Collection of As Two Ships Sections Pertaining to Northeast/MidAtlantic States/Big Cities

Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Cities

Chap 18 Done

Bloomberg Two Cities Issue

Chapter 17 Final as Revised Route 128

Chapter 15 Final: Philadelphia, Boston UR

Chapter 14 Final Second Phase New England Textile War

Chapter 11 Big City UR Models

Chapter 10 Big Cities Cope w/Depression

Chapter 6 Noble Experiment

Chapter 2 Phil, PA, Boston, MA

Case Study of Mass and Maine Eminent Domain Court

City Beautiful in Harrisburg, Wash DC, St Louis

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City Beautiful in Harrisburg, Wash DC, St Louis

Washington D.C.

Burnham had been a busy little bee since the Great White City and City Beautiful had certainly gathered considerable momentum in its aftermath. The prospect of yet another centennial-type event soon appeared on the horizon. In 1900 Washington D.C. would have its one hundred year birthday. Our friend, Downing had developed a plan, back in the 1850’s and Alexander Shepherd, our bureaucratic machine boss had spruced up the place with many buildings, streets and what-have-you in the post-Civil War Grant Administration. So in 1900 when the American Institute of Architects held its convention in D.C., it sparked the interest of Michigan Senator James McMillan. In time-honored Washington-style, a commission (the McMillan Commission) was formed by the D.C. Congressional Committee to figure out what could be done to “class up” the joint.

 

No doubt smelling lush contracts, Burnham, Olmsted’s son (the father by this time was not well) and Charles McKim (partner in the most prestigious Beaux Arts architectural firm, along with Stanford White) were appointed and drew up plans to update L’Enfant—an update organized about a great mall between the capitol and the Potomac around which key government buildings would be built, and a series of parks (Rock Creek a centerpiece), and monuments throughout the city. Working with the Pennsylvania Railroad, they proposed to remove offending rail lines and centralize rail access to D.C. in an impressive Beaux Arts railway station.[1] In effect, the proposed plan created a national civic center with companion parks and boulevards and monuments—the Cadillac of City Beautiful. In true style, the Commission jaunted off for a six week tour of the Continent to derive proper inspiration for their image of what a national capital should look like. The McMillan Plan was released in 1902 and over the next several decades, monument by monument it was put into place. The D.C. of present day seen by the average tourist is the McMillan Plan D.C.

 

The union station and plaza, the [Federal] triangle of massive, neoclassical federal buildings, the mall, … the Lincoln Memorial, and the memorial bridge to Arlington, the Jefferson Memorial (as a substitute  for [the Paris] Pantheon [and] …. Olmsted [Jr.]’s scheme for a park system, extending beyond the boundaries of the District of Columbia to include scenic areas along the Potomac River from Great Falls to Mount Vernon [and Rock Creek Park] …. all testify to the strength of the McMillan commission’s ideas.[2]

 

The plan served as a model for other cities to imitate. In 1910 Congress established the Commission of Fine Arts to implement the McMillan Plan and over the next decade much of the mall was rebuilt and the Lincoln Memorial was constructed. Following this lead World Fairs in Saint Louis, San Francisco and San Diego propelled the city beautiful design to ever-higher visibility and added a considerable “coolness” factor to the movement,

 

Burnham’s Washington Plan drove home the value of comprehensive city planning. Like the Chicago’s World Fair, the monumental Washington plan awakened and nurtured the belief that urban life could be orderly and efficient, that cities could be beautiful and inspiring. Capturing the attention of civic leaders in other cities, Burnham’s grandiose Washington plan gave new impetus to urban planning.[3]

 

New York City (Improvement Commission Report of 1907), Philadelphia (City Parks Association) and Baltimore (Municipal Art Society) kicked into high gear to get things going in their communities. New York’s effort didn’t come to much in the long run, and for various reasons neither did Baltimore. Philadelphia, however, although it took a considerable while to develop (1919) and carry out, built today’s Benjamin Franklin  Parkway.

 

The Chicago Plan

In 1896, at a formal dinner party (Merchant’s Club and later the Commercial Club—both merged in 1907) Burnham proposed to a groups of elite businessmen (such as Pullman, Marshall Field, and Phillip Armour), a scheme which would evolve over the next decade into a formal plan for the entire Chicago region. On the Fourth of July, 1909, the Chicago Plan was released and four months later, Chicago approved the creation of the development vehicle, the Chicago Plan Commission. Over most of the next two decades, some elements, but not others, were put into place.

 

Redemption of the lakefront from commercial, rail and industrial uses, creation of a highway along the city rim, relocation of railways and development of an internal freight and passenger transportation system, plus street rationalization and a park system in the periphery—and, of course, the civic center —were the principal features of the Plan. So over the next decade, the Navy Pier was built, the lakefront reclaimed from its old uses, the Illinois Central Railroad relocated, the Lake Front Ordinance (zoning) passed, Grant Park to Jackson Park-site of 1893 World’s Fair (eight miles) developed for beaches and parks, and by 1930 the residential Gold Coast was in place.

 

The Plan did not propose to decentralize or fundamentally alter the central business district, or its role in the metropolis, and it did not view urban sprawl as an evil. Indeed the Plan implicitly endorsed the metropolitan perspective and the conviction, widespread at the turn of the century, that continued geographic expansion, if balanced by the encouragement of institutions and physical facilities that emphasized unity and social integration, would provide the metropolis with the economic base, social coherence and political stamina to maintain its vitality.[4]

 

As one would expect, Burnham’s plan for his home city included everything we have come to expect from the City Beautiful—and one more!. As the above quote indicates, the Chicago Plan was a true metropolitan plan—extending out sixty miles into the Chicago’s hinterland. In fact, a central concept was to ensure adequate transportation to the central business district and out so that the CBD became, in effect, the region’s capital, its home base, its visible and vibrant symbol. “From Kenosha Wisconsin, on the north, to Michigan City, Indiana on the south, Burnham’s plan outlined a regional network of highways, parkways and forest preserves”[5] [connecting to the Downtown Loop]. The plan would later be accused of neglecting the urban poor (by housing advocates, and for ignoring the car. Neither are fair. As a confirmed parks and boulevards discipline, that was his solution for the needs of the urban poor; Ford’s Model T’s first year in production was 1908—when Burnham finished his plan. Despite the seeming obviousness of the car, it was not until the 1920’s that communities really felt the need to accommodate to it.

 

Burnham’s plan did, in fact, focus on transportation—the CBD Beaux Arts railroad station, the usual mainstay of most City Beautiful plans, was only the beginning to the Chicago Plan. Incorporating much of the Chicago Commercial Club’s previous recommendations, the Plan eliminated most grade crossings in the city and proposed a central clearing and warehousing yard, and linked them to the harbors at the mouths of the Chicago and Calumet rivers. Passenger traffic was removed from the Loop area and distributed to three different rail stations. A major concern the plan attempted to address is the nature and power of the public agency that the state needed to create for the plan to be implemented—a major appendix detailed its powers, calling for both city and county development organizations. The location of future public buildings and streets/boulevards, for example, should rest with these bodies. Areas for future annexation should be fixed and that too would rest upon these agencies.

 

In many, many ways Burnham’s plan came very close to being the nation’s first comprehensive plan. No, it did not deal with what would shortly become the principal Progressive concerns, housing and neighborhoods, but that points out that at root Burnham was not a product of the Progressive Era—he (and the City Beautiful) were the last hurrah of the Gilded Age. At its heart Burnham’s plan was, as Mel Scott asserted, fundamentally a “businessman’s plan”. That insight is important to us because it reinforces the process by which the plan had been developed. It was a creature, not only of Burnham but of the principal Chicago business organizations. It was researched and written in Burnham’s (and Edward Bennett’s) private office, and paid for by business contributions. The public sector led by the businessman mayor, Frederick Busse, until 1905 the Secretary and Treasurer of the Northwestern Coal Company, mirrored the Commercial Club.

 

Burnham’s Chicago was “essentially [an] aristocratic city, pleasing to the merchant princes who participated in [the Plan’s] conception, but not meeting some of the basic economic and human needs. In this metropolis for businessmen there are, with the exception of the central business district, no carefully designated areas for commercial enterprises … nor are there model tenements for workers, much less model neighborhoods … slums are mentioned, but only in one paragraph …. [Instead the Plan concentrated on] magnificent boulevards, imposing public structures and splendid parks”.[6]

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remembering that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that will stagger us. Let your watchword be order, and your beacon, beauty. Think Big.[7]

 

Kansas City; City Beautiful as a “Stroll in the Park”

Kansas City started down its city beautiful path in the early 1870’s. In those years, into the 1890’s, the goal was to build a parks and boulevard system a` la` Olmsted and Central Park. The Kansas City parks initiative was pure and simple driven by wealthy elites, notably the owner of the Kansas City Star, William R. Nelson. For a decade and a half, the Star pounded the parks movement week after week, letter to the editor and assigned articles by Star reporters. “Nelson’s systematic and resolute crusade for a parks and boulevard system … began in the mid 1880’s. There were three reasons for his crusade. The first was Nelson’s love of beauty [he loved art and possessed a notable collection ] …. Also the park and boulevard movement dovetailed nicely with [his] ‘good roads’ transportation campaign. Lastly, Nelson wanted the rough-hewn Kansas City to match his vision of a progressive, stable community, blessed with an active, corruption-free government.”[8]

 

The Star’s campaign “combined repetition and adulation”. In article after article he celebrated the glories and successes of parks in other cities. His campaign added a subtly to the usual simple “bigger and better than you” competitiveness seemingly inherent in our urban hierarchical competition. For Nelson, Kansas City was left out of the pleasures and benefits of parks; it was simply deficient in not having what other cities had. Cities destined to become a great metropolis had to have parks. But the immediate issue at hand was the city’s lack of a structure to build a park system; it needed to create a parks board. That required local legislative action, state authorizing legislation (charter reform), and a local approval referendum. Each time another city achieved one or another of these steps, Kansas City readers were sure to hear about it[9]. Chicago, eight years previous to the Columbian Exposition, was the model to be imitated; in the years leading up to that break-through event, Chicago and Olmsted created a mighty park system—which Nelson’s just had to copy. Creating the park board was the Kansas City’s first step.

 

For the better part of fifteen years, proponents for the park board argued their case—and got essentially nowhere. Finally, the logjam broke and state legislation authorized a park board in 1899 in that year’s new charter. But the board had no powers to issue bonds to pay for its proposed park system—and it had to convince an independent, and uncooperative Real Estate Board to condemn the required property. The board by itself was insufficient to its purposes. Local legislation was pushed hard to remedy these deficiencies, and with the muscle of wealthy elites, it was shortly approved—but a now hostile Real Estate Board failed to take action, and the city made no funds available. Wealthy elites could force legislation through, but could not stop foot-dragging. The Parks Board shot itself in the foot by trying to force the state to grant these powers; it backfired when the state Supreme Court found the city legislation to be deficient on a technicality and reversed the earlier municipal legislation. By 1891, a Parks Board without powers existed—and that was it.

 

Abandoning the Parks Board, new legislation established a Commission under a new charter supported aggressively by the newly-formed Kansas City Municipal Improvement Association. The corporate muscle behind this sweeping charter reform was overwhelming, and caught up in its caboose was the Park Commission, complete with bond issuance powers. The corporate elite was duly appointed to the Parks Commission by the mayor. The president, August Robert Meyer, a wealthy, German-educated owner of the Kansas City Consolidated Smelting and Refining Company, took over the lead from Nelson. Utilizing support from the city’s powerful, Commercial Club, Meyer pushed the previously uncooperative elements into slow, grudging conformity in support of the parks and boulevard system. Joined by the young, German-born and educated landscape architect, George Edward Kessler. The Parks Commission secured a small, twenty-one acre, piece of land from the Real Estate Board and began to build a park and garden.

 

The twenty-one acre start was as much frustrating as gratifying; it was not the park and boulevard system found elsewhere. Olmsted after visiting the city in March 1893 urged, given the almost indifferent support behind the city’s parks movement, only one additional park—which was not well received by the locals. The shock of the Great White City also hit hard in October 1893. In a report submitted that month Kessler summarized Kansas City park adherents’ commitment to do more. “We are but just beginning to realize that by beautifying our city … we not only will do our duty to our citizens, but we shall create among our people warm attachment to the city, and promote civic pride, thereby supplementing and emphasizing our business advantages and increasing their power to draw business and population.”[10] Their plan was for three separate large parks connected by wide tree-lined boulevards. These would, it was believed, lead to new wonderful, respectful residential neighborhoods which would replace the shanties of white and black residential areas in their path. The parks and boulevard movement was drifting into slum removal suggestive of what was later to occur.

 

The 1893 Plan was picked up on by the Star; the mayor and Kansas City’s political machine, led by James Pendergast joined in the parade, as did the Commercial Club. The problem once again involved bond issuance. Kansas City was bumping against state debt limits; the choice was between the park system, or, a new, badly needed water pumping station. The solution was local legislation which created a new form of debt issuance, a certificate, which did not count against the debt ceiling. The victory was short-lived as like previous local legislation the state Supreme Court held it violated the city charter. So back to charter reform went the park movement advocates—and in 1895 they secured yet another charter reform which not only legitimized the certificates, but finally removed the now Department of Public Works (the old Real Estate Board) from its ability to oppose or slow down boulevard construction and eminent domain. A citizen improvement association was set up and the necessary popular referendum proved victorious. The support of the Pendergast machine provided votes the wealthy elites could not.

 

Finally in 1895, with a powerful structure, the Parks Commission endowed with the necessary powers was ready to go forward.. A spectacular land donation in 1896 of more than 1,300 acres was like manner from heaven. Boulevard construction started—and then the roof, shingle by shingle fell in. “For almost four years [to 1900] … opponents of the park organized a series of petitions, public meetings, delegations to the council and the park board, court fights, substitutes for Kessler’s Plan, and an attempt to remove Meyer from the Park Commission”. The issue was the expense, the cost to implement the plan. Parks, compared to other projects was superfluous, a whim of the city’s wealthy. Most of the opposition came from the larger business community—the city’s small business and real estate industry. A Taxpayer’s League formed. Eventually law suits to the state Supreme Court resulted. In a series of decisions, starting in 1899 and ending in 1908, the Court finally upheld the certificate issuance.

 

While effective opposition was over after 1900, the City Beautiful in Kansas City had badly split its business community. The system put in place during these years, including its crowning jewel, the Paseo, was visually impressive, and it elicited considerable local support once in place. Nevertheless, after this lengthy and hard-fought success, the Kansas City Parks Movement phase of the City Beautiful was fairly well over—a side show to a new phase of City Beautiful. The next phase, the Union Station moved in an entirely new direction, toward revitalization of the CBD and a construction of a civic center complex.

 

Harrisburg: City Beautiful as a Comprehensive Infrastructure Plan

Our second and final first phase City Beautiful case study contrasts the experience of Kansas City with that of Harrisburg Pennsylvania. Harrisburg (population 40,000) in 1890 was one fourth the size of Kansas City, and the reaction of the city’s business community to parks and boulevards were 180 degree opposite. The city beautiful initiative was led throughout by Mira Lloyd Dock, an irrepressible, forceful and impressive advocate whose charismatic personality fostered cooperation, not division. Well-educated and bred, Ms. Dock embraced forestry, landscape architecture and conservation. She was a founder of Harrisburg’s civic association club, and served as chair of the Town’s Department of Forestry and Town Improvement. Although, Harrisburg had been the state capital since 1806, population growth was rather subdued, and the city, frankly, was a rather grubby affair, riddled with water pollution, unpaved streets, constant flooding, with “culm, washed down from anthracite mines … which brought [a] murky, foul-smelling liquid to spigots in Harrisburg”. A swamp on its northern border added to the city’s delights.

 

Dock’s campaign began in late 1900. Speaking before the Board of Trade, she delivered a one hundred slide presentation, in which she used the expression “City Beautiful” (Wilson believes this is the first time used publically). So energetic and compelling was the presentation, appealing chiefly to civic pride “and an interurban competitive spirit”, she made the case that parks benefited all classes, and called for bath houses, and playgrounds as well for the working class. Hers was a parks movement for all, not just the Nelson’s, Meyers and the Kessler’s. From the outset, Harrisburg’s parks were but one, a vital one to be sure, physical reform to benefit all classes that resided in Harrisburg.

 

The newspaper and the Board of Trade embraced her presentation and after a series of meetings announced in April 1901 a comprehensive plan of improvements that attacked the various negative features of the city. A city plan of improvements shortly followed. The Plan “reinforced Dock’s themes of beautification, recreation and citizen activism. It asked for parks, pure water, paved streets, a city hall, and increased taxes to pay for them”. It included a sewer to address pollution, and converted the swamp into a proposed park. While Dock was the only female, the Harrisburg business community stood united around the plan, and campaigned to achieve voter and council approvals. The business elite incorporated the Harrisburg League for Municipal Improvements to run the campaign and conduct the studies. With the newspaper support, private funding to support the campaign and to pay for engineering and planning studies to support the individual elements of the plan, the council approval followed as did voter approval (3-1) of the bond issuance. The dominating theme echoed urban hierarchy competition, which seemingly was common in most city beautiful campaigns. Women and the Civic Association was especially active. The role of the Civic Club, led by Dock, “paved the way” for success.

 

Fifteen years later all the elements of the plan had been successfully funded and installed. Three additional bond issuances were approved previous to 1915 to finance the Plan.“Four and one-half miles of streets were paved by 1902, and more than seventy-four by 1915. Filtered water, intercepting sewers, and flood control (dam) had raised municipal sanitation …..Harrisburg park acreage grew from 46 in 1902 to 958 in 1915. A 140 acre lake in Wildwood Park, the old … swamp, served recreational needs while it impounded floodwaters”. A Capitol Park extension soon followed and band platforms, swimming facilities, ball fields, grandstands, a nine-hole golf course, and playgrounds were constructed in the parks[11]. The various city and private organizations cooperated throughout. The Harrisburg first phase City Beautiful was defined differently than Kansas City, policy in the two cities was shaped by different players, with Harrisburg manifestly a more open process, and the business community involved in first phase city beautiful policy  was cohesive and sustained in its involvement, as opposed to narrow, fragmented, and not infrequently intermittent.  Size of city may be a factor in the policy system, as well as possible differences in political culture within the business elites.

 

San Francisco:

For all the success of Burnham’s he and his comprehensive plan stumbled badly in San Francisco. Its failure there makes visible the contrast and clash between the City Beautiful Progressive plan and Privatist economic development. It begins in 1904 when San Francisco merchants and a former mayor, desiring the city to issue municipal bonds to finance a hospital, sewers, schools, streets, library, jail and playground and parks improvements. Other improvements included an opera house auditorium, a music conservancy, planting of flowers and trees, prohibition of overhead trolley car wires (“as not befitting the dignity and beauty of our principal streets”) and the construction of harbor improvements made “necessary by the growth of commerce and the increasing population …”) all was to be achieved through a comprehensive plan which would “elevate the public taste” and serve as a “great advertisement for our city”[12].

 

To this end the reformers founded a civic improvement association (AIASF) and AIASF invited Daniel Burnham to town. Burnham brought along his assistant, Edward Bennett (who would later devise Portland’s comprehensive plan). In 1905, Burnham and Bennett produced a wonderful plan following faithfully city beautiful and McMillan Commission principles. In the midst of the discussion on the Burnham plan, San Francisco conveniently (April, 1906) almost totally burned down due to the famous 1906 earthquake. While terrible for the city and its populace, the virtually complete destruction of the past built environment created an opportunity for the plan’s speedy approval and implementation. To the surprise of Burnham and the AIASF the plan went nowhere. The city was eventually rebuilt with little or no correspondence to the outlines and principles of the Burnham plan[13].

 

City Beautiful the Elder: the City Practical

Other cities implemented City Beautiful CBD projects over the next few years, including Detroit, Pittsburgh and, as mentioned, Philadelphia. Cities out West and in the South (Dallas) attempted it, with less success, as well (to be discussed in later chapters). Prestigious college’s, such as Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Rice (Houston), Southern Methodist (Dallas), California Institute of Technology (Los Angeles) and the University of Colorado (Denver) designed their campus around city beautiful principles. Train stations, built in imitation of Union Station, were constructed in New York, Kansas City, Dallas and Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, [14] The City Beautiful Movement was in its heyday during the first decade of the twentieth century, but by the end of the decade the pushback was hard. It really started in 1909 at the First National Conference on City Planning. By the middle of the second decade it was increasingly apparent that America was likely to join into the European War. The heyday of the City Practical, or for some the City Functional and for others, the City Efficient was the 1920’s—but the shift from one to the other played out in the second decade.

 

St. Louis: A Sign of the Future

While it fits badly into the above time frame, St. Louis in the first decade witnessed a major departure from the orthodox City Beautiful. Its departure, however, presaged the direction in which the nation would shortly follow in the next decades. St. Louis had competed hard for the Columbian Exposition and obviously had lost. It tried again eleven years later (1904) with its “Louisiana Purchase Exposition”, a world’s fair that “dazzled visitors with an array of neoclassical palaces. Yet the St Louis Exposition went Chicago one better and offered a ‘Model Street’ lined with model municipal buildings erected by various American cities to house their exhibits …. [This Model Street was intended] to create higher standards of street equipment and city arrangement by practical suggestions from experts and by comparison of methods in vogue in American cities. … Located at the center of the Model Street was the Civic Pride Monument, a sculptural expression of the spirit emerging not only in Chicago, but throughout the United States.”[15]

 

Of interest to our tale is what followed the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. In 1905 the Civic League of St Louis formed a committee to draft a comprehensive image for the city’s future development. Two years later (1907) the plan it delivered was a path-breaker. The first part of the plan followed the conventional, Burnham, City Beautiful formula for creating “civic orderliness and beauty”. After all the plan observed “’A city can not … maintain a high commercial standing [prosperity and growth] unless it maintained at the same time a high civic life’. A metropolis that looked great would draw visitors and commerce; a town that appeared down at the heels would lure few dollars.”[16] What followed in the plan was to create the civic center—in each of its various neighborhoods.

The proposal to establish a number of neighborhood civic centers was revolutionary. It was based on the committee’s belief that neighborhood civic centers “would tend towards the development of better citizenship”. Neighborhood-based schools, libraries, police stations, and bath houses, clustered around a park with a playground, would not only provide a focus for the neighborhood, but foster neighborhood civic pride as well. “It is in relation to the immigrant that the neighborhood center would perform one of its most important functions …. Why not bring the foreigner in contact with the best of our civilization, and teach him that government is maintained for his welfare.”[17]

 

Unfortunately, it never worked out and the plan was not implemented. Still, St. Louis departure brought to light the forces of change operating alongside the orthodox City Beautiful Movement—forces which were not yet sufficiently strong to take the lead, yet would in a relatively short time auger the new directions of change for urban policy and even economic development,

Boston Mel Scott

 

 

Wrap Up and Segue way

 

The Expression of Political Culture in Structures: A Massachusetts Case Study

 

At this juncture we refresh in the reader’s memory that we wish to demonstrate and explain the character of Massachusetts’ approach to deindustrialization–is it Progressive or Privatist? Let’s observe the obvious at this point that of the three alternatives Massachusetts had clearly rejected the Privatist model in its debate and legislations during the decade following World War II. It was not even close–for almost a decade Massachusetts and all the other New England states for that matter never crossed within a country mile of adopting a Privatist solution to deindustrialization. Even led by Republicans the Massachusetts response to the collapse of the textile industry went out of their way to avoid any form of “retrenchment”, business climate reforms or cost minimization. Why? The explanation behind the New England model of IDB contains a major part of our answer to this question. What’s more, the explanation will directly address a number of the prime purposes of this history. In short, the following discussion is meant to be one of the most fundamental in the entire book.

 

Let’s not mince words and instead summarize the argument so we are doubly clear what we are presenting. Massachusetts and its MBDC and the other New England states had written state constitutions some of which were written as early as 1789. These state constitutions contained or were amended to include provisions, relevant to economic development, which were later interpreted by state courts in ways which carried over, sometimes a hundred years or more after the court decision, to 1950’s (and contemporary) economic development legislation, programs, tools, and activities. These earlier constitutional provisions and court interpretations precluded the possibility that any economic development legislation, strategies and tools would be Privatist in character and that instead they would more closely follow principles we have associated with Progressivism.

 

In the case of the IDB, the type of lending practiced by MBDC and other Maine-style development capital corporations, were the closest the state constitutions and court precedential interpretations permitted. The IDB in Massachusetts could never have been identical to the IDB contained in the BAWI Mississippi model or even the Oklahoma model.  Bluntly, this is one of the ways that political and philosophical principles of a population that lived hundreds of years earlier continue to the present day. They are embodied in state constitutions and court decisions. Our contemporary policy-making still reflects, reinforces and perpetuates these values and perspectives[18].

 

Our discussion begins with identification of a concept key to government involvement in economic development: when can the public sector, using public funding assist a private individual (corporation)?[19] In particular, how does one define the “public interest” in providing assistance to the private sector? The rationale involving public assistance of private activities is by its very nature quite versatile and the drawing of a line quite subjective. The world view of those who make such distinctions will certainly come into play as will politics and the facts at hand. Decisions regarding this concept, embodied into law by precedent, will shape subsequent interpretations and policy definition-formulation for years to come–until they are overturned or reset.

 

In the early years of the American Republic the public and private sectors, embracing two forms of Privatist thought (federalists and Jeffersonian anti-federalist-Josiah Quincy and Massachusetts being included as federalist) state government got involved in a number of canals, roads, railroads, banks and a wide variety of business-governmental speculative partnerships. The results were frequently not pretty. The public reaction, like a steamroller, swept over states over the next half century. Constitutional amendments or revisions pertinent to regulation public involvement with private ventures was a very frequent vehicle. Prompted by numerous defaults, bankruptcies and evidences of corruption exposed by the effects of the Panic of 1837 the reaction set in. “Led by Rhode Island in 1842 one state after another adopted provisions which precluded the investment of tax revenues in private enterprise or the lending of the state’s credit for the proscribed purposes”. By 1918 an estimated forty four states had some sort of constitutional restriction regarding contracting of debts or loans by the state[20]. These state constitutional restrictions remain and are frequently referred to as “gifts provisions”.

 

The degree of the severity of in separating public financing of private purposes varies in very meaningful ways across the states. Reflecting different periods of time and different catalysts, not to mention different political cultures, the original gift provision in state constitutions takes many forms and subsequent exemptions and interpretations offer huge opportunities for a variety of distinctions, many quite subtle, to emerge over the years. Another set of public reactions/constitutional amendments/judicial interpretations followed the municipal and state debacles which followed the Panic of 1873. It was in this environment that a critical decision-interpretation (Lowell v. City of Boston, 111 Mass. 454 (1873) by a Massachusetts state court defined the limitation of “public purpose” necessary for public funds to finance private activities. The decision established a precedent that affected Massachusetts economic development over the next one hundred years[21].

 

The 1873 Lowell decision and several subsequent decisions were summarized. updated and restated in a 1958 judicial opinion:

 

It is a fundamental principle of constitutional law frequently declared that money raised by taxation can be used only for public purposes and not for the advantage of private individuals… The paramount test should be whether the expenditure confers a direct public benefit of a reasonably general character … to a significant part of the public, as distinguished from a remote and theoretical benefit. [22]

 

This is a very restrictive definition of public purpose[23] and according to Tilden “the power of eminent domain and the use of public credit were quickly brought within the orbit of the public purpose doctrine” and as would be expected exerted considerable impact on Massachusetts’ 1950’s reaction to deindustrialization and the interstate IDB competition-diffusion. The 1953 legislation creating the Massachusetts Business Development Corporation effectively limited a “Massachusetts-style” New England IDB to a state guarantee of a private financing.

 

… it is apparent that the Massachusetts decisions have recognized this distinction between the economic assistance to the community at large and benefits to individuals.[24]

 

The funds used by MBDC for direct lending were acquired through pooled loans from private banks and insurance firms–not public dollars. Later in this chapter, a case study of City of Boston urban renewal will elaborate upon Boston’s inability to secure court ratification of its first commercial urban renewal initiative[25]. In the same case study with the City of Atlanta’s urban renewal program we will comment upon Georgia court rejection and a subsequent state referendum to amend the state constitution. The irony, of course, is that in these instances the gift provision as interpreted and amended by these two states led to two polar opposite policy consequences. These are all examples of a nation-wide phenomenon that is fundamental to the shaping of economic development policy and structure.

 

A brief review of Maine’s treatment of its gifts provision reveals how subtle nineteenth century distinctions can significantly affect the content of twentieth century economic development. The Maine counterpart to the Massachusetts Lowell v. City of Boston was the 185 Jordan v. Woodward. Jordan v. Woodward concluded that:

 

Strictly speaking, private property can only be said to have taken for public uses when it has been so appropriated that the public have certain and well defined rights to that use secured, as the right to use the public highway, the turnpike, the public ferry, the railroad, and the like. But when it is so appropriated that the public have no rights to its use secured, it is difficult to perceive how such an appropriate can be denominated a  public use,[26]

 

In 1871 the Jordan decision was used to deny Maine’s sub-state jurisdictions the authority “to pass laws enabling towns, by gifts of money or loans of bonds, to assist individuals or corporations to establish or carry on manufacturing of various kinds ….[27]. A year later in Allen v. Inhabitants of Jay the court took it a restrictive step further in denying assistance to a manufacturing firm saying that once a loan with public funds has been made

 

… the bonds and money raised from their sale become the bonds and money of the person borrowing, and subject to his control. The town has lost all power over the use and disposition of their loan[28].

 

But court decisions in the twentieth century distinguished the definition of the public interest in regards to taxation from the definition of public interest for eminent domain. A 1914 City of Portland bond to obtain land for and build a city auditoriums (a City Beautiful initiative) was sustained as a legal use of tax dollars. In 1954, a Maine court supported eminent domain for removal of slums, but declared in 1957 that a Bangor industrial development act which permitted a taking of land for the purpose of industrial development was unconstitutional. The consistent thread which underlies these seemingly diverse decision is that …

 

public benefit or interest are not synonymous with public use, and that in a broad sense it is the right in the public to an actual use, and not to an incidental benefit [and so the public] … cannot use a plot of land leased to ‘x’ Manufacturing Company.[29]

 

The approval of eminent domain for slum removal was separated from this limited public purpose definition and instead eminent domain (urban renewal) approval’s public purpose was linked to the state police power to secure public safety and health …

 

The clearance of the ‘blighted area” in our view is the use of property for purposes of public health, morals, safety and welfare. The ‘public use’ within the meaning of our constitution lies in the removal of breeding grounds of disease, juvenile delinquency, and other social evils.[30]

Our Maine case study more clearly, in our opinion, how a section of the state constitution can be interpreted to permit economic development activities which are justified in terms more compatible with the values of a Progressive political culture. To the extent that economic development activities support the community at large, the use of key economic development powers of taxation, bonding, and eminent domain can be justified. When such powers are used for the benefit of a private individual or corporation and the ability of the public and community is indirect and “theoretical” than such powers cannot be utilized. This will, of necessity, shape the structure of EDOs and influence the definition and formulation of economic development public policy strategies and tools as well.

 

Conversely, in that these examples cited in the past few pages have served to explain how in the critical post-second world war period states with a Progressive orientation responded as they did to the reality of deindustrialization and inter-state IDB and business climate competition, we can logically asset that something similar was going on in states with different varieties of Progressivism and most obviously something different was likely occurring in states with Privatist political cultures. In essence, as economic development rose in importance in this period, each state in its own way developed those economic development programs, strategies and tools, laying the foundation for its own particular state sub-state economic development policy system (the SSS).

 

In that eminent domain (upon which slum clearance and urban renewal ultimately rested) and state credit and bond issuance (upon which the IDB rested) shared a common foundation in the specific, historical definition and evolution of the state constitutional restriction of public purpose and public interest in public “gifts” to private corporations, the heritage of past political cultures, surprisingly still very accepted by elites and presumably masses, a hundred or more years later, was the prism by which mid-twentieth century economic development structures, programs, tools  and strategies were approved. An obvious consequence of these state constitutional restrictions was the indirect encouragement of a particular EDO-type, the public authority–or as we call it, the quasi-public EDO. The quasi-public EDO will in this period leap into prominence as the key organizational form of sub-state economic development.

 

Lest we forget another important concept which is also fundamental to our history. We did not draw much attention to the Department of Commerce’s delivery system. The Department of Commerce placed a major emphasis on local municipalities (towns and cities in New England) to establish their own EDO and to assume responsibility for managing their own growth; “to this end they advised existing groups and pushed for the formation of new ones”[31] Also a notable emphasis of MBDC was to make loans to local EDOs to allow them to rehabilitate obsolete and vacant existing space for new users. The state of Massachusetts was leading the way to encourage local governments and communities to provide for their own economic development activities.

 

The latter involvement and leadership by the state government in economic development will be the norm of our American economic development system. What programs and how those programs are structured will vary from state to state and within each state can vary by periods of time. This is how the fifty individual state sub-state economic development systems (the SSS) will be established. In the time period in question, (1945-1960) often revolving around the IDB and the Urban Renewal empowerment state after state will set up empowerment legislation and authorize, subsidize or occasionally almost require the formation of local EDOs. Again, the reality that the state policy and structural decisions will reflect the dominant political culture at the time of the state constitution and those state court decisions which subsequently interpreted that state constitution is yet another way by which our two ships of economic development contentedly continue sailing into the present time.

 

 

 

Philadelphia and Pennsylvania

 

Penn’s Privatism

Pennsylvania’s and Philadelphia’s governments were devised by Penn himself (1682 in his Frame of Government). Penn disliked government intensely. “Meddle not with government; never speak of it, let others say and do what they please …. I have said little to you about distributing justice, or being just in power or government, for I should desire you should never be concerned therein” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 369).  Quakers perceived government as tyranny and the source of religious persecution. Moreover, if any belief had gotten them in consistent trouble back in England, it was their volatile and innate rebellion against imposed authority. Quakers by nature questioned order and tradition, refused deference to elites, rejected formal religion and church hierarchies, and proclaimed salvation could only be found through individual study and revelation. Authority was unnecessary–left alone humans were all good and equal before the face of God. Pennsylvania, accordingly, was initially set up to provide as little “governance” as conditions permitted.

 

So government, no matter the level, was secondary, intended to be weak, and limited. Penn’s colony-level government proved to be the weakest of all. State government as created by Penn was even unwilling to defend itself when attacked by Native Indians (who were being displaced by Scotch-Irish and Germans). Unsurprisingly, Penn’s initial government framework collapsed in his lifetime; he was forced to import non-Quakers to run the colony’s affairs—and they failed as well. Government power, such as was permitted, was dispersed to a semi-autonomous county. While intended to be the principal operating unit of government, county powers and governance simply was not up to the task. County and municipal governments were infused with many separately-elected administrative offices that fragmented executive and legislative authority.

 

Penn originally recreated the classic medieval agricultural village in Pennsylvania. Individual farms extended outward from the village center periphery. For the first twenty years or so, the colony/state government surveyed and platted land accordingly: Germantown, Newtown and Bucks County reflected the medieval vision. Planned commercial centers were envisioned as “county seats” whose purpose was both commercial and administrative. Philadelphia, Bristol, Chester and New Castle were examples of these early planned centers. As other settlers (non-Quaker) moved into more rural areas, however, Penn’s hodge-podge system broke down.

 

Settlers moving into the western hinterlands, beyond Penn’s effective control established diverse homesteads, more resembling southern-style scattered communities than his planned medieval village. The farther from Philadelphia these planned centers were, the more they functioned as strong central units of government with their own hinterland; York, Reading, Carlisle, Easton, Bedford and Sunbury are examples. Following yet another governance model, Gettysburg, Chambersburg and Lebanon were established by a private city-builder (Russo, 2001, pp. 16-17). This city-building by private speculators prevailed in the mountain areas of Pennsylvania, expressed in towns or boroughs that served as county seat. Bellefonte, for example, was founded by speculator Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord[i] around a spring and an iron ore mine. “During the course of the eighteenth century Pennsylvania became blanketed with clustered settlements”. (Russo, 2001, p. 17). Quakers were followed by German, and then Scotch-Irish immigrants, Pennsylvania degenerated into America’s first version of aggressive sprawl—a style of city-building personified by one of its most famous resident, the pioneer Daniel Boone, “who set out on his wanderings westward from Pennsylvania, where his Quaker ancestors … had settled” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 121). Boone didn’t stop until he reached Kentucky and founded Boone’s borough.

 

Weak and fragmented state/local governments eventually produced a politics that was more radical, volatile, individualistic and anti-authoritarian than anywhere else in America. Philadelphia’s economic privatism coexisted wonderfully with democracy. Through the American Revolution until the establishment of the Republic in 1789, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania could charitably be described “as the most vital participatory democracy in the world …. [with] cosmopolitan contentious citizens [who] destroyed institutions, overturned traditions, subverted received authority, [and]  rejected established elites” (Wescott, 1884, p. 318)—near anarchy prevailed. Pennsylvania went through three state constitutions in twenty years (contrasted with Massachusetts which approved a 1780 state constitution still in effect today)[ii]. Still, Henry Adams described Philadelphia/Pennsylvania in rather positive terms:

 

The only true democratic community … Pennsylvania contained no hierarchy like New England, no great families like New York, no oligarchy like the planters of Virginia and South Carolina …. Pennsylvania became the ideal American State, easy, tolerant and contented …. With twenty different religious creeds … and a strong Quaker element made it humane …. To politics the Pennsylvanians did not take kindly. Perhaps their democracy was so deep an instinct that they knew not what to do with political power when they gained it… (Adams, 1961, pp. 82-83).

 

 

 

The net effect of all this was a distinctive Mid-Atlantic style of decentralized, weak, and fragmented governance. Its city-building was driven by private investment and investment/business elites. The irony is Penn’s unintended Privatism attracted settlers who, if they did not agree with it, could tolerate it and make profits from it. The withdrawal from governance by wealthy Quaker elites following their Inner Light or pursuing private profit created a vacuum, soon filled, mostly by Philadelphia’s commercial elites who evolved into a version of Privatism later made famous by urban historian Sam Bass Warner.

 

Warner’s Private City

Warner’s Philadelphia was a community of individuals seeking jobs and profit for themselves-families. Provision of public goods was afforded little priority–the role of the state government in municipal affairs or in the provision of public goods was noticeably absent. Business and government were separate worlds with the weakened/decentralized latter facilitating the expansion and prosperity of the former.

 

[Philadelphia’s citizens] depended for their wages, employment, and general prosperity upon the aggregate successes and failures of thousands of individual enterprises, not upon community action … the physical forms of … [Philadelphia], their lots, houses, factories, and streets have been the outcome of a real estate market of profit-seeking builders, land speculators and large investors. Finally, the tradition of privatism has meant that the local politics of [Philadelphia] have depended … on the changing focus of men’s private economic activities. The tradition assumed that there would be no major conflict between private interest … and the public welfare. The modes of eighteenth century town life encouraged this expectation that if each man would look to his own prosperity the entire town would prosper. (Warner, 1968, p. xii)

 

Warner’s Philadelphia’s governance, as had Penn’s, rested on a system of committees in which each committee performed a specific municipal function, loosely under mayoral-council control. The independence of multiple policy-making committees facilitated dominance by commercial businessman (made possible by withdrawal of wealthy Quaker elites):

 

The wealthy presided over a municipal regime of little government. Both in form and function the town’s government advertised the lack of concern for public management of the community. The municipal corporation of Philadelphia, copied from the forms of an old English borough, counted for little. Its only important functions were the management of the markets and the holding of the Recorder’s Court. A closed corporation, [the municipal government] choosing its members by co-option, it had become a club of wealthy merchants…. the town was hardly governed at all….ineffective police… streets went unpaved, the public wharves little repaired…no public schools, no public water, and at best a thin charity (Warner, 1968, p. 10)[iii]

 

Biases and limitations in Philadelphia policy-making became more apparent as the city developed into an industrial city. Warner’s case study of Philadelphia’s water works revealed three phases of Philadelphia’s municipal history. Initially, municipal governance was left to business elites, relying on consensus decision-making tempered by a “good for the community” filter. As the industrial city grew, problems become divisive, consensus fractured, and the city was unable to govern effectively. Warner concludes policy-making by business elites was managed with great difficulty and considerable inequality. Business elites no matter the historical phase pursued low-tax solutions rather than long-term community-wide policies.

 

Was this Privatism-thing successful?

Whatever its limitations, however, Philadelphia’s Privatism attracted more than its fair share of future population growth. Philadelphia developed a more an innovative, diversified and prosperous industrial economic base– its focus on chemicals and machine tools for example was every bit as pioneering as New England’s textile mills. An obvious example of Philadelphia entrepreneurism and its commercial elite is Benjamin Franklin who left Boston for Philadelphia, made his fortune, retired in his forties and became a world-famous scientist and statesman. Between 1791 and 1800 Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, home to Washington’s second term and most of the Adam’s Presidency. The National Bank was headquartered in Philadelphia. Canals and railroads constructed by its business leadership ensured Philadelphia’s competitive position in the American hierarchy of cities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. In such an open policy system, Philadelphia’s Privatist economic development approach evidently worked–and worked brilliantly—although politically nineteenth century Philadelphia and Pennsylvania developed a series of political machines, distinctive from NYC;s Tammany that lasted to almost 1950.

 

Penn’s weak system of governance fostered a political culture Woodard describes as “the most American of [his eleven] nations … welcomed people from many nations … pluralistic and [focused] on the middle class … where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate even apathetic …. Midlanders believe society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, but they are extremely skeptical of top-down governmental intervention” (Woodard, 2011, pp. 6-7). Midlanders brought their culture to Middle America: central Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, the Dakotas, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska—even Chicago and St. Louis. Interestingly, all save Illinois, voted for Trump in 2016.

 

 

Boston and Massachusetts

Boston, settled by Puritans who preached an “angry” God, a corrupt humanity, a heaven open to only those predestined (the Elect), but imposed a demanding obligation on the Elect to address needs of the community’s unfortunates. Puritanism rested upon a state-level Puritan “Elect” hierarchy that “guided” shareholder-based New England town democracy. In the Puritan system, town democracy and Puritanism were lodged in the town church–unlike Penn’s Pennsylvania, church and state were united. Structurally and morally the two systems of policy and governance were almost polar opposites.

 

John Winthrop

Boston’s equivalent to Penn (founder of the Town of Boston 1629)[iv] was the former English country squire John Winthrop. Winthrop established a Puritan policy system that distinguished between the roles of private and public in the Puritan community. Puritanism may have combined church and state, but it delinked the state from private profit and economic growth. Instead Winthrop’s Puritanism believed private profits should accrue to the community’s disadvantaged, and business elites distanced from policy-making.  In his famous “A Modell of Christian Charity” Winthrop advocated

 

[that] under a due forme of government, both civill and ecclesiastical” in which the concern for “the publique” must outweigh all private interests. We must bear one another’s burdens … We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of other’s necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality.… For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world. (Winthrop, 1630)

 

If this “modell” were applied to municipal governance—as Winthrop meant it to —the Model of Christian Charity would be Philadelphia Privatism turned upside-down, inside-out or both. Winthrop’s Puritanism perceived government as primary, to be an instrument to make men holy, and provide for the needs of the community’s most desperate. This (1) primary use of government (2) to care for the disadvantaged are two critical divides between Privatist and Progressivist political cultures. They are as evident in the seventeenth century—as they are today. If private sector success is key to community economic growth or if community economic growth is tasked to ameliorate inequality, then Progressive and Privatist cultures pursue different economic development goals.

 

Massachusetts Political/Administrative Structures and Relationships

Winthrop stressed the unity of church and state, less in his municipal corporation, than at the state level. The State, led by Elect was entrusted to infuse municipal governance with moral purpose and lead in local policy-making. The state of Massachusetts assumed responsibility that towns and their residents be moral, hard-working, prosperous citizens, deserving of a future with God in heaven. Municipal government was thus held accountable, not only to the will of the shareholder town meeting (established in 1636 Massachusetts)[v], but to God and his Elect in the state capital as well. Accordingly, in 1642 the Massachusetts General Court instructed each town to “train their children in learning, and labor and other imployments“. In 1647, the General Court required towns of fifty inhabitants to retain someone to teach children to “write and reade“, and a town of one hundred to set up a”grammer schoole” supported by public funds. The intention underlying education was each individual was expected to read his Bible. Literacy was essential, a prerequisite for self-governance at the town level. The role of the Massachusetts General Court in municipally-relevant affairs was significant, and remains so today.

 

As intense their desire to practice their religion, Puritans emigrated to unleash their middle class entrepreneurial spirits—reflected in the “business” purpose of town meetings and democracy. The Puritans secured their charter from the crown as a “trading company” owned by shareholders. City-building in early New England was a legal, economic enterprise, closely regulated by the state. Town shareholders included investors as well as residents. Each town formed an agreement/contract with its shareholders to perform tasks for the maintenance of the commons and designating tracts of land the proprietor solely owned and paid taxes. Originally, most of the land went unused and a function of town government was to attract and sell such unused units to new residents. This may be the earliest expression of Puritan town economic development. The town, as a private corporation, left to the discretion of the General Court (state government) most public policy areas. With few exceptions[vi], this tightly controlled unit of sub-state government was not replicated elsewhere in the United States. The Town evolved into a pure service delivery unit (Russo, 2001, pp. 10-11).

 

Wealthy families (Russo, 2001, pp. 49-52, 7-10) invested in new towns across the whole of southern New England (Connecticut and Rhode Island separated in 1662 and 1640’s respectively) and contested New York borders. By 1700 nearly all of New England, excepting the most northern areas, was incorporated. During the seventeenth century, original towns sold off land to form smaller towns. . Commercial centers developed (Cambridge, New Haven, Hartford, Salem, Providence, Springfield, and Boston). Most were ports (on the Atlantic or rivers). Nearly all were grid-platted. Dramatic growth occurred post-1700 with “clustering” of town centers. From that time, New England’s population growth lacked a “place to go”, and “pent up”, it awaited a future Yankee Diaspora.

 

The now-famous New England town democracy was not formalized by state legislation until 1660 (Massachusetts Open Town Meeting Law); the first town that practiced town democracy in the current sense of the expression was Ashfield. (Robinson, 2011). Over time, town meetings offered an opportunity for rival elites to crystalize; it is no accident that a Boston town meeting (1772), not the Bay State legislature, voted into existence the first Committee for Correspondence (including John Adams, Sam Adams, James Otis, Joseph Warren, and Josiah Quincy Sr. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 148).

 

The Evolution of Puritan Elites

After Winthrop Massachusetts Puritans softened the tough edges of his original system. As the Bay Colony matured, the religious intensity of Massachusetts’ Puritan governance wilted; a secular humanism displaced the harsh and demanding Puritan value system. This new mentality, however, left untouched critical values associated with Winthrop’s “city on a hill” passage. Commitment to community, a distrust of profit in public policy, the sharp separation of business from government, moral elite leadership of state government, the use of government to address needs of the disadvantaged, and the almost evangelistic function of the city on the hill as the “modell” of civic duty for others to imitate remained at the core of New England’s system of policy-making.  The transition from a Puritan Elect to Boston Brahmin took nearly 150 years,

 

The shift from raw Puritanism (Congregationalism) to Unitarianism[vii] commenced in the late eighteenth century. Long before Unitarianism was first preached at King’s Chapel in Boston (1784), however, generational change prompted by Puritan intolerance and inflexibility, and the development of a maritime sector to balance agriculture, weathered the old Puritanism. Authority, formerly derived from religion and morality, shifted to more secular foundations. Substituting for Calvinism was a Weberian Protestant ethic (hard work, a moral life) and commercial success.

 

Fifty years after its initial settlement the Puritan Religious Elect was replaced by a new Elect composed of morally-bound, highly-educated commercial elites most of financed or sailed the seas of the planet. Their new-found wealth, used for investment in maritime initiatives, was accumulated through the land sales associated with New England town-building. Post Puritan, pre-Unitarian business elites had evolved into a “codfish” aristocracy, based on fishing, whaling, and trade with Europe and the Far East. But success in business carried with it an obligation to serve the community by helping the disadvantaged and the general public welfare through service in government—a noblesse oblige. “The pulpit and the quarterdeck were the sacred and secular symbols of authority in the family, in society and in politics …. Boston federalism was a secularized version of the Puritan ethic.” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 199)

 

So unlike Quaker elites, post-Puritan elites accepted responsibility for governmental leadership. Governors after 1688 were drawn from this codfish aristocracy. “They modeled themselves not only on the Puritan ideal of authority, but also on the old Roman ideal of gravitas: self-interest yes, self-indulgence no …. They stood rather than ran for office, they listened to their own consciences, not to the voice of the people …. were collectivists rather than individualists, believing in family and class as organic communities and society as the family writ large” (Baltzell, 1979, p. 199). These men presided over what Baltzell calls a “deference democracy”—a democracy where aristocratic elites made policy on behalf of the “best interests” of its citizenry—“the best people were elected to office, time after time, in town after town for over two hundred years”[viii].

 

Transcendental Unitarianism replaced the fire, brimstone and sinners in the hands of an angry God with concern for humanity, a separation of church and state, a tolerance for religious diversity, and the essential goodness for mankind that, if protected from the evils of civilization, would “live long and prosper”. Education, always a first order Puritan priority, became the key vehicle to achieve both moral and economic ends. Education enabled, enlightened, empowered and was core to addressing needs of the disadvantaged. Almost imperceptibly, economic growth meant transforming “people”. Improving business profitability was separate and apart from government’s purposes—it was the responsibility of businessmen themselves. Boston-style Progressivism entrusted policy-making to a business elite, but sharply divorced private and business profit from policy-making as harmful to the overall community, and a bane to the community’s disadvantaged.

 

With the arrival of the Early Republic Boston’s agricultural and maritime economic base was disrupted by an emerging entrepreneurial business elite: textile manufacturers. As early as 1810 this manufacturing elite, accumulated wealth from factories built in Lowell, Andover, Salem and southern New Hampshire. Using a new form of business structure (the corporation), textile entrepreneurs made fortunes quickly, moved into Bulfinch-designed mansions in Boston high status neighborhoods, and by the 1830’s not only lived alongside the codfish aristocracy, but increasingly married into it. The Boston Brahmin, the Frankenstein-like fusion of these two elites, resulted.[ix] The Brahmin Elect carried with it the old Winthrop mission:

 

[an] obligation on the part of older families to the welfare of “their town” and new determination to participate actively once again in local political affairs … Boston could be saved if members of the “better class” took over their responsibilities and regained positions of social and political leadership in the community …. [They] emphasized the responsibility of “the happy and respectable classes” to watch over those laws that affected “the less prosperous portions of the community”. Their obvious desire for political control of Boston carried with it a sense of responsibility for the prosperity of the town and the welfare of its less fortunate classes–a sort of moral stewardship, a form of noblesse oblige–that would continue to be an integral part of Boston’s political heritage. (O’Connor, 2002, pp. 87-88).

Josiah Quincy

Only in 1820 did Boston petition the state legislature to change from town into city. By then Boston, a thriving cosmopolitan trading city of 18,000 in 1790 had increased to 43,000.  Boston desperately needed modernization of its infrastructure to accommodate population and a fishing industry that needed dredged harbors and rebuilt wharfs. Towns, however, lacked the authority to accomplish these tasks. City status, achieved in 1822, brought with it a charter that permitted a bicameral city council and a strong-Winthrop-style mayor in whom “the administration of all the fiscal, prudential and municipal concerns” were vested.

 

Elected in 1823 as Boston’s second mayor, Brahmin Josiah Quincy[x] stepped up to Boston’s infrastructure and service crisis. Concentrating on the oldest sections of the city, crushing the determined opposition of old Town elites, he established a municipal bureaucracy of experts accountable to him. Quincy then appointed himself as chairman ex-officio of the considerable number of independent boards and commissions and assumed authority not contemplated by the state constitution or the shift to city status (O’Connor, 2002, p. 93). While Philadelphia’s Privatist, weak, committee-dominated municipal government neglected its infrastructure and services, Quincy hired teams of sweepers to remove six tons of “dirt” from the city’s streets, established municipal garbage pickup service, established municipal level police and fire departments, created a department of corrections for youth offenders, acquired control over the city’s sewers and minimized their pollution–oh, and in case you missed it, conducted Boston’s first municipal-level urban renewal program–building in the cleared land the first Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market (ironically Logue’s initial 1960 urban renewal project rebuilt both). The Boston that Quincy left behind in 1828 was rated as the healthiest city in America–and the most indebted.

 

Traveling on a time machine to 1898, we would see his great-grandson Josiah Quincy IV (son of yet another Mayor John Quincy Jr.), the last of the Quincy dynasty as the Democratic mayor of Boston, a political party which included Boston’s immigrant Irish. Still very much a Brahmin, Quincy IV supported “extension of the powers of government and in the rights of organized labor and as mayor employed settlement worker Robert A. Woods, the social worker Alice N. Lincoln, and the founder of the playground movement, Joseph Lee.… [Quincy as Mayor] made Boston’s city government for a brief time the cutting edge of urban reform in America. (Baltzell, 1979, p. 373) In short, the first Josiah Quincy was no exception, his Progressive style of governance and economic development persisted through the nineteenth century.

 

Boston Progressivism stressed local governmental executive leadership by a Brahmin elite, pursuing the community’s greater good, with an emphasis on education and people related services. Called “Yankee” and “secular Puritans” by Woodard, our Progressives exhibited since the earliest days of the American Republic “the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives …. For more than four centuries, Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process and aggressive assimilation of foreigners”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 5)  Its discomfort with unbridled capitalism, corporate conflicts of interest, and persistent efforts to assist the disadvantaged thru municipal policy distinguish the approach.

 

“Government … could defend the public good from the selfish machinations of moneyed interests. It could enforce morals through the prohibition or regulation of undesirable activities. It could create a better society through public spending on infrastructure and schools”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 60)

 

Boston infused into Progressivism its sense of “mission”, its propensity to “impose its ways on everybody else”. “For the Puritans didn’t merely believe they were God’s chosen people, they believed God had charged each and every one of them to propagate his will on a corrupt and sinful world”. (Woodard, 2011, p. 61) This sense of mission overlaps profoundly into contemporary ED. Most evident in our “Policy World”, composed largely of Progressive-inclined academics—setting it apart from the more Privatist “Practitioner World”.

 

Observations and Questions before Moving On

There’s no mistaking Boston and Massachusetts for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Warner’s Privatism is not replicated in Boston. Nor should we think these are the only forms Progressivism and Privatism in existence at this time. One might assume Privatist elites in Charleston behaved and thought differently than Philadelphia because their Privatism has different roots. Progressive elites in Connecticut/Maine blazed their own Progressive path. A perhaps not-so-obvious lesson to be learned is variation among municipal business elites. There was no unity of purpose, vision and action across cities and regions, a pursuit of profit for example, did not create a unified approach to policy.

 

The Philadelphia business community stressed low taxes, and economic/population growth and Philadelphia politics was supposedly the most democratic and open in America at that time—in contrast to the more imperial rule of Boston’s Progressive elite to which the masses were expected to defer. The concern for infrastructure, physical redevelopment, education, assisting the disadvantaged—and services to people and neighborhoods was pretty much the opposite of Philadelphia. In any case, leadership by municipal business elites does not justify the conclusion that the outputs of such policy-making will be identical across cities and can be reduced to the simple grubbing for personal gain and business profit. There is something deeper going on—this history suggests a major factor in that difference is political culture.

 

If so, political culture played a significant role in the municipal policy process. Perhaps, it’s most significant impact is to define goals and beneficiaries for ED policy initiatives and strategies. The existence of such radically different political cultures as demonstrated by Philadelphia and Boston supports our assertion that American economic development has not followed a uniform, monolithic, nation-wide set of economic development goals. Two visibly different ways to conduct sub-state economic development preceded the industrial city. As to which is better, the answer rests upon which set of goals one posits. Is one set of goals and beneficiaries better than the other—well …? Philadelphia proved remarkably innovative and through much of the nineteenth century increased population sufficient to make it competitive with its neighbors and elite cities in America’s urban hierarchy. Less so Boston. But Boston defined its economic development in different terms—terms that worked well enough until Irish immigration smashed the ethnic and religious homogeneity of the Boston community. The future evolution of American cities demonstrated “two viable roads existed” and political culture shaped the decision on which to travel.

 

Bringing It All Together: the Noble Experiment

 

On March 30, 1909, at the prestigious Boston City Club, the opening speaker, Edward Filene[xi] tasked his audience of two hundred and thirty of Boston’s wealthiest business, religious, and educational elites that “our city can be immeasurably helped by coordination and planning ahead. We are allowing slum conditions … of overcrowded housing … even in the outskirts [suburbs] …. We must tackle this problem … we will bring to Boston … a knowledge of all the best things … done by any other city … combining all the best things in a Plan for Boston” (Scott, 1969). A later speaker, board member George W. Codman[xii], offered another motivation behind the Plan for Boston: “We have tried to run the city as a political institution and have made a dismal failure at it. We think now that we want a business administration of our cities with businessmen in command”.[xiii]

 

Soon coined “the Noble Experiment” the process and series of initiatives and events unleashed by Filene that night present a masterful case study of a number of themes discussed in this chapter. The case study reveals the complications and the contradictions that characterized policy-making in municipal systems moving into the “modern” era. The Plan turned out to be a major-league community development/ economic development initiative, led by the chamber and one of history’s illustrious mayors, Honey Fitz (grandfather of JFK who danced and sang “Sweet Adeline” at JFK’s 1946 first Congressional victory).

 

The Boston Plan

And so the Boston Plan For 1915 was announced—the Noble Experiment had begun. The Boston Plan Executive Committee led by Filene included James Storrow (General Motors), the heads of the Boston Chamber and Boston’s Merchants Association, and Louis Brandeis, in seven years a Supreme Court Justice. Eighty of Boston’s best business leaders served on the Board of Directors. The Plan included sixteen points to be achieved by 1915. The Plan included:

 

• Structural reforms (expert accounting for the city, reduce government waste and a new charter for Boston);
• Progressive reforms (the best public health department in the nation, comprehensive system of wage earner and old-age pensions, increase the number of branches in the public library, a system of public education “that actually fits the boys and girls of Boston for their life work”, and “better working conditions”);
• City Beautiful reforms (music in the famous Boston Park system) and an “intelligent system of transportation for the whole state, electric, express, freight and passenger”);
• Pure economic development initiatives such as “a careful accounting of the human resources of the city to include the skill level of the workers and the executive abilities of industrial leaders”, and growth in existing industries, and the “introduction of new enterprises”.

The Boston Plan was a two-pronged initiative. The first of the two prongs began in 1905 with the formation of the Good Government Association[xiv] whose membership totally overlapped the membership of the Boston 1915. The motivation for its establishment was the conviction of one James Michael Curley for fraud in a federal court. The 1905 election of John F. Fitzgerald, “Honey Fitz” was the last straw for Boston’s GGA. and they spent the entire of Honey Fitz’s first administration initiating law suits, state investigations, and newspaper attacks on him and the “Irish machine”. In 1907, they achieved approval by state legislature of the Independent Finance Commission to monitor City finances.

 

The state Finance Committee prepared a new charter for Boston whose intent was to reduce the power of the ethnic ward-based machine over the city council because the council levied high taxes to support its graft, patronage and capital projects in the neighborhoods. The mayor’s office was strengthened and given a four year term. The GGA got the charter on the 1909 ballot. On the same ballot was the GGA/Boston Plan’s James Storrow who ran against Honey Fitz for mayor. His de facto campaign manager was the Chair of the Boston Chamber. In an election in which more Bostonians voted than ever before, the charter passed (52%), Storrow lost, but businessmen candidates secured a majority on the city council. Honey Fitz was elected mayor; the first mayor in Boston’s history to serve four years. Also the first strong mayor in Boston’s history.

 

But only in Boston politics could the next event occur. Honey Fitz’s first announcement was to support the Boston 15 Plan.

 

Honey Fitz as Structural Reformer

Over the next four years, Fitzgerald worked to achieve the sixteen point plan. The Mayor brought in expert, Louis Rourke, chief engineer of the recently completed Panama Canal, to be his Commissioner of Public Works. That department resulted from Fitzgerald’s consolidation of the separate streets, water, and engineering boards/commission. Hurley then reorganized the entire system of parks and recreation. Fitzgerald was bringing efficiency and eliminating waste.

 

The Boston Plan went forward as well. In a conscious imitation of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the constructed the “Boston Exposition”: a “graphic display of the living and working city, a display of Boston as a going concern”. The Exposition first opened in the old Copley Square Museum of Fine Arts in 1910. A year later it was moved to a newly constructed Museum of Fine Arts, “built on clean City Beautiful lines” on a swamp tamed, and landscaped overlooking the Olmsted’s Back Bay Fens. The new campus was intended to attract “the willing worker on an average wage to bring up his family amid healthful and comfortable surroundings. That they may become useful citizens”. Over two hundred exhibits, broken down into three main themes: the Visible City, Educational, and Social and Economic. City planning, parks, streets and boulevards and housing exhibits were displayed in “the Visible City”. Also included was a model tenement, and an actual three bedroom North End tenement. Also on display was the City Beautiful as depicted for Chicago—and new “moving pictures”. The 1909 Expo targeted the gazelle of is day, the glamorous aircraft industry, complete with actual planes– a Curtiss airplane, models of the Wright brothers’ airplane and the winner of Europe’s aircraft race. So well-attended, a second “aeroindustry” Expo was held the next year at Harvard Aviation Airport (60000 attended). That Expo was followed up by a third the next year. Boston was attempting to establish leadership in a promising cutting-edge agglomeration.

 

Port of Boston Movement

Well “me hearties”, chambers and real estate exchanges were not the only Big City economic developers on the early twentieth century stage. Ports figure prominently in our history—we have already discovered our candidate for the first municipal government EDO is the NYC Department of Docks. During the Progressive Era two new versions of the port authority (Privatist and Progressive), will make their appearance. These newer versions of port authorities are but a continuation of the experiments to create a hybrid structure (HEDO) that integrates public power with private expertise and governance. This experiment will prove successful and durable—in fact, the Progressive port authority structure will be adapted to become the predominant 21^st century hybrid EDO.

 

Coastal and international trading, as well as fishing/whaling (maritime) industries were cornerstone agglomerations that built several American cities. Ports served as a home for export trade facilities around which its hinterland regional, economies depended. The ports/waterfronts of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston were also early gateways for immigrants. As early as the 1840’s, trans-Atlantic passenger routes meant ports ventured into tourism. Ports housed naval facilities and forts, as well as immigration-processing centers. Port facilities (piers, wharves, channels, customhouses, warehouses, loading and cargo transfer, transportation access, ship repair and dry docks, and people-processing facilities). Before 1900 there were only five public port authorities in the United States (Galveston, San Francisco, New York (Dept. of Docks), Portland OR, and New Orleans) (Luberoff & Walder, 2000, p. 10).

 

Nineteenth century port facilities were privately-owned or controlled by monopolies of railroads, power utilities and mining corporations. This old-style “Privatist” port was devoid of public powers and were more a vehicle to transfer railroad and marine assets into nontaxable public assets, allowing these monopolists to control logistics and trade infrastructure. By the turn of the century, however, with the Progressive Movement gathering momentum, non-railroad business elites had it with railroads/shipping firm’s monopolist-like control of ports. If the Progressive Movement did anything, it checked monopolistic concentrations of power, and in the case of ports and harbors, a “new-style” port authority was the mechanism.

 

Progressive municipal administrations stumbled onto a new model of Port Authority recently approved by Parliament in London England. The London Port Authority Act of 1908 model relied on a quasi-public/private, semi-independent port authority with mixed governance and substantial public powers (bond issuance, taxing and abatement authority, public ownership/management/lease of property for private use, and eminent domain)—a radical, indeed revolutionary, innovation in hybrid EDOs. The London model offered the added benefit of “insulate complex public programs from politics and ineffective management” (Radford, 2013, p. 8). The port authority structure was ideal. It permitted meaningful, and  legal, private participation in ED decision-making;  sale/leaseback to a port authority so that, private assets could be legally transferred to public ownership and subsequent private management/operation; public financing for assets publicly-owned meant favorable financial terms—and from the municipality’s perspective off-budget and off-debt cap limitations for important economic development tax generating infrastructure. Port authority powers installed long-term core marine and harbor infrastructure/improvements necessary for sustained harbor effectiveness and profitability (such as dredging, piers and long-term planning).

 

So Progressive Washington/Oregon—and Boston– municipal and state policy systems retooled and repurposed the port authority —to seize control over the waterfront, overturn its railroad oligopoly, and conduct an aggressive economic development growth strategy based on foreign trade and shipping.

 

Boston’s port and trade facilities (claiming to be the oldest active port in the Western Hemisphere) were in the 1850’s purchased by New York City-owned private companies. Motivated by its rivalry with New York City, and believing the opening of the Panama Canal offered fresh opportunities, the Boston Chamber in 1911 prepared a port authority bill for the Massachusetts state legislature. The intention was to reverse the port’s declining trade which, it was felt, was caused by inefficiencies created by competing railroads. Dredging and investment in key facilities was also included in the bill. A large appropriation was also included. The bill demarcated several industrial park-like areas adjacent to the terminals. The legislature increased the appropriation and approved the bill, creating a state-chartered Port of Boston with an appropriation of $9 million. The board of directors appointed by action of the governor and mayor were all chamber directors/members.

 

The Port’s first achievement was to convince the Hamburg-American Line to include Boston as a port in its trans-Atlantic passenger route. More to our interest, monopolistic access over the Commonwealth Pier by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad was broken when the Port annulled the old contract. The pier was rebuilt to accommodate the Hamburg-American line. A new dry dock constructed, modernized another pier and reclaimed some marshy flats for potential development (Sturges, 1915, pp. 242-46).

 

To induce Massachusetts manufacturers to ship out of the new port, the Chamber produced in 1913 the 265 page Handbook of the Port of Boston. Then Boston successfully lured the annual meeting of the International Congress of Chambers of Commerce to Boston in 1912, the first time that body had met in the United States. That achievement the result of a 1911 chamber-organized tour of seventy-five European cities in the course of which formal invitations were dropped off in each city. When the Congress arrived it brought 850 delegates, presenting an opportunity for Mayor “Honey” Fitzgerald to drop in, say hi, and leave a city monetary “contribution” to the event—the state had already done so. The chamber followed up in 1913 with a three month business exchange mission of South American and West Indies.

 

Boston Plan Pushes a CD Agenda

Breaking down into committees, Boston Plan business leaders forged ahead with projects such as constructing a Jamaica Pond boat house and bandstand, and starting the Woodbourne housing and settlement house. They brought in the noted playground expert Joseph Lee. A monthly publication New Boston, commenced. Fifteen bills were prepared for city and state approval. The Housing Committee was especially aggressive and in the first issue of the New Boston it focused on the housing conditions of the North End, West End, Charleston and South Boston. The committee recommended forming a bureau to investigate and enforce housing codes. In January 1911 Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., wrote an amazing article in the New Boston that reflected the status of the housing movement led by the Russell Sage Foundations, calling for Forest Hills-type planned communities in the suburbs of Boston (“A suburban town built on business principles”). The first priority of the housing committee was that “overcrowded, unplanned residential districts should not spread out along the newly opened rapid transit lines linking the downtown core with the suburbs of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain”. (Scott, 1969)

 

In 1911 the Boston Plan submitted to the Massachusetts state legislature an initiative calling for the creation of metropolitan district whose purpose was to provide Boston [and the forty towns of the] metropolitan district] with a city plan developed on “sound moral, industrial and social lines”. The three member board of directors would issue recommendations for housing, buildings, safety (fire and sanitary), congestion, and provide reserved land for public use. The proposal was aggressively lobbied by Plan 15 and the new Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber issued a formal report, “Real Boston, the Get Together Spirit among Towns and Cities”. To further support the initiative the Chamber created the Real Boston Committee composed of suburban and city business leaders. The fate of the “Real Boston” bill, however, was bleak indeed.

 

The Real Boston bill couldn’t gather support from any of several state legislative committees. A new bill was crafted to meet objections—but it too got nowhere. A month after submittal the legislative committee formally voted it down. The bill killed by suburban opposition fueled by suburban unwillingness to be linked in any way with Boston’s Irish machine and crony, high tax politics. Their ultimate fear was the metropolitan district was the first step to future annexation. The Massachusetts legislature shortly after passed its own long-range housing program ran out of a State Housing Commission. In 1913, the state Housing Commission required Massachusetts towns and villages to establish a planning board—which Honey Fitz did in January1914. But that was it. In January 1914, a new mayor, James Michael Curley began his first term as mayor of Boston.

 

Within a year the Boston Plan 15 organization collapsed and disappeared.

 

 

1920’s

 

Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal

Northeastern Pennsylvania’s eight county “anthracite coal region” provides us with an interesting counter to our unfortunate fascination with Big Cities and a companion to the New England/Carolina textile industry. The Lehigh Valley had plenty of coal, a chief source of energy, and that attracted a sizeable number of immigrants. Lehigh coal fueled the blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel and other furnaces throughout the Northeast and Great Lakes. The Lehigh story began in the 1880 when the Valley’s three principal cities (Scranton (45850), Hazleton[xv] (6935), and Wilkes-Barre (23339)) were established, along with numerous “patch” towns that formed around individual mines. Population peak for all three cities was reached in 1930: (Scranton, 143433), Hazleton (36765) and Wilkes-Barre (86626) — declining ever since. The highest growth period, 1880-1890, but each city experienced a second growth spurt (1870-1880, Scranton; and 1900 to 1910 for Hazleton). The high point in the anthracite coal employment was 1917 (175000); in 2000, coal mining employment was less than 1000. These were the golden years of the anthracite coal mining region.

 

Local boards of trade were founded in the 1880’s. Their strategy, given the cyclical nature of coal-mining, was to diversify the economic base. Economic downturns depressed mining production and were lean times indeed for these communities. Specifically, boards of trade sought to bring in firms which could employ women and children of mining families. While this probably fails to warm the reader’s heart, that was the goal. Attraction targets were silk and garment firms and the primary inducement was tax abatement. In Scranton, for instance “Commercial lenders in that decade (1880’s) formed a board of trade, which lobbied city officials to offer ten-year tax abatements to new companies that opened operations in the city”. (Dublin & Licht, 2005, p. 114)

 

Later, 1913-1914, the Scranton Board of Trade organized fund-raising drives to seed a $1 million dollar loan fund for its newly-established subsidiary, the Scranton Industrial Development Company. This is the earlier discussed “Scranton Plan” innovation, a sophisticated private-funded guarantee that was widely copied. In October, 1929, the chamber set up a second fund, the Credit Guarantee Fund to support its economic development program and in 1939, the chamber started programs to attract and retain youth (Dublin & Licht, 2005, pp. 114-5). Hazleton, less than fifty miles south of Scranton, pretty much mirrored Scranton’s economic development saga. Recruitment by its chamber-equivalent started in the 1880’s, intending to diversify into the silk and shirt sectors. Firms captured by their efforts were located in an industrial park-like, “factory hill”. By the mid-1920’s, 5,000 (mostly female) workers were employed in the silk and shirt sectors—about twenty per cent of coal-mining employment. Incentive packages included: guaranteeing a $50,000 mortgage, as well as purchasing part of a downsizing Duplan Silk plant (1935) and offering low-rent space for other industrial tenants (Dublin & Licht, 2005, p. 116). Hazleton’s most aggressive years in economic development still lay in the future during and immediately after World War II.

 

Wilkes-Barre (1880’s) Board of Trade established programs to attract silk and lace manufacturing, but their crowning success was the 1905 relocation of the Matheson Motor Company from Holyoke Massachusetts. Matheson employed nearly 500 workers. In 1929, the chamber expanded on its traditional attraction program by setting-up two ED committees: an Established Industries Committee (retention), and a New Industries Committee. The Established Industries core program was a “buy local” initiative and the New Industries Committee attracted firms identified from a plan prepared by its New York City-based consultant, the engineering firm Lockwood, Greene & Company (which conducted a comprehensive economic survey of the area). During the Depression decade, the chamber fundraised and established an Industrial Development Fund “that channeled the chamber’s efforts through the outbreak of World War II (Dublin & Licht, 2005, p. 117).

 

The most obvious observation is these second/third tier cities developed serious and relatively sophisticated ED programs, long before the turn of the century. These Boards/chambers sustained successful programs for a half-century. Planning and a consultant industry was in place previous to the Depression, and current tools and strategies (targeting, loan funds, guarantee programs, industrial parks, and tax abatement) were common. As far as strategy, the shared focus on the need to diversify and not rely on an agglomeration was evident to these local folk in the 1880’s. Their almost instinctual use of attraction supports our belief that attraction draws from “primeval urges triggered by an unstable urban hierarchy.

 

But there is dark side as well. Recruitment of targeted firms did occur; at least for Hazleton provided a measure of economic diversity. Having learned from our previous automobile discussion, the auto sector was in consolidation mode around 1905, and the Matheson Corporation moved from Grand Rapids to Holyoke Massachusetts in 1903 (acquiring assets of the defunct Holyoke Automobile Company). Its move to Wilkes-Barre in 1905 and Matheson’s subsequent failure in 1912 suggest problems. In 1919, the Owen Magnetic Automobile Company occupied the facility and in 1920 it sold 750 cars (one to Enrico Caruso the famous opera tenor)—but in 1921, it too went belly up. This turbulence suggest that Stage 4/5, “free-floating firms” were frequent beneficiaries of attraction programs. BTW: the Matheson facility still exists at the time of writing; best knowledge is that it remains vacant.

 

Big Cities Cope with the Depression

 

One way or another most Big Cities concentrated on fighting unemployment and its misery. The Community Chest was the most common initiative. The National Association of Community Chests and Councils selected a week in October 1931 to promote organized drives in 174 cities. Most cities surpassed their goals. Before it was over, 386 cities and towns had joined in raising almost $85 million. Rochester, New York tried something different. The city manager (1930) successfully requested a special work-relief appropriation from the city council. The original $250,000 appropriation expanded to $800,000 and the next year increased to $1 million. Taking advantage of a newly approved state law, he augmented this with a state work-relief grant. Then Milwaukee’s Mayor Daniel Hoan addressed Rochester’s chamber describing the “advantages” of a city without debt. Rochester, worried about its work-relief program, dispatched a committee to tour key cities to determine how cities were handling work-relief initiatives. The committee returned with the observation Rochester was a national work-relief leader, but no evidence existed work-relief had any material impact on local unemployment and left the city in considerable debt. Rochester reduced work-relief funding (McKelvey, 1968, pp. 80-1).

 

Little Rock combined an emergency appropriation of $20,000 in 1931 with $25,000 in private sources to provide emergency jobs. The money was gone within three months. Proper Philadelphians organized a Committee on Unemployment Relief in 1930. They raised nearly $4 million for free food and make work jobs for 14,000 destitute heads of families. By 1931, this ad hoc group evolved into the Bureau of Unemployment Relief within the city’s Public Welfare Department and distributed $3 million in city funds in the form of food, fuel and clothing. The Community Chest campaign raised millions more, but all available money had been tapped and dispensed by June 1932, when organized relief in Philadelphia stopped (Abbott, 1987, pp. 48-9)

 

Detroit, then as now, was the poster child of fiscal collapse. Detroit was one of the few large cities that assumed responsibility for paying relief to its unemployed. By 1931, with over 100,000 unemployed, Mayor Frank Murphy (Democrat) pulled together an “unemployment committee” to try to deal with the mess, but all it came up with was potato gardens and soup kitchens. While Detroit’s relief program was relatively small (although six times the per capita size of the second city (Boston) which offered a relief program) Detroit was among the first to edge toward fiscal collapse. “Detroit (1932) owed $27 million per year to its creditors; its total budget was $76 million, of which only $57 million was actually collectible”. (Abbott, 1987, p. 48) Detroit defaulted. Prior to 1934, federal municipal bankruptcy laws were nonexistent, but over 2,000 municipalities were in default (Florida, California and Texas—all with previous real estate booms—were worst hit). Congress responded with the Municipal Bankruptcy Act of 1934, amended in 1937 (Wilson, 1974, pp. 177-80).

 

Cities Take Advantage of Federal Programs

Big City mayors, knowing their state governments would/count not respond, pressed hard for massive federal assistance. Led by Detroit’s mayor Frank Murphy, Big Cities organized to do battle in Washington D.C. Finding existing municipal national associations of little help resolving Detroit’s unemployment relief crisis, Murphy pressed hard for over two years (1931-1933) to establish the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM). Unlike the National Municipal League, which was open to cities of all sizes, USCM initially restricted its membership to cities exceeding 50,000 population. “The mayors of big cities believed that their communities had special needs, and unlike most of the leaders of the smaller towns, felt that federal action was needed to cope with their problems, … the USCM attacked the old dogmas of home rule and state’s rights and espoused a cooperative federalism” (Gelfand, 1975, p. 39). While enjoying success in garnering federal public works and WPA relief funds, USCM did not enjoy a special relationship with the FDR administration before 1936.

 

Although he espoused national powers to combat the Depression, Roosevelt remained attached to some of the traditional principles of states’ rights. He examined the subject of federal aid to cities from the angle of constitutional theory, and came to the verdict that since ‘municipalities are the creatures of State Legislatures, primary duty is on the state to see to their solvency”. Sharing the (old-style) Progressive’s faith in greater home rule, Roosevelt maintained that ‘the less the Federal Government has to do with running a municipality in this country the better off we are going to be in the days to come” (Gelfand, 1975, p. 55)

 

The quest for federal dollars usually meant capturing their share of new federal jobs programs for the poor and unemployed. The alphabet soup of such programs included the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Aside from the obvious jobs they funded, they constructed public infrastructure (including beaches, parks, levees, bridges, tunnels, swimming pools, libraries, streets, recreational facilities, arts-related buildings, courthouses and city halls, and miles and miles of sewers). Supposedly, these programs built more than 100,000 public buildings.

 

In 1924, the Republican presidential plurality was 1.25 million (Abbott, 1987, p. 51). In the Depression, Unemployed ethnic and black relief/job recipients voted for FDR and the Democratic Party. The shift had started in 1928 when the Democratic presidential plurality in the nation’s twelve largest cities was 38,000, becoming in 1936 over 3.6 million. During these years, the solid “blue” Big City Democratic voting base was established—it continues to this day. The second, more disputed effect was its alleged displacement of the urban political machine by federal programs and bureaucracy. Up to and through the Depression many, if not most, Big City policy systems enjoyed a significant machine presence. Several well-known boss systems were in operation (Crump, Memphis/Shelby County; Flynn and Tammany;  Kansas City’s Pendergast, Boston’s charismatic mayor Curley; Chicago’s Kelly/Cermak;  and Jersey City’s Hague machines are the most well-known.

 

Most of these machines foundered after the end of the Second World War. The blame was placed on the so-called “the Last Hurrah thesis”, that argued the poor and unemployed no longer needed the favors of the ward boss, and unhinged ethnic electoral support of machines. Critics of the thesis observe that machines changed form after the World War, but they have never really disappeared—many persisted for a half-century or more after the New Deal. Critics also argue that except for social security, NIRA, the public works and jobs programs flowed dollars through states–administered through municipal bureaucracies over which machines maintained influence. Far from destroying machines, it solidified Democratic mayoral-based machines (Chicago’s Cermak, Kansas City’s Pendergast, and Pittsburgh’s Lawrence machines) (Wilson, 1974, pp. 184-7). The simple answer to post-War boss collapse was they died of old age (Dorsett, 1977, p. 115).

 

La Guardia

The go-to mayor with access to FDR’s New Deal was New York City’s LaGuardia (1933-1945). Nicknamed the “Little Flower”, La Guardia’s access was more through Eleanor than her husband. Roosevelt ran hot and cold with the mayor—at one point endorsing an opponent. The La Guardia-FDR relationship was complex and constantly in flux. What could one expect from La Guardia, an avowed socialist, registered Republican Party, who won three elections with a “Fusion” Party endorsement?

 

Harold L. Ickes was correct in his observation that La Guardia was not a team player, but one who wanted to run all over the field with the ball. He simply could not confine himself to working through the states as the administration and the governors had agreed (Funigiello, 1978, p. 52).

 

New York was uniquely successful, but even New York City had to fight tooth and nail to obtain funds. Compromise, intensive and persistent effort was required to keep funds from approved programs flowing through FDR’s bureaucracy. In the depression/wartime environment, municipalities pressed their agenda through whatever opportunities appeared. For example, a broadly defined civilian defense program allowed La Guardia to maneuver himself into the Office of Civilian Defense as its intergovernmental chair. He used that position to bypass state government, establish direct federal-state relationships, and press for a variety of agendas (often overlapping with Eleanor Roosevelt’s agenda) (Funigiello, 1978, p. Chapter 2). One reason La Guardia arguably was New York City’s greatest mayor, is in part due to his capturing federal funds.

 

The three La Guardia administrations fit the social reformer/Progressive mould to the tee. Incorruptible, working-class, people-oriented, and anti-large business, he harkened back to the turn of the century. La Guardia unified the NYC transit system under municipal control, broke the city’s dependence on bankers, built parks, low-cost public housing, re-installed a merit-based civil service, reorganized the police force, built airports and highways and fought tirelessly against the remnants of Tammany Hall.

It was during La Guardia’s tenure that much of Robert Moses’s bridge/highway/tunnel construction occurred. Previous to La Guardia’s, Moses developed his famous administrative, fiscal and political independence based on his public authority empire. For the most part, Moses was beyond the control of La Guardia (Moses was a political rival to La Guardia in several elections). During these years Moses regularly took on, and sometimes won, serious battles against no less than the President of the United States, who unwillingly financed a great deal of Moses’s most famous projects.

 

La Guardia links old-style social reform mayors to a more contemporary age. He is clearly associated with the infrastructure strategy—the airport named after him is justified—it was his idea and he built it. A committed participant in the public housing/slum clearance movement, La Guardia played ball in the Age of Urban Renewal. He retired in 1945 with New York City on the brink of fiscal collapse resulting from, it is alleged, bloated union wages, sprawling public bureaucracies, and excessive debt from his outsized infrastructure installation[xvi]. In that regard, he followed in the Josiah Quincy tradition.

 

 

The Baltimore Path

Baltimore follows a community development path. Its CBD-focused economic development will spin off only in the middle 1950’s. In 1937, a voluntary organization, the Citizen’s Housing Council, formed to monitor a Progressive Era housing ordinance “on the Hygiene of Housing” administered by the city’s Department of Health. Its focus, in an era of 1937 Housing Act slum clearance for public housing, was on the quality of neighborhoods and housing in particular. In many ways, this early private volunteer, unstaffed organization bridged the transition from our “old style” community development to an early version of contemporary community development.

 

The (Housing Act) Baltimore Housing Authority was formed in 1937; in 1940 it opened its first public housing (the Poe Homes). Ten additional projects were opened before the end of 1942 and two others before war’s end[xvii]. There were fourteen additional defense housing projects constructed during World War II (Williams, 2005, pp. 99, Table 3-1). Baltimore, in short, followed a very aggressive slum clearance/public housing program that in 2016 made the Baltimore Housing Authority the fifth largest in the nation. The Citizen’s Housing Council, however, moved in another direction. Concerned more with neighborhoods and their quality of life, than with housing per se, it realized the Department of Health and the Ordinance on the Hygiene of Housing wasn’t living up to hopes and expectations.

 

So in 1941 the Council expanded membership to include professional architects, planners and university professors, forming a new entity the Citizen’s Planning and Housing Association (CPHA). Its purpose was “To foster good city planning, … better land use, …improve housing and living conditions, … and correct urban decay … by means of research, public discussion, legislation, law enforcement”. It prioritized code enforcement and its first major victory, in 1947, was the formation of a city housing court—the first known housing court in the nation (Lyall, 1982, pp. 21-2). A year later, it successfully advocated the formation of a Department of Planning charged with “mapping out a strategy for stemming neighborhood blight through … a master land use plan”. For over a decade CPHA teamed with law enforcement and sanitation [departments] in a block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood effort, to remove code violations, clean streets, and enforce the rule of law. By the end of the decade, it had achieved approval of the “Baltimore Plan” and had organized programs and neighborhood-based organizations in 104 neighborhoods[xviii].

 

Neighborhood/housing projects ran into considerable difficulty in rather short order. The path-setting Baltimore Plan launched in1945 by Mayor McKeldin coordinated city bureaucracies in a hopefully sustained joint program we today label “concentrated code enforcement of targeted neighborhoods”. Committees of neighborhood residents were established to ensure sustained housing rehabilitation and a housing court empowered to enforce it. (1947). McKeldin also founded the Baltimore Redevelopment Commission in 1945 (with CBD-focused powers, but with no private membership) in which he housed the various city entities conducting elements of the Baltimore Plan. Selected blocks were designated for new public housing. Philadelphia (St Louis and Detroit also) followed with similar style initiatives. By the middle 1950’s all had either failed or exhibited serious flaws. The housing-neighborhood model generated more than its fair share of acrimonious conflict and public discussion. “At first, [neighborhood organizations] served as the focus of local self-help, clean up, and fix-up efforts; but gradually they evolved into powerful neighborhood improvement associations”. Worse, the Baltimore Plan yielded few permanent results; Baltimore’s suburban exodus was in no visible way ameliorated.

 

In Philadelphia as in Saint Louis, Detroit and Baltimore, a blitzkrieg attack by city inspectors and an aroused grass-roots leadership were intended to galvanize blighted communities and rid them of their worst features. Yet in one city after another community organization and rehabilitation campaigns produced disappointing results. In too many cases effective community organizations did not perpetuate rehabilitation projects….Without these external supports the programs generally collapsed (Teaford, 1990, pp. 116-18).

 

By the early 1950’s several CPHA business members sought a different approach, visiting Pittsburgh to see their CBD model. Upon return they organized a CPHA public forum that prompted elite CPHA businessmen, notably James and Willard Rouse, to form the “vault-like” Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC).  In 1956, with the Housing Authority charged with “corruption and inaction”, a new entity, the Baltimore Urban Redevelopment and Housing Agency, merged with the Redevelopment Commission. Its first CEO, Robert C. Embry Jr. (a CPHA member), became a HUD Assistant Secretary in 1977. At that point Baltimore embarked on a formal CBD-focused urban renewal program and its chief catalyst, James Rouse went on to be economic development’s arguably, most famous private developer. CPHA survived these reorganizations and continues to this day as a well-respected, highly successful city-wide, neighborhood-focused CDO.

 

New York and Robert Moses: Policy Innovation or Abuse

A1940, New York City’s Planning Commission Plan offered a strategy “to rehouse the poor, stabilize the dwindling middle class, and restore order to the city landscape with modern city-planning principles … ‘in accord with a master plan’ and ‘should include the assembly and clearance of slums and blighted areas, and their rebuilding for a variety of purposes—including privately financed housing for upper income and middle income groups, public housing for families of low income, commercial projects, recreational facilities, parks and playgrounds” (Zipp, 2010, pp. 15-6). The plan, which was never approved (Moses blocked it in the Board of Estimates), captured the post 1938 movement away from slum clearance purely for public housing to commercial, and housing for all incomes.

 

Manhattan’s Lower East Side was perceived as ripe for redevelopment and to Met-Life[xix] that spelled opportunity. Between 1942 and 1943, the company formulated a plan to clear eighteen blocks and replace residences, tenements, businesses and warehouses with two middle-class residential villages (Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper) to be built in Le Corbusier-modernist style. The idea was Met-Life’s (Frederick Ecker, board chair took credit). The project was perceived not only an investment for Met-Life, but a way to “give back to the city”. The Stuyvesant project brought “life in the country in the heart of the city”, say it in other words, a suburb in the city (Zipp, 2010, p. 17). Met Life had a track record for projects of this nature.  Parkchester, the largest private housing development in the United States (129 acres) had just opened in the Bronx in 1941. But “Parkchester was really a suburban development built on open land at the end of a subway line” (Zipp, 2010, pp. 77-8), Stuyvesant and Peter Cooper was redevelopment in its purest form—in the heart of downtown Manhattan.  Business Week and Met-Life insisted the immediate problem triggering Stuyvesant was blight and slums, but its ultimate purpose was to halt “’the process of decentralization which has been undermining the financial soundness of every major city in the United States’ (Business Week). What Ecker and Met-Life needed to make this happen was not money, they had plenty of that; rather they needed control of the real estate involved in the project.

 

Into that vacuum stepped Moses. Without knowledge of Met-Life’s plan, he saw the same Lower East Side opportunity and linked Met-Life to it. Before meeting with Ecker, Moses got La Guardia on board with a revolutionary urban redevelopment framework. On February 1, 1943 “Ecker, Moses, city comptroller Joseph McGoldrick and Met Life’s general counsel sat down in Mayor La Guardia’s office and signed an agreement for ‘the redevelopment of a blighted area of eighteen city blocks … [in which] Metropolitan Life would ‘provide all the money necessary to execute the project. The company would buy as much of the area as it could, and the city would step in to acquire the rest through its powers of eminent domain and then sell it to Meet Life at cost’. The City would give Met Life ‘all lands in streets closed’… Met Life would give back to the City any land needed for its streets … [and] would build access roads, paths, landscaping, and buildings that could cover up to 28% of the land and reach a height sufficient to produce not less than 32,000 rooms and not more than 34,000 rooms”…. Met Life’s tax bill would remain fixed based on the value of the property before redevelopment (Zipp, 2010, pp. 80-1). And there we have it: the first known project MOU outlining the private-public partnership. The fusion of necessary powers and responsibilities took place in the housing/redevelopment agency.

 

Little of this was legal. New York’s 1941 Redevelopment Companies Law did not include all the elements specified in the MOU. A new law was needed. Off to Albany went Moses. Moses wanted to separate the Act’s redevelopment powers from the iron grasp that only public low-income housing could be built on acquired land. He wanted to delink slum clearance from housing and public housers. Also he stripped out the requirement to provide “adequate provision for displaced tenants’ (Zipp, 2010, pp. 81-2) and removed restrictions on profits and limited dividends (Mitchell, 1985, p. 261) . Dutifully the state legislature agreed; the Hampton-Mitchell Redevelopment Companies Law was approved on March 30, 1943. “Stuyvesant Town was a crucial moment in the process by which downtown business interests transformed the housing reform movement into an effort offset decentralization and promote the central business district.” (Zipp, 2010, p. 83) The New York City Housing Authority was empowered to conduct privately –owned commercial housing redevelopment for middle/upper class residents.

 

Approximately, 10,000 low-income residents were displaced, and 24,000 mostly middle class residents took their place in the high rises. Doors opened in August, 1947 and fully leased two years later. When the project was resold to BlackRock in 2015, the sale was hailed by Mayor De Blasio as the best way to preserve NYC’s affordable housing —time apparently heals all wounds. In 1943 there were wounds. Protests essentially no different than heard today immediately appeared. “Class warfare” it was called; noted housing reformers (like Charles Abrams) attacked the project and model vociferously. From Day One private sector-led commercial/central business district redevelopment was not on CD’s agenda.

 

Pittsburgh

From the beginning Pittsburgh CBD-focused redevelopment was driven by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD). But ACCD’s beginning, under the guise of “the citizen’s group of the Allegheny Region” crystallized around 1941 (Tarr & Stewman, 1985, pp. 63-4). AACD was a private organization composed of, and led by, the one percenters. It spun off from the Pennsylvania Economy League and the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association (PRPA). Planning was a dominant strand, and chief policy focus through each of ACCD’s predecessor organizations. Initially formalized as an EDO in 1918, the Citizens Committee on City Plan (CCCP), they changed name to the Municipal Planning Association in 1920 and again in 1938 to the PRPA. In the 1920’s the CCCP/MPA stressed the CBD’s adjustment to the automobile, concluding decentralization threatened its vitality. Metropolitan federation was their preferred counter to suburbanization. Voters rejected the federation in 1929.

 

In 1939 RPAA brought in a consultant/planner, Robert Moses by name, to fabricate an “Arterial Plan for Pittsburgh”. It linked CBD to the suburbs thru a network of highways. Moses was instructed to focus on “the Triangle” which was to be the hub of the network and developed into a park. Moses Plan’s bottom line was CBD hegemony. Moses stressed the need to elimination the railroad yards that pervaded that sensitive area—also elimination of congestion by removing trolleys from the CBD. Park Martin, Director of the City Planning Commission’s got his feathers bit ruffled by the rather dominating role played by the PRPA business elites around the Moses Plan, but the Pittsburgh Chamber to set up a “Golden Triangle Division” with Richard K. Mellon as its Chair. Its purpose was to “crystallize citizen effort behind a movement to stop depreciation of real estate values within the Golden Triangle by making it a better place in which to work and transact business”. (Lubove, 1995, pp. 105, Chapter 5) The “godfather” behind ACCD was always Richard K. Mellon whose corporate empire included large financial institutions (Gulf Oil and Alcoa)—“a man of means, by no means”. Mellon lived up to his middle name “King”. He was among the ten richest men in America. He served stateside in the World War II Army and at war’s end was discharged. In his early forties, he had recently inherited several businesses (Mellon Bank). Mellon is representative of a generation of one percenters “coming of age” in postwar America’s business and political leadership.

 

ACCD by 1945 developed twelve committees including “housing and neighborhood development” and “economic problems”. To coordinate advocacy and policy research, it hired Executive Director Park Martin (former Allegheny Planning Commission Director–of ruffled feathers fame). Its “real guts”, however, was its Executive Committee which included only CEOs of the most powerful businesses in the metro—attendance and voting were restricted to the CEO personally. As Moses had done two years earlier, ACCD’s first order of business to pursue their downtown-focused agenda was to acquire political clout. Just as the Baltimore Plan was the creature of Mayor McKeldin, and Stuyvesant Town a partnership of La Guardia and Moses, Mellon needed a friend in City Hall.

 

The Republican Party machine controlled state and Big City governments since the 1860’s. That was fine with Mellon who was a stout Republican. Pittsburgh, however, had broken from the machine and elected David L. Lawrence the former Democratic Party state chairman. Elected Mayor in 1945 to his first term, Lawrence served four terms, leaving the Mayor’s office in 1959 and becoming in 1961 Pennsylvania’s first Catholic governor. Lawrence, born in the working class Pittsburgh Golden Triangle neighborhood, committed himself in his campaign platform to work with Mellon and the ACCD. He personally committed himself to CBD redevelopment; one of his first acts was to appoint Park Martin to the City’s Planning Commission—creating a formal link between ACCD and city administration. Several top ACCD members possessed considerable informal access to Lawrence—Mellon was not Lawrence’s go-to connection.

 

Lawrence’s campaign platform and ACCD’s downtown strategy overlapped; they comprised three related simultaneous initiatives (“smoke” or pollution abatement, flood control and the Point Park (Golden Triangle) redevelopment). In 1945 and 1947, the state approved a series of empowering legislations, nick-named the “Pittsburgh Package”, that both cleared the way for local action—authorization for municipalities to create urban redevelopment authorities for example–and satisfied necessary preconditions for private investment (smoke and flood control). To pursue these initiatives, with ACCD support if not instigation, Lawrence created (1946) the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority (he was chair, the board included city council and business leaders). Lawrence’s personal assistant, John Robin, was appointed its first CEO. In later years two additional authorities, a Parking and an Auditorium Authority were created to conduct CBD redevelopment projects.

 

Within weeks of Lawrence’s 1945 election, Republican Governor Martin accepted Point Park as a state park, a decision which required removal of several bridges, acquisition of land, followed by demolition. ACCD was designated the state’s administrative coordinator, and by 1949, with $7 million of state funds, the land (36 acres) had been assembled and demolition of 15 acres of freight yards, elevated bridges, railroad tracks, terminals, 26 commercial buildings and Pittsburgh’s old Exposition Hall, commenced. Earlier in 1946 a second Golden Triangle initiative (the 23 acre Gateway Center) started—funded by Equitable Life (Met-Life declined). The 59 acre Point districted was certified as “blighted” by the City Planning Commission in 1947. Construction commenced in 1950. Gateway Center redevelopment continued through 1964. First to be completed were three 20-24 story office buildings in 1952 and 1953. Mellon himself funded the new headquarters office for Mellon Bank and another for Alcoa in the early fifties—outside “the Point”–intended to demonstrate his commitment to other private CBD investment. In 1949, the Mellon Foundation provided $ 4 million for a public parking garage.

 

Four years previous to the July 15^th1949 Housing Act, the nation’s first formal postwar CDB redevelopment program was on its way—with state, local and private funds. Today called Renaissance I, the two decade (1945-1965) CBD redevelopment initiative followed closely the 1939 Moses Plan. “By 1967, 19 renewal projects were completed or under construction. These encompassed approximately 1500 acres (765 clearance).  Of the total acreage 465 acres were committed to industrial reuse, and another 103 to commercial office reuse. The total public costs were estimated at $171.5 million (including $112 million spread over 8 [post-1954] of the projects. According to the URA $125 million in tax assessments [resulted] … 50 industrial firms had been accommodated in new modernized facilities, and 55,000 persons worked in firms located in renewal areas (Lubove, 1995, p. 128).

 

The United Nations:

The United Nations project has much to teach us about CBD redevelopment or the “urban renewal” strategy. First, the United Nations Project, whatever else it might be, is a CBD redevelopment project. Second, it is evident who the vanguard of postwar urban redevelopment are. Third, the UN Project exposes the seldom appreciated “soft side: of urban redevelopment—the popular culture and media, the optimism, the symbolism—and insight into how Washington policy-makers, devising the Housing Act of 1949, learned from New York City’s adventure in urban redevelopment. They negotiated the Act while the “soft-side”, the golden years of popular, Policy World and media infatuation with the promise and the symbolism of urban regeneration were at its height.

 

Description of the UN Project is surprisingly simple. Big Four agreement at Yalta in February 1945 approved the UN. By the time the UN elected its initial leadership, secured financing, and began searching for a site, it was the very end of 1946. New York City did not have a lock on the site—far from it. Paris, London, Geneva were very much in play, and Philadelphia (neutral ground from Wall Street and Washington D.C.) became the lead U.S. site. Moses offered the 1939 World’s Fair (Flushing Meadows) site (where the UN had temporary Headquarters), but the Flushing site “bored” diplomats and soil composition issues complicated high-rise construction. The Moses site simply wasn’t acceptable.

 

In New York City’s favor, however, was New York City was where UN leadership/delegates wanted to be[xx]. In December 1946, a week from the final decision, the UN had the votes to locate in Philadelphia, not New York. At that point, nationally prestigious NYC real estate developer William Zeckendorf got involved. Zeckendorf had been working on his “X-City” redevelopment project a six-block site along Manhattan’s East River. The project was a massive private, commercial office redevelopment that would demolish the few residences (less than 200 families) that lived there, along with mostly vacant apartments, warehouses, factories and a not so symbolic huge, functioning slaughterhouse. Cows and pigs were literally herded through some streets to slaughter. Zeckendorf, still in the design stage, had purchased much of the site.

 

At this last moment, Zeckendorf told Mayor O’Dwyer he would sell the site to the UN if they wanted it. Moses and Trygve Lie (first UN Secretary General) had previously walked the site, revealing Moses’s behind the curtain role. O’Dwyer didn’t have money, so he called Nelson Rockefeller. On the night before the final decision meeting, Nelson went to dad, John D. Rockefeller, and asked the skinflint for money to buy the site which he would deed to the UN. Generous soul that he was, dad reached into his piggy bank and came up with $8.5 million ($85 million today) which did the trick—Zeckendorf sold the site that night, the UN leadership notified, and next day New York won the competition.

 

As to urban redevelopment’s nitty-gritty’s, the UN was certainly not a housing project, but otherwise was neither fish nor fowl: not commercial, built on land not subject to U.S. sovereignty, functionally a mere office building, perhaps a corporate headquarters. Its ambiguity opened the door to all sorts of revitalization initiatives that offered hope for central city revitalization. While financing was private, the City brought to the table, through the good offices of Robert Moses, its usual incentives: “Robert Moses delivered a roster of municipal incentives … Moses… believed that the provisions necessary to protect United Nation’s investment—tax exemption [and] for site and street closures needed to form a superblock—would be the same minimum incentives necessary to encourage the private clearance and rebuilding of expensive in-town land for urban renewal projects to come (Zipp, 2010, p. 51). Tossed in were tunnels, and zoning changes.

 

Design was by a team of the world’s most noted architects. Le Corbusier was a team member, and his design was selected. The City handled residential and business relocation (the latter so inconsequential it was done honorably, the former not so good). Site demolition, at UN expense, was also handled by the City. The site was not a slum (virtually no one lived there) and did not meet the technical letter of being blighted (businesses were profitable and paying taxes), but much of the site was vacant. Compared to the UN, the existing uses were obsolete, inferior—and in the way. They needed to be demolished—and that was the message imparted to future urban redevelopers.

 

Blight was not a technical or legal description; it was an image of decay, obsolescence and a past that was no longer working (Zipp, 2010, p. 59). These elements, then, were incorporated into the popular, the business, the media, and Policy World’s rationale–the “story” of why we needed urban redevelopment. Successful redevelopment of six blocks along New York City’s East River would be visible proof that urban redevelopment constituted a viable strategy to restore the central city. Construction started in 1947, a financial crisis averted in 1949, UN staff started working in the building in 1950 and in 1952, the first session of the General Assembly was held.

 

And since we mention the Policy World, despite misgivings by a few, the Policy World joined into the story as well. “Planners and architects ratified this symbolic linkage, claiming that overcoming urban disorder was not just the matter of city-rebuilding, but analogous to the United Nation’s fundamental mission”. Most urban-relevant and policy journals of the day supported the project and endorsed its promise as being the future for the city. Le Corbusier claimed that the United Nations and “the whole East River will be brought to life, will awaken … and will thrive as a ‘Radiant City’” (Zipp, 2010, p. 62). So did the New York Times. Even Lewis Mumford climbed on board. Despite initial skepticism and his general belief in dinosaur cities, by the end of the UN Project Mumford was gushing. The UN became to him a new opportunity to “found a new kind of urban community, … A new city … could be carved out of an older metropolis ‘by a large-scale process of slum clearance, removal, and rebuilding, financed wholly by the United Nations’” (Zipp, 2010, p. 60). Coming from Mumford, this hopeful image of the future resulting from urban renewal shouldn’t be taken lightly.

 

Through the prism of the United Nations the reader can see the larger picture, the usually unspoken backdrop justifying urban redevelopment through slum clearance as the best hope of the central city. Infused with meaning “the United Nations [Project] and the ethic of city-rebuilding stood together in the minds of progressives and liberals. Both were legacies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s political idealism…. Both seemed to many liberals to be the fruits of the struggle in World War II: replanned and rejuvenated cities went hand in hand with a world free from war and strife…“Both too were imperiled” (Zipp, 2010, pp. 66-7). The UN Project personified hope and sense of urgency. Lost today is that postwar urban redevelopment rested on a popular, not only business, consensus–a first order state and sub-state priority. While business elites blazed a path into urban renewal, they put their money where their mouth was. They were not merely greedy, self-interested, profit-seeking capitalists inflicting their miserable mentality–and the bulldozer–on poor and black. That ignores an idealism, the soft side of urban physical redevelopment as the audacity of hope, embraced by most urban residents, political leaders and private business. Government, thru partnership with the private sector, could remake the Big City and save it from Mumford’s extinction.

Textile War all phases

The Other Side of the Story: Southern Textile Industry

What happened when the South developed its own manufacturing capacity through southern entrepreneurial activity? It could work if it had a natural advantage, like tobacco and cigarette-making, but if the sector had existing rivals things got complicated pretty quickly. An oozing sore opened up between New England (Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island) and the Carolinas/Georgia, during the 1880’s. At issue was the initial rise of the Southern textile industry.

 

Massachusetts (and southern New England) dominated America’s early industrial revolution by virtue of its gazelle textile processing-apparel and machine-building industries started at the turn of the nineteenth century. That initial start translated into a regional agglomeration by the century’s end. New England in 1880, with 8% of the nation’s population, accounted for 20% of the nation’s manufacturing employment. Nearly half of New England’s manufacturing employment worked in textile-related industries. Eighty per cent of the region’s textile employment ranged in an arc twenty to sixty miles around Boston; one half of the nation’s textile workers hailed from New England (Rosenbloom, 1998, pp. 4-5).

 

If there were an industry the South could have dominated, it was King Cotton. Cotton growing was one thing, however, its processing and manufacture of cotton products quite another. The South lacked transportation infrastructure until the early 1880’s so cotton was inaccessible to its own firms; it was instead transported by sea to New England and other processing centers (Great Britain). That changed in 1880’s. The key to southern textile industrialization lay was surplus labor. Post-Reconstruction decline in Carolinas’ farm size and growth of share cropping, dispossessed poor whites who subsequently emigrated into new mill towns founded by startup textile mills.  “From the 1870’s to the end of the century [southern textile] employment grew at nearly 10 per cent per year with no detectable upward pressure on wages“. In 1880 southern wages ranged 30-50% below northern equivalents (Wright, 1986, p. 130). After Reconstruction (1876), however, southern investment in its textile sector exploded. In 1880 Massachusetts alone employed over 60,000 in cotton manufacturing; North/South Carolina and Georgia about 11,000 (Wright,1986, p.127, Table 5). Southern employment almost doubled between 1870 and 1880. By 1900 “one half of the South’s looms were within a one hundred-mile radius of Charlotte”: Charlotte, Greenville, Salisbury, and Spartanburg (the Southern Railway) (Goldfield, 1982, p. 124ff).

 

Textile mills required building new towns[xxi]—“company towns: “The mills clustered around towns and transportation facilities. Their local supporters were merchants and landowners in the town and surrounding areas. Their rhetoric was boosterism, the town as a collective enterprise …. the supply of cheap labor was the key to the continued growth of southern textiles over the subsequent half-century …. (But) with the rise of the cotton mills, the poor whites were welcomed back into the service of the South (Wright, 1986, pp. 44-5). The mills typically were set up outside city limits to avoid taxation; the basic unit of production was the “family labor system”, with female and child labor heavily relied upon. Often employers constructed housing, but seldom schools. Initial investment for these mills often came from “cotton mill campaigns” whereby the community in a semi-evangelistic, patriotic, crowd-funding movement (“Next to God, what this town needs is a cotton mill”) raised capital by selling stock in fifty cent lots. Mill towns grew through the 1920’s. Annexation was common in later years; small town urbanization resulted, and the southern textile industry painfully came into existence—on its own!

 

As the southern textile industry gathered strength, it attracted northern textile capital investment, particularly from New England’s textile machinery manufacturers. Investing in the South’s developing textile sector diffused the latest and greatest textile-producing technology to young southern mills while increasing New England textile machinery profits. The specialized machinery companies, offspring of the New England textiles parent, played the role of aggressive propagators of grandchildren who would ultimately destroy their own grandparents. As early as 1881 northern textile machinery manufacturers were “well-represented” at Atlanta’s International Cotton Exposition (Wright, 1986, p. 131).

 

New England’s textile manufacturing dominance gradually faded after the 1880’s.  “The concentration of textile and footwear production in New England up to 1880 reflected the region’s pronounced comparative advantage in these activities. After 1880, however, a series of events began to undermine the sources of this advantage … New England manufacturers now found themselves competing against lower cost producers in other parts of the country. … [New England’s] poor transportation links to the growing interior population, and limited natural resources endowments meant that it was poorly positioned to compete in many of the rapidly growing manufacturing industries …  it is not especially hard to explain, the region’s relative decline after 1880 (Rosenbloom, 1998, p. 2).

 

Post 1890 disruptive textile innovations (“ring spinning” obsoleted New England’s traditional “mule spinning” and the 1894 “Draper automatic loom”) transformed weaving, increasing the importance of cheap labor as the primary price differential in the final product. All of which strongly suggests the textile industry had entered into a Markusen’s Stage 3/4 cost-minimization/price sensitivity environment. New England manufacturers retained competitiveness in high quality production of skilled labor dependent fabrics, but lost market share in low-cost textile manufacturing. At this critical juncture (the 1890’s), however, New England owners were not willing to invest in new machinery or reconstruct facilities at their original sites (Rosenbloom, 1998, pp. 9-13). Disruptive technologies disproportionately went south. Why?

 

New England textile manufacturers were fully aware of potential implications from introducing innovations into southern textile mills. The challenge of the Southern textile industry was apparent to all–especially when the Panic (Depression) of 1893 hit New England textile-related industries like a ton of bricks. New England textile bankruptcies, unemployment, and emotions ran high throughout the nineties. Industry reaction to this disruption, however, was captured by an 1897 Arkwright Club of New England report[xxii]. Arkwright reported “the fact that labor is cheaper in the South; that the hours of labor are longer, and that there is neither any of the restrictive legislation urged among us by the labor unions … nor any prospect even of an early agitation in behalf of such restrictions…. So far as we could learn there is no disposition to organize labor unions”. Shades of state business climate comparisons and right to work laws!

 

Massachusetts manufacturers initially turned to their state government for help. Early January 1895 “representatives of three of Lowell’s largest corporations appeared before the Massachusetts legislature seeking amended charters permitting them to do business below the Potomac“. In 1897, the Massachusetts Legislature sent a delegation down South to figure it out–“several delegations, representing (textile) manufacturers of New England” followed and “some of the leading newspapers of the East have dispatched reporters to the Southern mills“. As reported in an 1898 Forum article

 

They have with one accord concluded that the South has an insuperable advantage in cheap labor, and that the mills of the East cannot at present compete with those of the South without cutting down wages. Hence the general precipitate reduction of wages in New England early in the year (1898). However, the wage-earners of New England do not seem to agree with their employers ….They say that the reduction of wages has diminished the purchasing power of the masses…They also hold that the cheap labor of the South has nothing whatever to do with the stagnation in New England, that everywhere cheap labor means inefficient labor, that high-priced labor always turns out the most product and the best product, and that consequently, the capitalist who employees high-priced labor has the advantage over the capitalist who employs low-priced labor. The effect of these teachings has been to impress upon the wage-earners and capitalists of New England that they are in no danger from the South, or any other country having cheap labor. The unanimity of opinion has lulled New England manufacturers to sleep by the soothing assurance of immunity from danger; meanwhile, Southern capitalists have continued to erect mill after mill, and to produce every year a higher grade of work, until the very sand has been dug from under the foundations of the cotton industry of New England. (Dowd, 1898)

 

In the years that followed millions of New England textile manufacturer dollars set up/bought into Southern mills (Woodward, 1981, p. 306). Unions screamed in protest. Prosperity and jobs returned and the problem and debate subsided.

 

Broken Cluster:  Second Phase of Textile Industry Decline

And now the second episode in our textile sector soap opera. When an agglomeration starts unraveling, economic developers are pulled in. That is a theme of this episode of the soap opera.

 

Until 1919 New England cotton textile manufacturers responded tactically, but mostly ignored the first phase decline. State government and local chambers had come under a short but intense pressure, and then moved on—“these [early] fears dissipated after 1900, and … the interregional competitive atmosphere changed. … Northern investment in southern mills ceased completely. When in 1912 Melvin T. Copeland completed his authoritative study of the industry, he wrote ‘No new southern branches have been established for several years, and one hears no suggestion that any are contemplated’”. So after the 1890-1900 scare New England textile manufacturers had, during a period of high demand and prosperity, either ignored or put up with competition from southern mills. New England textile-related employment stabilized—to a large degree caused by a narrowing of Southern wage differential due to supply constraints in Southern regional labor markets (Wright, 1986, p. 135), and worldwide increase in demand for cotton-related products did the rest. Uniforms for World War I armies were frosting on the cake. “It was all Good“! And then it wasn’t.

 

Almost immediately at war’s end, the bottom fell out of New England’s textile industry. Demand collapsed as new synthetic fibers (innovation) became popular and low-wage international competition hit profits hard. Restrictions on immigration after 1920 cut off cheap labor on which New England industry depended (French Canadians). Wright blames the collapse of America’s “tariff wall” that had sheltered both the South and New England. But lower cost southern mills were better able to withstand lean times (Wright, 1986, pp. 147-8).  . Unwillingness of New England cotton textile manufacturers to invest in New England facilities matched by the willingness of New England textile machine tool firms to invest in southern textile firms intensified post-WWI New England textile sector disruption. New England cotton textile manufacturers, on the other hand, blamed unions for inflating costs. They lobbied state governments for relief from unemployment taxes, perceived rightfully as a serious barrier to productivity improvements. Unions cited benefits from higher wage, high skilled union workers–advancing arguments congruent with today’s “advanced manufacturing” dialogue. The unions were more successful.

 

While the nation as a whole increased manufacturing employment (+2.2%, 1923-1929), New England manufacturing employment dropped from 1.25 million to 1.1 million (-12%). In Massachusetts textile employment fell -17%[xxiii]. “Nearly two-fifths of factory jobs in cotton disappeared during the twenties as plant closures spread through the commonwealth’s mill cities. Massachusetts also saw substantial employment losses during this era in woolen and worsted textiles, textile machinery and boots and shoes“[xxiv] “By 1930 the South exceeded the North in both numbers of plants and employment…. By 1935 North Carolina and South Carolina each had capacity exceeding the leading New England state, Massachusetts” (Markusen, 1985, p. 134).             Capacity dropped in absolute terms for the first time. Some mills simply terminated operations or declared bankruptcy. Others relocated for the South. A niche for high quality production remained, however, allowing the most adept producers to continue in the region… but New England’s textile manufacturers operating with old, often obsolete equipment were vulnerable when product demand collapsed (Rosenbloom, 1998, p. 14)

 

Southern ED Becomes the Problem

As the Twenties wore on, New England proceeded through its “hard landing”. The complex realities became lost and attempts to reform unemployment tax failed, and media, unions, textile firms, the business community became polarized and the dialogue changed. Blame shifted to the South’s oppressive labor conditions, cheap labor, and tax subsidies from Southern governments. The fact that nearly a million spindles moved during the twenties from New England to Southern mills only cemented in the minds of many New Englanders the problem was New England mills fleeing to South—runaway plants. Further proof was that Northern capital investment in Southern mills restarted.

 

Koistinen (Koistinen, 2002), however, succinctly asserts that New England textile manufacturers did not “flee” New England for Southern climes, but were driven out of business–into bankruptcy, by the lower-cost competitors of the Carolina’s and the South. During these years, Southerners (not Northerners) “founded, managed and financed the heavy majority of the textile companies” in the South. To be sure, he continues, some New England companies did move looms and spindles to the South (while maintaining their New England plants). Markusen counters “that a six-month strike in New Bedford in 1928 is believed to have crystallized textile mill owner decisions to leave”. (Markusen, 1985, p. 135) Koistinen counters New England mills were simply non-competitive; they shut down, not moved away (Wolfbein, 1954). If so, the Twenties were not characterized by runaway plants. But such is hindsight.

 

“Southern” ED was credited with luring firm after firm from New England to the Carolinas with state and chamber-led promotions/advertising coupled and tax abatements. Unlike the 1900 period, however, it is true they did. The argument, however, that the Carolina’s were a low tax business climate was correct, but overstated. The Carolinas at that time were two, of the only eight states in the nation that had a corporate income tax. Any favorable municipal property tax advantage was substantially mitigated by the state income tax. The Carolinas chief underlying strength was always the availability of low wage labor–not a favorable tax climate. A 1949, survey of 88 new plants that had moved to the South (not just the Carolina’s) during this period concluded that the firms “were usually not impressed by local concessions” and were more responsive to an “abundance of raw materials, untapped consumer market demand, and (surprise), the availability of a large, cheap and docile labor force (McLaughlin & Robock, 1949, p. 112).

 

Part of the reason the business attraction-recruitment-tax abatement program (Lepawsky, 1949, pp. 57-70) dominated New England media headlines was Southern politicians and economic developers publically and loudly “claimed credit” for their employment growth and Northern investment. Southern economic developers, in their conceit or naivety, sincerely believed they were responsible for firms relocating to the Carolinas–and let everybody and their brother know how good they were. Their logic seemed reasonable: promotion programs and employment growth overlapped, and there were anecdotes galore. Gloating and bragging in the media magnified the perceived effectiveness of Southern business attraction-recruitment-tax abatement efforts. Given the rather low opinion of the South held by Northern media and opinion-leaders, the idea that the latter were eating New England’s lunch rubbed salt into textile-induced wounds. By decade’s end, New England’s textile deindustrialization had become the New England Textile War.

 

Reaction of New England’s ED

Perhaps a more interesting tale was how New England responded to perceived southern economic development imperialism. Obviously, New England chamber industrial bureaus proved unable to stem the outflow of spindles and looms from New England plants–or do anything meaningful for textile firms that either went bankrupt or were closed by their owners. In 1921 the Boston Chamber of Commerce, Bureau of Commercial and Industrial Affairs published a booklet, “The Industrial Supremacy of New England” which defended New England, its industries and business climate from perceived attacks by outsiders. It was more a ‘rally around the flag’ ‘everything is still ok’ message. “Massachusetts has actually kept pace for a century industrially and in population … and Boston, its metropolis, has outdistanced safely some of its old-time rivals such as Baltimore“[xxv].

 

In 1922 a manufacturers association, the Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM) began a decade long campaign to counter claims that Massachusetts was in decline by generating favorable statistics and publicity. Through a series of reports and press releases throughout the 1920’s AIM kept up a constant effort to present the Massachusetts economy in a most favorable light. When the New England economy reeled with its first series of plant closings business leaders organized a “New England Week” in the summer of 1924. During this week a plethora of “industrial exhibitions, factory tours, public meetings and radio and motion pictures” featured the quality goods produced by the region’s firms and that the region was still in sound economic shape. This effort was mostly focused on Massachusetts’ domestic audience and should be considered as a business retention initiative.

 

The results of the “business week” were pleasing to the organizers and they formed a permanent organization to continue these and other initiatives to promote and publicize regional success. Joining with many local chambers of commerce (which led the formal effort), utilities, railroads and business of all sectors in 1925 set up a six state regional council. In the following year (1926) the six New England governors gathered together in Poland Springs Maine, along with their chambers of commerce, to formally empower the nation’s first public-private, multi-state economic development EDO: The New England Council (NEC) which exists to the present.

 

In the years after its founding, the Council mounted a multi-faceted campaign.

 

the (NEC): a) encouraged local manufacturers to adapt the latest management techniques and use laboratory research to aid in product development; b) sought to increase (private) financing for small regional companies, especially those producing technically innovative goods; c) promoted the area’s recreational attractions; and d) encouraged recovery efforts in localities hit by plant closures”…  NEC “mounted a wide-ranging and sophisticated public relations drive … … use of the most up-to-date management and marketing practices as key instruments for improving the competitiveness of area manufacturers … the Council worked to create the impression that, despite problems in some industries, the region as a whole was prosperous, forward-looking, and a ‘good place to live, work and play …. Thus the organization proudly announced that in 1929 it had issued 851 separate items on the economic progress of New England … reprinted in three hundred newspapers and periodicals in thirty-seven states”.[xxvi]

 

If this were not sufficient, the NEC in 1928, successfully acquired a board seat on the newly formed, the American Industrial Development Council (AIDC)

 

Through the Twenties New England sub-state governmental response was to work cooperatively with their local chambers of commerce. The earliest specific governmental response was the 1929 formation of the Massachusetts Industrial Commission whose purpose was to “encourage the growth of commonwealth industries”. The agency appears not to have been well-funded and, to our best understanding, mostly restricted itself to data-gathering and publication of collateral material concerning the state’s manufacturing assets. It was, after all, a Depression-era EDO. Still, Massachusetts had created its first formal state-level governmental EDO and the textile war was arguably the chief factor.

 

 

 

Ticking of the Clock

The Second New England Textile War:

I remember as a young Salem, Massachusetts’ resident, a city with a large, but closed textile mill that members of my family had once worked–but no longer. For the following decade I walked past the closed facilities, passing along the way a building a couple of blocks away. The building/facility, owned by a company named DEC (Digital Equipment Company) made a widget of no consequence to the young Curmudgeon. And he continued on his way.

 

The mill was the Pequot Mills originally named the Naumkeag Steam Cotton Company. It produced “Pequot cotton sheets”. Founded by a sea captain (Nathaniel Griffin) in 1839. The site allowed ships to unload southern cotton directly to the steam-powered plant. By 1847 the facility ran 30000 spindles and 640 loans. Polish and French-Canadians were its workforce, the latter from its beginning. The facility grew to twenty buildings–only one of which survived a 1914 fire—and were completely rebuilt and electrified after 1916. At its WWII peak Pequot employed 2725 workers. In 1933 an eight week wildcat strike over layoffs and Taylor-esque labor studies designed to increase efficiency garnered national attention. The company yield to the workers’ demands of “no research, no layoffs) (Chomsky, 2008). The mill was Salem’s largest manufacturer. In 1949 Naumkeag purchased the Whitney Mill in Spartanburg South Carolina, operating both plants until 1953 when the Salem facility was closed and 800 workers hit the streets. Workers as late as 1952 had agreed to work loan increases. The firm merged in 1955 with Indian Head Mills and in 1976 was purchased by a Dutch conglomerate.

 

Massachusetts and Rhode Island textile-related factories shut down over the decade following the war. They didn’t call it deindustrialization back then, no more than they did in the 1920’s or the 1890’s.

 

Employment in Massachusetts’ woolen and worsted sector plummeted from 49,000 in 1946 to 25,000 in 1953. In cotton goods, the number of jobs sank from 35,000 in 1946 to 19,000 in 1953. Due largely to declines in these industries total factory employment in the commonwealth fell from 582,000 in 1947 to 531,000 in 1955, a drop of 9 percent …. The economic difficulties of the region were known as ‘the New England problem[xxvii]‘. (Koistinen, 2006, p. 3)

 

Massachusetts’ Reaction to Textile Deindustrialization

Maine was the first state to formally respond to postwar textile deindustrialization. Maine’s pioneering answer, devised to conform to restrictive state gift and loan clauses, was the “development capital corporation (DCC)” approved in 1949. Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island copied Maine, approving their own versions during the 1950’s. The DCC model was a quasi, mostly private EDO hybrid, legally outside state government. The Maine DCC borrowed private funds to make loans to firms, indirectly guaranteed by hedge-like state mortgage funds. With DCC’s minimal state governmental support, Maine’s private sector was left to fend off inter-state competitive pressures. The reader might remember the DCC as the “Maine IDB model”, discussed earlier.

 

Massachusetts, however, was the New England regional leader–and ground zero of textile deindustrialization. In 1946, its Democratic governor Tobin filed a bill to establish a new state economic development department to foster growth in manufacturing. The new department would replace the underfunded and ineffectual 1929-created Massachusetts Development and Industrial Commission. Despite solid chamber support[xxviii], the legislation failed. To compensate budgetary and staff increases were provided to the ineffectual Commission.

From the Massachusetts textile industry, the problem was defined as an unemployment insurance-related issue—not as a competitive business climate confrontation. The state unemployment fund required firms that lay off workers to pay more into the system (merit rating). Driven by union support Massachusetts unemployment was generous by national standards[xxix], a serious business climate issue to be sure. Chronically underfunded, relying on annual subsidies and debt issuance to compensate for chronic deficits, bankruptcy was never out of the question. Throughout the 1950’s, Republicans and business groups sought unemployment reform; bill after bill was introduced, going nowhere–one chamber approvals, competing counter bills, extreme partisanship, and gubernatorial vetoes. Unable to secure reform, textile firms saw little advantage in discharging workers, and instead closed down.

 

A Republican governor, Herter, was elected in 1952–with a strong ED platform–hope for reform increased. Herter’s inauguration address called attention to the unfavorable Massachusetts business climate: “There has been built up throughout the entire country the feeling that Massachusetts is an unfavorable place either for the development and expansion of its existing industries or for the attraction for industries from other parts of the country.  But reform expectations too were smashed when an extremely weak compromise reform bill was finally approved in 1954. The bill provided virtually no relief to the textile industry. To rub salt in the wounds of business climate reformers, “Herter took no action to revive the unheeded 1952 recommendations of legislative special commission that the state’s corporate taxes be eased (Koistinen, 2006, p. 338). Business regulatory issues, real or imagined, elicited little response from the Governor or Democratic-controlled legislature.

So Herter chose another path.

 

In his 1953 Inauguration speech, Herter had also decried ‘ineffective promotional and development programs”. Rectifying this shortcoming then became his principal economic revitalization strategy. So Herter revived the earlier Tobin initiative and secured approval for the first cabinet level state economic development department in Massachusetts’ history (Department of Commerce, approved in 1955 with a $551,000 budget and eight staff). The Department of Commerce intended as the state’s counter to textile deindustrialization through an intensified nation-wide promotion, attraction and business retention. Democrats and unions lined up–in support! The AFL believed the new EDO would “attract new industries and encourage the expansion of one’s presently located here” (Koistinen, 2006, pp. 339, 341).

 

Herter also created a second state economic development agency, the Massachusetts Business Development Corporation (MBDC). MBDC (copying Maine’s DCC) borrowed funds from banks and insurance companies to make loans to manufacturing firms unable to secure conventional bank financing. MBDC’s approach provided access to capital, otherwise not available. Nearly all loans went fixed asset and working capital loans to manufacturers moving into the state. MBDC[xxx] issued several hundred loans targeting high unemployment geographies.

 

From this one can hypothesize late-stage sectors/firms define their problem in terms of location factors responsible for high costs (taxes, fees regulatory costs). The underlying cause, commoditization, lies outside industry, state or local control. Accordingly, state and sub-state policy systems can employ any number of ED strategies (tools, programs) to deal with its effects. That these strategies actually counter the root problem is less critical than being congruent with the prevailing ethos, culture and politics of the policy system—and they attempt a plausible solution to involved policy actors, including public opinion.

 

In any case, textile decline played out over the next two decades. New England lost a great deal of its textile sector to the Carolina and foreign competition. One New Bedford textile mill serves as an interesting, but ambiguous firm-level example. This particular mill, built in 1927, was the headquarters of Hathaway Manufacturing Company—known for its “expansive offices (which) featured oak and mahogany paneling and a marble fireplace”. Confronting the 1950’s textile decline, Hathaway bought out Berkshire Fine Spinning and became Berkshire-Hathaway. By 1962, the textile behemoth, Berkshire Hathaway, by 1962, however, was closing plants to cut costs, using the proceeds to buy back its stock. A thirty-four year old investor, Warren Buffett, saw in Berkshire an opportunity to buy cheap and sell dearly; so he acquired a majority stake in the company. After a brutal personal fight with Berkshire-Hathaway owners, he tossed them out in 1965.

 

Buffett closed the plant completely in 1985, selling, in 2000, the eighteen acre facility to an entrepreneur making military parachutes. The facility has been listed for sale since 2008, and at time of writing is on the verge of being demolished as New Bedford’s mayor is concerned the present owner may lease part of the facility to process “medical marijuana”. To add to the merriment preservationists may apply for landmark status. Buffett, in any case, retained control of the name. Today, sans textile mill, Berkshire Hathaway, headquartered in Omaha, is the ninth largest public company in the world[xxxi]. How one views or interprets this example can deliver an interesting discussion on deindustrialization—but New Bedford probably could care less; it’s stuck with a bombed-out eyesore.

 

Massachusetts’ Neighbors Respond to Textile Deindustrialization

Rhode Island possessed a substantial textile industry presence, second only to Massachusetts–and suffered similar deindustrialization simultaneous with Massachusetts. Democrats had dominated state politics since the 1930’s; in 1951 Democrat Dennis Robert was Governor. The business community through the 1950’s focused on business climate reform, also singling out unemployment taxes paid by business. Like Massachusetts a strong union opposition blocked their initiatives in the state legislature. A compromise, reached in 1958 similar to Massachusetts, yielded very little in terms of unemployment reform or business climate tax reductions. Governor Roberts in 1951, however, launched several ED initiatives to counter textile deindustrialization.

 

First, Rhode Island upgraded its state promotion commission to full departmental status. And in 1952 Roberts secured creation of a Maine-style DCC agency tasked with building and leasing industrial facilities, thereby increasing “ready to lease”, i.e. shovel-ready speculative sites. In 1957 he formed a commission to study whether providing state funds to localities for such facilities was helpful. The Commission said yes and the next year, the legislature approved creation of the Rhode Island Industrial Building Authority—winning a referendum to do so. The 1957 constitutional amendment referendum permitted a Rhode Island version of the “New England model”. Finally, in 1958, Roberts created a state Science and Research Council to coordinate existing research efforts and seek new ones. This may be the first state technology EDO (Koistinen, 2006, pp. 348-9).

 

Maine’s Democratic governor Edmund Muskie (first since 1929), created its first state-level ED cabinet department in 1955. “Expanding Maine’s existing promotional commission into a more effective government department was the leading item on the reform agenda“. And, in 1957, At Muskie’s urging, Maine created its Industrial Building Authority (IBA) to provide state assistance to local industrial corporations (Koistinen, 2006, p. 349). The IBA, however, did not conform to state constitutional precedents, thereby requiring a subsequent constitutional amendment (14-A). Thus, Maine, along with Rhode Island successfully approved a constitutional amendment to allow the IBA and Maine then had an IDB in its quiver. In the mid-1950’s both New Hampshire and Connecticut also approved legislation authorizing the creation of Maine-style DCCs. In the mid-1960’s under intense pressure from states with more aggressive forms of IDB, New England states took another bite from the IDB apple, passing a second round of legislation and constitutional referendums (New Hampshire followed the Oklahoma model and Maine and Vermont, Kentucky).

 

What’s Going On?

The reader might note each State essentially followed the same path and employed similar (IDB, attraction and promotional) strategies). They encountered the same process issues and difficulties in approving a strategy that did not directly address the deindustrialization’s core problem. Partisanship was not a factor—every New England state, Republican and Democrat, followed a fairly identical approach. Muskie like Roberts, Tobin and Herter (governors) led their state’s ED response to their state’s manufacturing decline. That raises a question: Where were county and municipal governments in this story?

 

Where is Lowell, New Bedford, Hartford or Providence? Deindustrialization’s effects were intensely felt at the municipal/town level, by their chambers in particular. Some responded, but did so haphazardly, episodically, and almost always ran afoul of state constitutions and judicial precedent. Nearly all state court decisions rejected reactive local government ED initiatives.  In 1954 the state legislature authorized the voluntary formation of local “industrial development commissions”[xxxii]. The IDCs were supervised by the State Dept. of Commerce. Taxpayer funding was limited to 1/20^th of 1% of the jurisdiction’s assessed valuation and capped at $50000. Appoints were made by the local legislature (town boards). The IDCs were authorized to research, advertise, manage prospects, but was cautioned NOT to provide “inducements” or “package deals”—but not prohibited. They were urged to work with

Other local EDOs (chambers) and direct financing could only be provided by the newly created State MBDC.

 

The problem became defined as countering promotion/incentives thought relevant to the flight of textile firms. That turned out to be the IDB. So each state attempted in their own fashion to forge an IDB, but, each encountered state constitution gift and loan clauses—cemented into law by long-standing judicial interpretations and precedents. Combined with a hesitant policy process, creating EDOs able to bridge the gap between private firms and public monies, the best the region could do was to copy the Maine version of the IDB—which wasn’t an IDB at all. Later a second round of reforms devised a limited IDB program. Interestingly, at no point did it enter discussion that the three states “stealing” their textile firms (the Carolinas and Georgia) never approved IDB authorizing legislation in this period.

 

When finally created, New England state EDOs  (1) favored business retention strategies that, through local EDOs,  issued loans and  developed speculative shovel-ready sites for existing and relocated firms; (2) launched “defensive” promotional programs, ostensibly designed to get the word out New England was a good place to do business, but, I suspect, intended mostly to reassure domestic firms that New England remained viable; (3) flirted with startups (manufacturing/ technological–gazelle-like firms), but taking few firm steps in that direction. As pressures mounted, Maine and Rhode Island approved constitutional amendments that widened the permissible range of state government activity for assisting private corporations. Massachusetts, the regional leader remained the most hesitant. Perhaps sensing a business climate confrontation strategy led only to “a race to the bottom”, a strategy that could not be adopted due to power balances and priorities of actors within its policy system, Mostly, New England states adopted defensive retention strategies that didn’t stand a chance in retaining textile firms, but offered some hope at economic stabilization. These fledgling efforts will bloom into a comprehensive state-level community development-private business strategy a generation later in a Dukakis administration.

New England’s Struggle against Textile Deindustrialization Shifts to Congress

New England turned to the federal government for help during the 1950s. Deindustrialization or an adverse business climate, whichever one prefers, had been redefined to a problem caused by unfair Southern incentives and business climate advantages. New England Congressional-Senate elected officials assumed aggressive positions limiting federal “incentives” which, in their view, unfairly subsidized regional competition. Senator Kennedy was especially aggressive. He argued:

 

The southward migration of industry from New England has too frequently taken place for causes other than normal competition and natural advantages. Since 1946, in Massachusetts alone, seventy textile mills have been liquidated, generally for migration or disposition of their assets to plants in the South or other sections of the country. Besides textiles, there have been moves in the machinery, hosiery, apparel, electrical, paper, chemical and other important industries. Every month of the year some New England manufacturer is approached by public or private southern interests offering various inducements for migration southward. … In 1925 New England had 80% of the (cotton textile) industry, now (1954) it has 20 per cent[xxxiii].

 

Kennedy criticized federal $.75 minimum wage that compared to Massachusetts’$ 1.64. He attacked “federal tax amortization benefits” (IDB-related federal tax abatement) that disproportionately granted benefits to southern plants, and federally-regulated shipping rates that he alleged “discriminate unfairly against New England“.

 

Apparently, “Muskie was no Jack Kennedy”. Muskie continued his economic development focus after his Senate election. In June 1963 as a member of ACIR he participated in its report A-18 which investigated IDBs. That Report outlined criticisms and proposed reforms to restrict usage of the federal tax abatement and urge states to curb abuses. The conclusions of this report were rejected by Muskie, who dissented formally—which, I cite as a commentary on Maine/Muskie’s different approach to economic development. Maine, it turns out, did not define economic development like Massachusetts: “I do not concur in the negative conclusions about industrial development bond financing expressed above. (1) States and their local governments should be encouraged–not discouraged–to attack problems of economic stagnation and underemployment; (2) abuses (of the IDB) have not been prevalent and …do not constitute a basis for condemning the self-help efforts of State and local governments; and (3) providing opportunity and incentive for industry and employment, through a free enterprise economy is a proper and legitimate concern of local government, (Industrial Development Bond Financing: A Commission Report, June 1963, p. 15)

 

New England’s cohesive (except for Muskie) federal delegation, however, continued its advocacy in fits and spasms for over three decades–climaxing in the middle 1970’s—to advocate federal action to ameliorate “southward migration” of New England firms. The southern business climate advantage was believed unfair, if not immoral for its inability to properly sustain individuals and families. New England’s solution was not a race to the bottom, but rather required the Federal government to compel the South to “climb to the top”. Textile deindustrialization had escalated into a federal as well as state/sub-state economic development issue. New England’s textile war with the South, like the Spanish Civil War, served as a shadow struggle masking a deepening divide between regions.

 

Judicial Decisions as Embedded Political Culture

Incentives, public funding of private firms and aggressive local action seemingly violated New England’s collective sense of how economic development should be handled. The South followed a different approach. That New England’s policy systems included actors, notably unions, that limited business influence— and redefined economic development away from Privatist growth through business corporations. These are key Progressive values. New England states had approved/amended state constitutions, Massachusetts as early as 1780, to reflect these values. More than a hundred years later these statutes were interpreted by state courts reacting to 1950’s economic development legislation, programs, tools, and strategies. It was not very pretty. Using Maine and Massachusetts as examples, New England judicial IDB interpretations rendered difficult 1950’s efforts to combat perceived southern IDB incentive competition.

 

The critical interpretation by a Massachusetts state court set the stage. Lowell v. City of Boston, 111 Mass. 454 (1873) narrowly defined, and severely limited the “public purpose” required if public funds were to be used to benefit private entities or projects. “The application of the rule has grown in vigor through the years, so that it continues today as a controlling force in dealing with the expenditure of public funds… In it lies the key to understanding the position of the commonwealth toward business inducements“. The original Lowell decision involved eminent domain. The decision established a precedent that affected Massachusetts economic development over the next one hundred years (Tilden, 1966, p. 15).

The 1873 Lowell decision (and several subsequent decisions) were restated in a 1958 judicial opinion relevant to the IDB initiative: “It is a fundamental principle of constitutional law frequently declared that money raised by taxation can be used only for public purposes and not for the advantage of private individuals… The paramount test should be whether the expenditure confers a direct public benefit of a reasonably general character … to a significant part of the public, as distinguished from a remote and theoretical benefit” (Tilden, 1966, p. 16). That narrow public purpose extended to town and city governments as well—thereby inhibiting public sector business assistance programs at the local level.

 

Compared to other states, this was a very restrictive definition of public purpose and the restricted definition extended to eminent domain and the benefit of public credit to private enterprise. The 1953 legislation creating the Massachusetts Business Development Corporation was mindful of this limitation, compelling a “Massachusetts-style” New England IDB that involved only an indirect state guarantee of a private financing. The funds used by MBDC for direct lending were acquired through pooled loans from private banks and insurance firms–not public dollars. In effect, Massachusetts gift and loan statutes and judicial interpretation of them prevented the state from devising public tools to assist Stage 4 businesses in decline.

 

Maine’s counterpart to Lowell v. City of Boston was (1885) Jordan v. Woodward. Jordan v. Woodward ruled that: “Strictly speaking, private property can only be said to have taken for public uses when it has been so appropriated that the public have certain and well defined rights to that use secured, as the right to use the public highway, the turnpike, the public ferry, the railroad, and the like. But when it is so appropriated that the public have no rights to its use secured, it is difficult to perceive how such an appropriate can be denominated a public use (Beck, 1966, p. 25). In 1871 the Jordan decision was the basis to deny Maine’s sub-state jurisdictions the authority “to pass laws enabling towns, by gifts of money or loans of bonds, to assist individuals or corporations to establish or carry on manufacturing of various kinds. A year later in Allen v. Inhabitants of Jay the court took it a restrictive step further in denying assistance to a manufacturing firm saying that once a loan with public funds has been made “The bonds and money raised from their sale become the bonds and money of the person borrowing, and subject to his control. The town has lost all power over the use and disposition of their loan (Beck, 1966)”.

 

While the prohibition of public funds in financing private firms remained intact, Maine found a way to bypass that restrictive interpretation when it confronted City Beautiful-era urban renewal and 1930’s slum clearance and public housing eminent domain. A 1914 City of Portland bond to obtain land for, and build city auditoriums (a City Beautiful initiative) was sustained as a legal use of tax dollars. In 1954, a Maine court supported eminent domain for removal of slums, yet declared in 1957 that a Bangor industrial development act which permitted a taking of land for the purpose of industrial development was unconstitutional.

 

The thread that underlies these decisions is “public benefit or interest are not synonymous with public use, and that in a broad sense it is the right in the public to an actual use, and not to an incidental benefit [and so the public] … cannot use a plot of land leased to ‘x’ Manufacturing Company. Eminent domain for slum removal was separated from the narrow public purpose definition, by linking eminent domain’s (urban renewal) public purpose to public safety and health, “The clearance of the ‘blighted area” in our view is the use of property for purposes of public health, morals, safety and welfare. The ‘public use’ within the meaning of our constitution lies in the removal of breeding grounds of disease, juvenile delinquency, and other social evils” (Beck, 1966, p. 32). Maine could do what it takes to eliminate slums, but not to provide business and cost minimization programs to private enterprise.

As Briffault later observed, the trend during the last half of the twentieth century was to devise ways to bypass narrow definitions and statute prohibitions against aid to business, but clearly, some states were more willing and able than others—and the path taken by each state mattered in economic development. While the direction of change was shared, the timing and the bypass precedents retained much of the spirit contained in the original state constitutions.

 

The Philadelphia Story

 

When one smushes urban renewal into one large ideological mass, it is easy to lose the real-time reality that UR was an “umbrella strategy” not a specific monolithic program that was pursued to “remove Negroes”. Under that umbrella strategy lurked a wide variety of actors, movements, constituencies, and goals. Philadelphia is our example to demonstrate the different forms of UR that existed, not only across the Big Cities, but within a single municipality. That allows us to sketch out how, I believe, different wings/approaches within American economic development evolved during these critical transition years.

 

The first task of this case study is to trace the policy system that produced Philadelphia’s UR strategy. It is clearly not identical to that outline in Boston where Progressive business elites doubled as Irish-hating Yankees. Moreover, one can more easily see how UR itself evolved—in ways that might not fit the “smush”. In this section one might see the rude beginnings of a new order, our contemporary American ED system jell and take shape. In particular one can see a division of labor involving transition-era chambers finding new roles and spinning off new EDOs. It is also possible to see the “governmental” wing of mainstream ED assume form within the mayoral administration—an evolution that involved a break from the community development wing of UR–from the housing authority to the redevelopment agency. This proved unfortunate for public housers and neighborhood physical redevelopers.

 

The Le Corbusier high-rise public housing spawned so many problems they had to be torn down—and a new federal housing role had to be devised. As bad, transition-era neighborhood-based housers using slum removal (to be fair, mostly highway-related slum removal) generated an intent and visceral neighbor counter-reaction that, in its good time, would itself join our contemporary community development system. In short, Philadelphia is a good place to examine the workings of our Scarlet Letter metaphor.

 

Philadelphia’s UR Background

Politically, with rare interruptions Philadelphia’s/State Republican political machine dominated Philadelphia politics from the Civil War to through 1950. Philadelphia consequently enjoyed an unsavory postwar political reputation, as a “corrupt and sleepy, unprogressive city” with limited home rule powers. War production strained Philadelphia’s existing housing, yet 1944, building permits in a city approaching 3.5 million, was only 160 new units. Housing surveys revealed that one-third of housing units required demolition/substantial rehabilitation.

 

Why? Metro 1940 population grew by 2%, Philadelphia’s declined by 1%. The Fifties metro increase was 14.7%; the city’s 7.3%–mostly Great Migration newcomers. From 1940 to 1950 the net increase of African-Americans approached 130,000. Over the next decade, 155,000 blacks were added. Steered to inner ring ghettos Black migrants found employment scarce. From 1948 to 1954, retail business fell by 10.4%; manufacturing employment declined 10.9% during the 1950’s (Beauregard, 1989, pp. 199-200)

 

Three term machine mayor, Bernard Samuel had in 1946 taken advantage of state enabling legislation to establish the city’s redevelopment corporation—one of the nation’s first. Samuels was listening to “Young Turk” Progressive housing reformers who sought to empower a strong Planning Commission that vigorously advocated not only for planning, but CBD redevelopment and neighborhood housing. The first wing (Young Turks), progressive young reformers styling themselves after LaGuardia, began meeting in 1939. Their discussion forums evolved into “the City Policy Committee” which limited membership (yet, included women and Blacks) and met at a restaurant. The Policy Committee’s true love was planning—next was housing improvement (Lowe, 1967, pp. 320-1). Among their members were two older reformers/politicos, Joseph Clark and his close buddy Richardson Dilworth.

 

In 1942, the Policy Committee convinced Mayor Samuels and city council to significantly empower a strong, quasi-autonomous Planning Commission (PHC). The PHC will be a central actor in post 1950 housing and urban renewal. At Phillip’s urging, the Policy Committee formed a permanent civic association to watchdog and supplement the new city agency: the Citizen’s Council on City Planning. The Citizen’s Council’s first initiative (1947) was to hold an exposition presenting their visual image of what Philadelphia could achieve through planning. The Exposition amounted to a call to arms for Philadelphia’s physical redevelopment, from highways to housing—including a visual map of Philadelphia’s blight.

 

An estimated 400,000 walked through its elaborate visual images and maps. Proposed changes included a mall and park around downtown Independence Hall, greenways, pedestrian bridges, and a waterfront walk along a marina and other recreational facilities. The CBD was the heart of the New Philadelphia. Working with other old-line Progressive groups (such as Philadelphia’s Bureau of Municipal Research), they lobbied Samuels (1949) to appoint Bacon, a protégé of a prominent member of the Policy Committee (Walter Phillips), first to the Philadelphia Housing Association (PHA), then Executive Director of the Planning Commission.

 

The PHC inherited and commenced planning (1949) for a major neighborhood redevelopment through slum clearance and relocation: the Eastwick Project (outlined above). Eastwick, a racially-integrated rather large neighborhood containing approximately 19000, mostly home-owning residents was envisioned by city planners as an area that “low-income blacks … could be relocated to a new planned community” (McKee, 2001, p. 552). Using “open land” or land acquired by eminent domain and cleared by demolition, a second phase, conducted by a private real estate developers, would build new suburban-style housing.

 

The project generated intense backlash from residents, but planning continued and Eastwick became the city’s first post-1949 Housing Act project. Quickly labeled as “the nation’s largest urban renewal project in 1958”, eminent domain and slum clearance of most of Eastwick followed. The Korman Company was awarded construction rights for replacement housing (1958), but little was actually built. Most of the cleared land remained empty for decades (McKee, 2001). Having removed most of the original population, Eastwick gained population between 1970 and 1990. Eastwick could have been the poster child for the Second Ghetto.

 

Business Coalition and Policy System Change

The second wing emanated from chamber and its “old Main Line” corporate elites. Disgusted with machine scandals, horrific governance, lousy water and economic stagnation, they coalesced in 1948 into the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM)[xxxiv]. Initially, GPM consisted of thirty-one members, who paid to play. Its initial budget was $ 225,000 which hired staff and consultants to formulate a CBD redevelopment plan, the centerpiece of which was moving a food distribution company (Dock Street Market) out of the downtown and opening up CBD land for redevelopment (Banfield & Wilson, 1967, p. 271). They invited Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Conference on Community Development’s Executive Director for advice. GPM’s CBD revitalization approach, centered around privately-financed offices/headquarters and the removal of physical blight; the public sector provided only accompanying infrastructure and site control.

 

GPM allied with reformist Young Turk, Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth, won the 1951 election and on January 1, 1952 Joseph Clark became Philadelphia’s first “strong mayor”. Planning, led by Bacon immediately started. Key projects included: the Triangle (blighted mixed use Center City (CBD) neighborhood, development of Independence Mall by the federal Department of the Interior’s National Park Service, Philadelphia airport (1953) expansion, Walt Whitman Bridge (Delaware Valley Port Authority), Penn Town housing project (north of Center City), and the signature project, Penn Center (the city’s first major post-Depression office/retail construction).

 

Varieties of Urban Renewal

Penn Center adjacent to City Hall was privately funded and constructed on privately-owned land. Bacon, working with the Chamber and Citizens Council, devised a plan that made Penn Center “the tangible symbol of a new kind of city” (Lowe, 1967, p. 331). But before construction started a major barrier had to be removed by an “unwilling” private corporation: the Penn Railroad. Pen Railroad owned an unused station/rail yard complex, square in the middle of the CBD (the “Chinese Wall”). The “wall” running eight blocks, separated north from south Philadelphia, was comprised sixteen tracks, and a transportation viaduct. Penn Railroad sprang into action only after Mayor Clark threatened to condemn the mess. Construction started in 1954.

 

Development didn’t always follow Bacon’s plan faithfully. But underground shopping, public spaces at street level, links to the subway system, a pedestrian mall, parking garages, and a visually-inspiring esplanade, from the foot of City Hall to the surrounding railroad and subway stations, were victories for Bacon. Underneath the mall was a pedestrian concourse offering restaurants, shopping, amusement, and sunken plaza. Office buildings “on stilts” ensured uninterrupted views and maximum sun. Nevertheless, “the city’s role [in Penn Center] was minimal” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 209); using private funds it was not associated with the city’s redevelopment authority.

 

Left to the city was neighborhood housing/slum clearance. The first such project (1950), the East Popular Penn Towne project, managed by the Redevelopment Authority, reflected Bacon’s Planning Commission’s innovative “self-help”, “shelter-oriented”, historic preservation-friendly, humanist Le Corbusier approach. Lest we wax too nostalgic, Bacon made extensive use of the bulldozer as well. Philadelphia’s neighborhood model did not follow the “Baltimore model”. The East Poplar neighborhood approach relied on slum clearance with mixed low-rise and high rise physical redevelopment combined with substantial rehabilitation of existing units, and preservation of old-Quaker residences (Lowe, 1967, pp. 333-6). Compared to Boston’s West End, Penn Towne was in another league altogether.

 

Penn Towne employed a number of innovative methodologies, partnerships, and policies—it was integrated. The idea was “good housing” or spores would stimulate investment in adjacent private properties. Accordingly, the RDA built units in the worst areas of the project—owned by Blacks. Those displaced, having nowhere to go, doubled up in the closest available units—prompting further deterioration and exodus. The project attracted national attention and favorable comment. It also exceeded budgets, schedules, and produced high vacancy rates. Private investment did not follow. It didn’t stop suburbanization or surrounding neighborhood succession. Bacon and others believed they had to do it better the next time.

 

Highways

Between 1950 and 1973 I-95, a beltway, and several expressways cut through and around Philadelphia. Highways were a significant element in Bacon/GPM comprehensive plans; highways were not forced upon the City or its UR leadership. But I-95 exerted a “dramatic effect”, tearing up areas running through northeastern neighborhoods, connecting to the airport and into the suburbs. “It sliced through many river wards causing the taking and demolition of large numbers of buildings and dividing neighborhoods physically … [cutting] of Center City (the CBD) from the waterfront … By the end of the period, the southeastern portion of the city was a virtual tangle of interstate highways, access roads, and bridge ramps.” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 215) The CBD emerged relatively unscathed; the Schuylkill Expressway, Philadelphia’s first modern highway, bulldozed one neighborhood, linking the CBD to the Beltway/I-95.

 

From the get-go opposition got in the way. As early as 1957 Society Hill’s resistance to highways affected their route. Opposition gathered steam with each freeway and expressway. “The final link in the inner beltway quickly [1964] became emblematic of the sharp contrast between Bacon’s showy center city projects and the deteriorating conditions in the residential neighborhoods beyond … [turning] the Crosstown Expressway proposal …into a flashpoint for Philadelphia’s urban renewal”. Arising out of this opposition came a new generation of lawyer-planners, the rise of citizen activists, and newly-formed community development organizations (CDOs) (Klemrk, 2011, pp. 133-6). With signs reading “Fry Bacon”, they protested; Crosstown was stopped, and stopped, and stopped—before it was abandoned in 1974.

 

Society Hill

Society Hill, a run-down, historically significant, low-income neighborhood touching the CBD captured Dilworth’s interest. Newly elected, he ordered Bacon to plan the project—and started construction on his new $150,000 house in the district. Bacon, long involved in promoting the area, lost control over the project, however, when Albert Greenfield, a politically-connected banking-CBD real estate developer (and taxi cab owner) became City Planning Commission Chair. Bacon came within an inch of resigning. In any case, Greenfield truly believed Society Hill was an important cog in downtown revitalization because its high quality, historically significant housing could attract affluent households to the CBD. Greenfield insisted the project required decisive private sector management to succeed. Dilworth agreed.

 

So, in 1956 Greenfield incorporated his change-agent, the nonprofit Old Philadelphia Development Corporation (OPDC) with the city’s financial and business elite on its board. OPDC, the direct descendent of today’s Center City Philadelphia and the founder of several key Philadelphia EDOs, drove the Society Hill project from beginning to end.. In 1956 OPDC hired Pittsburgh’s Mayor Lawrence’s Gateway Center redevelopment chief, John P. Robin as Executive Director. Formally, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Agency subcontracted with OPDC to develop the project, but the Board dominated policy that included design competitions, demolition, restoration of historic colonial houses, luxury high-rise apartments, and three office buildings built by  I.M. Pei and NYC William Zeckendorf. Urban renewal funds were used.

 

The project was slow coming together, and groundbreaking for its first phase was in 1961. Like Boston, UR required housing for “a prestige, upper-income … elite taste-setters …the first part of a coordinated set of efforts to revitalize center city as a place to live and work and to provide an image for the whole city’s revitalization” (Lowe, 1967, p. 350). Society Hill, always a controversial use of public funds, and a target for architectural and planner criticism, is, however, regarded as one of urban renewal’s more successful projects.

 

UR Splits ED at its Seams—an outline of contemporary Big City ED emerges

Traditional planning’s chief tool was the comprehensive plan that allowed for coordination and integration of zoning, codes, capital budgets, and infrastructure—both CBD and hinterland. It became clear in the Fifties that a comprehensive plan was not up to the UR task.  Comprehensive plans meant planning with many moving parts, required lots of expertise and time, great cost, and many independent actors few of which shared common goals—and planners had little actual power to compel behavior. Left unsaid was the outcry that resulting from UR linked to housing and slum clearance. The planning critique was not enough was being destroyed. The Mayor’s critique was the costs, political and financial, were too high relative to the impact.

 

As early as 1952, Mayor Clark recognized Bacon and planning had all they could do to cope with day-to-day UR. So he stoked up the redevelopment agency; its Board recruited private -sector heavy-hitters, and developed an internal long-range planning committee that included prominent planners (Martin Meyerson, for example). In 1956, Clark transferred, William Rafsky, his housing coordinator, to be the city’s redevelopment director. Successful UR program implementation required RDA powers, access to both federal urban renewal monies and corporate elites if plans were to be actionable.  To improve UR’s effectiveness, Rafsky produced studies that collectively constituted the CURA Report.

 

That report recommended no further slum removal of “Negro housing” until alternative housing could be developed. Efforts to retain manufacturing in the city’s economic base through industrial districts were prioritized. The Report reversed Bacon’s “developing spores” strategy, i.e. scattering islands of UR in the “belief” that private investment would fill in between the spores. It didn’t—in fact the reverse occurred. In response, Rafsky proposed to redirect UR to the CBD and concentrate initially on so-called “gray areas” (housing rings adjacent to the CBD). The Report called for both public and private investment—and recommended programs such as adult education, enhanced city services, treating family disorganization, delinquency, crime, fair housing and human rights—and poverty. These were the essential features of LBJ’s future Model Cities program, launched a decade later. The report, well-received, went nowhere.

 

In 1959, however, Philadelphia participated in a federal planning/UR innovation, the 1959 Housing Act’s “community renewal program” (CRP). CRP encouraged gathering data, observing effects, and making adjustments to the project. More than a planning tool, however, CRP acknowledged issues inherent to UR-style physical redevelopment. It opened up UR to include “social” concerns. Blight no longer meant solely physical deterioration, but widened to include education, crime, welfare, and health (congruent with Ford Foundation “Gray Areas” program). By 1963 over a hundred cities participated.

 

[CRP] suggested that social action should accompany the clearance or rehabilitation of buildings … yet most planners … had given all too little thought to the relation between social planning and their kind of planning, had only superficial knowledge of the welfare resources of their communities, and made no detailed study of the needs and desires of minority groups and the victims of poverty  (Scott, 1969, p. 598).

 

UR, under the pressures and realities of municipal level implementation, was bifurcating along Privatist/CBD/business assistance lines, while CD housing physical redevelopment mutated into a comprehensive form of CD. The housing authority managed CD/neighborhoods, and CBD/business programs moved to the RDA and a new set of EDOs and programs that worked with the jurisdictional economic base. So, Rafsky and the redevelopment agency became the lead actor in the CBD and business/eds and meds redevelopment process.

 

Within the none-too-gentle womb of municipal-level UR, a new corps of economic developers had made their appearance. Rafsky “shared with Logue the distinction of being the first in a new order of municipal officials conspicuously charged with producing teamwork among the agencies concerned with city-building and renewal, including special districts, quasi-public agencies, and even private corporations” (Scott, 1969, pp. 530-1). Pittsburgh was at the parade’s head, but by mid-1950’s (1956) Baltimore’s Mayor D’Alesandro Jr. reorganized planning/UR, centralizing relevant departments, offices and functions in a renewal/housing agency—with a powerful director, Richard L. Steiner. Logue sat in New Haven—and Rafsky in Philly. RDA leadership in UR was strong throughout the East.

 

CD and ED Work Together under the UR Umbrella

Rafsky involved the RDA with nonprofit institutional redevelopment, now eligible for federal funding. The GI Bill triggered growth of universities and colleges across the nation, including the University of Pennsylvania. Expansion of facilities and scope of activities logically resulted. By this time such projects were popping up across the nation (NYU, University of Chicago—and later in Philly, Temple). The question was where? A suburban location was arguably likely (the University of Buffalo, for instance moved to the suburbs). Philadelphia UR officials were determined not to let that happen In 1963 RDA partnered with Drexel, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia General Hospital and Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to plan, assemble and establish the University City Science Center (today’s University City) on Schuylkill’s riverbanks.

 

The RDA partnership included eminent domain of adjoining neighborhoods, use of federal UR monies and state funds to construct key facilities (the research building). Involved in this UR project were three neighborhoods, populated mostly by working class blacks and Italians. Up to 10,000 residents were eventually displaced. The idea was to create a beautiful “manicured” campus, architecturally au courant, that from a cynic’s viewpoint built an isolated “cordon sanitaire” from less desirable visual and social influences (Puckett & Lloyd, 2015). The buildings were “pointed” inward, away from the surrounding city. Today, the project is an outstanding success (Penn is the city’s largest single employer), but it took a while—for decades after considerable cleared acreage was used only for parking lots.

 

Moreover Philly recognized the existence of the problem with “no name” (deindustrialization). Philadelphia was losing its manufacturing. Between 1951 and 1956 the city lost 74 major companies, nearly 10,000 jobs, with payroll cutbacks affecting nearly 40,000 more (Lowe, 1967, p. 360). One asset the city had plenty of was vacant/unused land. So the City’s Department of Commerce established a nonprofit to acquire and assemble land, install streets and infrastructure, to be marketed and sold to business. Also established was the nation’s first industrial land bank. The corporation that inherited these functions, programs and tools, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), was a partnership with the Chamber who paid half its costs, and was governed by a thirty member public/private board, including the Mayor. PIDC still operates, having expanded into tax-exempt financing, lending, and a wide variety of business assistance programs. Its loan program commenced in 1961 after voters approved a $10 million general obligation bond to finance a revolving loan fund and add more land to the industrial land bank. After 1965, the Philadelphia UR program included industrial parks (Callowhill Industrial Historical District).

 

Bacon and the Housing Authority meanwhile turned their attention to its North Philadelphia district adjacent to Center City (called the “Jungle”, mostly occupied by African-Americans, and location of later 1964 riots). “The strategy employed was to remove dilapidated buildings in order to create land for new private development and public housing and also to stifle the blighting effect many existing dwellings were having on adjacent properties”. By 1962 10,126 dwelling units were demolished—North Philadelphia demolition continued until 1980 (totaling 35,196 dwelling units demolished, arsoned, or abandoned–32% of the North Philadelphia area). Population fell by 54%, becoming exclusively Black. “With clearance came numerous high-density public housing projects, but almost no new private construction” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 211). Many of those displaced in this project were intended to go to the pioneering “new town in town” UR project, Eastwick. No one, however, asked North Philadelphia African-Americans if they wanted to move to Eastwick in south Philadelphia—for the most part they didn’t. Eastwick became a middle class, predominately white neighborhood.

 

Buried beneath the fold were the torn up neighborhoods, demolished by highways and UR that created a new generation of leaders, new organizations, and new priorities. “The fight against [slum clearance] drew the neighborhood together and gave residents pride in a distinct community identity. Theirs proved a fierce battle for survival, confronting the urban renewal order directly with a multilevel strategy …. These citizens succeeded in driving a wedge, from the bottoms up, into the alliance between planning experts, politicians, and private developers” (Klemrk, 2011, pp. 133-6). Klemek is describing NYC, but the story is typical of our Big Cities. The legacy of UR is that in its ashes rose the phoenix of a new policy system—and a rejuvenated community development approach to our profession—all of which will be duly considered in future chapters.

 

 

Boston’s Urban Renewal Policy Systems

Boston, Ed Logue and Faneuil Hall are synonymous with UR—which is ironic in that UR left a controversial and complicated legacy. UR got off to a relatively late, clumsy, and frustrating start that reflected not on the state and the city’s political culture and politics, but also the legacy of its ethnic machine policy system that long had run the city. The role of the State and the city’s business community should be noted—as well as the role of the Mayor and his “expert” Czar. Boston suffered from intense suburban pressures, and noticeable CBD decline, but gravitated toward divisive and fiercely resisted neighborhood/housing UR projects. UR left in its wake an eastern style progressive policy system headed by long-time mayor Kevin White. White mixed CD and ED strategies/goals typical of future contemporary East Coast policy systems.

 

The principal lessons from the Boston case study include outlining the transformation of the Boston policy system from ethnic charismatic mayor/ethnic ward boss to a new charismatic mayor and ethnic machine-boss contemporary policy system. Obviously, “we kid” but that is what happened—from Curley to White, and his so-called “new machine”. We will finish the story in another chapter, but the bitter hostility between business and ethnic politicians, between neighborhood and CBD, the constant involvement of state government into municipal affairs and UR itself, all were expressed within Boston’s UR policy during the transition years. It is ironic indeed, that Boston today is known for the form of UR (CDB with a “growth coalition composed of strong mayor, corporate/business leadership and expert/professional management) that “lost” out to neighborhood redevelopment/housing community development—the reaction against which brought White into power at the end of this section.

 

In this tale one can see that Boston wears its political culture on its sleeve during these years, and how political culture prevented Boston’s political leadership from moving into an alliance with business for a sustained downtown revitalization. Instead, with the exception of the famous Government Center project, Boston’s UR initiatives are outside in the neighborhoods, or on the edges of its compact, loosely-defined downtown–where they had been in the Curley, Tobin and Hynes years. In the past (not now) Boston had a tough time dealing with its CBD, and there have been extended periods when someone threw the key to the “Vault” away and locked its denizens out of the policy system. This is for the most part lost in the smush of today’s UR paradigm.

 

Charismatic Mayor, Ward-Base Machines=Anti-CBD, Pro-Neighborhood

Boston’s dominant political figure in the first half of the twentieth century was James Michael Curley, the Frank Skeffington of Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah. First elected mayor in 1914, Curley served four, four-year terms and retired (unwillingly) from the Boston mayoralty in 1951 (half his last term in federal prison). He served as Governor and several terms in Congress. Curley presided over a decentralized, mostly Irish, ethnic ward-based, city council-dominant machine. He shared power with ward bosses the like of the proverbial Martin Lomasney.

 

He also fought a bitter war with the city’s business and corporate leadership, pushing out the Yankee Protestant Brahmins into nearby suburbs. The Brahmin elite, however, retained its leading position in Massachusetts state politics. Brahmins dominated the state and CBD, and the machine ran the neighborhoods (McQuade, 1967). The war between the two explains Boston’s CBD decline–why O’Connor described Boston as a hopeless backwater and McQuade as “two cities in one. The first is the Boston of a cultivated Yankee minority …. The other Boston lies on the far side of a deep, cold sea of historic hatred and is Irish Boston”.

 

The Massachusetts legislature resisted Boston home rule vigorously, directly controlling much of the City’s day-to-day administrative and policy-making power. Budgetary and fiscal powers, for example, exercised by the Legislature; the City’s civil service system and police administered by the state. Curley and business engaged in a sadly comical war of not picking up bank president’s garbage and the city not securing buyers for its bonds. Real estate taxes rose to such levels a 1950 comparison between Boston and twenty other large American cities placed Boston as the most expensive.

 

Curley left the inner city to wallow in its Puritan self-righteousness while he turned his attention and his municipal favors to those in the ‘other’ Boston who never failed to give him their loyalty–and their votes. While he showered the various neighborhoods with libraries, health units, parks, playgrounds, and bathhouses, he neglected the downtown section of Boston and allowed it to fall into a state of such disrepair than many native Bostonians began to give up all hope of its eventual recovery (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 12-3).

 

Pre-1950 UR

The Boston Housing Authority, established in 1935 empowered by 1933 Massachusetts enabling legislation built Icles New Deal NIRA/PWA housing starting with South Boston’s Old Harbor Village in 1935. The city’s first public housing project opened in 1938 (Vale, 2007). BHA participated in eight prewar Housing Act projects. Combined with 1937 Housing Act projects Boston “had the largest number of units per capita built anywhere in the country” and in absolute units second only to New York City (Bratt & Broadman, n.d., p. 5). Curley and Congressman (later Speaker) McCormack greased the public housing skids. Public housing was a Depression era political plum, providing homes and employment. BHA apparently did not enforce income standards and housing was a “ward boss’s opportunity” allowing over-income families (and city employees) to live in public housing (Vale, 2007, p. 193).

 

Boston also enjoyed its fair share of federal temporary housing during the war; the shipyards in Quincy, for example, required federally-funded units and areas were cleared. Immediately after the war, to accommodate returning veterans Massachusetts passed Chapter 200, a program to build veterans projects. In short, Boston was aggressive in clearing areas for public housing.

In 1951a former “hack”, John B. Hynes ran against Curley–and beat him; Hynes was mayor for two terms (until 1961). His City Council, horribly factionalized, contained any number of potential rivals, and candidates for employment. State government conducted a permanent guerrilla war on their Irish adversaries in City Hall. Under the Housing Act of 1949, BHA launched a second series of neighborhood public housing-slum removal projects. Three major public housing complexes were developed (Columbia Point, Bromley Heath, and Mission Hill Extension). All were dense, high-rise, Le-Corbusier style.

 

Public housing slum removal proved so controversial and politically unpopular that after 1954, Hynes shifted into CBD urban renewal (O’Connor, 1993, p. 77). Why? First, maverick anti-machine Hynes abandoned the past BHA policy of ignoring income guidelines. Worse, over-income city employees were forced out of existing public housing. Secondly, shorn of their corrupted middle-class tendencies, public housing came to be seen as “a dumping ground for those uprooted by [highway and other slum clearance], and they became linked in the public mind to racial conflict and poverty (Bratt & Broadman, n.d., p. 7).”

 

Highways as a solution to Boston’s decentralization was set on its “path” in 1942 when Washington-based CED planners and Boston’s corporate elite developed, separate from City Hall, comprehensive plans to minimize decentralization and revitalize the metro area’s stagnant economy. “There had been a planning competition in 1944, a highway plan in 1948, and a general plan for the city which appeared in 1950” (Mollenkopf, 1983, pp. 142-3). These ideas were incorporated into the eligibility plans required for housing act funds. With perfect timing (1954), Mass DOT approved a new expressway (Central Artery project) cutting through the city’s length. Earlier in 1953, another state expressway cut through Boston’s Chinatown stirring up negative neighborhood reaction.

 

The Central Artery Project uprooted over 900 businesses, prompted a vigorous business opposition (“Save Boston Business’), and crystallized neighborhood residents to form a “Save the North End” association (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 77-8). During the 1950’s the CBD lost 14,000 downtown jobs and $78 million of downtown-based tax assessments[xxxv] (McQuade, 1967, p. 261).UR-style expressway demolition. Displacement and non-relocation inflicted by the state created a nasty legacy for future UR.

 

Hynes’ CBD-UR “Bulldozer”

Hynes embraced CBD urban renewal as Boston’s salvation. In the switch to the CBD, however, Hynes inadvertently ran afoul of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, initially over tax abatement—gifting to business–more than eminent domain per se. As it persisted through the decade, Hynes’ inability to secure court approval for a hybrid public/private EDO proved his undoing. Hynes first opportunity came with a major project proposed by the John Hancock, corporation.

 

The John Hancock Life Insurance Company in 1953 started negotiations to build a 26 story office building in Copley Square[xxxvi]. The John Hancock would have been the first major postwar office building in the CBD; it soon became the symbol of Boston’s hope for a viable future. Five years later, however, the project was still hung up over negotiations on tax abatement. The issue was two-fold: the Court held a long-standing Puritan belief that private business should not benefit from tax abatement, and the Massachusetts Supreme Court followed that theme by enforcing its equally long-standing series of decision precedents forbidding such benefits. The John Hancock Tower, its sixty stories designed by I. M. Pei, never opened until 1976.

 

An even worse fiasco involved reconverting a major railroad yard project anchored by Prudential Insurance. That project also was befouled by tax abatement. Tax abatement was critical because Boston’s downtown property tax rates were “far and away the highest of any major city in the U.S. … more than twice as high as in New York (City) and Chicago … Commercial valuations in Boston were very high, frequently above market value.” (McQuade, 1967, p. 262)  On its own without a tax deal (1957), Prudential acquired the site and kept the project alive. No sooner had the property been acquired, the Massachusetts Supreme Court outlawed tax abatement for redevelopment. Still, in March 1958 a tentative backdoor abatement agreement achieved, Republican Governor Furcolo stepped in, using the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority as an intermediary owner to abate taxes. Prudential, in January 1959 held a ground-breaking ceremony on Boston’s first commercial urban renewal style project. At this critical juncture the Court rejected that solution as well–construction ceased. In 1961 Prudential was a big, quiet hole in downtown Boston.

 

A Bridge over Troubled Water

The business community was skeptical about Hynes. It needed a bridge-builder and that role was played by Boston College’s new (1953) Dean of Business Administration, Father W. Seavey Joyce. Joyce organized a conference, “Greater Boston’s Business Future”, in May. 1954. Attended by over 200 key business elites, the conference touched off a newspaper and informal dialogue on tax abatement and Back Bay development. The “good father” followed up with private conversations and dialogue between private and public leaders with many of the “right” people (Bill Sullivan Boston Patriots owner, the Governor, Hynes, taxpayer groups, Boston Citizen’s Council, Chair of the First National Bank, and he Urban Land crowd). As the dialogue grew more action-oriented, the participants agreed to meet regularly and formulate an action agenda. A public-private advocacy group (the Citizen’s Seminar Group) resulted (O’Connor, 1993, p. 119).

 

The group in Oct 1954 held its first public seminar. At that seminar, Hynes put tax assessment, tax abatement and redevelopment on the table. He presented his image of a redeveloped Boston downtown, a new World Trade Center along with the stalled John Hancock and Prudential projects. In early 1955 business leaders traveled to Pittsburgh, met with Mellon, Lawrence and the Allegheny Council. Speakers like Mumford whose low-rise, anti-skyscraper perspective was warmly appreciated. With grants from the Ford Foundation, the group staffed up a research bureau and a public television series. Under the leadership of Gilbert (President of the Gillette Corporation), the Citizens Seminar spun off the research group; it became Boston Bureau of Public Affairs. The Seminar Group heard and endorsed Hynes’ view on how UR should be conducted. “The only way that decay and blight may be uprooted [Hynes asserted] is by a complete physical change in the affected neighborhood or area” (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 157).

 

At his second inaugural speech (1956), Hynes outlined an aggressive CBD redevelopment plan, including a Boston Common garage and a new housing and neighborhood projects by the Buffalo Housing Authority. Hynes acknowledged Boston was facing financial collapse and that to address looming fiscal disaster, Boston needed enabling home rule legislation giving Boston control over its tax base and budget. Senate leader Powers (Hynes defeated mayoral opponent) never agreed to any such package. Hynes’s plans were dead in the water—again.

 

In the midst of this debacle, the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) had all it could do coping with public housing and slum rehabilitation projects it was pursuing. The harried and isolated commercial urban renewal program, buried within BHA, languished. So the Citizen’s Council, Chamber of Commerce and corporate leaders pressed Hynes to set up an independent urban renewal bureaucracy. The City Council agreed, amazingly the state concurred; in September, 1957, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was born.

 

Late in 1959 Moody’s lowered Boston’s bond rating to Baa, “making Boston, among cities in the United States with over a half million people, the only one assigned this poor rating”…. the city headed toward the shameful specter of municipal bankruptcy (O’Connor, 1993, p. 147). The prospect of financial default was the final straw. Chaired by Safe Deposit and Trust Company’s Ralph Lowell, and CEOs from Forbes, First National Bank, John Hancock, New England Telephone two big name Boston law firms, and the Harvard Business School dean, Boston’s city fathers gathered in a boardroom adjacent to the vault of the Safe Deposit and Trust Company. The “Vault”, otherwise known as the “Boston Coordinating Committee”, was born.

 

The West End

In the meantime BRA had started working on its first mixed-use urban renewal project: the West End. Noted architect Victor Gruen was retained to plan and design the Charles River Park. Media/Policy World opposition was loud, but residents believed that like almost everything in Boston, the project would sooner or later implode and they need not worry. BRA proved them wrong and on December 10, 1959, Hynes announced its initial project, developer and financing.

 

Slum removal wiped out the entire neighborhood–thirty-eight blocks, forty-one acres, 9,000 residents—an entire low-rent, low-rise Italian tenement neighborhood was gone. In its place high rise, high rent housing for the affluent. ‘The West End symbolized all that was wrong with city planning in the 1950’s’…, ‘because it bulldozed the homes of poor people and replaced them with an enclave for the wealthy’ (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 138-9). Appalled at the heartless way residents—mostly elderly, many refugees or displaced persons from World War II unable to speak English–had been uprooted from modest apartments. The visceral reaction to the West End project paralyzed Hynes/BRA’s second project, the Government Center-Scollay Square project. It didn’t help that a prominent leader of the “New Boston Committee” and financial supporter had been named as principal West End developer (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 150)–marking the end of UR under Mayor Hynes. His heritage is the Freedom Trail—a tourism masterpiece.

 

Collins and Logue: the Dynamic Duo

On January 4, 1960 a new mayor was sworn into office. Maverick Democrat John Collins had won an unexpected victory. Collins advocated an even more aggressive redevelopment agenda than Hynes and he was not associated with the dying Curley policy system. Confined to a wheelchair, Collins conveyed a FDR New Deal image to Boston. BRA stole Ed Logue from New Haven to jump-start the stalled Hynes redevelopment projects and implement his signature campaign theme: “the New Boston”. Set up as BRA “CZAR (also head of the mayor’s office for development, housing, and planning) Logue prepared a comprehensive ten project “Ninety Million Dollar Development Plan in January 1961. Shortly after the federal Urban Renewal Administration approved $30 million, matched by $30 million from the state to implement the Plan—the Vault had done its job. Boston reopened stalled projects, and commenced slum clearance for CBD and neighborhood housing.

 

Logue designated the Prudential as ‘blighted”, breaking the logjam over the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s opposition to tax abatement. Prudential started design (using Le Corbusier-style skyscraper motif) and the project opened early in 1964. Alongside the Prudential, the Hynes Auditorium and Sheraton twenty-nine story hotel established the site as Boston’s principal civic convention and tourist center. Nearby in a “contagion of improvement”, the First Church of Christ Scientist received UR funding “that included administration buildings, apartment complexes, merchandise marts, and a seven hundred foot long reflection pool that lit up approaches to Massachusetts Ave and Symphony Hall.” (O’Connor, 1993, p. 225)  Tufts New England Medical Center also conducted significant redevelopment of a “rundown” neighborhood with Logue assistance.

 

On the seventh day, however, Logue didn’t rest; he turned his attention to the last stalled project: the Scollay Square/Government Center. Whatever its architectural merits (Government Center has been described as the ‘crate that Faneuil Hall came in”’; others asserted its “Mycenaean or Aztec overtones”), Government Center became the symbol of the New Boston—opening the way for development of the waterfront. (The famous Faneuil Hall Rouse Marketplace Project was developed in the late 1970’s. and will be discussed in a later chapter. In 1960, Faneuil Hall as designated a historic landmark and in 1964 was added to National Register of Historic Places).

 

In 1963 Collins was overwhelmingly reelected, carrying nineteen of twenty-two wards. At that point the “New Boston” and UR was no longer a failure.

 

The Worm Turns

Scollay Square was bulldozed, and only after intense Brahmin opposition was a key historic building (Sears Crescent) saved; Boston’s working class supported saving the old burlesque hall (the Old Howard), but it was torn down. These were hints of what was to follow when Logue left the CBD and moved UR into Boston’s neighborhoods. Old, working class neighborhoods, with wooden two or three story apartments, tenements, and SROs would not do. “The city’s new program was designed to transform these valuable locations into clusters of attractive and income-producing communities with the kind of shiny new townhouses and modern apartments that would bring middle-class families and well-to-do professionals back to the city” (O’Connor, 1993, p. 226). In these five short years, Boston UR tore down several neighborhoods, started replacing them with middle class/professional housing, destroying in the process much of the political and social fabric of the city.

 

After 1963, stressed by the proposed neighborhood projects, the city polarized; class/racial war followed. Community neighborhood organizations formed. Residents demanded involvement in decision-making. Local groups stopped projects (Southwest Corridor), and opposed and delayed many projects. Starting in 1965.continuing for several years, a series of mostly racial riots, burned down sections of the inner city. In 1966, voters elected another mayor, with a new approach to urban governance and a new way to provide development to Boston; it came in the form of a new style of community development.

 

 

 

Route 128

Route 128, more correctly pre-Route 128 Harvard-MIT, was the technology’s birthplace. Boston-Harvard-MIT grasped an initial advantage over other regions by dint of its well-established university relationships with the Defense Department and Washington DC. These relationships developed over two centuries and they crystalized around technology’s rise immediately previous to WWII. WWII holds the key to our understanding of pre-Route 128 new emerging sectors.

 

Harvard was the nation’s prime intellectual leader and “generator” of governmental/corporate elites.. By the twentieth century Harvard was Washington D.C. on the Charles River. War/Defense policy-makers had more links to Harvard, it seems, than to West Point or Annapolis. The Harvard Business School played a similar role for America’s top corporate leadership. Harvard trained the leadership that sent government contracts to the Boston area and founded new industry. Harvard had been doing this for a long time; Edward Land, for example, had spun off Polaroid (1937) from Harvard. Harvard’s other key sector-building contribution was to create the nation’s first venture capital firm (1946). With capital from the local insurance industry and the university, Georges Dariot and former MIT President Harvey Compton formed the American Research and Development Corporation, New England’s, and probably the nation’s first formal venture capital firm.

 

MIT had unique advantages also. Founded in 1861 to pursue “its uniquely practical focus …the orientation toward the needs and interest of the industrial community” (Lampe, 1988, p. 3) rendered MIT a university whose mission dovetailed with private innovation and applied commercial R&D. MIT also had a longstanding history of spinning off companies–as early as 1889 (Arthur D Little) and Edison’s Bell Telephone (1877). MIT proved to be the single most important launching pad for Route 128 firms, claiming that during the 1950’s and 1960’s it spun off over 100 startups from their research labs. Lincoln Labs, for example, spun off Data General, Raytheon and Digital Equipment. By 1986 MIT’s accelerators had spun off 400 firms since 1950 with sales in excess of $29b and employment of 175000 (Lampe, 1988, p. 12).

 

Interestingly, neither Harvard nor MIT wanted research on the campus itself. Each set up separate off-campus research laboratories. Nor did the university directly finance or invest in research. MIT (1955) concluded that “investing in start-up companies was too risky and not consistent with how ‘men of prudence, discretion, and intelligence manage their own affairs’…. [So] In spite of the university’s commitment to commercially relevant research, it kept firms at arm’s length^{” (Lampe, 1988, p. 4)}. Accordingly, MIT spun off-campus Lincoln Laboratory for Air Force-related research, followed by MITRE Corp, and Draper Laboratories—university accelerators in today’s parlance. Given that Route 128’s first span opened only in 1951, the separation of the university physically from the spin off laboratory accelerators was a defining characteristic of Route 128 experience.

 

Central to this spin off phenomenon is a “platform” company”. University research labs produced first generation platform companies that spun off second generation companies using the motherships’ technologies and processes. Platform companies spin off firms like a popcorn-maker pops popcorn. A platform product can potentially be used in a number of industries/sectors, not all of which actually exist when the product is first introduced. The organizational model that developed from the business culture of Route 128-platform firms retained their control over second generation spin offs, keeping them within its corporate structure as a subsidiary or “department”. This transformed the first-generation company into a vertically integrated “holding corporation”–a technology conglomerate (Saxenian, 1996). Those second-generation firms outside the conglomerate found it difficult to acquire scale-up financing other than from its corporate parent—who imposed its products and technology as a condition of financing on the second-generation firm. Entrepreneurs within technology behemoths may have had little recourse than leave the area to start a firm outside the conglomerate structure. Silicon Valley platform firms followed a different model with starkly different results—including “birthing” new sectors adjacent to the platform company.

 

The critical fuel behind Route 128, the Silicon Valley and Texas Instruments growth were federal research contracts and a world war. Federal contracts over decades paid for applied research to develop and construct specific prototype models (radar systems) –not basic research. Basic research had been developed decades previous (in some cases four decades previous). Like a fine wine, basic research must be carefully aged until a specific product is needed for which someone is willing to pay. Federal spending for basic research will likely employ your grandchildren. Researchers, previous to 1940, had already developed important breakthroughs and concepts, some equipment and specialized skills/processes and knowledge-mentoring relationships. In the 1920’s, for instance. MIT researchers started research on the minicomputer and in 1953 constructed, Whirlwind, the “world’s first reliable real time electronic digital computer. They were waiting to be used when a market developed.

 

Design was one thing, production was another. Commercialization and scale up production required yet another infrastructure to be readily available. The 65 colleges and universities in Boston area “provided a critical source of professional labor, including physicians, managers, and lawyers as well as engineers and scientists-the labor force and middle management needed to grow production from the innovation. The Boston area could provide both. The results of all this were pretty dramatic stuff. “By the late 1960’s high technology has taken firm root in Massachusetts, accounting for nearly 10% of total employment“ (Lampe, 1988, pp. 5-6).

 

Route 128, itself, is a limited-access circumferential highway that opened in 1951, allegedly the nation’s first. As early as 1955, Business Week referred to the highway in an article “New England Highway Upsets Old Way of Life” and called it the “Magic Semicircle“. By 1958 99 firms and 17000 workers had located along Route 128; by 1961 there were 169 firms, employing 24000 directly on the highway, and as many very close by. In 1965, MIT researchers counted 574 companies, and the number more than doubled in eight years. In 1972, there were 1212 firms (Lampe, 1988, p. 16). By the 1970’s, the “Massachusetts miracle” had created the nation’s leading center of electronics innovation.  The reader might remember this happened while New England’s textile industry was collapsing.

 

Sustained Innovation: a Second Wind?

Military contracts to the region, however, fell precipitously between 1967 and 1972–about 40% decline in real terms. The state lost 112,000 manufacturing jobs, 15% from high tech firms. Close to 30000 defense-related jobs were lost between 1970 and 1972 (Lampe, 1988, p. 17). Route 128 firms forced to wean themselves away from federal contracts shifted into production/sales to commercial consumer markets. The key to 128’s transition was the minicomputer. A second Massachusetts miracle began in the 1970’s as advances in engineering design, discovered during the Sixties, reduced computer size and cost while expanding capabilities Advances opened up new markets and innovated commercial applications creating demand for products Route 128 firms could supply. DEC, Wang, Raytheon and Honeywell scrambled to take advantage.

 

DEC’s (a 1957 spin off from Lincoln Lab) was the platform company. Its entrepreneur Kenneth Olson had developed a microcomputer Spun off in 1957 from Lincoln Lab Olson located DEC in an abandoned textile mill (not on Route 128). First on the market, DEC’s sales exploded. Fortune magazine (1986) declared Olsen as America’s most successful entrepreneur. DEC could have spun off lots of entrepreneurs and small firms, and to a certain extent it did. Data General spun off, becoming a DEC competitor. So did Silicon Valley’s Hewlett-Packard. But for the most part, DEC retained innovations within its corporate structure, became more rigid, and, for various reasons, less responsive to consumer demand. DEC tried to shape, if not compel, consumer demand to suit its research designs and products. That didn’t work—consumers wanted what consumers wanted.  Data General, using DEC technology, was the first to fail and was sold to EMC in 1998. The writing was on the wall. In 1998 DEC also was acquired by Compaq (a Texas Instruments spin off whose chief competitor in the PC market was another Texas firm, Dell). In 2002 Compaq was acquired by Hewlett Packard. The minicomputer had lost the battle to the PC. Technology had moved too fast for DEC. Massachusetts had lost its firms to Texas and California.

 

 

Former Big Cities Push Back the Shadows

 

The names, familiar, or not, are: Coleman Young of Detroit, Schaefer in Baltimore, Koch New York City, Caliguiri in Pittsburgh, Voinovich-Cleveland, St. Louis’s Schoemehl, and Griffin in my Buffalo were Teaford’s most prominent Messiah Mayors. To these names, one can add a Sixties survivor, Boston’s Kevin White. Chicago and Philadelphia (Rizzo a law and order, anti-busing police chief, conservative and populist, didn’t fit Teaford’s mold) missed the messiah mayor boat. Minneapolis with a weak mayor form of government and Cincinnati with a city manager were not in the running. Messiah Mayors demonstrate successful economic development in a crisis environment requires more than choosing the correct economic development strategy. It is a complete package including leadership, power-management, hard work, charisma, image, confrontation.

 

Messiah mayors had boosted the spirits of many urban dwellers and made them proud of their cities… [They] fashioned enough of an urban consensus to keep themselves in power … [and] eliminated some of the obstacles in the way of revitalization. These messiah mayors may not have worked as many miracles as they claimed, but they were generally adept enough … to keep up the illusion of success (Teaford, 1990, p. 307).

 

Their success required use of charisma to harness political and bureaucratic power. Most Messiah Mayors were attacked as bosses in that they constructed a new-style political machine based on city bureaucracies, projects, pork, jobs, and services to get them through elections. CETA public service jobs were great until 1982. On the whole, these mayors were not cerebral, or nice guys; they were aggressive, in your face, publicity-hounds and credit-takers who established a reputation for getting things done and inspiring confidence. Power and personality became intertwined. Policy-areas other than ED were vital, but ED was their meat and potatoes. Gruen was correct, downtown is the visible symbol of former Big City metropolitan viability and the CBD revitalization was a defining characteristic of Messiah Mayors.

 

Re-function the CBD, but first “Pay the Bills”

Messiah mayors embraced a fairly consistent set of ED strategies. In the late Seventies and Eighties several strategies were attempted. These included CBD revitalization (office, corporate HQs, downtown malls), festival, waterfront (and entertainment) districts, convention and tourism destinations, Eds and meds, sports stadiums, and cultural/arts districts. But the one they all had to follow before any other was to “pay the bills”–dealing effectively with the fiscal crisis. This required battling the unions and reducing budgets and public expenditures. Their success in this endeavor was measured by ratings from credit agencies–and by voters appreciative of a serious effort to keep taxes low.

 

By 1980 a big-city mayor was a success if he or she could just keep the city from going bankrupt. .. Thus deficit and debt figures were powerful answers to police officers threatening to strike or neighborhood groups demanding improved services… between 1977 and 1985 the number of municipal employees dropped in ten out of the twelve older central cities … three slashing their personnel more than 20 percent (Teaford, 1990, p. 263).

 

Cost-cutting, efficiency, wage stabilization, personnel reductions, and tax increases and were the dark side of the messiah mayor. Voters understood they were bankrupt, or on its precipice; the saving grace was austerity worked. In 1981, after six years, NYC reentered the money markets. In 1985 Koch retired the last of the federally-guaranteed debt. Voinovich massively reformed city administration, personnel management and fiscal management. An austerity program and bank loans at favorable terms, tax and utility fee hikes—and big layoffs. The city income tax was raised by 33%. In 1983 Cleveland reentered the national bond market, and in 1987 it paid off the last of its crisis debt and the state commission that had handled its finances disbanded.

 

A part of that solution was, in Teaford’s words, “a heavy strain of ballyhoo about the long-awaited arrival of central city renaissance, a rebirth that supposedly would soon fatten starved budgets and relieve residents of some of their tax burden”. (Teaford, 1990, p. 268) The central pillar of that ballyhoo relied on the visible physical redevelopment of the city

 

Rebuild the Core

Visible and believable city revitalization meant messiah mayors and economic developers returned, yet again, to physical redevelopment and public-private partnerships. They couldn’t call it urban renewal; mercifully UDAG and Rouse came along. Rouse’s first festival market project, Boston’s Faneuil Hall, was completed in 1976. It was so pioneering (inspired by San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square) and its success redefined urban renewal. The most popular and publicized physical redevelopment strategy was simply to hire Rouse and copy Boston’s Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market. Rouse prospered, becoming a modern-day Daniel Burnham. South Street Seaport in New York City (1982), Market East in Philadelphia, St Louis Union Station, Portland’s Pioneer Palace and Riverwalk Marketplace in New Orleans were other Rouse festival marketplaces built in the eighties. Some were never completed (Niagara Falls and Buffalo). What made it all possible for the cash-strapped cities was UDAG, the one remaining vestige of the Age of UR.

 

Rouse redefined UR into a mixed use waterfront/entertainment/development project anchoring the development with museums and tourist attractions. Baltimore’s, Rouse’s hometown, Harborplace Project (mid-1980’s) provided a good example. Residents and tourists used the facilities and enjoyed themselves. Redevelopment no longer was symbolized by displaced poor and minorities. Festival marketing attracted local middle-class spenders and tourists. Food, shopping, views, street entertainment, and a dollop of culture and art—a festival market and waterfront redevelopment was the ultimate mixed use district that redefined the inner city as safe and a fun place. Rouse had given urban renewal new meaning and a positive emotional attachment.

 

Projects of this period included: Detroit’s waterfront Renaissance Center, San Francisco’ Fisherman’s Wharf, Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square, Denver’s Laramer Square, Chicago’s Navy Pier, Atlanta’s Peachtree Plaza, Kansas City’s Crown Center, St. Louis Laclede’s Landing and Union Station, and New York’s South Street Seaport. A typical example, St Louis Center opened with two hundred shops, anchored at each end by a department store. The Union Station was a ninety year old rail depot and train shed with eighty shops, twenty-two restaurants, and a hotel. For the most part, they still remain today, interwoven into present day tourism strategy and urban fabric.

 

In their effort to rebuilt and refunction the CBD, former Big Cities caught a break. Cyclical growth in the commercial/office sector, driven by a national shift to a service economy, provided opportunities for CBD redevelopment. Commercial growth led to relocation of corporate and regional headquarters. Private sector office and HQ strategies helped offset the sustained decline of CBD retail, the resulting from the collapse of CBD department stores and the rise of “big box” specialty retail. Downtown ceased being the metro areas’ prime retail center. Instead, it would function as the administrative office and corporate headquarters function for the region. Mollenkopf’s 1983 concern, however, was valid: “some eastern cities have a rich supply of these activities (HQ and corporate, banking offices)—cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Boston. Others, particularly the industrial cities, like Buffalo, Youngstown, Toledo, Gary and the others … do not” (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 233).

 

No matter the city, examples of big name private sector CBD projects can be found. For the most part these projects were natural and organic, not the consequence of ED. Chicago’s Sears Tower went up; Milwaukee built its First Wisconsin Center. From a 1973 20% commercial vacancy rate, NYC dramatically—and rapidly—lowered it to 4% by 1978. It continued through 1986 as the city opened 45 million more square feet of commercial space. A similar office boom spurred Caliguiri’s “Renaissance II” in Pittsburgh that equaled the total square footage of the previous two decades. Cleveland constructed the forty-five story Sohio Building and Cincinnati a new Proctor and Gamble’s corporate HQ. The Baltimore Sun declared 1984 “as the year of the crane” (Teaford, 1990, pp. 269-72). Office and headquarter commercial growth, however, was not a universal panacea. Detroit’s Renaissance Center, headquarters of General Motors, was, at best a mixed success–by 1983 its debt/ownership restructured.

 

Messiah mayors used tax-exempt bonds to enhance arts and museums.  Pittsburgh and the Heinz Foundation established a mixed use cultural district in the Golden Triangle, Cleveland’s Playhouse Square and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame captured the headlines and attracted crowds, Baltimore’s Mayor Schaefer developed in his signature Inner Harbor project, the National Aquarium, and Buffalo’s Shea’ and Kleinhans Music Hall are examples of culture and theater as elements of urban revitalization. The image, if not a reasonable reality, of downtown re-functioning was forged during these years. Partly this was made possible thru a revolutionary, and media-catching redevelopment, Gruen’s “downtown mall”.

 

In the eighties, a number of central cities .built regional downtown malls to support remaining department stores and provide ridership to mass transit lines built in the early 1970’s. “Supporters of downtown malls hoped that they would do for the central business district what regional malls did for suburbia: provide attractive, safe and comfortable environments for shoppers; restore economic vitality, and perform vital social, cultural and community functions. Arguably, such malls were a poor imitation of the more grandiose plans proposed by Gruen in the late 50’s and early 60”s, nevertheless they were popular and in vogue with public opinion. West and Orr uncovered nearly 20 such downtown malls; another 8 were built in central cities outside the CBD (West & Orr, 2003, pp. 194-5). For the most part these malls were constructed in the Northeast and Midwest (Boston, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Columbus Ohio, Bronx, Indianapolis, St Louis, Cleveland, and Providence, Buffalo and St Paul.

 

Sports and Stadiums

Sports stadiums, despite any claims to the contrary, are not job generators. The real function of a sports stadium is (1) image, perceived city residents and leaders as urban competitiveness and (2) a ton of just plain folks getting together to watch their heroes, make fools of themselves, and have fun—often with their families. The purposes behind sports stadiums drive us more refined folk nuts. In academia and think tank land there is a body of literature (Delaney, 2003) devoted to cataloging the job creation failures and taxpayer subsidies, marking these “redevelopment” projects as abject failures, fat cat capitalist greed, and a distortion of true public purposes. (Full disclosure: As an ED CEO, my agency built/financed/managed major league stadiums—I am proud of it). Rich capitalist owners should build their own facilities but sports arenas are complicated affairs for an economic developer.

 

Stadiums address the needs of community residents to feel proud and garner respect for their home town–home team–their home city. There’s nothing wrong with civic patriotism! Rich Folk civic patriotism builds opera halls and Modern Arts Museums that more normal folk won’t go near. Sports provide the social and often psychological glue vital to a positive community and metropolitan fabric. And more than that, a sports team that moves and leaves an empty stadium is a perceived rejection of that community, quite likely a real loss of national status and competitiveness, and a visible structural testament of the city’s fall from greatness. Failure to update, modernize, create a sports sizzle experience falls to the public arena. The failure of public officials to provide a competitive stadium will cost elections, generate intense and never-ending media criticism, and create a sense of public sector incompetence held by large segments of a community’s population. Sports stadiums are an integral element of an effective strategy of urban revitalization.

 

So, no surprise, messiah mayors built sports stadiums as a very conscious effort to generate approval and the perception of urban revitalization.

 

A big city had to have big-time sports, and a giant domed stadium [and an exploding score box, luxury boxes, cheerleaders and entertainment] could supposedly lure business and visitors just like an up-to-date convention center. Mammoth sports arenas, elaborate meeting facilities, and vibrant festival marketplaces all seemed to spell visitors dollars and a fun reputation for a traditionally begrimed urban core. They were all part of the promotional package of the late 1970’s and the 1980′ (Teaford, 1990, p. 276)

 

Minneapolis started the decade off building a domed stadium to keep the Vikings and Twins in town. The Vikings existing stadium, “the old Met” or the “Ice Palace”, in Bloomington, a suburb—now the site of the Mall of America, became vulnerable in the late Sixties when the new AFL/NFL merger expressed strong discontent with stadiums less than 50,000 seats. After more than a decade of anxiety and debate, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, a domed stadium, opened in 1982[xxxvii] (since torn down and replaced in 2014 by U.S. Bank Stadium—apparently stadiums do not enjoy a long useful life). Allegedly the politics behind the HHH came into place with the opening of rival Detroit’s domed (Hartman, 1974)stadium, the Pontiac Silverdome. In that instance the central city stole the stadium from a suburb.

 

Baltimore suffered through a reverse experience. The Colts in 1984 left town [literally in the middle of the night—after being threatened with foreclosure] for Indianapolis. Schaefer scrambled, not only to find a replacement, but to retain the Orioles. The solution was the two stadium ($235 million) Camden Yards project–a project that thirty years later is considered a success and a Schaefer achievement by local residents–and voters. Cleveland, of course, migrated to Baltimore in the 1990’s making the project the success it was. The St Louis Cardinals moved to Phoenix and the Los Angeles Rams eventually moved to St Louis during the 1990’s as well. Watching all these public relation disasters, Coleman Young rushed to modernize Tiger Stadium, finding big bucks in a very distressed city to keep them in place. While I support stadium construction with public dollars, I admit these case studies are little more than an ED soap opera.

 

Convention Centers and Tourism

Dennis Judd, concerned with “the industry without a smokestack”, and its role in downtown revitalization and intercity competition, found (1960’s) about sixty-five American cities operated convention bureaus to attract and assist convention groups. By 1977, their number increased to approximately one hundred, and doubled again by 1983.Judd observed a 1972 survey uncovered seventy cities that had opened, had under construction or were actively planning construction of multi-million dollar convention centers. Municipal leaders as of 1978-1979  were Chicago, New York, San Francisco, New Orleans and Washington DC, the top five in conventions–but New York, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles in number of attendees (Judd, 1984, pp. 388-93). Judd is not comfortable convention centers are a sound economic development strategy; nor was Chester Hartman who asserts that “most large convention centers lose money” and not all cities that compete ought to (Hartman, 1974, p. 165). The industry appears highly concentrated; winners win big, but losers … well, lose.

 

In 1977, St Louis opened its new convention center, the nation’s tenth largest, and the race was on. Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Jacob Javits Center in New York City were enormous convention centers built within nine years of St Louis’s opening. By that time St Louis dropped to nineteenth place. Chicago enlarged McCormick Place and retained its number one status, beating out the twenty-two acre, 90000 occupancy, Javits Center. Cleveland and Cincinnati revamped/expanded facilities to compete in the national convention and meetings industry. Detroit built Cobo Hall and Boston the Hynes Convention Center. The approach did not inevitably generate success; some cities failed miserably in attracting tourists, filling hotel beds, and signing up conventions and meetings. Other cities made it work: Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco and New Orleans (‘the usual suspects”) did fine. A few medium-size cities competed effectively at a regional level. Local publicity campaigns helped, but ran out of dough; absent the sizzle we were left with the gristle. Over the next decades, many convention centers/hotels turned into chronic open sores in the downtown fabric (Judd, 1984, pp. 388-400).

 

A remarkable initiative that redefined state-level tourism is remembered to this day: I LUV NY[xxxviii]. The iconic tourism campaign was launched in 1977 by New York City and later picked up by New York State. The campaign, adapted from an earlier Montreal Canada advertising campaign, caught on. City after city developed a high-priced media image attraction strategy touting each city as the destination place of a life time. Often these tourism campaigns were turned on their head and advertised to local citizens and metropolitan residents: Buffalo’s “Talking Proud“, “I Love New York“, “My Kind of Town” and Detroit’s “Super City USA and the Four Tops singing “Do it in Detroit” appealed to out-of-towners and local residents. These strategies complemented the Messiah Mayor’s need for faith in the city’s future and need to deliver visible achievements to justify that faith.

 

In the Eighties tourism and conventions meshed with corporate HQ, festival markets, waterfront redevelopment, cultural districts and sports stadiums—they all countered the shift from manufacturing into the service economy—demonstrated that former Big Cities could compete. A new urban life style, sports teams. TV shows (Mary Tyler Moore’s Minneapolis, WKRP Cincinnati) hinted at today’s “branding”. A viable tourism program affirmed a resident’s hope that her city was attractive to others. Emerging from the era of Big City collapse this was economic development at its best. Capturing this reaffirmed pride, an article in Saturday Review explained “the big city, our big city, is not indispensable to our self-esteem, so much so we take a chauvinist delight in luring a Peter Rose to our ball team, or a Zubin Mehta to our symphonic podium … our thirst for urban display is overriding the less glamorous priorities of health, welfare, and education.”[xxxix]

 

Stability Achieved

Several trends developed from the 1980’s Messiah Mayors, but a rough, surprisingly durable stabilization followed for former Bi Cities after 1990. They didn’t die after all. Periodically, the media would tout a “back to the city” movement—usually by young professionals (never families)—and CBD and central city population would tick upward. One or another former Big City was cited by the Media and Policy World as the decade’s comeback kid. Gentrification articles were sure to follow. And then bad times hit and the numbers went down. Comeback kids faded into the mists. Cynical? Perhaps?

 

That messiah mayors favored CBD revitalization in partnership with a corporate sector did not necessarily mean they were at war with neighborhoods. Jimmy Griffin was an exception to this, but even he was forced by the city council to fund neighborhood opponents with CD dollars. Coleman Young, despite his labor union and neighborhood activist past was more extreme in his CBD orientation than most messiah mayors. Poletown is testimony to that. At the other extreme was Boston’s Kevin White who pioneered in former Big City a neighborhood-based-political strategy. White told the city council that “for too long urban renewal in Boston has emphasized rebirth of the downtown area at the expense of the neighborhoods‘” (Teaford, 1990, p. 240). His first two administrations set up neighborhood “little city halls” (terminated in his third, however). Messiah mayors had to deal with CD neighborhood movement during their tenure. Pittsburgh’s maverick mayor, Peter Flaherty in 1969 vowed “As a mayor I will concentrate on the neighborhoods, rather than on the downtown section”. St Louis Mayor Alfonso Cervantes stressed two “pressing priorities” for his administration— “fight against crime and the fight to preserve our neighborhoods”. Neighborhoods were an established component of most Messiah-era redevelopment. City councils in Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Minneapolis protected neighborhoods and urged their redevelopment as core to their city’s ED strategy.

 

But another, less comforting trend could also be observed. The two region Big City hegemony had seemingly drifted apart. The Midwest, Great Lakes states especially, was now the Rust Belt, many cities labeled as “legacy cities” ranging from chronic decline so a slow, fragile growth in the best of economies. In the Midwest farm belt rural decline was noticeable, but what really screamed out was deindustrialization hit the Midwest harder than the East Coast and Mid-Atlantic. The Midwest was the nation’s industrial heartland, and while as explained earlier, deindustrialization did not really mean wholesale loss of manufacturing jobs, manufacturing sectors were facing stiff global headwinds, and no longer as attractive to post-1990 generational cohorts. Comparative advantage helped our East Coast financial centers, but not so much the industrial heartland.

 

The development of the “new auto alley” was followed by Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” documentary about GM and Flint Michigan. Michigan and Detroit became ground zero for the American auto industry transition. During the 1980’s the Chicago metro area lost 188000 heavy industry jobs (-33%). Rouse waterfront and festival markets, lacking sufficient discretionary income, a more profound city/suburban distinction (race), and outside the tourist trade did markedly less well; Toledo’s Portside waterfront project failed outright. The Midwest was making the transition to the service/ finance/technology economy less well than its eastern neighbors (Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 1993). It was a much harder slog for economic developers in the Midwest and Great Lakes.

 

Between 1990 and 2000 average metro population growth for the seventeen Big Cities of the North and Midwest was almost 8% (only Buffalo and Pittsburgh metros lost population); central cities declined 2.3%. (Table 15-2, p. 270). Thirteen of seventeen metro areas increased population between 2000 and 2006 (Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Boston lost metro population). New York City came roaring back. Washington D.C. grew the most jobs. After stabilization in the 1990’s, however, central cities mostly pulled backed between 2000 and 2006. Of the seventeen, only (in order of growth) Kansas City, New York, Washington D.C., New York City, Columbus and Indianapolis enjoyed any pre-Great Recession population growth. Detroit and St. Louis lost the most (McDonald, 2008, pp. 270, Table 15-2, pp. 308-310 Tables 17-1 and 2). McDonald concludes “recession and jobless recovery have placed in jeopardy the continuation of the [former Big City] urban rebirth of the 1990’ and hampered of … central cities to turn the corner” (McDonald, 2008, p. 313).

 

Somewhere between 33 and 35% of the population lived in our largest cities (nationally). It has ranged around that since 1930. Our faithful Big City chronicler Jon Teaford asserted thepost-1980’s gap between Big City and its suburb never closed—“instead central cities pursued a different path … a distinctive market niche that would distinguish them from suburban competitors”. The central city would not be the monolithic “hub of all metropolitan life”, rather it characterized itself as the “urban way of life different from the prevailing suburban norm” (Teaford, 2006, p. 166). If so one might make a case that an unspoken de facto polycentric metro area had emerged from the Big City collapse of the Seventies.

 

Big City hegemony had passed into our history, but former Big Cities and their-(de facto) polycentric metro areas had not! A rough, fragile, uneven stabilization of former Big Cities had emerged from the implosion of the 1970’s. Messiah Mayors had managed to keep central cities afloat and restored fiscal and some functional stability to jurisdictional economic bases—but population mobility was still working against them. With occasional blips and bleeps, exceptions that prove the rule, this grudging stability of Big Cities and their metro areas has been a foundation of our contemporary economic/community development worlds.

 

 

 

 

 

Asking For Trouble: Two Cities as Neoliberalism

Serving three terms as New York City mayor provides plenty of opportunity to be criticized. The most visible and earliest two cities critique was made in Julian Brash’s, Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City, but the concept has also been the center point behind Danny Katch’s “Mayor Michael Bloomberg: A Depreciation”, International Socialist Review, Issue #90 and Dan Steinberg, “Planning the Neo-liberal City”, New Politics, Vol. XIII, No. 4. To the Curmudgeon, the unifying element in the wide diversity of luxury city/two cities critiques is class, i.e. social class–rich versus poor–that kind of thing. The second unifying dimension is that proponents of Luxury City/two cities critique view Bloomberg as a “neo-liberal”. The two elements tend to travel together.

As background for the reader, “two cities” proponents view capitalist corporate elites as using the city to serve their self-interests– i.e. make a profit. This can be done by their controlling the political class elected to lead the city, or secondly, to physically grad a hold of key elements of the Mayor’s economic development strategy (usually physical redevelopment, deregulation and tax cuts) so the corporate elites can transform the city, urban-renewal style, so that portions of the city are physically redeveloped to build new projects for these elites. In this physical redevelopment, existing residents, the poor mostly, are removed, displaced, and uprooted to new areas unwillingly. The rich achieve their profits by manipulating urban America to the inevitable detriment the poor (sometimes the middle class and mom and pop business as well). The real estate and developer community (FIRE) are the most commonplace culprits–but big business capitalism is the ultimate cause of the problem. This generalized description of the two cities critique overlaps, very, very closely with the standard critique used in recent years against something called Neo-Liberals and Neo-Liberalism. [From this point on we will not use hyphens in neoliberal or neoliberalism except in quotes]

So the next issue is what the heck is neoliberalism? First of all, despite the existence of a very large amount of literature on the topic, there is not an easily understood and consensual definition. Almost everybody who writes about or uses the “concept”/economic approach defines it to fit their particular approach. It is fruitless for us in this relatively brief review to enter into a precise definition.  Investopedia defines neoliberalism as:

An approach to economics and social studies in which control of the economic factors is shifted from the public sector to the private sector. Drawing upon principles of neoclassical economics, neo-liberalism suggests that governments reduce deficit spending, limit subsidies, reform tax law to broaden the tax base, remove fixed exchange rates, opening up markets to trade by limiting protectionism, privatizing state run business, allow private property and back deregulation.

Neo-liberalism first jelled during the late 1930’s and came into prominence in the post-World War II period. In more current days, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are held to be examples of neo-liberals in office. Some even called Clinton a neo-liberal. That’s the problem with a fairly loose set of definitions. The thing is most active politicians and economists do not define themselves as neo-liberals or advocates of neo-liberalism, they are labeled as neo-liberals by others. One does not go down to the Auto Bureau and register as a neo-liberal; the usual procedure is to read in an academic journal or magazine that you are, in fact, a neo-liberal. Few outside academia, the disciplines of economics/planning/ and maybe political science specifically have even heard the word before. Being called a neo-liberal is not meant to be a compliment, like neo-Keynesian is. Nobody in their right mind wants to be willingly called a neo-liberal. It’s like admitting to be an old-style “robber baron” or the banker (Mr. Potter-Lionel Barrymore) in “It’s a Wonderful Life”. “Two cities” is a proxy for “Bloomberg is a neo-liberal” and the expression bridges the gap between academia and the voter.

If the proponents of the luxury city/two cities approach are the opposite of this, then we can reverse the above definition and at minimum suggest their core issue is to shift control of “the economic factors” from the private sector to the public sector. Essentially for those opposed to neoliberals and neoliberalism, the private sector, economics and the economy, should be subject to democratic controls and accountability and the ends of economics, the practical results of economic growth ought to be to help the citizen and resident as opposed to the corporations and the individual capitalists. Antagonists of neoliberalism are usually upset because the normal way neoliberalism operates is that the private sector indirectly is able to dominate, or manipulate, the public sector, i.e. government, thereby distorting elections and overturning the more legitimate ends of public policy. So, the neoliberals get their proxies to run for office, and then they get their proxies to intermediate with the citizen and resident.  Government, in varying degrees, is made into a tool of the neoliberals and government policy serves, not the average citizen, but the interests of the neoliberals and their corporations.

But Bloomberg screwed things up and got himself elected three times as mayor. Bloomberg eliminated the middleman. Bloomberg, “the Neo-Liberal”, would directly and legally run the city government. Therein lies the nexus of the current Bloomberg’s luxury city/two cities critique. Bloomberg, by sheer dint of his biography fits is the personification of the neoliberal. The problem with Bloomberg as mayor, however, is that he departs from the conventional model by which the neoliberal is supposed to operate by directly and personally controlling the city. Bloomberg is his own intermediary with the citizen, voter and tax payer. That he was elected for three terms is not only an outrage, but a reality that demands some explanation.

Accordingly, Brash and the others allude to “the Bloomberg Way” so to describe the neoliberal as mayor.  “Got himself elected” is the right choice of words, because to the luxury city/two cities proponents Bloomberg bought these elections literally–and the third term he not only bought, but compelled city government to make the legal adjustments which made that possible. There is some truth to these charges–that Bloomberg fits the description of a billionaire “plutocrat”, that he spent so much in the elections and was a shade heavy-handed the third term elections–provides a level of acceptability to the larger argument. Once in office the independent fortune of the mayor provided Bloomberg some insulation against the populist media as well as access to key private and public decision-makers which was so important in his economic development program. Also Bloomberg was able to recruit and sometimes pay for the “best and the brightest” to staff his administration. The ability to finance his own election was critical to his independence. Plutocracy yes. But also a mayor able to keep some distance from constituencies, such as unions and neighborhoods. He was the “mayor who couldn’t be bought”–or controlled by traditional New York City powers that be. But if having lots of money and using it to get elected got Bloomberg off on the wrong foot to begin with, the obvious reality that he easily won his elections raises disturbing questions. Why did voters vote for him being the most basic?

The explanation was Bloomberg the man and his style of leadership–“the Bloomberg Way”:

‘The Bloomberg Way’ refers to an ostensibly pragmatic, non-ideological approach to urban governance that places a premium on management skill, technical expertise, and data-driven evaluation. In its core formulation, the mayor serves as CEO, the city government is a corporation, business and residents are clients and customers, and the city itself is a product to be branded, marketed and developed, On this logic, the city’s bottom line depends on its ability to generate more property tax revenue, which therefore is a primary consideration when it comes to land use policy and economic development. The flip side, of course, is that distributional concerns–for example, the quality of jobs produced and the impacts of public actions on the stability of neighborhoods and fragile networks of small businesses–are of secondary importance at best. [Steinberg, “Planning the Neo-liberal City”, p. 2]

Bloomberg’s vision of making New York City a ‘luxury product’–a high status habitat of waterfront playgrounds and neo-artisan style designed to attract the international elite and keep the local middle class wanting to stay despite the sticker shock. On the other [hand] this program of urban renewal for the rich has barely touched the majority of the city’s people who have fallen deeper into poverty and near-poverty. [Danny Katch: “Michael Bloomberg” p. 3]

Brash charges that Bloomberg the neoliberal mayor and his brand of neoliberal economic development rejected the right of those disadvantaged by Bloomberg’s policies and strategies from defending themselves through political conflict and opposition. NIMBY, a traditional enemy of economic developers, in his mind is the legitimate opposition of those hurt, just as gentrification, usually viewed as success by an economic developer, is viewed by the two cities advocate as a defeat for those residents displaced or disadvantaged by the success of the more wealthy/middle class moving into the neighborhood. Hudson Yards and the Atlantic Project are victories of the corporate rich over the residents and small business in these areas– and are not for the greater good of the City as a whole. In this dialogue there is a battle between technocrats and the people–between experts with their plans and strategies—and the community. There is a whole lot of existentialism going on here! This is a circle that is not going to be squared any time soon.

Bloomberg (a member of the Transnational Capitalist Class) and his “best and brightest” administration (the Professional-Managerial Class, in our case Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development) took over through elections which Bloomberg “bought” and used government to cram down through planning, economic development projects/incentives and branding a set of policy goals and programs which ran counter to the interests of the average citizen, the lower classes, small mom and pop business, immigrants, and neighborhoods of color. Bloomberg advanced the interests of his neoliberal chums (transnational capitalism) directly by controlling government himself. De Blasio, in adopting major tenets of the luxury city/two cities critique, placed himself, his campaign, and his future Administration as a departure of the neoliberal domination of city government. He would require politics, economics, planning, and economic development to serve the interests of those outside the neoliberal capitalist framework.  Whether or not all this is an attack on specific Bloomberg’s economic development program and strategy is unclear–at least to the Curmudgeon.

Now whether that is what the voters actually voted for–well, that is another matter. Bloomberg wasn’t defeated; he was termed out. No doubt, after twelve years in office, many simply wanted a new face and a new approach and in a one party city, De Blasio was the guy who came out on top.

[1] Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (3^rd Ed) (New York, Macmillan Publishing Co, 1983), pp. 262-263.

[2] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., pp. 55-56.

[3] Raymond A. Mohl, The New City, op. cit. p. 79.

[4] Miller and Melvin, the Urbanization of Modern America, op. cit. pp. 140-141.

[5] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p. 143.

[6] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 108.

 

[7] Try Scott

[8] William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins Press, 1989), pp. 101-102. This case study is principally drawn from his chapter 5, “The Struggle for an Urban Park and Boulevard System in Kansas City”.

[9] William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, op. cit., pp. 102-103. An 1875 charter reform permitted Kansas City to exercise eminent domain. The only structural vehicle, however, authorized to use that power was the Real Estate Board, which concentrated on streets and roads and was populated by engineers less enamored with arts and beauty, and more mindful of expense.

[10] William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, op. cit., p. 109.

[11] William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, op. cit., p. 139. The Harrisburg case study is also drawn from Wilson: Chapter 6 “An Elite Campaign for Beauty and Utility in Harrisburg”.

[12] Blackford, op. cit. pp. 40-41.

[13] The San Francisco City Beautiful experience will be discussed in a future chapter on the West. The experience of Portland and Seattle will also be assessed at that time as well. San Francisco is inserted into this chapter as it is important in understanding the legacy of Burnham and the total City Beautiful.

[14] Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit. p. 25

[15] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p.144.

[16] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., pp.144-145.

 

[17] Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, op. cit., p.145.

 

[18] The reader should clearly understand that the following discussion regarding state constitutions and the interpretation of key economic development related constitutional sections and concepts by state courts is only one (a) piece of the policy-making puzzle. The same can be said of our assertion this discussion is relevant to the transmission of political culture, our two ships, through generations. There is nothing casual or determinative about these factors. We assert only that we believe them to be important, meaningful and a part of the explanation. Also, by implication this perspective is without doubt state-based and inherently will display considerable variation and some diffusion over time and geography. This perspective will need additional study to be complete. It is evident to the Curmudgeon that verification of this discussion will not be statistical or even math-based as these methodologies are not sensitive to the distinctions, definitions and the passage of time.

[19] The concept is certainly critical to tax abatement, eminent domain, and public lending and business climate and structurally the involvement of private sector in economic policy-making is also affected.

[20] Robert J. Tilden, “Public Inducements of Industrial Location: A Lesson from Massachusetts” Maine Law Review, p. 14; see also David E. Pinsky, State Constitutional Limitations on Public Industrial Financing: A Historical and Economic Approach, University of Pennsylvania Law  Review (1963), pp.. 277-284 and Columbia Law Review, Volume 59 (1959), pp- 619-623. A more recent legal review of gifts provisions in state constitutions cites that in 2011 forty six states had some form of a gift provision in their state constitution. See Nicholas J. Houpt, “Shopping for State Constitutions: Gift Clauses as Obstacles to State Encouragement of  Carbon Sequestration”, Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, Volume 36, Number 2 p. 379ff–see footnote 117; see also, Richard Briffault, The Disfavored Constitution: State Fiscal Limits and State Constitutional Law, Rutgers Law Journal. Volume 34.  907 and Ralph  L. Finlayson,  State Constitutional Prohibitions Against Use of Public Financial Resources in Aid of Private Enterprises, Emerging Issues in State Constitutional Law, Volume 1 (1988).

[21] Tilden, op. cit. p. 15.”… the application of the rule has grown in vigor through the years, so that it continues today as a controlling force in dealing with the expenditure of public funds”… In it lies the key to understanding the position of the commonwealth toward business inducements”. The original Lowell decision involved eminent domain.

[22] Opinion of the Justices, 337, 781, 150 N.E. 2d 693, 696-97 (1958)-Tilden, p. 16.

[23] An even more restrictive definition was included in the Washington state constitution approved in 1889 included Article VIII, sections 5 and 7, “prohibit the state and its political subdivisions from loaning state money or credit, and prevent the gifting of public money or property, to any private entity, unless necessary to support the poor and infirm”. David d. Martin, “Washington State Constitutional Limitations on Gifting of Funds to Private Enterprise: A Need for Reform”, Seattle University Law Review, Volume 20, p. 200. This is without doubt a more perfect expression of Progressivist values in a state constitution.

[24] Tilden, op. cit. p.3.

[25] The “Back Bay Development Corporation” as Opinion of the Justices, 332 Mass 769, 126 N.E.2nd 795 (1955)

[26] Robert E. Beck, “The 1965 Maine Municipal Industrial and Recreational Obligations Act”, Maine Law Review, p. 25.

[27] Opinion of the Justices, 58 Me. 590-91 (1871) found in Beck, op. cit. p. 27.

[28] Allen v. Inhabitants of Jay, 60 Me. 124, 133 (1872), found in Beck, op. cit. p. 28

[29] Beck, op. cit. p 32.

[30] Beck, op. cit. p 32.

[31] Koistinen, “Public Policy” op. cit. p. 342.

[i] This is the famous Talleyrand of Congress of Vienna fame. Visiting Pennsylvania in 1790m he entered into a land speculation that founded Bellefonte.

[ii] Pennsylvania voters since 1790 have approved four state constitutions (1790, 1838, 1873, and 1967).

[iii] See also, Judith M. Diamondstone, “Philadelphia’s Municipal Corporation, 1701-1776,” Pennsylvania Magazine, XC (April, 1966), pp. 183-201; Edward P. Allinson and Boise Penrose, “The City Government of Philadelphia“, Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, V, (Baltimore, 1887), pp. 14-33.

[iv] Winthrop served twelve terms as Governor (never Mayor of Boston which at that time was a town). If Winthrop has an image today, it is as an inflexible, sexless, staunchly conservative Puritan. In his day, however, Winthrop was a moderate authoritarian, not mean-spirited (he warned Roger Williams secretly to get the heck out of Salem, and was criticized for being too lenient with Anne Hutchinson). He outlived five wives, and was father of eight, maybe nine, children–many sadly dying young –as did his first four wives. Upon landing at Logan Airport, think of Winthrop—he owned the land.

[v] Approved by the Massachusetts General Court in March 1636. Cities were latecomers to New England. New Haven was the first in 1784, Boston, 1822, New Hampshire the 1840’s, and Springfield in 1852. Hartford is a city/town consolidation.

[vi] Moravians, religious refugees, founded settlements exclusively for themselves. They carefully planned their towns, the first being Bethlehem in 1741 Pennsylvania (followed by several other Pennsylvania boroughs) and a second set in North Carolina, the town of Economy in 1753 and Salem in 1766—others followed.

[vii] Unitarianism first appeared in Lithuania and, of all places, Transylvania in the mid-1500’s.Traveling to London, then to New England, it was first preached in Boston’s King Chapel in 1784. Inclined toward Deism (which rejects religion as a source of authority, but asserts through reason and science the existence of a God can be discovered), Unitarianism, from its earliest days, appealed to the wealthy and intellectual. In 1805 Harvard taught its first course in Unitarian theology. As New England Unitarianism evolved, it morphed into “transcendental Unitarianism” (from German liberal theology) associated with Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendental Unitarians stressed the essential goodness of mankind and adopted a more intellectual, semi-secular humanistic approach.

[viii] Baltzell’s observation was supported by no less than John Adams who wrote in his Defense of the Constitution: “Go into every village in New England, and you will find that the office of justice of the peace, and even the place of representative, which has ever depended only on the freest election of the people, have generally descended from generation to generation, in three or four families at most” (Baltzell, p. 170).

[ix] Samuel Eliot Morrison described this elite fusion as the marriage between “the wharf and the waterfall“. In an 1861 novel, Elsie Venner (1861), Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. dubbed the new business elite the “Boston Brahmin“. Holmes’s novel characterized this elite as “harmless, inoffensive, and untitled”, with houses by Bulfinch, their monopoly on Beacon Street, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of their mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness“. Our description of Puritanism’s evolution is indebted to O’Connor’s, the Hub: From Town to City.

[x] Quincy, a former Congressman, a strong Federalist and a stolid Brahmin was quite the charismatic personae. Related to John and John Quincy Adams (Abigail’s mother was a Quincy), Quincy devoted his life to politics, subsequently served six terms as Mayor leaving to become President of Harvard for seventeen years.

[xi] Filenes. Boston’s long-lived prestigious department store was founded by William Filene, a German-Jewish immigrant in 1881. Edward, born in 1860 Salem left Harvard to run the family business (with his brother Abraham Lincoln Filene). Filene opened up his famous “Bargain Basement”. While a staunch proponent of Taylor’s scientific (treat them like an ox) management, he instituted a profit-sharing plan, a minimum wage for women, forty hour work week, paid vacations, health clinic and entered into collective bargaining arbitration with his company union. He also formed a savings and loan association for his employees. Filene was ousted from the Filene’s active management, retaining title of President. A founding member of the newly-merged Boston Chamber (Ritchie-led) in 1911 and in the same year the leading proponent behind America’s first Workmen’s Compensation Law (Massachusetts). He regularly corresponded with a diverse assortment of national leaders, including Woodrow Wilson, Mahatma Gandhi, and Vladimir Lenin. The Boston Plan, Plan – 1915, was his idea.

[xii] Codman’s son Charles was General George Patton’s chief aide during World War II. His part was played in the 1970 movie ‘Patton’ by Paul Stevens.

[xiii]“Woodbourne and the Boston 1915 Movement”, Jamaica Plain Historical Society www.jphs.org/20thcentury/woodbourne-and-the-boston-1915-movement.html

[xiv] Founding organizations were the Associated Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants Association, and the Boston Bar Association. Louis Brandeis was a chief founder.

[xv] Hazleton, meant to be Hazelton, was misspelled at incorporation—and as we say, the rest was history.

[xvi] Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York, (New York McGraw-Hill, 1989); Alyn Brodsky, the Great Mayor: Fiorello LaGuardia and the Making of the City of New York (New York, Truman Talley, 2003); and Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013).

[xvii] http://www.baltimorehousing.org/75th_timeline

[xviii]  http://www.cphabaltimore.org/accomplishments/; Katharine Lyall, A Bicycle Built for Two, op. cit., p.22

[xix] In 1942 Met Life was the largest private corporation in the United States (assets in excess of $6 billion (1942 dollars). Ecker was a long-time Progressive-style housing advocate; he linked philanthropy with housing reform to build housing for both workers and low income.

[xx] Moses is quoted as saying delegates wanted to be “in mid-Manhattan, with the restaurants, hotels, and the flesh-pots, and all the rest of it”, Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects, op. cit., p. 38.

[xxi] Textile mill towns were similar to sawmill towns created in other parts of the South. Although the cotton mill inspired crowd-sourcing financing campaigns, sawmill towns apparently did not; northern investors graciously stepped up to the plate instead.

[xxii] Manufacturer’s Record, XXXII (December 24, 1897), p. 335, C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, op. cit. p. 307. Arkwright Club membership consisted of New England’s cotton and woolen CFO/treasurers.

[xxiii] U.S. Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2 (Washington D.C., 1975) p. 666;

[xxiv] David Koistinen, “Public Relations in Deindustrializing New England: Accenting the Positive in Deindustrializing New England” (Business and Economic History On-Line, Volume 3, 2005, p. 3 (www.thebhe.org)

[xxv] Boston Chamber of Commerce, The Industrial Supremacy of New England: A Glimpse of the Present Situation of New England’s Industries (Boston, 1921), pp. 3, 6

[xxvi]David Koistinen, “Public Relations in Deindustrializing New England: Accenting the Positive in Deindustrializing New England” Business and Economic History On-Line Volume 3, 2005, p. 4 and p. 10 (www.thebhe.org)

[xxvii] Massachusetts Department of Labor and Industries, Census of Manufacturers in Massachusetts

[xxviii] The Massachusetts Association for Manufacturers opposed wage competition would increase unionization.

[xxix] “In nine Dixie states during this period, mean weekly benefits were $15.55, with an average maximum duration of 16.9 weeks. Bay State benefits averaged $23.66 with 23 week duration. Massachusetts, the cheapest of the six New England states, was lower than New York and other Mid-Atlantic states. Koistinen, “Public Policy” op. cit. p. 331.

[xxx] MBDC morphed into a New England-wide nonprofit SBA certified lender. http://www.bdcnewengland.com.

[xxxi] Kris Hudson &Anupreeta Das, “Mayoral Mission: Rescue Warren Buffett’s Bad Investment“, WSJ, p.1.

[xxxii] Chap. 297 Mass Acts & Resolves of 1954 “To Permit Economic Development of the Community”. The industrial development commission was legislatively formalized in 1961 (1961 Act Chap 40, Section 8a) and amended in 1967.

[xxxiii] John F. Kennedy, “New England and the South“, the Atlantic Monthly, January, 1954.

[xxxiv] In 1973, Philadelphia Movement merged with Philadelphia Partnership, becoming Greater Philadelphia Partnership.

[xxxv] Curley ran a scheme where each year business got obtain one year tax abatement (in 1949 that scheme eliminated 11.6% of Boston’s entire tax levy). Few records were kept, and those that were found were allegedly written in pencil. Walter McQuade, “Urban Renewal in Boston” in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit., p. 262.

[xxxvi] One of John Hancock’s tenants was to be the American Research and Development Corporation (America’s first venture capital firm–spin off from Harvard and MIT) and principal funder of Route 128 firms

[xxxvii] Amy Klobuchar, Uncovering the Dome, Waveland Press, 1986. Yes, she is presently Senator Klobuchar. It was her senior thesis, written long before she married her husband, a former Star Tribune sportswriter.

[xxxviii] Wells Rich Greene advertising agency and Milton Glaser was the graphic designer. The song was written and composed by Steve Karmen.

[xxxix] Karl Meyer, “Love thy city: marketing the American metropolis”, Saturday Review, 6, April 28, 1979, p. 16.