Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  One of the most important legacies of neighborhood urban renewal in Boston was the spur it gave to community organizing, which flourished thereafter in many realms of American society. Intense contestation over what constituted an ideal physical environment and how to best achieve democratic decision-making taught Bostonians to assert themselves in new ways. The Great Society programs would mandate “maximum feasible participation,” but the real learning took place on the ground, where the scale of urban renewers’ ambition to remake the city would arouse new heights of popular activism and inspire the birth of dozens of grassroots organizations. Just taking the South End of the 1960s alone, the list of organizations that involved ordinary citizens in neighborhood planning included SEURC (South End Urban Renewal Committee); CAUSE (Community Assembly for a United South End); SEFCO (South End Federation of Community Organizations); SEPAC (South End Project Action Committee); SETC (South End Tenants Council), which became TDC (the Tenants Development Corporation); ETC (Emergency Tenants Council), which became IBA (Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción); CATA (Columbus Avenue Tenants Association); PEURC (People’s Elected Urban Renewal Committee); and SEDC (South End Development Corporation). A number of these organizations, along with Madison Park Development Corporation and Charlesview Inc. in Allston, became the kernels of the major post–urban renewal vehicle of subsidized housing construction: community development corporations.98

  Community mobilization became so effective in Boston, in fact, that it led to a major defeat for the BRA by the early 1970s. Logue had left town, but the plan that got killed was his. Two major highways for Greater Boston had been on the drawing board since the late 1940s but were made financially feasible by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: the Inner Belt (I-695), a mostly elevated ten-mile, eight-lane loop through Charlestown, Somerville, Cambridge, Brookline, Roxbury, and Boston’s Fenway; and the Southwest Expressway (I-95), an eight-mile road designed to route traffic onto a major highway instead of through residential streets in Hyde Park, Roslindale, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and the South End, connecting Route 128 in Canton, south of Boston, to the Southeast Expressway, with a transit line down the center. Although these roads were projects of the Massachusetts Department of Public Works (DPW), and not technically the BRA, the BRA had a big stake and role to play in clearing land for roadways that would move traffic expeditiously through city neighborhoods. Both Logue and Collins supported this highway construction as the best way to minimize traffic congestion, maximize access to downtown, and secure the New Boston’s dominance in its region.99

  Although rumblings of opposition against these highways had been voiced at the DPW’s public hearings as early as 1960, radicalized BRA employees helped intensify the pushback against the highways. One day in 1965, the transportation planner Fred Salvucci and the architect Tunney Lee were studying maps of the proposed Inner Belt alignment and decided to drive the route. In doing so, they discovered to their horror how many buildings would have to be demolished and how many thousands of residents would be displaced.100 At first they investigated alternatives to the planned route, but then they shifted to rejecting the whole project. Everyone told them, “You’re crazy, you can’t stop them … you’re wasting your time.” Joined by three others with whom they would soon found UPA, they wrote a letter of protest to a local newspaper and signed it “The Cambridge Committee on the Inner Belt.”101 So began an intense and ultimately successful battle against these highways. As residents of Greater Boston came to understand the destructive impact these roads would have on residential neighborhoods—many of them white and middle class—they joined forces first to reroute the roads and then to stop them entirely. Although there were the inevitable frictions, low-income community activists from Lower Roxbury, suburban environmentalists, and elite professors from Cambridge’s MIT and Harvard found common cause in this battle.

  The wide swath that these proposed highways would cut throughout metropolitan Boston—endangering even the venerable Museum of Fine Arts Boston and similar cultural institutions in the Fenway—propelled the formation of a broad-reaching, metropolitan-wide opposition. The result was a sophisticated anti-highway campaign orchestrated by the United Effort to Save Our Cities (SOC) and the Greater Boston Committee on the Transportation Crisis (GBC), whose very names reflected their expansive geographic reach. What ensued were hundreds of neighborhood meetings, media outreach, petition drives, and big rallies in Boston Common like “Beat the Belt” and “People Before Highways Day.” The protests intensified after Logue and Collins left office, culminating in Governor Francis Sargent’s partial moratorium on highway construction in 1970 and, after comprehensive review, his final decision in late 1972 to cancel both projects. Sargent then led a successful effort to amend federal law with the National Mass Transportation Assistance Act of 1974 to allow interstate highway funds to be used instead for mass transit. Sadly, termination came too late to stop substantial clearance in Roxbury and the South End, adding significantly to the total number of demolished homes attributable to urban renewal broadly defined.102

  When interviewed in 1977, Collins still regretted the state’s failure to construct the Southwest Expressway: “It was an example of the most sensible coordinated planning in the country,” he insisted.103 Nor did Logue ever publicly change his mind about the importance of highways for Boston’s survival. However, Anthony Pangaro, who had worked for Logue in New York and was recruited to Boston in 1973 to help implement the linear Southwest Corridor Park planned to replace the canceled expressway, felt that Logue eventually came to recognize the value of mass transit over mass highways. Logue continued to tease Pangaro—“You rascal, you; you’re undoing all my good work”—but Pangaro felt that “he had some respect for the fact that his idea had been dismantled by a more current one, if not a better one … [In the original plan], there was the road and the transit line was down the middle of the expressway … It was totally wrong, but it was the only way to get it done at the time.”104 The defeated highways may have been a rare case when public opposition was so strong, so widespread, and so in tune with larger attitudinal changes about the necessity of investing in mass transit. But they also demonstrated that under the right circumstances, mobilized citizens could successfully constrain the actions of a powerful government agency like the BRA, to the point of even eliminating any need for negotiation.

  With the exception of Allston, where Logue and Collins stubbornly refused to negotiate, and the highways, where a politicized public warded off any negotiation, how effectively a Boston neighborhood mobilized to make demands of the BRA determined what it got in return. Michael Appleby, the author of “Logue’s Record in Boston,” the detailed study commissioned by critics in New York City hoping to keep Logue out, astutely observed that “the amount of clearance that takes place [in a neighborhood] appears to be inversely related to neighborhood political strength.”105 So, he elaborated, Washington Park, which cooperated enthusiastically with the BRA, had a 35 percent relocation rate (to some extent at its own request) and less long-term success than Charlestown, whose residents played hardball and in the end experienced only 8.8 percent relocation, all of whom were offered new homes in the community. In a similar vein, Collins lamented a decade after leaving office that “Washington Park and its inhabitants supported renewal and cooperated with the renewal process and it hasn’t worked out quite as well as it should have.” In contrast, “a vocal minority in Charlestown opposed urban renewal and yet it has worked out far beyond their greatest expectations and beyond even mine.”106 When Logue returned to Boston in the mid-1980s, he was struck in walking around the South End and Charlestown “over and over again about how much physical improvement has taken place. Clearly private initiative fed upon the initial drive and success of the public initiative.” But when it came to Washington Park, although “things are much better than they were,” they are “not so much improved as in the other two neighborhoods.”107

  Keyes offered a further explanation for th
e glaring disparity acknowledged by both Collins and Logue. He argued not only that successful negotiation between a neighborhood and the BRA yielded victory in the rehabilitation planning game but also that how the winners managed the competition with other teams in their communities mattered. In neighborhoods where one interest group was powerful enough to control the game alone, and thus marginalized other local groups, it felt little pressure to demand a renewal plan from the BRA that met diverse community needs. This was the case in Washington Park, where the Snowdens and other pluralist democratic leaders paid little heed to low-income protesters. In contrast, in a community like Charlestown, where public opinion was very divided and multiple groups vied, the only way for the BRA to move forward was to accede to the demands of many participatory democrats and deliver less residential upheaval to everyone.108 Of course, Roxbury also had to shoulder unfair burdens from Boston’s racial dynamics. The community that Collins and Logue encountered in the 1980s was coping with a steady stream of poor residents unwelcome in other parts of the city, burdening that neighborhood with more social and economic problems, lower property values, continued discriminatory treatment by mortgage lenders, and other stressors, all of which encouraged the black middle class to leave.109

  Logue had entered Boston naively waving the flag of “planning with people,” but by the time he left, that phrase would carry much greater significance than he ever intended. For example, the African American newspaper The Bay State Banner interpreted the resolution of the Madison Park struggle in December 1965 with equanimity in its editorial “A Battle Is Over”: “Logue’s agreement with the Lower Roxbury Community Committee is a victory for the concept of planning with people. It would never have been achieved if Ed Logue had not been committed to that principle, or if the Madison Park residents had not been resolute.”110 The Madison Park community organizer Alex Rodriguez took a more critical stance toward the BRA, but he—like Mel King—understood that urban renewal created opportunity as well as opposition: “Urban renewal had a negative impact to get a positive impact. It had to hurt before it helped … It disrupted before it re-created, and it was in the re-creation that positive came.”111

  The lasting legacy of urban renewal proved quite the opposite of what Logue had sought. He initially wanted pliant communities that were appreciative of the BRA’s well-intentioned experts, registering preferences when given specific choices, but not challenging at any fundamental level a hierarchical model of planning. What Boston got instead was community vigilance and empowerment. An investigator who surveyed the long-term impact of Boston’s urban renewal a good decade after Logue departed concluded that “Logue’s method of operation had implicitly helped to legitimize the notion of neighborhood control over the planning process through intense local citizen participation in it.” Logue, he argued, fought against attempts to turn participation into control, “but in practice the two were very difficult to separate from one another.”112 Keyes would himself conclude many years after his fieldwork of the mid-1960s, “Looking back, there had never been anything in Boston like the city-wide engagement of citizens that took place because of urban renewal!”113

  While there is much to value in the groundswell of community activism stimulated by Boston’s urban renewal, its prevalence in the 1960s and 1970s raised crucial questions about the future of urban planning and redevelopment in the city. In the wake of urban renewal, Boston, like many other cities, found itself struggling to implement even good projects with community benefits. Harry Cobb, the Pei partner who planned Government Center and who increasingly recognized urban renewal’s limitations, issued a heartfelt warning. As much as he appreciated the populist “cure” to the urban renewal “disease,” he worried that “what’s been lost is the capacity to think about the city in larger terms as it does need to be thought of.” He lamented that in the years after urban renewal, “There’s still tremendous resistance to that … We still haven’t figured out how to reconcile that need to think about some aspects of the city in larger terms with the need to respect and involve local communities. That gap has not been bridged anywhere.”114

  SEEKING CITY HALL

  Logue’s Boston years came to a surprising denouement. Faced with constant challenges from the neighborhoods to achieving his New Boston and aware of the intensifying drumbeat of participatory democracy in the city, Logue did the logical if unorthodox thing: he sought a popular mandate for his program by running for mayor. During summer 1967 he campaigned to be one of two top vote-getters in the nonpartisan primary election, scheduled for late September, who would then compete in the November runoff. As Logue often told the story, in the late winter of 1967 Collins announced to him privately, “Ed, I’m not going to go again.” Collins had taken a bruising beating in the Democratic race for the Senate in 1966, and it seemed to a close adviser like Henry Scagnoli that he was getting bored with the job.115 Logue protested, “For Christ’s sake, Mayor, we’re not through.” Collins stood firm—“I’m not one of these guys [who] hangs on too long”—and added, “Ed, you’ll never be through.” Then, in Logue’s telling, Collins suggested that Logue run himself.116

  This conversation may indeed have been the final spark, but Logue admitted elsewhere that he had been considering a run for mayor for several years, as would “anybody that works for a chief elected official in a responsible, highly visible job.”117 Life magazine’s profile of Logue back in December 1965 in fact had suggested that Collins’s possible victory in the Senate race might push Logue to run for mayor. Around this time, he began to act increasingly like a candidate for office, sending notes of condolence and congratulation and undertaking other acts of solicitousness learned at the knee of the master, his old New Haven boss Dick Lee.118 Publicly Logue claimed that with Collins out of the mayoral race, he saw no one he could imagine working for in the emerging field of candidates. So he decided to run himself. As he later put it, “In 1967 I looked at it all—the city, and where we were, and where we had to go, and who would be in charge—and before the [city hall] building was even occupied, I attempted my leap from the top floor [BRA offices] to the fifth floor [mayor’s suite]. And that is how my seven years in Boston came to an end.”119

  This was the first time that Logue abandoned his administrator’s back room for the elected official’s front office, and he failed miserably at it. To his great disappointment, in a very large field of ten, he finished fourth, following the top vote-getter Louise Day Hicks, who, as a member and former chair of the Boston School Committee, was the notorious defender of the segregated Boston public schools; and the then secretary of the commonwealth Kevin White and the Brahmin scion John Winthrop Sears, whom he trailed by only 158 votes. A number of factors explain Logue’s poor showing when he, and many others, thought he had an excellent shot at winning. First, White and Sears were Logue’s neighbors in Beacon Hill and competed for the same elite support Logue needed. White was already well known as a holder of state office, and even more crucially, he was extremely well connected politically, his father, grandfather, and father-in-law all being influential Boston Irish politicians. Sears, a Rhodes scholar, was a moderate Republican state representative with a decent civil rights record, a long Brahmin pedigree he traced back to Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, and enough wealth to amply fund his own campaign. His great-great-grandfather David Sears had built the granite mansion on Beacon Street that housed the elite Somerset Club and the Sears Crescent, now incorporated into Government Center. If Yankee Boston wanted its own man in city hall, Sears was the one.120

  Second, Logue ran a poor campaign. He had limited funds at first to launch his run, with only a bank loan guaranteed by a well-off cousin. Trusting, as usual, in his fraternal networks, Logue brought his inexperienced brother Frank from New Haven to direct the campaign. A newcomer to Boston politics, Frank proceeded to alienate local movers and shakers like Collins’s right-hand guy Scagnoli, who had run all Collins’s campaigns and knew everyone in town. Collins
asked Scagnoli to help Frank Logue, but when Scagnoli and the corporation counsel Arthur Coffey offered their assistance, “We were treated rough by him. We were practically told that he didn’t need us … And as a consequence, I didn’t lift a finger, even though I liked Ed Logue,” explained Scagnoli.121 It likely didn’t help the candidate’s image that Logue’s wife, Margaret, eager to have a well-deserved summer vacation after her year of teaching but not to become the First Family of Boston, took off with the children for their usual summer in Martha’s Vineyard. Logue was disappointed: “It was very upsetting, but that’s the way it was.”122 Looking back, Logue also blamed his loss on not starting early enough. He was the last candidate to announce, leaving him only the summer to build support and requiring him to depend extensively for campaign help on willing BRA staffers, who, though not civil servants, were often relative newcomers to the city. It was rumored that “the BRA was empty during the election.”123

  Third, and what Logue did not mention, was his lack of talent as a politician. Robert Litke, BRA project manager for the waterfront area, recalled how Logue asked to be introduced to all the Italian businessmen he knew in the nearby North End: “Ed, myself, and a couple of others are walking the streets, and I’m walking next to him, and little old ladies are coming down and old men, and I said, ‘Ed, say hello, tell them who you are.’ … So he’d walk up to somebody and say, ‘Hi, I’m Ed Logue,’ and he’d pull his hand back. ‘This is not working, Ed. Go up to them and say, “Hello, I’m Ed Logue, I’m running for mayor, I’d like your vote.”’”124 Logue’s forté—to be forceful, opinionated, and strategic behind the scenes—did not serve him well as office-seeking glad-hander; one reporter observed that “he seems to prefer discussion to slap-happy greetings.”125 The Globe journalist and political insider Marty Nolan blamed Logue’s defeat mostly on the flush Sears campaign, though he couldn’t help noting that “here’s a guy who runs a huge bureaucracy and can’t run a campaign.”126 There was more consistency than Nolan recognized. The flaws in how Logue ran that BRA bureaucracy—micromanaging, avoiding clear lines of authority, and registering his strong personal views with little filtering—came back to haunt him in the campaign.