Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

  As property values plummeted and, landlords claimed, rent control constrained their profits, building owners often found insurance payments more lucrative than rents, leading to an epidemic of arson. The journalist Bill Moyers laid out the brutal truth: you could buy a large occupied apartment house in the Bronx for less than $1,000, take advantage of the city’s three-year tax moratorium while collecting several thousand dollars a month in rents, provide minimal heat and services, and when enough tenants gave up in disgust, you could buy a first-class arson job for $200 and collect on the federally subsidized fire insurance to walk away with $70,000 to $80,000.14 In the 1970s, the Bronx averaged twelve thousand arson fires a year, over thirty a day, making the local New York Fire Department Engine Company No. 82 the busiest by far in the city. The New York Times even ran a daily box, what came to be called the “Ruins Section,” to record the latest fire tally.15

  This dramatic decline in the South Bronx made it an affordable if greatly troubled destination for low-income newcomers to New York City, particularly African Americans from the South and Puerto Ricans, contributing to a major racial transition in the borough. As in so many other places, they arrived just as factories that once had provided good working-class jobs moved out. With gainful employment scarce, poverty grew, bringing all the usual attendant social problems of landlord disinvestment, poor city services and retail options, drug dealing, crime, failing schools, huge unemployment, high rates of infant mortality, and somewhere between a third and 40 percent of residents requiring welfare assistance. This downward spiral sent long-standing inhabitants fleeing, resulting in the Bronx losing 40 percent of its population between 1970 and 1980 alone, as entire blocks emptied out.16 When the ABC sportscaster Howard Cosell famously interrupted his reporting of game two of the October 1977 World Series in Yankee Stadium to exclaim that the Bronx was burning, he was only confirming to a national audience what local observers had noted with alarm for a long time and what a week earlier Jimmy Carter had seen for himself.

  The deteriorating conditions of the South Bronx had not escaped city officials, but they had made little progress addressing them. Mayor Beame’s housing and development administrator, Roger Starr, and the investment banker Felix Rohatyn, who was leading the fiscal rescue of New York City as chair of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, went so far as to seriously float the idea of “planned shrinkage,” by which they meant focusing resources on areas of strength in the city and abandoning others they deemed hopeless, their top candidate being the South Bronx. It was in fact Starr’s and Rohatyn’s “callous disregard for human lives” that had outraged Badillo and spurred him to propose such an ambitious housing plan to rebuild the South Bronx.17 Soon after assuming office, the Koch administration would take a different—albeit equally infuriating to some Bronx residents—tack. In a notorious effort to distract from the borough’s decline, the city put decals of curtained windows with flower pots and other signs of domestic stability on abandoned buildings visible from major highways crisscrossing the Bronx.

  All was not hopeless within the South Bronx, of course. There were impressive pockets of resilience and creativity during the otherwise discouraging 1970s. A resourceful, charismatic priest, Father Louis Gigante, had founded a nonprofit community development corporation tied to his Saint Athanasius Church in 1968. His South East Bronx Community Organization (SEBCO) pioneered efforts to renovate housing and provide social services to the poor Hunts Point neighborhood, soon nicknamed Gigante Land.18 The invention of hip-hop music, break dancing, and graffiti art by young residents of the Bronx’s housing projects would achieve national, even international fame. In 1978, a group of community-minded artists opened a storefront arts space in Mott Haven called Fashion Moda, “a museum of Science, Art, Invention, Technology, and Fantasy,” which helped promote the local arts of hip-hop and graffiti.19

  But residents also had a hand in worsening rather than in improving conditions when they fought over meager spoils. Corrupt Bronx politicians (many of whom would eventually serve jail time and were labeled by Logue as “the crummiest [of] political leadership, operat[ing] the place like a dime store”) put lining their personal pockets above their public duty.20 And a cunning, streetwise operator named Ramon Velez, a Puerto Rican immigrant and former welfare caseworker, opportunistically used federal antipoverty funding intended for poor people to run a political machine out of his Hunts Point Multi-Service Corporation. By the early 1970s, Velez was running the largest antipoverty empire in New York City, controlling a thousand jobs and managing $12 million in funds. Velez earned the enmity of many honest figures in the South Bronx, including Gigante, Badillo, and later Logue, with whom he would eventually have a showdown.21

  It was no surprise that when the photographer Lisa Kahane arrived in the South Bronx in 1979 to document the devastation, she found it “an unimaginable wasteland. It was frightening and fascinating, not just another neighborhood but another realm, visible but incomprehensible, an urban wilderness actively populated by ghosts … Seventy-five thousand buildings abandoned in one place in twentieth-century America? Now that’s scary.”22 It was here that Logue sought his comeback.

  TAKING ON THE SOUTH BRONX

  Despite these dreadful conditions—perhaps because of them—Logue lobbied hard for the job heading the South Bronx Development Office. Although Logue faced few competitors for such a formidable challenge, it was still not easy for him to get hired, given his well-known history at the UDC. Badillo had had to convince Koch to hire Logue; “I was imposed on him,” Logue later admitted to an SBDO staff member. Koch, in turn, felt he had to reassure critics not to worry, that Logue would not have financial autonomy.23 It helped that as New York City, Yonkers, and New York State faced financial crises similar to those faced by the UDC, the agency’s default became less easily attributable to Logue’s mismanagement. But still, many city officials remained wary. When Logue walked into his final meeting with Koch to seal the deal for the SBDO, he was surprised to find twenty commissioners of various ranks in the room, until he realized, he later said, “I know why they’re here. The idea is to keep an eye on me so I won’t get out of control.” And even after Badillo assured New York governor Hugh Carey, Logue’s former adversary, “You know, Hugh, he’s all right, he’ll do the job,” Carey still insisted, “I don’t want any of my money to go to him.”24

  Logue would never fully overcome this skepticism, which surely contributed to the limited cooperation he got from the city and the state throughout his years at the SBDO. “They did their best to marginalize him,” said Stephen Lefkowitz, who remained well connected in New York politics following his years as general counsel at the UDC.25 But Logue made up his mind to ride the waves, attracted to the challenge, convinced of the worthiness of the cause, and eager for the opportunity to get back in the game, working first with Badillo until his ambitious plan went down in flames and then accepting Koch’s invitation to run a more modest operation.26

  Many of Logue’s friends and colleagues were far less enthusiastic about him taking the job. “Everyone thought I was going to get eaten alive,” Logue mused.27 Even if he survived in this near-impossible position, they thought it was humiliating for him to accept it. “It was really a huge comedown for him, to run the world and then run this,” said Larry Goldman from UDC days.28 Richard Kahan, another UDC staffer, was convinced that “he was not going to be happy up in the Bronx with no staff, no power, and a mayor that didn’t really care about his success,… and we tried to talk him out of it.”29 John Stainton, at his side in Boston and at the UDC, fretted that whereas once Logue had worried about thousands of units of new housing, now “he is talking about 250.”30 Joseph Fried, the journalist who had sympathetically chronicled Logue’s fall from power at the UDC, was more sanguine. He argued rather poetically that the South Bronx and Ed Logue were well matched for a joint redemption, the defeated man and the defeated community both poised for rehabilitation.31

  Others close to Logue under
stood why Ed was honestly attracted to this job. They knew it had always been as much the mission as the power that had motivated him. His wife, Margaret, acknowledged the lesser status but felt “he thought he was doing something important.” His sister, Ellen, claimed, “He never talked about it as a comedown … It was something he viewed as a horrendous challenge. He was engaged in it. And he felt he was giving the people their hope.” His old friend Allan Talbot recognized that others “thought it was a sad ending to a meteoric career,” but Logue personally considered the job “relevant to everything he had done in his life.” And Logue’s Boston and UDC collaborator Robert Litke felt that Logue was being offered a historic opportunity “to create a social and physical mechanism that would [remake] the South Bronx from the bottom up.”32

  It took a while for the SBDO to become a functioning operation. After a short stint in the small 86th Street office occupied by Logue Development Company, the SBDO set up shop in two New York City locations: in the South Bronx at 529 Courtlandt Avenue between 148th and 149th Streets and in Manhattan at 1250 Broadway, at 32nd Street. Stalwart Janet Murphy, who had accompanied Logue from Boston to New York a decade earlier, now returned to his side. After working for a banking consortium in the years since the UDC’s collapse, she happily took up her familiar role as Logue’s gatekeeper. And she did her job well. Even in this much smaller office, a staff member recalled, “We were all scared of Janet.”33

  Reaching back even deeper into his network of contacts, Logue got help with hiring staff from Sally Bowles, an old friend since Logue had worked with her father, Chester, in Connecticut and India.34 As he had in the past, Logue sought out idealistic young talent eager for a public service opportunity and mentoring.35 Two of the earliest recruits were Jennifer Raab and Rebecca Lee. They fit the profile perfectly. They had both grown up in working-class neighborhoods of New York City, Raab in Washington Heights, Lee in a Queens housing project. After completing graduate school in public policy—Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School for Raab, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for Lee—they accepted Logue’s job offer from among several other options, attracted, as many had been before them, to the chance to make significant social change and be tutored by an experienced veteran in the field.36 Other young idealists would follow them to the SBDO. For example, Peter Bray, a master’s candidate in the city planning program at MIT, heard Logue lecture there about his work in the South Bronx and then sought him out to ask for a job.37 By fall 1980, the SBDO staff had grown to seventy, split between the two offices. Here it basically remained while Logue was at the helm, though he perpetually struggled to make payroll. Notably, for the first time women filled many of the important jobs, reflecting a new era when women like Raab and Lee were getting graduate degrees in the urban field and expecting to have serious careers. But it shouldn’t be overlooked that as a small, local operation, the SBDO might have seemed less attractive to ambitious men and thereby offered women more opportunity.

  Mayor Koch’s initial charge to the SBDO to undertake a comprehensive plan for the South Bronx fit well with Logue’s usual approach. He had begun his work in New Haven, Boston, and New York State with similar surveys that evolved into blueprints for future redevelopment programs. Areas of Strength, Areas of Opportunity was released in December 1980 and became known in-house as “the Red Book” for its bright red cover and importance as the gospel according to Chairman Logue (albeit much larger in format than Chairman Mao’s then popular Little Red Book). It was wide-ranging in scope, with separate sections on economic development, housing, human services, parks and recreation, transportation, and land revitalization, and politically savvy in organizing itself according to the South Bronx’s six community districts, honoring the existing channels for neighborhood input into the city’s planning process. The Red Book set out to identify present points of strength and then to build the SBDO’s ambitious plans for action around them.38 With none of the combined planning and development powers that Logue had previously demanded in every other city he had worked in, he nonetheless pushed forward.

  THE SBDO AGENDA

  Economic development in the South Bronx was a major focus for the SBDO. Logue had long made job creation a priority in redevelopment, convinced that the availability of decent work was the key to revitalizing a city for all its residents. In the South Bronx, the situation was dire, the very worst in a New York City that was hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs in general. Of the 2,000 manufacturers operating in the Bronx in 1959, 650 had left by 1974, taking an estimated 17,688 jobs with them; and the situation was only getting worse. Between 1976 and 1980, 5,500 more jobs disappeared.39 To encourage investment by potential employers, the SBDO oversaw a South Bronx Economic Development Coordinating Committee (EDCC), made up of representatives from New York State, New York City, and Bronx Borough economic development offices, in hopes of bringing all the key players to the same table. The EDCC met monthly to review proposals and to try to create a one-stop development agency to attract customers.40

  The economic development strategy also involved developing industrial parks in the South Bronx to entice potential employers away from alluring suburban locations, viewed by many manufacturers as a safer choice than New York City. Bathgate Industrial Park, a 21-acre site adjacent to the Cross Bronx Expressway developed in conjunction with the nonprofit New York City Public Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was the first to be completed. Logue raised $4.3 million from the federal government and $3.1 million from New York City, with the promise of creating one thousand jobs. Bathgate’s first tenants were Aircraft Supplies Company and Majestic Shapes, a shoulder-pad manufacturer. Here, and in the 10.5-acre Mid-Bronx Industrial Park (and the planning for Intervale, which was never built), the SBDO oversaw the preparation of land, including demolishing unwanted buildings; expedited any needed rezoning for light manufacturing; relocated utility easements; consulted with local community boards; redirected traffic, and more. Logue was proud that when he “first came to this job in 1978, the attitude of business was ‘Get the hell out before you get burned.’ There were three million square feet of empty industrial space.” And by 1984, he thought, probably too optimistically, “We have convinced industry that the South Bronx is a safe place to remain in, grow in, and come into.” Logue’s strategy? “Give business as much as they can get in the suburbs.”41

  The last piece of the SBDO’s economic development program involved sponsoring the annual South Bronx Industrial Fair with all the EDCC partners to sell the borough to prospective tenants, promising to accelerate the labyrinthine approval process that too often discouraged commercial and industrial companies from entering New York City. Rebuilding the industrial base of the South Bronx was a much bigger, longer-term project than Logue’s modest organization could realistically undertake, but despite the hard sell and the limitations of being more of a broker than an active redeveloper, the SBDO made some important inroads.

  Shifting its attention from the economic health of the Bronx to the personal health of its residents, the SBDO focused as well on human services. As far back as New Haven and Boston, Logue had insisted that social service interventions must accompany physical redevelopment. With Gray Areas funding from the Ford Foundation, Logue had launched Community Progress Inc. in New Haven and Action for Boston Community Development in Boston to coordinate social service delivery that too often, he felt, was balkanized. Both these agencies, however, had met a mixed community reception in the anti-paternalistic political atmosphere of the 1960s. Later, at the UDC, without the same local orientation as his New Haven and Boston redevelopment agencies, Logue nonetheless had prioritized creating social service spaces in new housing, whether schools, senior centers, clinics, or recreational facilities. By the 1980s in the South Bronx, human service work met less grassroots resistance than it had previously, partly because administrators like the SBDO’s Karolyn Gould had previously learned important lessons about how to involve community memb
ers in decision-making and partly because by the 1980s, as the government safety net was shrinking, any and all available services were valued. The SBDO’s attentiveness to job training, along with more traditional social service programs addressing poor health, addiction, disability, and teenage pregnancy, made its work all the more appreciated by struggling South Bronx residents.42