Saving America's Cities
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On social scientists becoming policy experts in the postwar era, see Nicole Sackley, “Passage to Modernity: American Social Scientists, India, and the Pursuit of Development, 1945–1961” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2004); Ian Hart, “The Quest to Institutionalize a Social Report in American Government” (D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 2009); Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and James Allen Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: Free Press, 1991).
48. David Ekbladh, “‘Mr. TVA’: Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933–1973,” Diplomatic History 26, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 335–74; Balogh, Chain Reaction.
49. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, War on Poverty (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 14.
50. Logue, notes for speech to AVC, 1948, EJL, Box 1, Folder 7.
51. Powledge, Model City, 22. Logue used the term himself as late as 1998; Logue, “Mike Sviridoff Tribute, March 26, 1998,” EJL, 2002 Accession, Box 23, Folder “March 1998 Mike Sviridoff,” 3.
52. Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 402, 406.
53. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 217.
54. Logue quoted in the Ford Foundation, Metropolis (booklet, 1959), EJL, Series 4, Box 25, Folder 47, 13.
55. See, for example, New Haven Redevelopment Agency, Redevelopment Plan for the Oak Street Redevelopment Area (New Haven, CT: 1955; revised 1966), 20; criteria for blight in New Haven Redevelopment Authority, “Application for a Preliminary Advance of Planning Funds, submitted by NHRA, New Haven, Connecticut,” December 28, 1950, 20, Rotival, Box 37, in Francesca Ammon, “‘Town Living in the Modern Manner’: A History of the Postwar Redevelopment of Downtown High-Rises in New Haven, CT” (seminar paper, Yale University, 2006), 5–6, in possession of the author.
56. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 51.
57. On the deterioration of the meritocratic intentions of civil service, see Nicholas Thompson, “Finding the Civil Service’s Hidden Sex Appeal,” WM, November 2000.
58. Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 274–75, 362.
59. Similar arguments continue to be made that the city is the most promising level for progressive policy and the revival of liberalism; see Harold Meyerson, “The Revolt of the Cities,” American Prospect, May–June 2014, 30–39; and Meyerson, “Why Democrats Need to Take Sides,” American Prospect, July–August 2014, 22–24.
60. “What Is Urban Renewal” and “Planners, Politicians and People: New Haven, Connecticut, ‘Bulldozed’ by Urban Renewal,” in “Special Supplement: The Case Against Urban Renewal,” Human Events, April 1963, 1, 12–13.
61. Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale, 1927–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 158–64.
62. Harold Grabino, interview, March 22, 2006, by telephone, Ruben, transcript, 12.
63. Wexler, interview.
64. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 410–13.
65. Logue, interview, Steen, December 13, 1983, New York, NY, 6.
66. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 161; Singerman, “Politics, Bureaucracy, and Public Policy,” 138–39. New Haven alderman William Lee Miller put it this way: “The great trick in urban renewal appears to be to have people working for the city who know how to forage in its behalf out in the nation’s bureaucratic jungles. It is not enough that the federal government pass city-helping laws; there must also then be hunters for the city who can make their way through all the Titles I and Titles II to find the meat”; Miller, Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, 154.
67. Robert Hazen, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 14, 2007, New York, NY; Taylor, interview by Dahl, 7, 18.
68. Taylor, interview by Dahl, 7, 18.
69. Dahl, Who Governs?, 130.
70. Singerman, “Politics, Bureaucracy, and Public Policy,” 154–59, on what he calls “the Redevelopment Bureaucrats”; Grabino, interview.
71. Logue to Richard Lee, September 6, 1957, EJL, Series 4, Box 27, Folder 70, 2.
72. Logue, Memo to Richard C. Lee, September 6, 1957, “RE: 1958 Executive Salary Scale,” EJL, Series 5, Box 64, Folder 503.
73. Logue, interview, Steen, December 13, 1983, New York, NY, 6.
74. Quoted in Powledge, Model City, 90.
75. Ensminger to Logue, May 13, 1957, EJL, Series 4, Box 25, Folder 43; Ensminger to Logue, December 28, 1957, EJL, Series 4, Box 25, Folder 46.
76. “The Ford Foundation Program Letter, India: A Master Plan for India’s Capital,” Report No. 95, February 12, 1958, EJL, Series 4, Box 26, Folder 53; “The Ford Foundation Program Letter, India: Report of a Pilot Project in Urban Community Development,” Report No. 112, May 23, 1960, EJL, Series 4, Box 26, Folder 54, with memo attached from Logue, dated September 1960.
77. Paul N. Ylvisaker, interview by Charles T. Morrissey, September 27 and October 27, 1973, Folder 15, Box 5, Ylvisaker Papers, Harvard University, in Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 145–46.
78. Mary Hommann to Margaret Logue, February 2, 2000, MDL.
79. Grabino, interview.
80. Ellen Logue, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, April 13, 2008, Berkeley, CA. A young Larry Goldman marked his acceptance in the inner circle at the UDC when he “began to be included in the 6:00 or 6:30 ‘Come into my office and have a drink’”; Lawrence Goldman, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 3, 2010, Newark, NJ.
81. Joseph Slavet, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 31, 2007, Boston, MA; Herbert Gleason, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 31, 2007, Cambridge, MA; Martin Nolan, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, May 24, 2007, Cambridge, MA.
82. Richard Kahan, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 15, 2007, New York, NY.
83. Richard Bell, interview, February 24, 2006, Ruben, transcript, 23, 25.
84. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 42–43.
85. Logue, interview by Dahl and Polsby, Dahl, 29. Logue continued to boast throughout his career, as, for example, when he claimed that the UDC “had half the state allocation [of 236 money] for the whole country; Logue, interview, Jones, Tape 3:39.
86. Wexler, interview, and Wexler, email message to author.
87. “Bold Boston Gladiator—Ed Logue: Planner Stirs Up a Ruckus and Battles Opposition to Build the Place of His Dreams,” Life, December 24, 1965, 126–34; “What’s Happening in Proper Old Boston?,” Newsweek, April 26, 1965, 78.
88. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 22–24, 43.
89. Maurice Rotival to Steve Carroll, Confidential Memo, February 21, 1955, Rotival, Box 37, no folder number; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 37–38.
90. “Report by Dahl and Wolfinger, Mayor Richard C. Lee,” May 2, 1958, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Special Interviews,” 1.
91. MLogue, interview.
92. Ray Wolfinger, April 14, 1959, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Special Interviews and Reports by Ray Wolfinger,” 2; Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 274.
93. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 42.
94. Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 41.
95. MLogue, interview.
96. Logue, interview, Steen, March 3, 1986, Lincoln, MA, 29.
97. Theodore “Ted” Liebman, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, October 15, 2006, New York, NY.
98. Taylor, interview by Dahl, 6. Larry Goldman, a young staff assistant to Logue later at the UDC in New York, still remembers with pride when Logue openly expressed his affection toward him: “He once told me how precious I was to him, and that was great. I remember he met my mother, my father, and said som
ething like,… ‘We like having Larry here’ … There [was] a lot of tough love, but there was more tough than love a lot of the time … I think we all wanted his approval. He was a very strong father figure … There were certain circumstances under which he could tell you that he cared”; Goldman, interview by Cohen.
99. Taylor, interview by Cohen; Howard R. Moskof, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, April 21, 2006, Chevy Chase, MD.
100. On the common use of “urban housekeeping,” see, for example, Rebecca Sherrick, “Their Fathers’ Daughters: The Autobiographies of Jane Addams and Florence Kelley,” American Studies 27 (Spring 1986): 50.
101. Michael H. Carriere, “Between Being and Becoming: On Architecture, Student Protest, and the Aesthetics of Liberalism in Postwar America” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2009); Vincent Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale: A Memoir,” in Vincent Scully, Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger, Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 315–16.
102. Dahl, Who Governs?, 130.
103. Taylor, interview by Dahl, 5.
104. Maurice E. H. Rotival to Logue, February 4, 1959, and Rotival to Logue, October 26, 1959, Rotival, Box 35, Folder “N.H. City 1956–57.” Correspondence between Logue and Rotival in New Haven conveys constant tension, particularly Logue’s frustration that Rotival’s office was not completing assignments adequately and on time and Rotival’s complaint that Logue was not giving his firm work worthy of their full capacities as planners; see correspondence between the two in Rotival, Boxes 35 and 37, and EJL, Series 5, Box 100, Folder 991.
105. Logue to Maurice Rotival, Memorandum, December 8, 1954, Rotival, Box 36, Folder “N.H. City, 1954–55.” Also see Carl Feiss to Maurice Rotival, May 9, 1955, Rotival, Box 37, no folder title or number; “Carl Feiss, a Pioneer of Urban Preservation, Dies at 90,” NYT, October 27, 1997.
106. “How to Get Renewal off Dead Center,” 169.
107. Robert Fishman, ed., The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000); Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, Planning the Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), particularly Thomas W. Hanchett, “Roots of the ‘Renaissance’: Federal Incentives to Urban Planning, 1941 to 1948,” 283–304; Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1995); Louise Nelson Dyble, “The Continuing Saga of Zoning in America,” JPH 9, no. 2 (May 2010): 140–46. Andrew M. Shanken makes a convincing case for the war’s impetus toward more planning, though he argues for a precipitous collapse of its most utopian aspects once the war ended; 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
108. Dahl, Who Governs?, 116–18; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 18, 34–35, 38, 241.
109. Wolfinger, Politics of Progress, 276. It is quite clear that Rotival’s firm, not the New Haven Planning Department, was doing the technical planning work for New Haven redevelopment, much of it out of an office adjacent to the New Haven Redevelopment Agency. Even with all Logue’s frustrations with Rotival’s firm, he never discussed giving the work instead to the city’s staff planners; see EJL, Series 5, Box 100, Folder 991 for correspondence between Logue and Rotival’s office.
110. Paul Davidoff, “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning,” JAIP 31, no. 4 (1965): 331–38; Tom Angotti, “Advocacy and Community Planning: Past, Present and Future,” Planners Network, April 2007, http://www.plannersnetwork.org/publications/2007_spring/angotti.htm.
111. In a provocative essay, Thomas Campanella contends that planners today continue to see their profession as low status and of trivial significance. He holds Jane Jacobs responsible, arguing that her critique of planners “diminished the disciplinary identity of the planning profession” and “privilege[d] the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise.” He laments “the seeming paucity among American planners today of the speculative courage and vision that once distinguished this profession.” While Campanella shares my view of planners’ professional decline, his blaming of Jacobs suggests that he misses how planners also lost out to development administrators; Thomas J. Campanella, “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, ed. Max Page and Timothy Mennel (Chicago: Planners Press of the American Planning Association, 2011), 141–60.
112. Logue, “View from the Village,” on Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, “American Cities: Dead or Alive?—Two Views,” AF 116, no. 3 (March 1962): 90.
113. Ieoh Ming Pei, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, June 11, 2007, New York, NY.
114. John M. Johansen, John M. Johansen: A Life in the Continuum of Modern Architecture (Milan: L’Arca Edizioni, 1995), 37.
115. Quote from I. M. Pei in the exhibition “Beyond the Harvard Box: The Early Works of Edward L. Barnes, Ulrich Franzen, John Johansen, Victor Lundy, I. M. Pei, and Paul Rudolph,” curated by Michael Meredith, October 5–November 15, 2006, HGSD.
116. See the graph in Lizabeth Cohen and Brian D. Goldstein, “Paul Rudolph and the Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal,” in Reassessing Rudolph, ed. Timothy M. Rohan (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Architecture, 2017), 16, based on data from Tony Monk, The Art and Architecture of Paul Rudolph (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), 122–24.
117. Ray Wolfinger, “This is Ray on November 2 dictating a number of items dating from my stay in the Mayor’s Office,” November 2, 1958, Dahl, Box 1, Folder “Special Interviews,” 8–9. After this conflict, Logue watched University Towers closely. In December 1958 he wrote in a memo to staff members, “I heard a rumor that changes had been made in the plans which down-graded them. Is this rumor true? Please let me know immediately”; Logue to Norris Andrews, John Maniatty, and Tom Appleby, December 10, 1958, Rotival, Box 38, Folder “#2.”
118. Natalie de Blois, interview by Betty J. Blum, March 12–15, 2002, West Hartford, Connecticut, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Art Institute of Chicago, transcript, 47–48, http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/caohp/id/15893/rec/.
119. Liebman, interview. Larry Goldman concurred: “He loved to hang out with architects”; Goldman, interview.
120. Logue, “Work of the Boston Renewal Administration in the Urban Core,” address to the Harvard Graduate School of Design eighth annual Urban Design Conference, “The Role of Government in the Form and Animation of the Urban Core,” May 1, 1964, 5, 8; proceedings in Papers of Josep Lluís Sert, Special Collections, HGSD.
121. Charles Abrams, “Some Blessings of Urban Renewal,” in Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy, ed. James Q. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 561–62, originally published in Abrams, The City Is the Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), chapter 9.
122. Robert A. M. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 8, 10, 80–108; for “piazza compulsion,” 91–94; for towers, 94–98; on technologically inspired mega-structures, 105–8.
123. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture, 15, 17; also see discussion of Rudolph, 12.
124. Logue to Eugene Rostow, December 5, 1961, EJL, Series 6, Box 150, Folder 445.
125. Quotes from Logue, interview, Schussheim, 20; Talbot, Mayor’s Game, 127, 131, also see 117–18, 126–34. In addition, see Grabino, interview, on Stevens’s experience as a real estate investor and inexperience as a real estate developer. For more on Stevens’s eclectic career, see E. J. Kahn, Jr., “Profiles: Closings and Openings—I,” New Yorker, February 13, 1954, 37–56; E. J. Kahn, Jr., “Profiles: Closings and Openings—II,” New Yorker, February 20, 1954, 41–59; Duncan Norton-Taylor, “Roger Stevens, a Performing Art,” Fortune, March 1966, 152–204 (with page breaks). On Stevens’s unsuccessful Boston effort, see Elihu Rubin, Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 167–72.
127. Jerome Rappaport, interview by Lizabeth Cohen, September 17, 2007, Boston, MA. For more on the auction, see Taylor, interview by Dahl, 5; “New Haven: Test for Downtown Renewal,” AF 109, no. 1 (July 1958): 81. The city had agreed without protest to the auction to avoid politically damaging charges of a land “giveaway” to Yale, which would have been deeply resented by locals. But Lee and Logue expected that Yale would prevail, which would assist with its current faculty housing crunch while also helping to hook Yale and Stevens for the big job of Church Street.