Saving America's Cities

by Lizabeth Cohen

    22. Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds., Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies that Transformed a City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 251–52; Orlebeke, New Life at Ground Zero, 191–93.

    23. Chris Arnold, “How the House Tax Overhaul Bill Could Hurt Affordable Housing,” Morning Edition, NPR, December 15, 2017.

    24. Beryl Satter, “Structural Injustice: A (Teenage) Primer,” Seventeen: Harvard Design Magazine, no. 4 (Fall–Winter 2017): 125.

    25. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” American Economic Review 106, no. 4 (April 2016): 855–902; John Eligon, Yamiche Alcindor, and Agustin Armendariz, “Tax Credits to House Poor Reinforce Racial Divisions,” NYT, July 3, 2017; Barbara Samuels, “‘Nowhere to Live Safe’: Moving to Peace and Safety,” Poverty and Race 23, no. 6 (November–December 2014): 1; Thomas B. Edsall, “Does Moving Poor People Work?,” NYT, September 16, 2014.

    26. Sarah Serpas, “For Low-Income People of Color in NYC, Segregation Is a Regional Problem,” City Limits, August 1, 2016.

    27. Robert Jensen and Cathy A. Alexander, “Resurrection: The People Are Doing It Themselves,” in Robert Jensen, Devastation/Resurrection: The South Bronx, exhibition catalog, November 9, 1979–January 13, 1980, Bronx Museum of the Arts, 83–112; Karolyn Gould, email message to author, March 31, 2008.

    28. Julie Sandorf, interview by Alexander von Hoffman, November 9, 2000, New York, NY, quoted in von Hoffman, House by House, 33.

    29. Felice Michetti, interview by Alexander von Hoffman, March 9, 2001, New York, NY.

    30. Edward Luce, “Beauty Contest Reveals Ugly Truths,” Financial Times, June 6, 2018.

    31. Logue cautioned about NIMBYism’s excesses; “With the NIMBY … attitude [applying to] prisons, homeless shelters, trash disposal, affordable housing, [we] will come to realize that some decisions can’t be left to localities. We need a public process, but not a local veto”; Corman, “Former BRA Head Takes Another Look at the City He Helped Plan,” 6.

    32. “New Data Reveals Huge Increases in Concentrated Poverty Since 2000,” August 9, 2015, citing findings of Paul A. Jargowsky, Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty and Public Policy (New York: Century Foundation, 2015), that the number of persons living in high-poverty neighborhoods nearly doubled from 2000 to 2015 and poverty became more concentrated there along racial lines; https://tcf.org/content/commentary/new-data-reveals-huge-increases-in-concentrated-poverty-since-2000/.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It has become commonplace to say “It took a village” when seeking to highlight a great collaborative effort. In the case of this book, the almost fifteen years I have been at work on it and the many people who have helped me along the way suggest that it is more appropriate to say “It took a city.” For about half of that time, I had the pleasure and responsibility of serving as dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Although that position undoubtedly delayed my writing, it taught me many things that proved of great value as I inched toward the book’s publication. Above all, I became more fully aware of the importance of reaching out broadly with ideas that might otherwise remain within the academic realm. Radcliffe prides itself on bringing the latest scholarship to a wide, intellectually curious audience. Knowing that many Americans share my love for and worries about our nation’s cities, I have taken a biographical approach to this book in hopes that it will help engage readers. I thank my colleagues and advisory board members at the Radcliffe Institute, who worked closely with me for seven years to expand Radcliffe’s reach and who were always supportive of “the book” that they knew was long simmering on the back burner.

  There are risks and benefits to writing recent history that still lies within some people’s recollections. The risk is that surviving participants will contest your interpretation. The benefit is the help they can offer, which I found to far outweigh the risk. I have been particularly fortunate that Ed Logue’s family members and associates have been more than generous with their memories, their mementos, and their patience as they awaited the publication of this book. Ed Logue’s wife, Margaret; children, Bill and Kathy; sister, Ellen; and late brother, Frank; as well as Ed and Margaret’s assistant, Kim Heath, have been enormously helpful over the years, always eager to answer my questions, share family photographs and papers, and connect me with others, while remaining respectful of my independence as a historian. In the course of researching this book, I have interviewed or had substantive conversations with almost one hundred individuals. All enthusiastically welcomed me into their homes and offices or traveled distances to meet me. They often shared precious photos and documents, along with their reminiscences. Some were suffering from serious illnesses when I interviewed them, more than one attached to an oxygen tank. A few are no longer with us. What they had in common was a commitment to having Ed Logue’s and their own stories told and made part of American history. This book would have been much the poorer without their voices.

  For their willingness to be interviewed, I thank Mel Adams, Robert Beal, Robin Berry, John Bok, Peter Bray, Winifred Breines, Robert Campbell, James Cannon, Carmen and Rafael Ceballo, Harry Cobb, Josephine Cohn and Preston Keusch, Stephen Coyle, Robert Dahl, Frank Del Vecchio, Stephen Diamond, Larry DiCara, Peter Eisenman, Robert Esnard, Gordon Fellman, Janet Bowler Fitzgibbons, Herbert Gans, Alexander Garvin, Robert Geddes, Herbert Gleason, Lawrence Goldman, Robert Goodman, Karolyn Gould, Harold Grabino, Linda Greenhouse, Gail Gremse, Reginald Griffith, William Grindereng, Chester Hartman, Robert Hazen, John Johansen, Richard Kahan, Nicholas Katzenbach, Langley Keyes, Penn Kimball, Melvin King, Rebecca Lee, Tunney Lee, Stephen Lefkowitz, Norman Leventhal, Anthony Lewis, Ted Liebman, Robert Litke, Ellen Logue, Frank and Mary Ann Logue, Margaret Logue, Christopher Lydon, Paul McCann, Michael McKinnell, James McNeely, Janet Murphy, Howard Muskof, Martin Nolan, Thomas O’Connor, Anthony Pangaro, Lisa Peattie, I. M. Pei, William Poorvu, Jennifer Raab, Jerome Rappaport, John Ryan, Susan Saegert, Frederick Salvucci, Henry Scagnoli, Joseph Slavet, John Stainton, Esther Maletz Stone, Allan Talbot, Ralph Taylor, William Tuttle III, Richard Wade, Harry Wexler, and John Zuccotti.

  Although Ed Logue was no longer living when I launched this project in 2005, he having died in 2000, others who had the good fortune of interviewing him when he was alive have provided me with invaluable first-person sources. Many of those interviews are now in Logue’s papers at Yale, but other oral histories with Logue and his close associates were generously shared by Peter Bray, Deborah Elkin, Andy Horowitz, Lawrence Kennedy, Greg Ruben, Morton Schussheim, and Alex von Hoffman. During the period from 1983 to 1991, Ivan Steen of SUNY Albany interviewed Logue ten times in order to thoroughly document his work with the New York State Urban Development Corporation. I am grateful to Professor Steen for sharing the audiotapes and transcripts of these interviews with me to complement what was available in Logue’s Yale papers. The sociologist Frank Jones interviewed Logue over a two-day period in 1999. Although the transcript is in Logue’s papers, I want to thank him for the service he provided by engaging in such a far-reaching, in-depth discussion with Logue about his full career. All of these interviews helped bring Ed Logue and his milieu to life for me. The Columbia Center for Oral History Archives undertook an extensive Edward I. Koch Administration Oral History Project, which was of tremendous help as well.

  I have also benefited from the support of many colleagues as well as individuals who participated in or closely observed Logue’s life. They have shared advice, insights, and encouragement; reviewed drafts of proposals, lectures, and maps; introduced me to others; shared relevant materials in their possession or stumbled upon while doing their own archival research; and so much more. I am grateful to Alan Altshuler, Hillary Ballon, Frank Barrett, David Barron, Paul Bass, Jon
athan Bell, Nicholas Bloom, Peter Bray, Robert Caro, Michael Carriere, Sue Cobble, Nancy Cott, John Davis, Jameson Doig, Claire Dunning, Robert Ellikson, Louise Endel, Susan Fainstein, Justin Florence, Eric Foner, Gerald Frug, John Gaddis, Gary Gerstle, Jess Gilbert, Glenda Gilmore, Edward Glaeser, Brian Goldstein, Linda Gordon, Robert Gordon, Chris Grimley, Michael Gruenbaum, Dirk Hartog, Dolores Hayden, Diana Hernandez, Jennifer Hock, Andy Horowitz, Ada Louise Huxtable, Ken Jackson, Jerold Kayden, Alice Kessler-Harris, Jim Kloppenberg, Alex Krieger, Michael Kubo, Clifford Kuhn, Matthew Lasner, Stephen Lassonde, Deborah Leff, Neil Levine, David Luberoff, Elisa Minoff, John Mollenkopf, Mitchell Moss, Dan Okrent, Mark Pasnik, Alina Payne, Alan Plattus, Douglas Rae, Tim Rohan, Mark Rose, Lynne Sagalyn, Nick Salvatore, Hashim Sarkis, Chris Schmidt, Jane Shaw, Gaddis Smith, Jonathan Soffer, Tim Stanley, Robert Stern, Tom Sugrue, Mary Summers, Adam Tanaka, Lawrence Vale, Jim Vrabel, David Wylie, and Elizabeth Ylvisaker. From the very first day that Dawn Ling began working as my assistant at Radcliffe in 2015, she went out of her way to facilitate my work on this book. In the final stages of identifying images and securing permissions, she truly became my partner, sharing all the challenges that these tasks involved. We were helped greatly by Jess Brilli, who brought her graphic design talents to photo scanning, and Lisa Albert, who managed the substantial financial bookkeeping required.

  The “Friends of Ed Logue,” who built a website and mounted an exhibition on UDC housing to ensure that Logue’s legacy would not be lost, have become my friends as well, providing me with invaluable documents, sitting for interviews, and introducing me to other friends of theirs and Ed’s. I hope that Stephen Diamond, Ted and Nina Liebman, Tony Pangaro, and Tunney Lee know how much they have contributed to this book. Another group of individuals who provided a bridge to the past are the ROMEOS (Retired Opinion-Makers Eating Out), a group of former journalists and public officials who lived through Logue’s Boston years. They connected me to several crucial interviewees. Robert Hannan and Edward Quill have worked tirelessly to keep this group going. Although I have long been interested in cities and the built environment, I was not trained as an architect or a planner. Over the years at Harvard, I have benefited enormously from the instruction of colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Some are singled out above, but many more have tutored me and warmly welcomed me into their ranks, including the former dean Mohsen Mostafavi.

  Being part of a university has also given me the gift of talented students—undergraduate and graduate—who helped me tremendously as research assistants. Most of them were enrolled at Harvard, but a few Yalies assisted me as well. I hope that they will recognize their contributions throughout the book and that the work they did has helped them as much as it has me. They are now lawyers, professors, planners, school teachers and principals, bankers, and businesspeople, but without exception they proved themselves hardworking, resourceful researchers, digging up nuggets of gold and helping me to assess their value. I owe a great debt to Francesca Ammon, Michael Baskin, Niko Bowie, Lauren Brandt, Christine DeLucia, Claire Dunning, Anna Fogel, Kyle Frisina, Brian Goldstein, Matthew Hartzell, Tammy Ingram, Andrew Kalloch, Erica Kim, Charles Loeffler, Pete L’Official, Andy Malone, Whitney Martinko, Bradford Meacham, Elisa Minoff, Robin Morris, Paul Nauert, Geoffrey Rathgeber, Bekah Glaser Ross, Aditi Sen, Nico Slate, Alex Stokes, Ashley Tallevi, and Clinton Williams.

  Friends, colleagues, and my husband, Herrick Chapman, served as invaluable readers of draft chapters of this book. Herrick, Brian Goldstein, Alice O’Connor, Daniel Rowe, and Susan Ware read the whole manuscript and greatly strengthened the book with their penetrating insights. Gareth Davies, Daniel Horowitz, Laura Kalman, Michael Kazin, and members of the Boston Area Twentieth-Century U.S. History Writing Group read one or more chapters, giving me the benefit of their incisive feedback.

  Financial support from several sources made possible the time to research and write, and subsidized travel and interview transcriptions. At an early stage of this project, Ed Glaeser and David Luberoff, who were at the helm of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Taubman Center for State and Local History at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, enthusiastically awarded me a research grant, conveying great confidence in the project, which in turn buoyed my own confidence in proceeding. Rick Peiser, who was then running the Real Estate Academic Initiative at Harvard’s GSD, similarly offered crucial financial and moral support. Sabbatical leave and research funding from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Radcliffe Institute helped me complete the book. Receiving the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professorship in American History at Oxford during the 2007–2008 academic year brought many advantages, including immersion in the British postwar urban experience and the stimulating company of the Oxford Americanists under the leadership of Richard Carwardine, the then Rhodes Professor of American History.

  Audiences at many universities and conferences have listened attentively as I tried out ideas and, through their challenging questions and comments, helped this book to evolve and improve over its many years of incubation. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to share my work with colleagues on four continents and in a variety of settings, including the American University of Beirut, Boston University (two conferences), Brigham Young University (Russel B. Swenson Lecture), Cambridge University (American History Seminar on two occasions), the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, the Chicago History Museum (Urban History Seminar), the University of Cincinnati (Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Lectures), Columbia University (symposium on Robert Moses), East China Normal University in Shanghai, the JFK Institute at Freie Universität Berlin, the German American Studies Association, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., the Harvard Humanities Center (Architecture and Knowledge Seminar), the Taubman Center for State and Local Government / Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston / Center for American Political Studies jointly sponsored lecture at Harvard, the University of Kentucky, the Lawrence History Center in Massachusetts (urban renewal symposium), Leeds University, University of London, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (conference at Center for Advanced Studies), Manchester University (Postgraduate Conference in American Studies), University of Maryland (Rundell Lecture), University of Massachusetts Boston (Betty and Matt Flaherty Lecture), Massachusetts Historical Society (two events), University of Miami, Northern Illinois University (W. Bruce Lincoln Memorial Lecture), Notre Dame University (conference at Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism), Oxford University (Harmsworth Lecture, American History Research Seminar, and Economic and Social History Seminar), Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Center, Society of American City and Regional Planning History Conference, Queen’s University Belfast, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (dean’s inaugural lecture), Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute (two symposia on biography), Society of Architectural Historians, Tulane University, University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, University of Wisconsin–Madison (conference on consumption), Urban History Association, Warwick University, and the Yale School of Architecture (conference on Paul Rudolph).

  Libraries and archives, and their dedicated staffs, made my research possible. Foremost were the rich collections in Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, including Ed Logue’s papers and those of many of his colleagues in New Haven. In New York, I benefited from archives at Columbia University, New York University, and the New York State Archives in Albany. In Boston, materials at the Boston City Archives, the Boston Public Library, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Northeastern University, and the always astonishingly wide-ranging holdings of the Harvard Libraries proved indispensable as well, particularly the GSD’s Loeb Library, whose diverse collections are a reminder that architects and planners leave behind impressive work in print, not just their imprint on the built environment.

  I signed on with Farrar, Straus and Giroux early in this book’s development, which has given me the benefit of Eric Chinski’s wise counsel for a long time. But it was when I pres
ented him with a full draft that I really understood why he has earned a reputation as such a brilliant editor. He read closely, attentive to everything from argument to word choice. Although I was at first shocked at his request that I cut thirty thousand words from the draft, he showed me how to do it and improved the book. At FSG, I have also benefited from the first-rate support of Julia Ringo; the production editor, Carrie Hsieh; and the jacket and book designers, Alex Merto and Richard Oriolo. M. P. Klier was everything an author hopes for in a copy editor—an appreciative reader with a light but magical touch. Jeffrey L. Ward created handsome maps. Steve Weil has ushered the book out into the world with care and commitment. My agent, Geri Thoma, has been by my side from the very inception of this book, helping to shape it, reading perceptively, and knowing when to keep her distance and when to intervene. Her genuine excitement about the book helped sustain me.

  Finally, I want to thank my wonderful family. Since the last time I wrote book acknowledgments, my immediate family has grown. Daughters Julia and Natalie, in marrying, have bought us sons at last with their wonderful husbands, Paul and Nico. And Saving America’s Cities comes into the world only a few short months after the birth of our grandson, Jesse, who is growing up in Jersey City, where his parents have enthusiastically made their home. The rest of my extended family are also city people, having claimed New York City as home base for generations and caring deeply about its fate. My last thank-you is for my husband, Herrick, who has been my partner in so much over the more than forty years we have been married. Together we have raised children; made and remade homes; explored cities worldwide; endlessly debated issues rooted in the past, present, and future; and taken turns serving as sounding boards, editors, and critics of each other’s work. I dedicate this book to him for all these reasons as well as in appreciation for his deep commitment to making cities a home for all. Growing up in Denver during the height of the civil rights movement and attending a big, diverse public high school left a mark that years spent in the Bay Area, Pittsburgh, New York, and Boston have only deepened. I thank him with all my heart for the love and support he has given me over the years.