Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Fast-tracking worked as well as it did because Logue once again proved himself a wizard at securing federal dollars. Although the UDC created great fanfare around tapping into state and private sources of capital, funding from HUD in fact remained key. While the resources available to him were by no means sufficient—Logue constantly called for greater federal funding to write down the price of land and to provide more rent supplements to low-income tenants—he made extensive use of the Section 236 subsidy program created by the 1968 Housing Act, which replaced the Section 221(d)(3) mortgages that he had relied on so heavily in Boston. This Section 236 program, available to state as well as municipal agencies, reduced the interest on mortgages for new or rehabilitated multi-unit dwellings from the conventional market rate down to 1 percent, making the construction of low- and moderate-income housing more feasible. Used for more than 90 percent of the UDC’s construction, Section 236 subsidies could reduce the cost per room from $78 to $43.81 The UDC managed remarkably to get over 60 percent of all Section 236 funding available nationally, receiving at least 90 percent of New York State’s share. Logue’s shrewd strategy was to come in at the end of the year with fully completed forms to claim uncommitted Section 236 money, counting on the fact that HUD would not want to return unused appropriations to Congress. One could even say that a mutual dependency developed between HUD and the UDC, where Logue brought to New York State $2.7 billion in federal subsidies from write-downs and direct 236 grants and HUD in turn benefited from the high visibility of the UDC.82

  AVOIDING CLEARANCE

  Fifteen years in the redevelopment business in New Haven and Boston had taught Logue that urban renewal’s reputation suffered its greatest damage from the criticism that it too aggressively demolished existing buildings and displaced current residents. Logue’s own thinking had evolved over time from advocating massive clearance during his early years in New Haven to rehabilitating older structures in Wooster Square by the time he left that city. In Boston, he had carefully distanced himself from the old-style leveling of the West End and sought greater balance, coming to value the preservation of historic buildings downtown as well as in neighborhoods like Charlestown and the South End. But still Logue had battled justifiable, and growing, popular disapproval of urban renewal. He now hoped that the UDC, operating on the much larger terrain of a whole state, might find new ways to meet the huge need for decent housing without requiring excessive clearance. As he told a conference of colleagues in 1970, “We cannot repeat the mistake of the Housing Act of 1949,” which “put all of the emphasis on rebuilding, tearing down and rehabilitating in the inner city … And city solutions alone will not work.”83

  Logue’s desire to build big—and without controversy—drove him to seek out two new sources of land for UDC projects. The first were languishing former urban renewal sites that existed in many cities, where clearing had taken place but no developer had come forward with a project. Eleanor Brilliant estimated that by 1967 more sites had remained leveled for urban renewal in New York State than had been rebuilt.84 As Logue explained it, “We were not, at UDC, seriously in the relocation business,” which had taken so much time and effort in New Haven and Boston, “because we either took open land outside the cities, or we took urban renewal sites, which had long since been cleared and nothing had ever happened to them.”85 This salvaging of sites that had been eyesores in New York’s cities for years, “collecting garbage and defeating incumbents while awaiting a developer with cash in hand,” as one journalist evocatively put it, meant the UDC was often received with open arms rather than local opposition.86

  When the UDC did target an occupied urban site, Logue insisted that the city involved clear it first. So, for example, low- and moderate-income housing projects that the UDC undertook early on in New York City—in Coney Island, at Twin Parks in the Bronx, and at Harlem River Park—were on parcels already scheduled for clearance by the city. As Brilliant explained the strategy: “He could therefore hardly be accused of tearing down the homes of poor people to build projects that would benefit the white upper classes, as had been the case in Boston,” referring here to the notorious West End.87 There was irony, of course, in the UDC adopting a tactic for avoiding conflict with communities that took advantage of the glaring scars left behind from an earlier, more disruptive era of urban renewal.

  The other major source of UDC land—more conducive to large-scale projects than abandoned inner-city urban renewal lots—consisted of sizable tracts of open land outside major cities that could be turned into New Towns. What soon became the UDC’s most distinctive program had been percolating in Logue’s mind for quite a while. Decentralizing people and jobs from crowded, poorly serviced urban neighborhoods had long made sense to him. He had promoted it unsuccessfully in Boston when he argued for building subsidized housing in suburbia and even carving the city into multiple New Towns. Once in New York, he had seized every opportunity to encourage investment in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, even at the expense of developing midtown.88 But the New Town concept involved dispersal at a much larger scale, promising plentiful new housing, community amenities, and jobs in self-contained communities touted as more satisfying social environments than typical suburbs. Particularly appealing to Logue, a New Town could be built on undeveloped land: “I don’t have to condemn it. I don’t have to relocate any families. I don’t have to demolish any buildings.”89 New Towns also marked another kind of break with ideas that Logue had once enthusiastically embraced: a turn away from the modernist orthodoxy of separating functions, promulgated by Le Corbusier and his followers. New Towns aimed instead to integrate living, working, schooling, shopping, and recreating all in one planned community, with each activity placed in close proximity to, not apart from, the others.

  New Towns historically had been rare in the United States. The British Garden City Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had led to only a handful of American replicas in the United States, such as Radburn, New Jersey, and Sunnyside Gardens and Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York. Under the auspices of the New Deal during the 1930s, a few more ambitious New Towns had emerged—Greenbelt, Maryland, and Roosevelt (originally Jersey Homesteads), New Jersey, most prominently. And in the postwar years before Logue arrived at the UDC, three privately planned communities were founded by prominent commercial developers: Reston, Virginia, by Robert E. Simon; Columbia, Maryland, by James W. Rouse; and Irvine, California, by the Irvine Company.90 The real action had occurred in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, where governments looked to New Towns to replace heavily damaged infrastructure and provide desperately needed new housing. New Towns, combining residences, public buildings, and work sites in a totally new planned environment, offered an ideal solution. Prime examples were the twenty-eight New Towns built in postwar Britain, the most well-known being Stevenage and Milton Keynes; Tapiola in Finland; Vällingby and Farsta outside Stockholm; Cergy-Pontoise in France; and Nordweststadt near Frankfurt, Germany. (The concept spread to developing countries in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia as well.)91 Logue had carefully tracked these New Towns worldwide and visited many of them, most recently in spring 1968 when he had stopped in Sweden and Finland on his Ford-funded travels during his stint as Visiting Maxwell Professor of Government at Boston University.92

  Not long before, after his electoral defeat in fall 1967, Logue had gained hands-on experience with the New Town concept when he accepted a consulting job at the invitation of his old New Haven Redevelopment Agency deputy Tom Appleby, now executive director of the District of Columbia Redevelopment Land Agency. Here Logue, as principal development consultant, helped plan a new community to be built on a 335-acre federally owned parcel in northeast Washington, formerly the site of a fort protecting the city during the Civil War and more recently a youth detention center run by the Department of Justice, soon to be vacated. President Lyndon Johnson himself had initiated this project, hoping it would serve as
a prototype for the nation of a well-designed, “balanced” urban community, integrating residents of different economic and racial groups. Here they would interact as neighbors and share local amenities such as new schools, a mini-rail transportation system, recreational facilities, and open space. Although the project faltered over conflicts with neighbors and Johnson’s departure from office, the Fort Lincoln New Town project, as it was called, remained a touchstone for Logue when he moved to the UDC.93 Johnson’s interest in the mixed-income New Town idea, moreover, led to the New Communities Act of 1968, which provided modest amounts of federal money that Logue would later tap at the UDC.

  Logue began implementing his New Town strategy soon after arriving in New York. Within a year, progress on three New Towns was under way. Although they had much in common with European models, which Logue sent senior staff to visit, the UDC’s New Towns struggled with distinctly American challenges.94 All three were built on unoccupied land, though legally they existed within the jurisdiction of a larger town or city, a fraught relationship given the power of localities in the United States. The UDC’s dealings with New York City over Welfare Island were part of its larger agreement with the city. But in upstate New York, both the town of Amherst, future home of Audubon, and the village of Baldwinsville, future home of Radisson, initially resisted the UDC’s plan, mostly out of fear that such a large population increase would encumber local services and require higher property taxes. Lawsuits were brought, and ultimately dismissed, in both cases, but it remained difficult to convince current residents that these New Towns within their boundaries would be a boon, not a burden. Inhabitants were also anxious about the new residents who would be flooding their semirural, white communities. The Syracuse Herald-Journal editorialized that local residents of Baldwinsville “feel put upon by the plans for 20 percent of the projected rental housing to go to low income individuals and families … some of whom might be clients of the social services department.” The Buffalo Evening News put it even more bluntly. Homeowners, it claimed, feared “moving the ghetto to Amherst.”95

  Despite common challenges, each New Town was unique. The New Town of Radisson (at first named Lysander) was located twelve miles northwest of Syracuse, on 2,800 acres (4.5 square miles) purchased from the old Baldwinsville Army Ordnance Depot, which had been used for manufacturing explosives in World War II and then abandoned. As he so often did, Logue brought in a familiar face to plan the project: David Crane, his former director of planning and design in Boston, who had also consulted on the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Fort Lincoln projects and was now practicing and teaching in Philadelphia. Crane’s plan, to be implemented over ten years, called for five thousand units of mixed-type housing, intended to accommodate sixteen thousand to eighteen thousand residents, with a town center featuring offices, retail stores, a medical center, and recreational facilities, including parks, a golf course, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Eight hundred acres were reserved for industrial use, testament to the “jobs first” commitment of the project and intended to provide ten thousand to fifteen thousand jobs. Although Radisson, when completed, did not fulfill all of Crane’s plan, one of its major successes was attracting the Schlitz Brewing Company to build a $100 million regional brewery, employing almost a thousand workers. UDC staff joked about “Schlitz—the beer that made Radisson feasible.” In time, State Farm Insurance also opened a regional headquarters, which employed another thousand.96

  The other upstate New York New Town was Audubon, in Amherst, four miles east of Buffalo near where the $650 million, one-thousand-acre SUNY Buffalo campus was under construction. This branch of the state university was expected to eventually enroll tens of thousands of students and increase the area’s overall population by two hundred thousand. To plan Audubon—smaller in area but larger in anticipated residents than Radisson—the UDC hired the British planner Richard Llewelyn-Davies, whose firm was developing the second-generation British New Town of Milton Keynes north of London. With twenty-four hundred acres to work with, Llewelyn-Davies called for nine thousand units to house around twenty-five thousand people of diverse incomes—a third reserved for low-income families and university students and staff—along with shops, offices, light industry, research facilities connected to the university, community recreational facilities, and substantial open space.97

  The third and quite different New Town—in that it integrated residential, commercial, civic, and recreational buildings but less so work sites—was Roosevelt Island, the UDC’s largest project statewide.98 Dubbed a “New-Town-in-Town” for its location in the middle of New York City, this community was the latest use of the 147-acre semi-abandoned Welfare Island, which beginning in the 1820s—when the city acquired it from the Blackwell family—had housed institutions mainstream society sought to keep at a distance: prisons, almshouses, workhouses, insane asylums, and chronic disease hospitals. By the late 1960s, only two hospitals remained operative, along with a training facility for the New York Fire Department. The island—stretching for two miles from 50th to 86th Streets in Manhattan and eight hundred feet at its widest—had long attracted development interest, including twice by Robert Moses. That attention grew now that the city struggled with a housing crisis; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), newly under state control, pledged to expand the subway connections between Manhattan and Queens with a new tunnel under Welfare Island; and Logue’s UDC was flush with ambition and capital. On December 23, 1969, New York City gave Logue just the Christmas gift he most wanted: a ninety-nine-year lease to develop Welfare Island. Planning had already begun under the auspices of a Lindsay-appointed citizens group, the Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee, on which Logue sat as the likely developer. Earlier that fall, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled The Island Nobody Knows and its accompanying catalog unveiled a master plan commissioned by the committee from the well-known architect Philip Johnson and his then partner John Burgee.99

  Johnson and Burgee’s plan took advantage of Welfare Island’s natural strengths—plentiful waterfront and impressive panoramas of Manhattan and Queens—in proposing a mixed-use, urban-style, car-free community of five thousand apartments to house approximately eighteen thousand residents of diverse economic status. Not far from the bright lights of Manhattan by subway, it offered New Yorkers a quieter, more spacious living environment. Flats ranged in size from efficiencies to four-bedrooms for large families. Johnson and Burgee’s plan called for a town square facing the waterfront with shops in a glass-roofed arcade, a three-hundred-room hotel, offices, restaurants, and a marina. Apartment buildings with retail, schools, a library, community rooms, and fire and police services embedded in them were to be located along a Main Street spine, which was curved for aesthetics and built densely to leave large areas of the island free for parks, playing fields, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. Buildings were taller along the street, stepping down in height as they grew closer to the river. U-shaped buildings with grassy courtyards preserved water views for all residents, as did promenades circumnavigating the island to give low- and moderate-income tenants access to the stunning skylines of Manhattan, since their buildings faced grittier Long Island City, Queens. The island was to be served by a new subway stop on a line that traveled between Manhattan and Queens.

  Philip Johnson had often been dismissed as an uninspiring establishment modernist, so his Roosevelt Island plan surprised the major architectural critics in New York City.100 Ada Louise Huxtable considered the project the UDC’s “showpiece and star performance,” and Johnson himself “a late-blooming urbanist of notable sensibilities” who had created “a genuine urban environment.” The critic Peter Blake concluded, “I can’t think of a more exciting site for a new town anywhere in this country. If we botch this one, we might as well give up on urban design altogether.” Paul Goldberger praised the island as “exhilarating … Finally … an urban space of real quality in New York … Main Street has the potential of becoming one of the
city’s most pleasurable, if briefest, urban experiences. Its bends and curves are just enough to provide interest, but not so much to be cute.” As others chimed in with similar enthusiasm, even Johnson himself acknowledged how much his plan for an intimate, walkable, mixed-use community differed from his former work and from the typical modernist emphasis on isolated towers, superblocks, and car-dependent residences and commerce. He proclaimed wryly, “This is my Jane Jacobs period.”101

  Roosevelt Island became Logue’s pride and joy, the ultimate fulfillment of his utopian vision for a socially diverse and architecturally distinctive New Town. He could barely keep away from it during construction. As a New York Times reporter told it, “Logue is to be seen at least once a week plunging in his bearlike way around the site—old corduroys, green Shetland sweater, shirttail hanging out and no hard hat covering his stack of grey hair; slow-speaking, fast-thinking, an interesting mixture of charm and combativeness; fussing about the color of tiles and asking awkward, probing questions of his staff. He is proud of what he is doing on the island.”102

  Logue brought to this project a sensibility honed in Boston to value a negotiated cityscape that both conserved the historic and showcased the modern. As Johnson and Burgee said in The Island Nobody Knows: “It is an integral part of the plan for this island that its important landmarks be saved … [so that] any new community that may rise on this island will have tangible symbols of the past upon which to build its future … Wherever possible, we have tried to juxtapose the old and the new—historic landmarks and new housing.”103 Although some original island buildings were in fact lost, the Gothic-style Chapel of the Good Shepherd (1889) became a meeting space and interfaith religious home; the restored clapboard Blackwell House (1796) served as a community center for small social events; the James Renwick–designed lighthouse (1876), on the northernmost tip of the island, was repaired; the Strecker Memorial Laboratory (1892) was adapted by the MTA as a power-conversion center for the subway; and the Octagonal Tower (1840s), once the entrance to the country’s first municipal lunatic asylum, was integrated into a new apartment building.104