Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  Logue recognized the limitations in what the UDC could do to counter the inequities of American society. For one thing, HUD rules required that units with different modes of financing be put in separate buildings. But Logue didn’t disagree. He told an interviewer when discussing Roosevelt Island, “To an extent I believe you can mix moderate and low income families, but the price of housing is such that you can’t mix low income and middle income in the same building because I, for one, can’t justify giving lower income families the same quality of accommodations that people get who pay two or three times as much for it. On the other hand, you can’t work it the other way. You can’t get the upper income families, who have the widest range of housing choices, to take less than they otherwise deserve.”129 Faced with these obstacles, Logue believed that well-designed and commonly shared neighborhood schools and public spaces, like sidewalks, parks, libraries, transit, and the like, would have to do much of the work. In its physical planning, as with its financing structure, the UDC had to content itself with pushing a socially liberal agenda within the constraints of the capitalist marketplace.

  OTHER RACIAL INITIATIVES

  “Negro removal” had long been a major criticism of urban renewal and one that Logue was particularly sensitive to. In an interview in 1985, he acknowledged honestly that “many black leaders believe that urban renewal was primarily ‘Negro removal,’ and sometimes it was.”130 Logue hoped that the UDC would act and be perceived differently. After all, it was born in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and promoted by its midwives, Rockefeller and Logue, as an innovative way to redress racial and class disparities. In explaining why he had accepted the UDC job, in fact, Logue pointed to the Kerner Commission Report, released in late February 1968 while he was in negotiations with Rockefeller. The report had motivated him to “get involved again in solving various urban problems,” he told a journalist, continuing, “New concepts must be tried, instead of the same old approaches snarled in red tape as are most of the federal urban-aid programs.”131

  Despite Logue’s conviction that the UDC had a key role to play in improving New York State’s troubled racial landscape—both material and attitudinal—figuring out how to navigate this politically charged terrain was not easy. Black communities everywhere in the state, but particularly in the capital of black America, Harlem, were the opposite of the blank slate Logue had sought with his New Towns. Not only were the late 1960s a time when urban residents were encouraged to participate actively—and often did combatively—in shaping federal programs like Model Cities or to weigh in on urban renewal schemes through now-mandatory community advisory committees, but African American neighborhoods like Harlem were becoming politicized in another way. Younger, more militant activists were challenging the integrationist black political elite, along with the white power structure, by calling for Black Power and community control. Harlem in fact had been the site of the first struggle for community control of New York City’s schools two years before the more infamous months-long confrontation in 1968 between the community board of Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville and the United Federation of Teachers. In spring 1968, tensions exploded in Harlem with an angry response to King’s assassination and protests over Columbia’s encroachment into city-owned Morningside Park to build a new gymnasium. The growing polarization of racial politics in the late 1960s forced Logue, who in Boston had been more comfortable with the established black middle class of Washington Park than with Roxbury’s radicals, to revisit his expectation that the UDC could promote a liberal, integrationist civil rights agenda.

  Tensions would explode dramatically in Harlem during 1969.132 Three years earlier, the Urban League president Whitney Young had proposed that Governor Rockefeller locate the new World Trade Center, where all state offices in New York City were to be consolidated, in Harlem. Though the state declined to give up the downtown site—key to its ambitions for Lower Manhattan—pressure from Young and other Harlem leaders won the concession of a smaller building for state offices uptown. In time, officials chose 125th Street and 7th Avenue for a combined office tower and community cultural center. The project was welcomed by establishment interests like Harlem’s major newspaper, The Amsterdam News, which proclaimed the State Office Building “the herald of Harlem’s economic revival.”133 Clearing of the site began during the summer of 1967, with efforts made to hire black firms for everything from design to demolition. When it came to approving the construction budget, however, the state legislature dragged its feet, appropriating funding for the twenty-three-story office building only under pressure in 1969 and withholding it from the community building. The state’s abandonment of the locally oriented part of the project not only was an affront but also played into the political conflicts raging within Harlem.

  Opponents calling themselves the Harlem Committee for Self-Defense and the Ad Hoc Committee for a Better Harlem decried the project as an act of colonization by exploitative outside interests. They charged that the building neither reflected a community decision-making process nor responded to what the neighborhood actually needed, which they identified as a high school, low-income housing, and a day care center. Just as construction was about to begin in July 1969, protesters, now united as the Harlem Community Coalition, shut down the project, establishing a tent city on the cleared lot—which they labeled “Reclamation Site #1,” a warning of more to come—in an act of defiance against the state as well as the many establishment leaders who still backed the State Office Building as a valuable public investment in Harlem. The squatters also allied with a community design group known as the Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem, which had opposed Lindsay’s hiring of Logue back in 1966. Together, they developed a more neighborhood-oriented alternative to the state project, now dubbed the “SOB.” Faced with the occupation of the site, Rockefeller called a halt to construction. After three months of standoff and with the Harlem community’s leadership deeply divided, Rockefeller finally decided in September 1969 that there was enough support to go forward and he sent in police to oust the protesters.

  Meanwhile, Logue had offered the governor his and the UDC’s services to mediate the dispute and oversee the construction of a community-oriented structure next to the State Office Building, which he unsubtly named the Harlem State Service Center to emphasize its potential contributions to the neighborhood.134 For months, Logue and a few widely trusted local leaders met privately with the various sides in a sincere search for a consensus or at least a compromise. Highlighting the intractability of this highly factionalized conflict, The New York Times’s Ada Louise Huxtable called the crisis “Rockefeller’s Vietnam” and compared Logue’s negotiations to the Paris peace talks, which were going on—unproductively—at the same time.135 Resolution proved as difficult in Harlem as in Paris. No broad-based agreement was ever reached, and Logue’s UDC gained little of the local credibility it had hoped for. By the time the State Office Building opened in 1974, however, militance had receded, and the project was widely praised for at least showcasing the work of African Americans in many professions.

  Logue’s longer-term answer to the challenge raised by the State Office Building controversy was to propose in December 1969 the creation of a new subsidiary of the UDC, not unlike what existed for Welfare Island, to provide for more community self-determination in the redevelopment of Harlem. The protesters had sent a blunt message when they posted a sign at their occupied site: “Stop the colonizer … Don’t let Harlem be invaded.”136 But in the months that followed, Logue found it difficult if not impossible to implement the kind of negotiations with neighborhoods that he had become accustomed to in Boston, because he could not identify a partner to speak for all parts of the community. He had hoped that the Harlem Urban Development Corporation (HUDC) would become that representative group, but it soon became clear that the board and top staff he recruited—individuals he thought could both work with the UDC and be broadly accepted in Harlem—gave much greater
voice to the business, professional, political, and church leaders who had supported the State Office Building than to their opponents. They were establishment figures. The seasoned civil rights leader John “Jack” E. Wood, Jr., formerly the director of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing and not from Harlem, became president and chief executive officer; Percy E. Sutton, a civil rights activist and the first African American to serve as Manhattan borough president, was named honorary chair; and Judge Herbert Evans, director of the Freedom National Bank, took on the leadership of the thirty-one-member board.137 Confronted with a fractious political landscape and convinced that he had given a fair chance to critics calling for more participatory democracy, Logue grew exasperated and fell back on the pluralist democrats who represented traditionally organized interests in the community.

  Over the years, the HUDC racked up a mixed record. On the positive side, it did give local black leaders an unprecedented degree of control over state redevelopment in Harlem. And it gave the UDC a partner on the ground to work with in a politically fragmented community starved for resources. By the end of 1974, the HUDC had overseen UDC investments of $150 million in nine residential projects delivering more than three thousand dwelling units and a fourteen-hundred-seat elementary school.138 On the other hand, the HUDC hardly challenged mainstream planning and development. Despite Logue’s encouragement, he couldn’t even get his subsidiary to take the lead on planning a community facility for the State Office Building site. And in its worst moments, particularly in the years after the UDC collapsed and the HUDC continued to exist as an autonomous community development corporation, it made reckless decisions and often operated as a patronage machine for board members pursuing their own self-interest, taking advantage of HUDC’s access to public and private investment dollars.139

  The UDC’s effort to mount a robust affirmative action program proved less controversial and brought more acclaim than the Harlem project. Not only did it fit better with Logue’s integrationist orientation, but he could control it fully through his power as UDC president rather than having to negotiate with a politically complex set of actors, as in Harlem. Governor Rockefeller had sent a strong message that New York State was committed to affirmative action, but Logue—more than most agency heads—took that charge to heart. Of the UDC’s 500 employees, 23 percent were minority, including 15 percent of the 330 professional and technical staffers.140 As early as 1970, nine of the UDC’s fifty-four projects had been designed by minority architects, although only 1 percent of New York State’s architects were black or Puerto Rican.141 By 1973, 16 percent of the UDC’s total construction contracts, worth more than $55.5 million, had gone to minority builders. The rate was much higher in New York City, where more firms were located.142 That same year, in a detailed discussion of affirmative action, which had become a regular feature of the UDC’s annual reports, Logue claimed that 26 percent of construction workers on projects statewide were minorities.143

  At the same time as he trumpeted these successes, Logue lamented the persistent obstacles to minority entrance into the skilled trades. The UDC did what it could to work around discriminatory labor unions, with the goal of having at least the same percentage of minority workers on a project as were present in the local municipality. In the case of the State Office Building, for example, 60 percent of the workforce was black or other minority, along with the architects, the civil engineering firm, one of the construction companies, an electrical subcontractor, and the construction superintendent, The Amsterdam News proudly reported.144 To reach that number of construction workers, training was provided on the job. This wasn’t unusual. The UDC contracted with a minority-run operation called the Recruitment and Training Program (R-T-P, formerly the Workers Defense League) to offer technical assistance and job counseling to minority workers on many project sites and with the Contractors’ Training and Development Office to help minority-owned contracting firms acquire skills including bookkeeping, writing proposals, and securing bank loans, all required when working with a state agency like the UDC.145

  That Logue made affirmative action a UDC priority was clear in his instructions to Donald Cogsville, the UDC’s African American affirmative action officer. “I want you to go out and look at those sites and make a judgment about whether there are enough minorities on these jobs. If there aren’t, complain … tell him you’ll be back in four weeks more and if you don’t see improvement, the contractor’s not going to get paid.”146 Cogsville indeed credited the agency’s well-recognized success with affirmative action to having “a guy at the head of the organization who says ‘God damn, it’s going to be done,’ and then gives the freedom to do whatever is necessary to get things done.”147 Other developers and even a black activist in fact complained that the UDC was monopolizing the state’s very small number of minority subcontractors and black construction workers. One white-owned electrical company, Public Improvement Inc., brought a suit against the UDC, claiming that an electrical contract went to a higher bidder who was a minority.148 Aggressively implementing affirmative action practices on UDC sites, much like setting quotas to ensure diversity in residential projects, was the kind of progressive racial policy that suited Logue’s top-down management style. He found much harder the messy negotiations and uncertain outcomes that accompanied a more participatory decision-making process demanded by challengers in Harlem, as had their counterparts in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven and Boston’s Lower Roxbury.

  REDESIGNING MASS HOUSING

  During Logue’s time in New Haven and Boston, architects had benefited greatly from the federal government’s investment in urban renewal. Now, with the visibility and resources of the UDC at his disposal, Logue felt he had an even greater opportunity to engage architects in design innovation. At the top of his list stood finding viable alternatives to the high-rise public housing that for years he had dismissed as dehumanizing and ghettoizing. Although he estimated that it might cost 5 to 10 percent more to hire better architects to do good design, Logue said, “I thought it was worth it. And when you look at the public housing that Bob Moses built as against the parks he built, for example, it’s outrageous … He set a [disastrous] national model.”149 Quality design, Logue was confident, could also help “remove the stigma attached to housing built under public assistance programs.”150

  The architect Werner Seligmann—architecture professor at Cornell and Harvard in the era of the UDC, later dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, and the designer of a prominent, moderate-income UDC project, Elm Street Housing, in Ithaca—described the dire situation in 1974: “Less than 10 years ago most schools of architecture considered the topic of housing hardly worthy of investigation … This lack of concern explains the few significant housing innovations and dearth of housing models in the United States.” Seligmann went on to argue that “improvement of housing can only be accomplished by a persistent and thoroughly informed effort,” and he commended the UDC for being “remarkable in giving opportunities to talented and responsive architects and in encouraging their contribution.” While Seligmann acknowledged that “this has not been a bed of roses for either the UDC or the architects,” he concluded that “the results speak for themselves: each project addresses a particular set of issues, and collectively they produce a backlog of solutions and models to build on.”151 Seligmann’s endorsement of the UDC’s housing program drew attention to one of its chief features: developing prototypes in housing design and construction for broader adoption.

  The first challenge Logue faced in creating prototypes of subsidized housing that were attractive, livable, and economical was identifying architects to design them. He often lamented that “if you let architects alone they will make a statement,” rather than address the social concerns he felt were so crucial. Logue pursued a number of other goals as well. He wanted a balance of high-profile architects and young up-and-coming talent. Conveniently, soon after the UDC launched, Philip Johnson invited Log
ue and some of his top staff to a party he threw at his glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut, to introduce them to the young crowd of architects in New York.152 Over time Logue’s roster came to include an eclectic mix of the Architects Collaborative; Max Bond; Davis, Brody & Associates; Kenneth Frampton; Ulrich Franzen; Gwathmey Siegel; Lawrence Halprin; Philip Johnson; Dan Kiley; Richard Meier; James Stewart Polshek; Prentice & Chan, Ohlhausen; and Edward Durell Stone, among many others. Having a large stable of architects was important if the UDC was to avoid a cookie-cutter look to its buildings and any resemblance to typical public housing.153

  Logue valued architects who had already proved themselves good partners, which brought him back time and again to some of the same designers. John Johansen and Paul Rudolph were veterans of New Haven, while numerous architects had helped in Boston (in such numbers that I. M. Pei and his partner Harry Cobb felt shut out by “so many Boston architects!”): Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, Carl Koch, Josep Lluís Sert, Chloethiel Woodard Smith, Don Stull, and Ben Thompson, among others.154 McKinnell recalled that every working architect was well aware of the “big, big schemes” of this “incredible powerhouse” that was the UDC, though to keep getting work you had to prove that you were “an architect with a social conscience.”155 Rolf Ohlhausen concurred that membership in organizations like Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility was a ticket to the UDC.156 But even the best architects, the UDC felt, required coaching from the agency’s inside design team. Tony Pangaro, who worked closely with the UDC’s chief architect, Ted Liebman, recalled the challenge of collaborating with “all of these fancy architects that Ed decided he wanted to hire,” when few of them “had ever done a shred of housing in their lives.”157