of the South End were still functioning as rooming houses, many operating on strict ethnic lines. At least a third of the area’s thirty-five thousand inhabitants lived in them.

  The South End remained a diverse port of first entry in Logue’s era, so different from most of Boston’s ethnically homogeneous and insular neighborhoods. Residents identified themselves as coming from forty different ethnic groups, with 41 percent of the community nonwhite—mostly African Americans with growing numbers of Puerto Ricans. Nearly a quarter of the population was made up of single-person households, due partly to the neighborhood’s very visible Skid Row. And not surprisingly, the district was among the very poorest in the city, accounting for a third of Boston’s welfare caseload. Danny Soltren, who was born in Puerto Rico but grew up mostly in the South End, remembered that around 1960 “everybody was poor; there were poor Syrians, poor Chinese, poor Irish, poor blacks, poor Greeks, and poor Puerto Ricans. We were the new minority coming in. There was a little bit of everything.”83

  But the decade of the 1960s would see significant transformation in the South End, fragmenting the area into even more subcommunities. As the Prudential Center neared completion in 1964, the red-brick and brownstone houses on the nearest South End streets attracted urban homesteaders eager and financially able to convert rooming houses into single-family dwellings. Another group who found opportunity and tolerance in the diversity of the South End were gays and lesbians, always there but now venturing farther out of the closet in the more culturally liberal 1960s. In Boston’s South End, as in many cities, they often brought their two-earner household incomes and their sweat labor to renovating run-down properties. No surprise that with all these changes under way in a neighborhood so close to downtown, in a city determined to reinvent itself as the New Boston, working-class families living in low-rent apartments or public housing were feeling increasingly anxious about their futures.84

  This was the heterogeneous South End that Logue’s BRA made the third site of its tripartite neighborhood renewal initiative. The diffuseness of the neighborhood proved both an asset and a liability for the BRA. Mostly, it led to a long struggle to find organizational vehicles and participatory procedures that gave the BRA sufficient community support to move forward with an urban renewal plan. At first the BRA contracted with the United South End Settlements (USES) as the BRA’s representative and the ABCD base in the community, an arrangement not unlike the one with Freedom House in Washington Park. USES established the forty-member South End Urban Renewal Committee (SEURC) for community input. When South End activists like Mel King condemned that organization as too limited in reach—particularly as too homeowner dominated—the BRA encouraged structured consultation with sixteen neighborhood associations. But even that process seemed to overrepresent homeowners and local businesses, who, as property owners, voiced the strongest support for the renewal project and not surprisingly wanted less public or subsidized housing than the lower-income renters who feared getting squeezed out.

  In response, community activists like King began mobilizing tenants through new organizations such as his Community Assembly for a United South End (CAUSE), the Emergency Tenants Council (later Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción), and the South End Tenants Council (SETC).85 Meanwhile, Logue, worried that if left to the private market the South End might gentrify too quickly and undermine his hope for socioeconomic balance, tried to interest nonprofit developers in building housing in the South End. In June 1966, soon after receiving a $37 million federal grant for renewal of the South End, he wrote to one nonprofit prospect, “It is our belief that the South End should be a balanced community, too. It should continue to contain a fair share of housing which low income families now living in the area can afford.” He stressed the urgency of creating some five hundred units. “The problem in the South End is that middle and upper-income families are moving in, and their demand for housing is escalating acquisition prices. If the [nonprofit] corporations do not succeed in buying now, they may be unable to purchase later at a price which permits low-cost housing.”86

  King and his fellow activists also felt the clock ticking, and they pushed hard for—and eventually won—a more representative, elected rather than appointed SEURC, a victory for promoters of participatory democracy over pluralist democracy. And in the years after Logue left the BRA, they launched grassroots actions designed to pressure Mayor White’s city hall to build more low- and moderate-income housing to allow longtime renters to remain. Following a series of occupations of the BRA’s South End site office that mocked the BRA as “Blacks Run Again,” CAUSE became even more ambitious. On April 26, 1968, King led picketing around a temporary parking lot on land that once had housed a hundred low-income families and now was slated for a parking garage and market-rate apartments. Hundreds joined the protest over the next few days, creating a festive “tent city” encampment of tents and scrap-wood shanties that drew wide attention to the neighborhood’s tremendous need for affordable housing. It took twenty years, but finally community persistence resulted in a 269-unit mixed-income project rising on the site bearing the name Tent City Apartments, with three-quarters of the units affordable for low- and moderate-income tenants.

  The most substantial affordable housing project to emerge in the South End was Villa Victoria (Victory Town), begun in 1968 and completed in 1982, developed by Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA). This nineteen-acre project contained almost 750 mixed-income housing units combining
new 221(d)(3) townhouses, renovated rowhouses, and a high-rise for the elderly, along with stores, playgrounds, a cultural center, social service offices, and a paved, tree-sheltered public plaza reminiscent of outdoor gathering spaces in Puerto Rico. It became home to about three thousand people. IBA worked closely with the Madison Park architect John Sharratt on the design, secured seed money from a local Episcopal church and sizable grants from the federal and state governments, and sold three hundred units to the Boston Housing Authority to help support the lowest-income renters.87 In the 1980s, the momentum created by all this South End neighborhood housing activism carried over to a successful campaign to demand jobs for local, particularly minority, residents and the allocation of retail space for community-oriented stores in the newly planned Copley Place retail-hotel-office complex at the border of the Back Bay and the South End, adjacent to the Prudential Center.88

  By the end of urban renewal, the dogged, demanding struggle of the South End lower-income community had forced the BRA to make concessions, much as eventually had happened in Charlestown. As a result, the South End that emerged out of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s was, despite the relentless pressures of gentrification, a surprisingly diverse neighborhood, given its proximity to downtown and affluent Back Bay. Private homes and condos continued to skyrocket in price, but they existed alongside a substantial amount of subsidized housing such as Tent City and Villa Victoria, still tenant-managed under the IBA and employing fifty residents. Ironically, considering the intense conflict between the BRA and the community, the South End perhaps more than any other Boston neighborhood came to embody the mixed class and racial profile that Logue desired, though little provision was made for the single residents of lodging houses from pre–urban renewal days. They had few advocates in the New South End.

  The community’s success in fending off total gentrification did not escape Mel King. In fact, rather than condemn the urban renewal of the South End out of hand, King instead credited it with successfully mobilizing the less privileged in the area and ultimately providing a channel through which the community could negotiate with the city for greater resources. The South End of the twenty-first century is testimony to King of the survival of “a lot of buildings” and “folks allowed to remain here or their counterparts that wouldn’t have happened if urban renewal hadn’t taken place.” In a world where “development … was city, state, or federally supported,” rather than privately driven, there was an opportunity “to include a percentage of folks who were public housing eligible” in a diverse neighborhood that included “low-, moderate-, and market-income folks.”89 To a surprising extent, King and Logue shared a common vision, though King was much more convinced that community activism was required to safeguard it.

  NONNEGOTIABLE

  The rehabilitation planning game did not always work, and when it didn’t, both the BRA and a neighborhood could suffer. In the North Harvard part of Allston, a small community directly across the river from Harvard University and adjacent to its stadium and business school, Logue and Collins dug in their heels and insisted on honoring a commitment the city had once made to a developer for a 1950s tower-in-the-park-style, ten-story luxury apartment building. The urban renewal project required the taking and demolition of fifty-two wood-frame houses, many run-down, but home to seventy-one predominantly Irish and Italian families. Logue admitted it was “a bad project,” but he and Collins feared that backing down would demonstrate weakness and force the BRA to capitulate to anti-renewal forces in other neighborhoods like Charlestown and the South End. They told themselves they were compensating the owners at fair market value. It is also likely they calculated that if Harvard was actively acquiring land in the area for future expansion (the university already owned ten of the fifty-two homes, the ones, in fact, in the worst condition), then the university might be planning eventually to clear the land for its own nonprofit development, which would take the land off the city’s tax rolls. Privately owned luxury apartments would appeal to Harvard employees now and protect the city’s property tax income into the future.

  The outraged residents of North Harvard were enthusiastically supported by radical students and young faculty at Harvard, including some of UPA’s founders, in a strange alliance with the right-wing John Birch Society, which saw an ideal opportunity to blast urban renewal as a violation of private property rights. At Chester Hartman’s instigation, nine members of the Boston chapter of the American Institute of Planners sent an open letter to the mayor and the BRA registering disapproval of this “throwback to the bulldozer type of urban renewal … essentially a West End in miniature” and urging low-rent housing on any vacant land. Vocal protests took place at every public hearing and attracted national media coverage. Large signs reading “To Hell with Urban Renewal: It Is Legalized Theft of Private Property, We Shall Defend Our Homes with Our Lives,” “Mayor Collins: We Want Our Homes!” and “Urban Renewal Belongs in Russia” went up for all to see. Picketers jeered outside the mayor’s residence in Jamaica Plain. Elected officials in Boston and Washington, D.C., were persistently lobbied. And the sheriff and his agents were forced reluctantly to drag the holdouts from their condemned houses. Finally, unable to ignore the firestorm of angry protests any longer, Collins appointed a blue-ribbon committee to arbitrate and then agreed to its recommendation that those houses still standing be allowed to remain. But it was too late. Urban renewal officials in Washington senselessly insisted that their funding was contingent on full clearance of the site.90

  In the end Logue learned a lesson about the high price to be paid for failing to negotiate with a neighborhood. He never got the planned apartment tower, and his personal—and the BRA’s—reputation suffered irreparably. In Del Vecchio’s words, “It was totally unnecessary in the big picture for Boston and a political black eye for Logue.”91 Logue later admitted the huge mistake in his testimony during the Ribicoff hearings and in fact explained it exactly that way, as an unfortunate failure to negotiate. In a rare admission of his failings, Logue uncharacteristically admitted, “I would like to say it started before my time, because in fact it did, but I didn’t disavow it. That project was more famous, that small seven acres, than the whole rest of the program … I would like to say that we negotiate. It is our policy to negotiate the urban renewal plan, and develop it jointly with the people who live in the community. Where we did not do that in North Harvard, we paid and paid dearly for it.”92

  When Logue set out to write his memoirs in the 1990s and plotted a chapter on his greatest mistakes, sure enough, number one on the list was “The North Harvard Street Project.”93 The BRA did eventually change the proposed housing from luxury apartments to a low-rise 221(d)(3) cooperative sponsored by the Committee for North Harvard, an interfaith collaboration of five Allston-Brighton congregations, which the community welcomed. In 1969–70, the affordable, 213-unit Charlesview Apartments rose in Barry’s Corner, at the intersection of North Harvard and Western Avenue. Today, three of these congregations—Catholic, Methodist, and Jewish—continue to sponsor the project, even as it has been rebuilt nearby in a deal struck with Harvard University, which after many years of delaying had begun to expand its campus into Barry’s Corner.94 In North Harvard, the unwillingness by both sides to negotiate led to a standoff in which neither party got what it wanted.

  TAKING STOCK OF NEIGHBORHOOD RENEWAL

  The Boston that Logue left in 1968 was a very different city from the one he entered in 1960. Although still struggling, downtown seemed poised to host an economic revival built around FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) and knowledge industries. The Prudential Center, Government Center, and other rising modernist monuments would stand alongside the rehabilitated Quincy Market, Sears Crescent, and other historic landmarks to create an eclectic skyline, embodying a compromise between the BRA and historic preservationists that gave a distinctive visual signature to the New Boston. That negotiated cityscape, moreover, would also reflect a mix of public and private invest
ment. Logue, looking back in the mid-1980s when Boston was booming, was convinced that market forces could never have done it alone and he in fact feared that any tilting toward the private side could threaten the public interest. “The public sector created the New Boston and the public sector must control it,” he insisted.95 Langley Keyes, student of Logue’s Boston, cast back with similar eyes. “Logue took a city that was flat on its back and got it up on its feet.” Comparing Boston of the 1960s to Athens constructing its Acropolis, he claimed, “It was the golden age of federal largesse, and Logue was the Pericles. You can’t understand the city today without saying ‘Collins and Logue did it.’ Without those guys—nothing.”96

  In the neighborhoods, however, Logue’s ambition to foster modernized, socially mixed communities proved more controversial and less uniformly successful. Logue admitted as much in 1985 when he described the two-part series he was commissioned to write by the Boston Observer: “One part would focus on downtown whose revitalization has earned Boston worldwide renown … The second part would focus on the neighborhoods where the story is equally interesting, far more complex and where the results are very much a mixed bag.”97 Nonetheless, what happened in Boston’s neighborhoods was not the 1950s top-down style of urban renewal that took place in Logue and Lee’s New Haven and Simonian and Hynes’s South and West Ends. Rather, as with downtown, the renewal that resulted reflected a compromise between the BRA and Bostonians, a negotiated cityscape that bore the marks of tense give-and-take between the BRA and community residents. This was the case whether the outcome was 221(d)(3) church-sponsored housing in Washington Park, the new homes alongside Madison Park High School, minimal demolition and maximum rehab in Charlestown, the construction of Villa Victoria and Tent City Apartments in the South End, or the Charlesview Apartments in Allston.