This history of city building in the United States over almost three-quarters of the last century suggests two final aspirations. First, there is no one right or wrong way to remake a city, but rather it requires above all a spirit of experimentation and a process of negotiation where every interest has a seat at the table—public officials as well as private investors, urban planners and architects, multiple levels of government, and residents. As Logue learned from hard experience over his career, the fate of cities cannot be left solely to top-down redevelopers or government bureaucrats or market forces or citizens’ groups. Rather, the goal should be a negotiated cityscape built on compromise, an approach that Logue came to accept in Boston, after failing to do so in New Haven, and that he eventually promoted in the South Bronx. Second, a better understanding of this history will hopefully reawaken from a long slumber the will and wherewithal to revitalize cities that still struggle for economic survival, to invest in neighborhoods still lacking adequate services, and to improve the prospects for those Americans still poorly housed or, in the worst cases, homeless. This would be the legacy of urban renewal that Ed Logue would want us to honor and that he would consider the highest tribute we could pay to his lifetime of public service, imperfections and all.32
ED LOGUE WITH SIBLINGS AT YALE, 1956. The five Logue children (left to right: Ed ’42, Ellen, John ’46, Frank ’48, Gordon ’47) grew up in Philadelphia with their widowed mother, having lost their father when Ed was twelve. With Ed leading the way, all four boys attended Yale College on scholarship. Ed, Frank, and Gordon also went to Yale Law School on the GI Bill. (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE)
A UNION ACTIVIST ON CAMPUS, 1942. Logue (with union button) expressed his liberal Democratic politics at conservative Yale by supporting unionization of the university’s hourly workers during his senior year and becoming a full-time union organizer upon graduation. Agitating against the Yale administration launched a pattern in Logue’s life of enjoying being a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast. (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE)
STUDYING EUROPEAN CITIES FROM THE AIR IN WORLD WAR II. Logue entered military service in early 1943 hoping to be a pilot but ended up a bombardier instead. He credited those cockpit hours with educating him in urban planning. (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE)
OBSERVING NEW TOWNS IN THE NEW NATION OF INDIA. India introduced Logue to an American government– and Ford Foundation–supported program of community development, in which infrastructural improvements and New Towns aimed to provide social benefits. He later applied these strategies to his urban renewal work in the United States. (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE)
ASSISTING AMBASSADOR CHESTER BOWLES IN INDIA, 1952–53. Logue served as special assistant to Bowles (shown here with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru). Logue considered Bowles a mentor, one of several father-like figures he looked up to as a young man. (MURALI / PIX INC. / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTY IMAGES)
THE NEW HAVEN URBAN RENEWAL TEAM, 1954–61. Upon his return from India, Logue joined the reform Democratic administration of the new mayor Richard C. Lee (left) to help revitalize the city. Lee and Logue forged a dynamic partnership that attracted more federal dollars per capita to the “model city” of New Haven than to anywhere else in the nation. (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE)
SELLING URBAN RENEWAL TO THE NEW HAVEN COMMUNITY. This exhibition, Time for Action, was part of the campaign to promote urban renewal among the city’s residents. (Logue is in the light jacket, with the planner Maurice Rotival to his left.) Mostly, however, New Haven’s redevelopers reached out to leaders of established organizations, in an approach that the Yale political scientist Robert Dahl labeled “pluralist democracy.” (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE)
DOWNTOWN APARTMENTS FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS. Lee here is proudly showing off a model of the new New Haven that he and Logue aspired to create. Closest to him are the luxury University Towers apartments, designed to keep middle-class residents from moving to the suburbs. In time, tearing down working-class neighborhoods for higher-income residences faced criticism everywhere. (ROBERT W. KELLEY / THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION / GETTY IMAGES)
URBAN RENEWAL BY DEMOLITION. Desperate to improve the draw of downtown as suburban residential living and shopping increasingly threatened New Haven’s viability, the urban developers leveled blocks of the city’s center to fill downtown with new modern buildings, intended to signal that New Haven was headed for a successful future. (NEW HAVEN MUSEUM)
CONNECTING DOWNTOWN NEW HAVEN TO THE INTERSTATE. Fearing that the new highway would sideline the city economically, the urban renewers built the Oak Street Connector from I-95 to downtown. The working-class Oak Street neighborhood, at the time considered a slum, was demolished to create this new gateway to New Haven, which included Malley’s and Macy’s department stores, attached to Paul Rudolph’s parking garage, in the foreground. (NEW HAVEN MUSEUM)
LOGUE WITH THE REDEVELOPMENT DEPUTY RALPH TAYLOR. Logue became a leader in creating a new national profession of urban redeveloper, an expert with general administrative know-how who then calls on others with more specialized, technical mastery. Visible out the office window is the intersection of Church and Chapel Streets before urban renewal demolition began. (COURTESY OF H. RALPH TAYLOR)
GOVERNMENT CENTER, CORNERSTONE OF BOSTON’S URBAN RENEWAL, 1963. This project sought to use the financial power and physical presence of government at every level to goad the reluctant Yankee-dominated private sector into financially investing in Boston. Here Logue (far left with his son Billy) is flanked by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) board chairman Monsignor Francis Lally, Mayor John Collins in the wheelchair, and Gerald Blakeley, president of the real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes. City, church, and private developers all shared a common interest in renewing Boston. (KARIN KEYSER FOR CALVIN CAMPBELL, PHOTOGRAPHER)
BOSTON’S CATHOLIC CHURCH, ALLY IN URBAN RENEWAL. From the earliest days, Cardinal Richard Cushing (left) and his archdiocese became the city’s collaborators in redevelopment. The church was motivated by its substantial real estate holdings, a vested interest in keeping residents rooted in its geographically bounded parishes, and the injunction by the Second Vatican Council to participate more fully in civic life. (COURTESY OF BOSTON CITY ARCHIVES)
FROM RUN-DOWN ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT TO SEAT OF GOVERNMENT. Despite promising not to repeat the demolition-style urban renewal that had leveled the immigrant West End, Logue’s BRA constructed Government Center on the site of Scollay Square, Boston’s red-light district. It faced minimal opposition, given that this downtown area was in decline and was more popular with tourists and students than residents. (PHOTO © IVAN MASSAR)
GOVERNMENT CENTER UNDER CONSTRUCTION, 1965. Logue and Mayor Collins are in front of the huge pit that will become the new city hall and plaza. A Newsweek article in April 1965 entitled “What’s Happening to Proper Old Boston?” described the project as “the most ambitious civic rejuvenation program in the nation.” Historic Faneuil Hall and Sears Crescent, bordering the site, survived but were soon dwarfed. (PHOTO © IVAN MASSAR)
GOVERNMENT CENTER SOON AFTER COMPLETION, 1971. The new brutalist-style city hall was surrounded by county, state, and federal buildings. As the renewers had hoped, this huge public expenditure jumpstarted more private investment—starting with the curved Center Plaza office building and the New England Merchants National Bank tower to the left of city hall. (AERIAL PHOTOS OF NEW ENGLAND, COURTESY OF PEI COBB FREED & PARTNERS)
NEGOTIATING BETWEEN OLD AND NEW. Logue came to recognize the importance of preserving some of Boston’s historic buildings, such as the nineteenth-century Sears Block and Sears Crescent pictured here. A distinctive “negotiated cityscape” resulted, though critics still complained that too much of the historic city was lost to urban renewal. (COURTESY OF BOSTON CITY ARCHIVES)
MAKING THE CASE FOR URBAN RENEWAL TO CITY COUNCIL. This was one of the many hearings in which the BRA presente
d its redevelopment plans, making extensive use of models and graphics. (TED POLUMBAUM / NEWSEUM COLLECTION)
ENEMIES ON CITY COUNCIL. With little power to challenge the mayor, some city council members—rooted in the ethnic neighborhoods once tied to James Michael Curley’s Democratic machine—contested the BRA’s plans in raucous meetings and hearings. When Life magazine ran a feature in December 1965 entitled “Bold Boston Gladiator—Ed Logue,” it included this photograph of “Mrs. Katherine Craven [who] once said ‘the resemblances between Logue and Hitler are striking.’” (TED POLUMBAUM / NEWSEUM COLLECTION)
THE BRA WELCOMED IN ROXBURY’S WASHINGTON PARK NEIGHBORHOOD. Urban renewal was most enthusiastically welcomed by the home-owning black residents of Washington Park, who feared the deterioration of their middle-class neighborhood as whites moved out and poorer blacks moved in. Muriel Snowden (left) and her husband, Otto, were founders of the Freedom House Community Center, the local operating base for the BRA. Between Snowden, Collins, and Logue is Rev. Samuel Laviscount of Saint Mark Congregational Church, which partnered with the BRA to build subsidized housing. (COURTESY OF BOSTON CITY ARCHIVES)
GROUND BREAKING FOR THE FIRST NEW HOUSING IN WASHINGTON PARK, 1963. Surrounding Logue (second row, second from the right) are many local clergy, members of the sponsoring Saint Mark Congregational Church and its nonprofit development corporation, and other community activists in Roxbury. Notable is Paul Parks (back row, left), then a leader of the Boston chapter of the NAACP and later the Massachusetts Secretary of Education in the midst of the Boston busing crisis. (NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT)
RESIDENTS OF ROXBURY’S MADISON PARK SUCCESSFULLY DEMAND HOUSING. Low-income residents of the Madison Park neighborhood of Roxbury organized in May 1966, as the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation, to pressure the BRA to incorporate critically needed housing into planning for a new high school. Much more combative than the middle-class Washington Park residents, they had recently forced the city to stop illegal dumping of everything from trash to cars in Madison Park. (COURTESY OF BOSTON CITY ARCHIVES)
REV. WALTER C. DAVIS DEDICATING CHARLAME PARK HOMES II IN ROXBURY, 1966. This moderate-income subsidized housing was sponsored by the Charles Street AME Church of which Rev. Davis, speaking here, was the pastor. The garden apartment–style design appealed to prospective tenants, but inadequate funding kept the rents out of reach for many families who had been dislocated by redevelopment, to Logue and Collins’s great frustration. (NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT)
WHOSE CHARLESTOWN? The isolated white working-class community of Charlestown proved the most challenging for the BRA to win over. Here, as elsewhere, Logue’s BRA learned to play what one observer called the “rehabilitation planning game”: negotiating with neighborhoods to give them more of what they want in return for their support. The tougher the neighborhood opposition, the greater its gains. Middle-class owners of historic homes surrounding Charlestown’s Bunker Hill Monument were the most enthusiastic. Here Mr. and Mrs. William F. Hennessy receive a citation for participating “in the forward march to progress now being made throughout the New Boston.” (COURTESY OF BOSTON CITY ARCHIVES)
MILITANT SOUTH END ACTIVISTS CHALLENGE THE BRA. The South End neighborhood had been home to a skid row, lodging houses, and many poor Bostonians. But with an impressive supply of historic rowhouses surviving and the new Prudential Center opening nearby in 1964, it began to feel the pressure of gentrification. South End community activists, such as Mel King and his Community Assembly for a United South End, pushed the BRA for a more representative elected South End Urban Renewal Committee and substantially more subsidized housing. (COURTESY OF BOSTON CITY ARCHIVES)
A FAILURE TO NEGOTIATE IN NORTH HARVARD, 1965. The one place where Logue and Collins failed to negotiate at all was the North Harvard neighborhood of Allston. Their determination to condemn existing houses for an apartment tower infuriated the community, eventually forcing the BRA to back down. Logue later said this intransigence was the worst mistake of his career. (PHOTO BY BILL BRETT / THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES)
CAMPAIGNING FOR BOSTON MAYOR, 1967. Only once in Logue’s career did he venture out of the offices of a redevelopment agency—when he ran for mayor of Boston. Logue failed to win one of the two spots in the run-off election. (COURTESY OF JOHN STAINTON AND MICHAEL GRUENBAUM)
ELECTORAL VICTORY IN ROXBURY, 1967. The only election ward that Logue won outright was in the heart of Roxbury, where Washington Park residents repaid his commitment to their neighborhood’s urban renewal. Here he is greeting Roxbury supporters (from left to right: Logue, Muriel Snowden, Kenneth Latimer). (NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DEPARTMENT)
OPPOSING LOGUE’S HIRING IN NEW YORK CITY, 1966. When the newly elected mayor John V. Lindsay tried to hire Logue, local housing activists feared another destructive Robert Moses and campaigned actively against him. Lindsay extended the offer anyway, but Logue turned him down when the mayor would not grant him powers that were extensive enough. (COURTESY OF THE TAMIMENT LIBRARY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY)
GOVERNOR NELSON ROCKEFELLER SIGNING THE UDC LEGISLATION, 1968. Rockefeller created, with Logue’s advice, the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC) to construct badly needed subsidized housing and redevelop the state’s troubled cities. He then named Logue president of the UDC, with enormous powers to employ eminent domain, override local zoning and building codes, and exempt projects from taxes. (DIGITAL COLLECTIONS OF THE NEW YORK STATE ARCHIVES)
ROBERT MOSES, INSPIRATION AND NEMESIS. Logue rejected any equivalence made between him and New York’s once powerful city builder, Robert Moses. Although sharing Moses’s conviction that physical interventions could improve people’s lives, Logue considered himself much more committed to progressive social change than Moses. As Yale graduates, the two men occasionally met up at football games, like this one in November 1968. (COURTESY OF FAMILY OF EDWARD J. LOGUE)
NEW YORK CITY MAYOR JOHN LINDSAY, RELUCTANT UDC PARTNER, 1969. Lindsay at first resisted what he saw as state interference in New York City. But he finally relented out of desperate need for the UDC’s resources and proven ability to produce subsidized housing quickly. This press conference announced the signing of an agreement between city and state. Logue is at far left. (URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION)
EXPERIMENTING WITH NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR HOUSING. As early as its 1969 Annual Report, the UDC promoted innovation in building methods to make housing construction more efficient and affordable. Examples included preassembled modular units that saved time and labor on-site and electrical wiring panels developed by NASA. (NEW YORK STATE URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION ANNUAL REPORT, 1969)
ROOSEVELT ISLAND, LOGUE’S UTOPIA IN THE EAST RIVER. Roosevelt Island embodied Logue’s idealistic goals for the UDC. Like the other two New Towns that the UDC built in upstate New York, it aimed to mix residents along income and racial lines. It was also car-free and handicap accessible, long before the latter was common, and it used technology in innovative ways. (THE ROOSEVELT ISLAND HOUSING COMPETITION, NEW YORK STATE URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION [BOOKLET], 1974)
PRESERVING HISTORIC STRUCTURES ON NEW ROOSEVELT ISLAND. Historic buildings already on the island, like the Chapel of the Good Shepherd here being repurposed as a meeting and interfaith facility, were incorporated into the UDC’s “New-Town-in-Town,” a commitment to preservation that Logue had learned in Boston. (THE ROOSEVELT ISLAND HOUSING COMPETITION, NEW YORK STATE URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION [BOOKLET], 1974)
PLANNING MARCUS GARVEY PARK VILLAGE, 1972. Long opposed to high-rise public housing, Logue experimented with developing a low-rise, high-density alternative at Marcus Garvey Park Village in Brooklyn. Here Logue is discussing a housing prototype with the UDC architects Ted Liebman (left) and Tony Pangaro (next to Logue), and with Peter Eisenman (farther right) and Kenneth Frampton (not in photo) from the nonprofit Institute for
Architecture and Urban Studies, contracted by the UDC to design Marcus Garvey. (COURTESY OF ROBERT PERRON PHOTOGRAPHY)
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