Boston

 

Boston: Hugh O’Brien, Boston’s first Irish mayor, appeared on the scene in 1885. O’Brien, businessman and politician, and editor of Shipping and Commercial List, served four terms and was succeeded over the next fourteen years by Yankee Brahmins/politicians and businessmen including Josiah Quincy whose great grandfather can be found in Chapter 2. Boston, in other words, despite a very large Irish population, and a series of ethnic Irish ward-based machines, plus the existence of a city-wide Irish-dominated Democratic party committee was unable to establish a city-wide machine governance of Boston during the nineteenth century (or the twentieth century as well).

 

Interestingly,  a year after O’Brien’s first election (1884), the Republican state legislature transferred control over Boston’s police force to the state itself and approved an independent municipal civil service system for Boston —beginning a micro-management by the state legislature that would continue, some would say, to the present day. The role and power of state government in Boston’s municipal policy-making, especially economic development policy-making, will also be discussed in future chapters. Also, of interest, Yankee Josiah Quincy was elected as a Democrat—with Irish votes—and his administration after the Panic of 1893 was characterized as an example of “municipal socialism” while using patronage in public works and building public baths and parks—a Progressive approach, one might surmise.[1]

 

Things would change dramatically after the turn of the century and the arrival of “Honey Fitz” John Fitzgerald—but that is a later chapter in our story. Late nineteenth century Boston politics was effectively fragmented: with strong, conventional Irish ward machines (such as Martin Lomasney’s 8^th Ward), a city-wide Democratic Irish-led committee in a convoluted partnership with the Yankees who controlled city government and administration—themselves in alliance with the Boston Chamber of Commerce. It appeared that first generation Irish reached accommodation with the Yankees; their sons and daughters not so much.[2] Again, a single ethnic group, the Irish, constituted the almost exclusive core of the ward-based ethnic machines.

[1] Richard Dilworth, (Ed) Cities in American Political History, Washington D.C., Sage, 2011), p. 314.

[2] See especially, Thomas O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1995). O’Connor develops exceedingly well how the Irish formed their American political culture and how that culture strongly impacted their politics and their governance once they were able to capture control of Boston’s city government in the twentieth century. We will pick this up in later chapters and consider how these cultural forces were able to meaningfully shape Boston’s politics for nearly a hundred years, but affect economic development policy-making.

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Progressive Era

Boston:

 

Blending City Beautiful, Structural Reform and Policy Swirls—and the Machine

On March 30, 1909, at the prestigious Boston City Club, the opening speaker, Edward Filene[1] tasked his audience of two hundred and thirty of Boston’s wealthiest business, religious, and educational elites that “Your hosts have asked you here … to consult with you. We believe that the growth and welfare of our city can be immeasurably helped by coordination and planning ahead. We are allowing slum conditions … of overcrowded housing … even in the outskirts [suburbs] of our city. We must tackle this problem and we can find a way. In the headquarters which will be opened tomorrow morning on 20 Beacon St … we will bring to Boston … a knowledge of all the best things that have been done by any other city in the world, and combining all the best things in a Plan for Boston”.

 

A later speaker, board member George W. Codman[2], pronounced the real motivation behind the Plan of 1915: “Have we not misconceived the true nature of our corporate city life? 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”.[3]

 

The Noble Experiment

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 (later to reorganize and save General Motors from bankruptcy), 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 in six years, 1915. The Plan combined:

 

• Structural reforms (expert accounting for the city, understand the sources of government waste and reduce them, 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”.

 

So the Boston Plan was a two-pronged initiative. The earlier of the two prongs began in 1905 with the formation of the Good Government Association[4] 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 when Curley falsely took a civil service exam on behalf of a constituent. Curley was the Irish politician, hero of the Last Hurrah. The 1905 election of John F. Fitzgerald (JFK’s grandfather), “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 at him and the “Irish machine”. In 1907, they achieved approval by state legislature of the Independent Finance Commission which subsequently monitored City’s 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 they believed the graft and maladministration of the council weakened “the industrial and commercial base of the city” because the council levied high taxes to support its graft, patronage and capital projects in the neighborhoods. Their chief opponent was the much studied ward boss, Martin Lomasney The mayor’s office was strengthened and given a four year term. The Boston Plan 1915 adopted the charter which was placed on the ballot for the next November (1909) election.

 

To cement Honey Fitz’s political demise, and secure charter approval, James Storrow, Plan 15 Executive Committee member, ran against Honey Fitz for mayor. His de facto campaign manager was the Chair of the Boston Chamber (and fellow Plan 15 Executive Committee member, Bernard Rothwell). 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. The Boston ethnic ward based machine had lost—and the era of the strong, charismatic mayor had begun. But only in Boston politics could the next event occur. Honey Fitz’s first announcement was to support the Boston 15 Plan.

 

Honey Fitz, the Boston Plan—And the Real Boston Plan

The new charismatic mayor would work cooperatively with the city business elites who moments before had sought to remove him and the Irish from power. Over the next four years, Fitzgerald worked to achieve the goals of the sixteen point plan. Fitzgerald brought in the expert, Louis Rourke, the 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 folk were not sitting idly either. In a conscious imitation of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the constructed the “1915 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 a Curtiss airplane, models of the Wright brothers’ airplane, and new “moving pictures”. Even the Catholic Church displayed in a portion of the hall—the new Bishop, soon to be Cardinal O’Connell was also cooperating. The 1910 Exposition was so successful that a second Exposition was held later in the year.

 

Breaking down into committees, the Boston Plan business leaders forged ahead with projects such as constructing a Jamaica Pond boat house and bandstand, and starting in motion the Woodbourne housing and settlement house. The 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”.

 

The most important Boston Plan 15 initiative was issued in 1911 and submitted to the Massachusetts state legislature for approval. It called 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 study and issue recommendations for housing, buildings, safety (fire and sanitary), congestion, and provide reserved land for public use. The proposal was actively and 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 enough support to win approval of 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 was dead—killed by suburban opposition. Suburban opposition was based on suburban unwillingness to be linked in any way with the Boston 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 Housing Commission. In 1913, the state Housing Commission did require Massachusetts towns and villages to establish a planning board—which Honey Fitz did in 1914. 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.

[1] Filenes. Boston’s long-lived prestigious department store was founded by William Filene, a German-Jewish immigrant in 1881. Edward, born in 1860 Salem, my home town, left Harvard to run the family business (with his brother Abraham Lincoln Filene); he qualified as a candidate for America’s best employer. A staunch proponent of Taylor’s scientific (treat them like an ox) management, Filene opened up his famous “Bargain Basement” (I shopped there), he instituted a profit-sharing plan, a minimum wage for women, forty hour work week, paid vacations, and health clinic. He engaged in collective bargaining arbitration with his company union, and formed a savings and loan association for his employees. Filene was ousted from the Filene’s active management, though he retained the title of President. He was a founding member of the newly merged Boston Chamber of Commerce (Ritchie-led) in 1911 and in the same year was the leading proponent of 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.

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

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

 

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

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policy system cut

Boston’s Post War Urban Renewal:

“A hopeless backwater” is the title of O’Connor’s first chapter–a not especially positive first impression. Unlike Atlanta, Boston was not to be first out of the urban renewal starting block or first to forge anything like a Progressive Coalition. Instead, our starting point concerning Boston is the political machine. Boston’s machine, a bit less formal and structural than some, rested on a city best described as suffering from an internal class war; on one side was the Catholic, Irish, working class and on the other largely Protestant, middle class. It was a war between the Yankee and the Celt.[1]

 

The Yankees in a basic fashion held sway over the downtown and the city’s business community while the Celts dominated the neighborhoods–and for the most part, the voting booths. In this class war, the Catholic Church played an important, sometimes divisive, sometimes intermediary role between the warring elements. Sometimes the Catholic Church could cross its working class roots and work with the middle class Catholics who permeated private sector middle management business and non-profit institutions (universities and hospital) or the various hostile factions of the political machine. On the other hand, the Catholic Church could be very political.

 

Boston’s dominant political figure of the first half of the twentieth century was James Michael Curley, Frank Skeffington of Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah. First elected mayor of Boston in 1914, he served four, four-year terms and retired (unwillingly) from the Boston mayoralty in 1951 (he served half of his last term in federal prison). He also served several terms in the House of Representatives and was Governor of Massachusetts. To complete the picture somewhat, he did serve his first prison term before he was ever elected to be mayor in 1914 and arguably his support or whatever it was he did, got FDR his 1932 Presidential Democratic Party nomination. He also successfully sued the producers of the famous John Ford and Spencer Tracy film. “Enuf said” we will not compare Curley to Hartsfield; we are talking about entirely different mayors.

 

Boston (and Massachusetts), however, was not oblivious to the world around it–or to the impact of the urban crisis. Tobin, a former protégé of Curley, broke with Curley (as would a future mayor John Hynes) and Tobin was able to beat Curley in the two mayoral elections previous to and through World War II (1937-1945–Curley for most of this period served in Congress). As David Lawrence in Pittsburgh had done, Tobin delivered a sort of machine-based and led Progressivism into Boston’s economic development.

 

Previously, in 1935 (Curley was Governor at the time), Boston had created the Boston Housing Authority (previously it was a division of the Public Works department), and Tobin sponsored the city’s first public housing project in 1938[2] (empowered by 1933 Massachusetts enabling legislation stimulated by NIRA, the stimulus for Atlanta’s initial foray into public housing and slum clearance) which were completed in the 1938-1942 period. Boston had indeed kept pace with Atlanta–for the most part without the benefit of any Progressive business-led coalition (which was not how David Lawrence implemented urban renewal). Tobin also promoted infrastructure enhancement of city-owned Boston airport[3]. All this came to an end, with the reelection of Curley (still in jail we might add) who was elected to his fourth term as mayor in 1946.

Massachusetts, as a state did not, and had not, rejected slum clearance and public housing. It like Atlanta had entered this policy area as early as 1933 and in the immediate post war period  approved two very aggressive housing-slum clearance programs: the 1946 Chapter 372 City-State Program and the 1948 Veterans Housing Act[4] both meant to provide housing for returning soldiers. Curley and Boston, however, were not active participants in these programs, but Boston’s suburbs were. The real loser, perhaps, in Curley’s laid back use of slum clearance and public housing was the CBD[5].

 

Curley, his machine, and the class-ethnic war characterized Boston politics through 1951. Curley’s war with the business community makes any discussion of a Progressive Coalition unnecessary, and it also serves as an important factor in explaining the serious central business district decline. That is why O’Connor describes Boston as Curley retires as a hopeless backwater. The machine, as we know, focused on neighborhood and people-based policies and initiatives. The machine was not about urban revitalization as economic developers understand it and the Boston business community, never able to consistently impact the machine’s policy-making was on the permanent outs

 

Curley had welded the various ethnic elements in the neighborhoods–the Irish, the Italians, the Jews and others–into a powerful political coalition devoted to him personally and capable of neutralizing the opposition of the downtown Yankees, who submitted to his power, but who stubbornly denied  him legitimacy … 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 may native Bostonians began to give up all hope of its eventual recovery.[6]

 

It would appear that Curley was a pioneer in neighborhood-based economic development. In fact, the machine and business engaged in a sadly comical war of bank president’s garbage not being picked up and the city not getting buyers for its bonds.

 

the Boston Globe wrote …that the ‘negative attitudes of the Yankee-dominated insurance industry was so fervent that no mortgages on buildings in Irish-dominated Boston were granted. Unable to match the Irish in the multiplication of their numbers, the Yankees had yielded them the political management of the city, but withheld from them the financial resources necessary to change it.[7]

 

There will be no Central Atlanta Progress in pre-1950 Boston history; and there was no access by the City of Boston to federal funds. The federal government was rightfully concerned any federal grant, urban renewal or otherwise, would only be scoffed up by someone in the Curley machine[8]. Under Curley, the city was an outcast in a state that looked upon him and the city as an oozing leper without a cane or bell.

 

The urban crisis, as the reader might suspect, did not bypass Boston. In fact, that crisis made itself right at home in Boston. Boston, under Curley, unlike most other large cities, made little effort between 1946 and1950 to come to grips with the various manifestation of the crisis. As might be expected, Boston declined earlier, faster and more severely than its other large city counterparts. The sad reality that the Curley machine was not exactly on close terms with the relatively small (compared to other large Eastern cities) black community, largely centered on the original Irish enclave of Roxbury where Curley grew up. In such an environment as Boston offered, the black community did not seriously negotiate anything with city government or the business community, and pretty much restricted its attention and concern to the relatively few blocks in Roxbury settled by blacks.

 

In particular, Boston suffered from what has been described as the Curley effect[9] which purports to mathematically prove that Curley as an election strategy distorted economic reform policy to drive his middle class opponents out of the city. The reality is that Boston suffered from the most extreme post-World War II decentralization-suburbanization exodus, possibly in the entire nation[10].

 

But in the 1951 election a really pissed off (let’s see if this survives the editor) former hack from the machine ran against Curley in the primary–and beat him. The now independent, we hesitate to attach any label of Progressive, candidate, John B. Hynes ran in the general election and won. Hynes would be reelected and serve as mayor until 1961. Curley, now in his seventies, lurked in the background until 1958 (when he passed on) conspiring with any and all political factions to regain control of the machine and Boston. Hynes greatest achievement could well be that he stood as a wall against Curley, allowing Curley’s machine to wither, and for all practical purposes finally die. As to whether Hynes was in a position to make up for lost time in addressing the urban crisis, is the question to which we now turn.

 

Open bleeding wounds take time to heal and they leave scars when they do heal. Hynes came from the machine and many of his governing coalition were still drawn from it. The City Council horribly factionalized and containing any number of potential rivals meant that, again unlike Atlanta, there was no real likelihood that a “unified government” was possible. The real crippling limitation on Hynes, however, was arguably, the state government. The state government had been dominated for a hundred years by Republicans–Yankee Republicans.

 

Boston’s Yankees had conducted political guerrilla warfare on their Irish adversaries down the hill [the state capitol building on Beacon Hill] at City Hall. Using their power in the state legislature, Republicans set limits on the city’s ability to borrow funds, and set up a maximum amount on its spending for public schools. They refused to let Boston raise its taxes or increase its assessments without specific permission of the state legislature, and they even insisted on taking the appointment of the city’s own police commissioner out of the hands of the mayor… state legislature appointed a special watchdog agency, consisting of seven prominent businessmen and civic leaders to monitor [its] municipal administration …[and] establishing such a complex system of controls and restrictions that it became almost impossible  …to conduct their own affairs or finance their own needs. Major city expenses had to be borne by real estate taxes, which rose to such high levels that a comparison made in the 1950’s between Boston and twenty other large American cities, put the Bay State capital on top of the charts.[11]

 

Even the gradual post-World War II shift in the state legislature from Republican to Democratic control did not particularly work to the city’s advantage. Representatives from the outlying suburbs … assumed a ‘holier-than-thou attitude toward the complicated problems of the big city … [and] ‘dirty Boston politics’ and refused to support any measures that would help the city solve its complex fiscal problems.[12]

 

Hynes became mayor shortly after the federal government had provided additional stimulus and direction to slum clearance and blight removal through the Housing Act of 1949. Boston’s response to that stimulus, now that Curley was out of the picture, was for the city planning board to construct and issue an “ambitious” comprehensive (master) plan for not only Boston, but its adjoining metropolitan areas. The core and principal driver of this plan was revitalization of Boston’s central business district. The plan’s specific recommendations included:

 

…creating a series of distinctive civic, cultural, and educational districts … redeveloping the dilapidated area along the …waterfront…creating a new wholesale produce market area with greater access to highways and truck routes; improving local railroad terminal facilities, and expanding the downtown business district …better mass transit facilities.. converting unsightly pockets of slum areas and blighted districts–especially those uncomfortably close to the downtown business district–into usable and productive property [which included middle class residential housing].[13]

 

The Boston Housing Authority then launched into a second series of public housing-slum removal projects. After 1954, however, these projects generated considerable controversy and since Hynes preferred slum clearance and urban renewal to be directed at the CBD rather than housing, the City shifted its urban renewal priorities to the CBD and adjacent neighborhoods.[14]

 

The City easily found itself in opposition to state-imposed expressway construction through the city itself (as it did in the 1953 expressway through Chinatown). Urban renewal-style demolition, clearance and non-relocation performed by the state for these expressways did little to foster support for any city-led urban renewal program in the central business district or for any neighborhood-based urban renewal project as well. The state expressway construction (Central Artery project) actually made the CBD worse off in that a major state expressway cut off the CBD from the city’s waterfront areas. The Central Artery Project uprooted over 900 businesses and prompted the formation of a private business opposition (“Save Boston Business’) while neighborhood residents formed a “Save the North End” association. None of this, very stereotypical style urban renewal, was led, paid for, or wanted by the City of Boston or its mayor (although he did acknowledge the infrastructure would result in some long term benefits[15]. That state government could be the primary urban renewal force in a major American city, however, does not fit into the conventional stereotype.

 

Whatever his preferences, Hynes was in no position to lead (or follow) a serious urban renewal program. Upon entry in office, he had appealed to the business community to join with him and his “reform” administration. A “New Boston Committee” had been formed but it collapsed as it attempted to handle the issue of property tax assessments (and other issues as well). To reduce property tax assessments in the central business district (Curley had financed his neighborhood projects through excessive CBD business assessments) generated a firestorm–and Hynes was still very much dependent on his neighborhood-based constituencies.

 

It would be several years, however, before … urban renewal could be put into practice. Although John Hynes clearly understood the importance of cleaning up slum areas and modernizing the downtown business district, he was not yet in a position to organize new coalitions or to remove the legal and financial obstructions that would make the kind of long-range redevelopment programs … possible.[16]

 

The business community itself was skeptical about Hynes and with Curley still wandering about the neighborhoods and generating newspaper coverage, it probably had a right to be. Years of war had generated what O’Connor called a business “politics of inertia”[17]. There was no experience with “city efficient” participation and Massachusetts state government was such a player in municipal and metropolitan affairs that business attention was easily diverted toward the state.

 

But in this crazy quilt of dysfunction that was Boston in the fifties, an opening was found to bring Boston’s business elite into a productive relationship with city government–the catalyst and inspiration, incredibly, came from an amazingly unlikely source, the Catholic Church. Recently (1953) named as Boston College’s Dean of Business Administration School, Father W. Seavey Joyce organized a conference “Greater Boston’s Business Future” in May. 1954. Attended by over 200 key business elites, including many we would classify as cross-border elites, the conference touched off a formal (newspaper) and informal dialogue on critical issues such as tax abatement and focused attention of development of the Back Bay. Tax abatement, probably more so than eminent domain opposition, was very considerable impediment to urban renewal redevelopment in Boston.

 

As early as 1949 the John Hancock Life Insurance Company had been negotiating to build a 26 story office building in Copley Square downtown[18]. The project had quickly become the visible symbol of Boston’s hope for a viable future. Five years later, the project was still hung up over negotiations on tax abatement concessions. An even worse fiasco involved a major, perhaps somewhat loosely formulated, railroad yard project anchored by Prudential; it too was befouled with tax abatement controversy. Tax abatement certainly generated academic and neighborhood opposition, but it also fragmented the downtown business community in an unexpected way. Some very elite downtown headquarter business leaders loved the old, eyesore in which they worked. This was the heart of the old, eighteenth century downtown and it should be preserved and not altered with new style redevelopment.

 

Father Joyce’s conference brought all this out into the open and he took it upon himself to follow up with private conversations, meetings and dialogue between private and public leaders. These were high level dialogues with many of the “right” people (Sullivan owner of the Boston Patriots, the Governor, Hynes, key tax payer groups, the Boston Citizen’s Council (elite private sector group), Chair of the First National Bank, the Urban Land crowd). As the dialogue continued and grew larger and more action-oriented, the participants agreed to meet regularly and formulate an action agenda. Boston had finally forged a sustained public-private dialogue and advocacy group[19].

And then Hynes waged the 1956 mayoral election against Senate Minority Leader John Powers. Hynes won in a bitter election. At his second inaugural speech Hynes outlined an aggressive plan for redevelopment (including a centerpiece Boston Common garage and a new series of housing and neighborhood projects by the Buffalo Housing Authority). He also acknowledged that Boston was facing financial collapse and that to address that looming fiscal disaster, Boston needed positive reform legislation from the state legislature. This legislative action would return to Boston control over its tax base and budgetary decisions. Powers and the Senate never agreed to any such package over the next four years and to the contrary passed additional legislation which further hamstrung the City. Suburban state legislators held the city up for patronage, city contracts and probably worse.

 

The Citizen’s Seminar Group in 1956 recognizing that the Senate would kill anything associated with Hynes constructed and pushed forward its own state-city fiscal reform legislation[20]. They did achieve some success with the legislature, but not enough for Boston to deal with the pending financial and budgeting crisis which was now building up a head of steam. The two redevelopment projects, however, in this environment continued to go no place and languished to the point that they seemed dead. At the last moment (1957), on its own without a tax deal, Prudential acquired the site (no development yet, however).

 

No sooner had the property been acquired, than the Massachusetts Supreme Court outlawed tax abatement for redevelopment (as the Georgia Supreme Court was to do). Negotiations continued with a backdoor style tax abatement and in March 1958 a tentative agreement was reached between the City and Prudential. The agreement, however, required state approval. Prudential, in good faith, announced the project, held a ground-breaking ceremony, and began construction on Boston’s first commercial urban renewal style project. It was January, 1959. At this critical moment, Republican Governor Furcolo, using the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority as an intermediary owner to save the project–but the Court rejected that solution as well. Prudential, with a big hole in the ground in the middle of downtown Boston, stopped construction.

 

In the midst of this debacle, another chapter in Boston’s urban renewal history was unfolding. The Boston Housing Authority (BHA) had all it could do with the new series of public housing and slum rehabilitation projects it was pursuing. The hard-pressed redevelopment, commercial urban renewal program was handled by a division within the BHA. The Citizen’s Council, the Chamber of Commerce and other major corporate leaders pressed Hynes to detach the urban renewal division and set up its own autonomous bureaucracy. The City Council agreed and the state authorized its approval, and in September, 1957, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was born. The BRA followed the Quasi EDO model outlined in this chapter and it was a semi-autonomous agency governed by four mayoral and one gubernatorial appointee. Hynes appointed Joseph Lund a VP of the locally prestigious Bradley Real Estate Group and Chair of Urban Land’s Research Institute.

 

The BRA’s started working on its developing an action plan for its first proposed commercial, mixed use urban renewal project: the West End. This was the project that Herbert Gans would detail in his sixties classic study of urban renewal, the Urban Villagers and noted urban architect and designer, Victor Gruen was retained. Opposition of the affected areas was intense, but oddly enough, many residents did not take the proposed project seriously; they believed like almost everything in Boston’s past, the project would sooner or later implode and they need not worry. With some surprise, the project evolved to the point that on December 10, 1959, Hynes announced the BRA board had approved its initial project, the developer and the financing. It had taken nearly ten years, but Hynes had finally launched his first CBD redevelopment project. But… this is Boston; the story is not completely over.

 

The apparent ruthlessness with which the demolition program was carried out in the West End produced such a wave of horrified revulsion that the future of any further ‘urban renewal’ projects in Boston was much in doubt. Even more than the physical destruction that had wiped out one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, people everywhere were appalled at the heartless way in which former residents–most of them elderly, many of them refugees and displaced persons from World War II, a number of them unable to speak English–had been uprooted from their modest homes and apartments

 

‘The West End symbolized all that was wrong with city planning in the 1950’s’… wrote Lawrence Kennedy, ‘because it bulldozed the homes of poor people and replaced them with an enclave for the wealthy’.[21]

 

The effect of the West End project on BRA’s second ongoing project, the Government Center-Scollay Square project was serious negative. Hynes was now fully engaged in the planning and consensus building on what would become his signature project–he had less than a year left in office at this point. Aside from the West End, the entire of his commercially driven redevelopment vision was still stalled, the Boston Common project a scandal without even a ground-breaking, and his housing-neighborhood projects receiving as much criticism as praise. Now that he was a visible lame duck, the long brewing fiscal and financial crisis erupted.

 

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[22]. For the Boston private sector, 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 and two Boston big name law firms, 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[23].

 

On Monday, January 4, 1960 a new mayor was sworn into office; in the previous November John Collins had won, another unexpected victory and had swept into office. Collins had an even more aggressive redevelopment agenda. It was under Collin’s leadership that BRA would hire Ed Logue to spring free the long-stalled Hynes redevelopment projects and transform Boston into the urban renewal state capital of America. In January, 1960, however, that was all in the future.

 

[1] O’Connor, op. cit. p 12 but reference to the entire of Chapter 1 supports our description.

[2] Lawrence J. Vale, From Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007

[3] This is Logan Airport today. Originally acquired from the Department of Defense (Dept of Army) in 1929 (an interim one year ownership by the state of Massachusetts). The City operated the airport out of the Parks Department until 1941 when, in response to the 1939 state’s entry into airport public policy which established the state as a lead player (Massachusetts Aeronautics Commission). In 1956 the state approved establishment of Massport, a quasi state EDO which included not only the airport, but bridges and roads, and the Port Authority.

[4] This is the source of the Curmudgeon’s 1952 first home built on a landfill along the Atlantic

[5] Vale, op. cit pp 161ff.

[6] O’Connor, op. cit. p. 12-13.

[7] O’Connor. op. cit. p. 42.

[8] In a later section we shall outline the beginnings of the famous technological revolution labeled Route 128–the Eastern counterpart, actually founder, of Silicon Valley. In an incredible irony, Route 128’s birth occurs in the Curley years. Innovation and knowledge-based aficionados are no doubt proud of that heritage–but there is more of Curley than Dukakis in Boston’s technological revolution. In any case, federal funds did not flow to the city of Boston, but they poured into Harvard and MIT.

[9] Andrei Shlelfer and Edward Glaeser, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate, JLEO, Volume 21, No 1. NBER

[10] In the CBD nothing of consequence got built for decades. Congestion, in a city whose roads were designed             and planned by bovines not Brahmins, became horrendous[10]; and the bridges and tunnels which connect                Boston (an island originally) to the mainland were choke points–literally–road rage was a way of life. Business    start ups from Harvard and MIT couldn’t cope with this lack of infrastructure and when Route 128 opened its f    first twenty-seven mile segment in 1951 that’s where they went. Boston’s waterfront was in collapse, tourists   stayed home and business was in exodus. Boston was, indeed, and, in fact, a hopeless backwater in 1951.

[11] pp. 42-43.

[12] p. 43. The Curmudgeon would also add that Hynes chief political and electoral rival was the Senate      Minority Leader and the second most powerful force in the state Senate; that Minority Leader was Hynes’s           principal opponent in his second election.

[13] pp. 75.

[14] p. 77. “We have all the low-rental projects we need” (Hynes)

[15] O’Connor, op. cit pp. 77-88.

[16] O’Connor, op. cit. p. 77.

[17] O’Connor, op. cit. p. 79.

[18] 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.

[19] Meeting at a Boston College site the group formalized into the very wordy group “Citizen’s Seminars on the            Fiscal, Economic and Political Problems of Boston and the Metropolitan Community” (so much for sparse         Yankee conversation). In Oct 1954, it held its first seminar. At that seminar, Hynes put tax assessment, tax           abatement and redevelopment on the table. He also presented his image of a redeveloped Boston downtown, a    new World Trade Center along with the stalled John Hancock and Prudential projects. In early 1965 these       leaders traveled to Pittsburgh and see firsthand the Pittsburgh model of urban renewal (they met with Mellon,             Lawrence and the Allegheny Council). Returning, the Citizens Seminar Group continued to meet “and     fraternize”; they brought in speakers such as Lewis Mumford whose low-rise, anti-skyscraper perspective was        deeply appreciated and embraced. With grants from the Ford Foundation, the group staffed up a research bureau                 and a public television series. The group, now under the leadership of Gilbert (President of the Gillette   Corporation) spun off the research group and it became Boston Bureau of Public Affairs.

[20] O’Connor, op. cit. p. 119. The legislation had the support of the Citizen’s Council, the Boston Retail Trade Board, the Chamber of Commerce, the Boston Real Estate Board (the Urban Land crowd),and Boston Municipal Research Bureau.

[21] O’Conner, op. cit. pp. 138-39.

[22] O’Conner, op. cit. p.147.

[23] O’Conner, op. cit. p.147. The Vault became identified with private elite participation in economic development and urban renewal in particular. But similar private elite entities occurred in some form in most cities–many emulating Pittsburgh’s elite commitment. For example in Minneapolis “Business elites initiated and directed the city’s first downtown-centered redevelopment strategy from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Corporate leaders from the exclusive Minneapolis Club formed the Downtown Council (DTC) in 1957, which in turn coalesced diverse business interests into a single, driving force for redevelopment. The DTC took the lead in the city’s renewal effort by formulating a strategy with which it sought to revitalize the downtown retail sector to lure suburban shoppers back to the city …Denise R. Nickel, The Progressive City: Urban Redevelopment in Minneapolis” Urban Affairs Review, Volume 30, 1995, p. 358.

 

Boston’s Post War Urban Renewal:

“A hopeless backwater” is the title of Thomas H. O’Connor’s first chapter of “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”[1]–a not especially positive first impression from a scholar who loved the City. Boston was not to be first into the urban renewal race or first to forge anything like a Progressive Business Coalition. Our starting point is Boston’s Boss-style policy system. Most of our case study concentrates on how Boston was finally able to move away from a decentralized Boss-dominated ward-based political machine, overcome a bifurcated political culture, and forge a Business-Progressive, Age of Urban Renewal Coalition.

 

The second theme describes what Boston did when it finally participated in CBD urban redevelopment/renewal. Hopefully, the reader will see how these two themes are strongly interrelated. In many eastern and Midwestern cities urban renewal and CBD redevelopment required something akin to a policy system-change. A final, third theme presents hopefully sufficient detail to demonstrate to the reader the inherent individual municipal diversity within the actual Age of Urban Renewal experience so the reader will be able to judge the applicability of the contemporary urban renewal paradigm to Boston.

“A hopeless backwater“, title of Thomas O’Connor’s first chapter in “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”[2]–is not especially positive coming from a scholar who loved the City. Our starting point is Boston’s charismatic mayor/boss policy system. Boston moved away from that system electing an empowered charismatic mayor able to work with a business growth coalition. The new policy system dedicated itself to CBD modernization through urban renewal. The consequences of urban renewal, however, triggered a reaction that brought an entirely new policy system into power. Urban renewal, the maker and destroyer of municipal policy systems, is an important take away from this case study.

 

 

The Boston Backdrop

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. He also successfully sued the producers of the famous John Ford/Spencer Tracy film. First elected mayor in 1914, Curley served four, four-year terms and retired (unwillingly) from the Boston mayoralty in 1951 (he served half of his last term in federal prison). He also served several terms in the House of Representatives and was Governor of Massachusetts. To complete the picture somewhat, he did serve his first prison term before his initial term as mayor and Curley’s early 1932 support of  FDR probably was on some help in securing FDR’s Democratic Party nomination. That Curley was a character is without question—that Curley did more than merely set the tone of Boston politics for the better part of a half-century is an understatement. He was the Boss of a decentralized, mostly Irish ethnic ward-based machine, sharing power with ward bosses, and the like of the proverbial Martin Lomasney.

 

A perhaps simplistic summary of Boston’s political culture in the pre-Age of Urban Renewal period was that the Irish, and other ethnic and racial populations, had essentially pushed the famous Yankee Protestant culture, described earlier, into the closely-packed adjacent suburbs. The Brahmin’s relinquished as little actual political and economic power as possible, however, playing a powerful role in Massachusetts state politics. The Massachusetts legislature accordingly resisted Boston home rule vigorously, leaving much of the City’s day-today administrative and policy power in the hands of the state legislature. Budgetary and fiscal powers, for example, were strongly shaped by the Legislature, and the City of Boston’s civil service system was operated by the state of Massachusetts. Boston, it is safe to say, could never have conducted CBD regeneration, or any form of serious economic development, without the concurrence of the state Legislature or a Massachusetts state bureaucracy.

 

If this were not bad “enuf”, the control exercised by the Brahmin elite over the City’s economy and its central business district was nearly total. The Boston Chamber (and Real Estate Exchange) were outside of, and in virtually total opposition to, the ethnic machine—whose base of power was in the ethnic neighborhoods. It is no exaggeration to assert that the standard fare of Boston politics and elections was (1) fighting among the ward bosses; (2) the electoral victory of a charismatic ethnic city boss-mayor like Curley; and (3) a war between the Yankee CBD/economic elite and the ethnic neighborhood machine(s) superimposed on a dominant state of Massachusetts hegemony. Bosnia in the 1990’s would pretty much describe Boston-style politics. In such an environment, how could politics NOT be a major part of the economic development story[3].

 

Curley, the machine, and class-ethnic war characterized Boston politics through 1951. Curley’s war with the business community makes any discussion of a Progressive Coalition unnecessary. That war also serves as an explanation for Boston’s almost incredible decline in its central business district. decline. That decline is why O’Connor described Boston as a hopeless backwater. The machine focused on neighborhood and people-based policies and initiatives and was not about urban revitalization as economic developers understand that term. The Boston business community, never able to consistently impact the machine’s policy-making, which it viewed with contemptible disgust. was on the permanent outs with Curley in particular.

 

Curley had welded the various ethnic elements in the neighborhoods–the Irish, the Italians, the Jews and others–into a powerful political coalition devoted to him personally and capable of neutralizing the opposition of the downtown Yankees, who submitted to his power, but who stubbornly denied  him legitimacy … 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 may native Bostonians began to give up all hope of its eventual recovery.[4]

 

The machine and business engaged in a sadly comical war of bank president’s garbage not being picked up and the city not securing buyers for its bonds. “The Boston Globe wrote …that the ‘negative attitudes of the Yankee-dominated insurance industry was so fervent that no mortgages on buildings in Irish-dominated Boston were granted. Unable to match the Irish in the multiplication of their numbers, the Yankees had yielded them the political management of the city, but withheld from them the financial resources necessary to change it”.[5] There will be no Central Atlanta Progress in pre-1950 Boston history. And there was no access by the City of Boston to federal funds. The federal government was rightfully concerned any federal grant, urban renewal or otherwise, would only be scoffed up by someone in the Curley machine[6]. Under Curley, the City was an outcast in a state that looked upon him and the City itself as an oozing leper without cane or bell.

 

The Transition Years: Mayor Hynes

But at a critical time, Curley wandered off into other pastures. Maurice Tobin, a former Curley protégé, broke with Curley, and beat him in two mayoral elections  (1937-1945). Curley wound up for most of this period either as Governor or served in Congress. But as David Lawrence did in Pittsburgh, Tobin managed a sort of machine-led, neighborhood/housing redevelopment which tapped into early Housing Act funds. In 1935 (Curley was Governor at the time), Boston created the Boston Housing Authority (previously it was a division of the Public Works department), and Tobin sponsored the city’s first public housing project in 1938[7], completed between 1938 and 1942. Tobin also promoted a significant infrastructure enhancement of city-owned Boston airport[8]. All this good stuff, however, came to an end with Curley (in jail) being elected to his fourth term as mayor in 1946.

 

But in the 1951 election a really pissed off (let’s see if this survives the editor) former hack from the machine ran against Curley in the primary–and beat him. The now independent candidate, John B. Hynes ran and won. Hynes, reelected, would be mayor until 1961[9]. Open bleeding wounds take time to heal and they leave scars when they do heal. Hynes came from the machine; many of his governing coalition were drawn from it. The City Council horribly factionalized, containing any number of potential rivals meant that a “strong unified administration” was impossible. The crippling limitation on Hynes, however, was state government. The state government, dominated for a hundred years by Republicans–Yankee Republicans, continued its war against the City.

 

Boston’s Yankees had conducted political guerrilla warfare on their Irish adversaries down the hill [the state capitol building on Beacon Hill] at City Hall. Using their power in the state legislature, Republicans set limits on the city’s ability to borrow funds, and set up a maximum amount on its spending for public schools. They refused to let Boston raise its taxes or increase its assessments without specific permission of the state legislature, and they even insisted on taking the appointment of the city’s own police commissioner out of the hands of the mayor… state legislature appointed a special watchdog agency, consisting of seven prominent businessmen and civic leaders to monitor [its] municipal administration …[and] establishing such a complex system of controls and restrictions that it became almost impossible  …to conduct their own affairs or finance their own needs. Major city expenses had to be borne by real estate taxes, which rose to such high levels that a comparison made in the 1950’s between Boston and twenty other large American cities, put the Bay State capital on top of the charts.[10]

 

Boston Tries to Enters the Age of Urban Renewal

Hynes became mayor after the Housing Act of 1949. Now that Curley was out of the picture, the City wasted no time. The city planning board issued an “ambitious” comprehensive plan for not only Boston, but its adjoining metropolitan areas. The principal driver behind this plan was CBD revitalization. Specific recommendations included:

 

…creating a series of distinctive civic, cultural, and educational districts … redeveloping the dilapidated area along the …waterfront…creating a new wholesale produce market area with greater access to highways and truck routes; improving local railroad terminal facilities, and expanding the downtown business district …better mass transit facilities.. converting unsightly pockets of slum areas and blighted districts–especially those uncomfortably close to the downtown business district–into usable and productive property [which included middle class residential housing].[11]

 

The Boston Housing Authority then launched into a second series of neighborhood public housing-slum removal projects. Slum removal for neighborhood public housing proved so controversial and unpopular—the reaction was intensely negative—that after 1954, Hynes, who preferred that any slum clearance be directed at the CBD, shifted urban renewal to the CBD (and adjacent neighborhoods).[12] But it was too late. In the meantime, the state of Massachusetts (specifically, the Mass Department of Transportation) had approved a new expressway cutting through the length of the City.

 

Slightly earlier in 1953, another state expressway had cut through Boston’s Chinatown and stirred up further negative neighborhood reaction. While the City was unwavering in its opposition to these expressways, the  urban renewal-style demolition, clearance and non-relocation inflicted by the state for these expressways stopped dead any city-led CBD  urban renewal program (or for any neighborhood-based urban renewal project as well). To make matters even worse state expressway construction (the Central Artery project) made the CBD even worse off, cutting off the CBD from the city’s waterfront areas. Also the Central Artery Project uprooted over 900 businesses and prompted the formation of a vigorous business opposition (“Save Boston Business’) and crystallized neighborhood residents to form a “Save the North End” association. To repeat none of this, very stereotypical style urban renewal, was led, paid for, or wanted by the City of Boston or its mayor (although he did acknowledge the infrastructure would result in some long term benefits)[13]. That state government could be the primary urban renewal force in a major American city, however, does not fit into the conventional stereotype. Whatever his preferences, Hynes was in no position to lead (or implement) a serious urban renewal program.

 

It would be several years, however, before … urban renewal could be put into practice. Although John Hynes clearly understood the importance of cleaning up slum areas and modernizing the downtown business district, he was not yet in a position to organize new coalitions or to remove the legal and financial obstructions that would make the kind of long-range redevelopment programs … possible.[14]

 

Back in 1951, Hynes had appealed to the business community to join with him and his “reform” administration. A “New Boston Committee” had been formed, but it collapsed attempting to handle the issue of property tax assessments Curley had financed his neighborhood projects through excessive CBD business assessments. Though the CBD lost during the 1950’s 14,000 downtown jobs and $78 million of downtown-based tax assessments[15], Hynes attempt to lower CBD assessments generated a firestorm–and Hynes was still very much dependent on his neighborhood-based constituencies. Long-nurtured on a diet of anti-Yankee, anti-business, anti-downtown rhetoric, and the neighborhood voter was not yet ready to bury the hatchet.

 

The business community itself was skeptical about Hynes and with Curley still wandering about the neighborhoods and generating newspaper coverage, it probably had a right to be. Years of war had generated what O’Connor called a business “politics of inertia”[16]. There was no experience with “city efficient” participation and Massachusetts state government was such a negative player in municipal and metropolitan affairs that business attention was easily diverted.

 

It’s Darkest Before the Dawn

But in this crazy quilt of dysfunction that was Boston in the fifties, an opening was found to bring Boston’s business elite into a productive relationship with city government. The catalyst behind change came from an amazingly unlikely source: the Catholic Church. Recently (1953) named as Boston College’s Dean of Business Administration School, Father W. Seavey Joyce organized a conference  for “Greater Boston’s Business Future” in May. 1954. Attended by over 200 key business elites, including many we would classify as suburban-based elites, the conference touched off a formal (newspaper) and informal dialogue on critical issues such as tax abatement and focused attention specifically on development of the Back Bay.

Tax abatement, more than eminent domain opposition, proved to be the chief policy hindrance toward a CBD-oriented redevelopment program. Despite building a smaller ($6,5 million) office building in the Curley years—which Curley quickly assessed at $24 million[17]–the John Hancock Life Insurance Company in 1953 started negotiations to build a 26 story office building in Copley Square downtown[18]. The John Hancock would have been the first major postwar office building in the CBD. The project quickly became the visible symbol of Boston’s hope for a viable future. Five years later, the project was still hung up over negotiations on tax abatement concessions. The issue was two-fold: the Irish 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 sixty story John Hancock Tower, designed by I. M. Pei, never opened until 1976.

 

An even worse fiasco involved a major railroad yard project anchored by Prudential Insurance. That project also was befouled by tax abatement controversy. The issue 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.”[19] Despite the obvious need for CBD renewal, tax abatement not only generated both Policy World and neighborhood opposition, but it also fragmented the downtown business community in an unexpected way. Some very elite downtown headquarter business leaders loved the old, eyesore in which they worked. This was the heart of the old, eighteenth century downtown and it should be preserved and not altered with new style redevelopment. Urban renewal as perceived in the fifties was too blunt an instrument to be sensitive to historic preservation.

 

In the midst of all these CBD-related angst, Father Joyce’s conference brought this frustration, fear, and bitterness out into the open. The “good father” then took it upon himself to follow up with private conversations, meetings and dialogue between private and public leaders. These were high level dialogues with many of the “right” people (Sullivan owner of the Boston Patriots, the Governor, Hynes, key tax payer groups, the Boston Citizen’s Council (elite private sector group), Chair of the First National Bank, the Urban Land crowd). As the dialogue continued and grew larger and more action-oriented, the participants agreed to meet regularly and formulate an action agenda. Boston had finally forged a sustained public-private dialogue and advocacy group[20] (the Citizen’s Seminar Group).

 

And then Hynes waged the 1956 mayoral election against Senate Minority Leader John Powers. Hynes won in a bitter election. At his second inaugural speech Hynes outlined an aggressive plan for redevelopment (including a centerpiece Boston Common garage and a new series of housing and neighborhood projects by the Buffalo Housing Authority). He also acknowledged that Boston was facing financial collapse and that to address that looming fiscal disaster, Boston needed positive reform legislation from the state legislature. This legislative action would return to Boston control over its tax base and budgetary decisions. Powers (his defeated opponent) and the Senate never agreed to any such package over the next four years and, to the contrary passed additional legislation which further hamstrung the City. Suburban state legislators held the city up for patronage, city contracts and probably worse. In short, the 1956 mayoral election, and its policy aftermath was an unmitigated disaster.

 

So the Citizen’s Seminar Group in 1956, recognizing that the Senate would kill anything associated with Hynes, pushed forward its own state-city fiscal reform legislation[21]. They did achieve some success with the legislature, but not enough for Boston to deal with the pending financial and budgeting crisis which was now building up a head of steam. The two prominent redevelopment projects in this environment continued to go no place–to the point that they seemed dead. At the last moment (1957), on its own without a tax deal, Prudential acquired the site (no development yet, however) and kept the project alive, but just barely.

 

No sooner had the property been acquired, than the Massachusetts Supreme Court outlawed tax abatement for redevelopment (as the Georgia Supreme Court was to do). Negotiations continued with a backdoor style tax abatement and in March 1958 a tentative agreement was reached between the City and Prudential. The agreement, however, required state approval. Prudential, in good faith, announced the project, held a ground-breaking ceremony, and began construction on Boston’s first commercial urban renewal style project. It was January, 1959. At this critical juncture with the project going forward on the company’s good faith alone, Republican Governor Furcolo stepped in, using the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority as an intermediary owner, to save the project–but the Court rejected that solution as well. The Prudential, nothing but a big hole in the middle of downtown Boston, stopped construction[22].

 

How Does One Open a Vault? By Seeing the Specter of Disaster

In the midst of this debacle, yet another chapter in Boston’s urban renewal history was unfolding. The Boston Housing Authority (BHA) had all it could do coping with the new series of public housing and slum rehabilitation projects it was pursuing. The hard-pressed and isolated commercial urban renewal program, buried in a small office within the BHA, was clearly unable to assist any of the beleaguered downtown projects. So the Citizen’s Council, the Chamber of Commerce and other major corporate leaders pressed Hynes to detach the urban renewal division and set up its own autonomous bureaucracy. The City Council agreed, amazingly the state authorized its approval, and in September, 1957, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was born.

 

The BRA followed the usual quasi EDO model (a semi-autonomous agency governed by four mayoral and one gubernatorial appointee). Hynes appointed Joseph Lund a VP of the locally prestigious Bradley Real Estate Group and Chair of Urban Land’s Research Institute. The BRA’s started working on an action plan for its first proposed commercial, mixed use urban renewal project: the West End. This was the project that Herbert Gans would detail in his sixties classic study of urban renewal, the Urban Villagers and noted urban architect and designer, Victor Gruen was retained. Opposition of the affected areas was intense in the media and Policy World, but oddly enough, many residents did not take the proposed project seriously. Residents believed that like almost everything in Boston’s past, the project would sooner or later implode and they need not worry. With some surprise, the project evolved to the point that on December 10, 1959, Hynes announced the BRA board had approved its initial project, the developer and the financing. It had taken nearly ten years, but Hynes had finally launched his first CBD redevelopment project. But… this is Boston; the BRA’s West End Project was a disaster.

 

The slum removal project 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.[23] ‘The West End symbolized all that was wrong with city planning in the 1950’s’… wrote Lawrence Kennedy, ‘because it bulldozed the homes of poor people and replaced them with an enclave for the wealthy’.[24] The apparent ruthlessness with which the demolition program was carried out in the West End produced such a wave of horrified revulsion that the future of any further ‘urban renewal’ projects in Boston was much in doubt. Even more than the physical destruction that had wiped out one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, people everywhere were appalled at the heartless way in which former residents–most of them elderly, many of them refugees and displaced persons from World War II, a number of them unable to speak English–had been uprooted from their modest homes and apartments

 

The after-effects of the West End project on BRA’s second ongoing project, the Government Center-Scollay Square project marked the end of urban renewal under Mayor Hynes. Hynes, however, while fully engaged in the planning and consensus building, had less than a year left in office. Aside from the West End, the entire of his commercially driven redevelopment vision was still stalled, the Boston Common project a scandal without even a ground-breaking, and his housing-neighborhood projects receiving much criticism. Now that he was a visible lame duck, the long brewing fiscal and financial crisis erupted.

 

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[25]. For the Boston private sector, 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[26].

 

A New Independent Mayor, a Professional Urban Renewal Director—the Project Goes Forward

On Monday, January 4, 1960 a new mayor was sworn into office;. During the previous November John Collins had won an unexpected victory. Collins had an even more aggressive redevelopment agenda than Hynes. He was not associated with the dying machine. Confined to a wheelchair, Collins brought the FDR new start image to Boston. Under Collin’s determined leadership, BRA hired Ed Logue to spring free the long-stalled Hynes redevelopment projects and to create his signature campaign theme: “the New Boston”. In this section, the story of Collins, Edward Logue urban renewal program will be briefly presented. While description is valuable in and of itself, the more sublime theme is the manner in which urban renewal was applied to Boston, and its role in affecting future Boston politics and economic development policy.

 

It took only three months for Collins to bring Hartford’s Ed Logue[27] Redevelopment Director into Boston as a consultant. As consultant Logue prepared a comprehensive, ten project, “Ninety Million Dollar Development Plan”, which was announced by the Mayor in September, and led to his controversial “election” as BRA Administrator (and also head of the mayor’s office for development and office of planning—this is what a Czar looks like) in January 1961. Shortly after, the federal Urban Renewal Administration approved $30 million for Boston’s development plan, which was matched by $30 million from the state of Massachusetts.

 

Logue immediately set to clear the deck of stalled projects[28], designation the Prudential as a ‘blighted area’ under federal urban renewal law, he broke the logjam over the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s opposition to tax abatement (he transferred the property to the BRA, leasing it to the Prudential Corporation). Prudential dutifully started design (using Le Corbusier-style skyscraper motif), construction followed and the project opened early in 1964. Adjoining the Prudential was the construction of the Hynes Auditorium and a Sheraton twenty-nine story hotel, establishing the site as Boston’s principal civic, convention and tourist center. Also adjacent in a self-described “contagion of improvement”, the First Church of Christ Scientist received urban renewal 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.”[29] The Tufts New England Medical Center (South Cove area below Chinatown) then started a 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 (the Government Center has been described as the ‘crate that Faneuil Hall came in”[30]’, while others assert its having “Mycenaean or Aztec overtones”[31]), and ignoring the incredible disruption to Boston’s downtown (the author drove a cab for several years around that mess—and he is still bitter), the Government Center was the heart and the visible symbol of the New Boston. The contagion of improvement that followed completion of that project literally rebuilt Boston’s CBD, and opened the way for designing a new waterfront fit for the modern age. In November, 1963 Collins was overwhelmingly elected to a second term, carrying nineteen of twenty-two wards. Urban renewal was not regarded as a failure, the “New Boston” was seen as real by Boston’s voters.

 

And now the page turns! Scollay Square was bulldozed, and only after intense Brahmin opposition was a key historic building (Sears Crescent) saved; the working class supported saving the old burlesque hall, and a beautiful structure it was (the Old Howard), but it was torn down. These were hints of what was to follow when Logue left the confines of the CBD and moved urban renewal into Boston’s neighborhoods. The logic of urban renewal could not easily stop with office and government buildings. CBD-oriented urban renewal easily extended to supplementing new office and service  developments with residential neighborhoods sufficiently attractive to house their occupants. The old, working class ethnic/racial 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”[32]. And such is the “square” that cannot easily be “circled” which lies at the core of urban renewal as a public policy.

 

There is no easy answer to this dilemma, although many are argued. The flip side of urban renewal is gentrification and the replacement of new with old. Sixties style urban renewal, led by the corporate-progressive coalition was needlessly zero-sum. In the early and  middle 1960’s as various urban renewal projects tore down blocks of neighborhoods, the residents resisted. Collins and Logue avoided the politically powerful neighborhoods (South and East Boston), but without a representative on the City Council your neighborhood was in trouble. After the 1963 election, the city polarized and 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 potentially worthwhile projects.

 

From the perspective of the urban renewal coalition, things began to get out hand. In 1964, the Office of Economic Opportunity Act provided a flow of federal funds to set up community and low-income organizations. Incredibly, the federal government had gotten itself into a situation where federal monies were subsidizing slum removal in low-income neighborhood, riling up the residents of these neighborhoods, thus promoting the feds put out another stream of money to neighborhood residents to stop such demolition. Then starting in 1965 and continuing for several years was a series of mostly racial riots, almost insurrections than burned down large sections of the inner central city. To make matters even more bizarre, in this period of internal crisis the federal government was increasingly preoccupied with a fast-expanding war in Vietnam—the effect of which was to let the local parties conduct their urban renewal vs. community empowerment battle on their own terms. In five short years, Boston urban renewal had transformed the downtown, tore down many inner city neighborhoods, started replacing them with middle and professional class housing, and destroyed much of the political and social fabric of the central city.

 

Ed Logue, unintentionally, was writing an updated urban renewal manual—of what works and what doesn’t. CBD/neighborhood physical redevelopment would be redefined over the next decade—but was too late for the sixties. By the time Collins left office in 1967 (and Logue lost his bid for mayor), Irish-Catholics and Blacks were outraged, hostile, frustrated, and many were literally in the streets. Boston politics would be for decades dominated by the organizations created in opposition to, and the legacy of, Logue’s urban renewal. The effect of this legacy, and the legacy of far too many other eastern and Midwestern cities, has carried over into physical redevelopment as an acceptable economic development strategy. Had he only limited urban renewal to the CBD?

[1] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970” (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1995). See also O’Connor’s, The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001) and “The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, Back Bay Books, 1995).

[2] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970” (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1995); The Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001); “The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston, Back Bay Books, 1995).

[3] Walter McQuade, “Urban Renewal in Boston” in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit., p. 260 describes Boston 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”.

[4] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970” op. cit. p. 12-13.

[5] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970” op. cit. p. 42.

[6] There is an exception, partly, to Curly bossism. In a later chapter the history will discuss the start of the famous Route 128 technological revolution. In an incredible irony, Route 128’s birth occurred mostly in the Curley years. Innovation and knowledge-based aficionados are no doubt proud of that heritage—but, frankly, there is more of Curley personalism than Dukakis rationalism in Boston’s early technological revolution.

[7] Lawrence J. Vale, From Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007. The Boston Housing Authority, empowered by 1933 Massachusetts enabling legislation, had been stimulated by NIRA, also the stimulus for Atlanta’s initial foray into public housing and slum clearance.

[8] This is Logan Airport today. Originally acquired from the Department of Defense (Dept of Army) in 1929 (an interim one year ownership by the state of Massachusetts). The City operated the airport out of the Parks Department until 1941 when, in response to the 1939 state’s entry into airport public policy which established the state as a lead player (Massachusetts Aeronautics Commission). In 1956 the state approved establishment of Massport, a quasi state EDO which included not only the airport, but bridges and roads, and the Port Authority.

[9] Curley, then in his seventies, lurked in the background until 1958 (when he passed on), conspiring with any and all to regain control of the machine and Boston. Hynes greatest achievement could well be that he stood as a wall against Curley, allowing Curley’s machine to wither, and for all practical purposes finally die.

[10] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”. op. cit.  pp. 42-43.

[11]Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”, op. cit.,  pp. 75.

[12] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”  op. cit., p. 77. “We have all the low-rental projects we need” (Hynes).

[13] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”, op. cit., pp. 77-88.

[14]Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970” O’Connor, op. cit. p. 77.

[15] Walter McQuade, “Urban Renewal in Boston” in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit., p. 261.

[16] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”O’Connor, op. cit. p. 79.

[17] Walter McQuade, “Urban Renewal in Boston” in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit., p. 262. 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.

[18] 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.

[19] Walter McQuade, “Urban Renewal in Boston” in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit., p. 262.

[20] Meeting at a Boston College site the group formalized into the very wordy group “Citizen’s Seminars on the Fiscal, Economic and Political Problems of Boston and the Metropolitan Community”. In Oct 1954, it held its first seminar. At that seminar, Hynes put tax assessment, tax abatement and redevelopment on the table. He also presented his image of a redeveloped Boston downtown, a new World Trade Center along with the stalled John Hancock and Prudential projects. In early 1965 these leaders traveled to Pittsburgh and see firsthand the Pittsburgh model of urban renewal (they met with Mellon, Lawrence and the Allegheny Council). Returning, the Citizens Seminar Group continued to meet “and                fraternize”; they brought in speakers such as Lewis Mumford whose low-rise, anti-skyscraper perspective was deeply appreciated and embraced. With grants from the Ford Foundation, the group staffed up a research bureau and a public television series. The group, now under the leadership of Gilbert (President of the Gillette Corporation) spun off the research group and it became Boston Bureau of Public Affairs. Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”, op. cit. p. 119.

Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”,  op. cit. p. 119. The legislation had the support of the Citizen’s Council, the Boston Retail Trade Board, the Chamber of Commerce, the Boston Real Estate Board (the Urban Land crowd),and Boston Municipal Research Bureau.

[22] The Prudential Tower, now the second tallest building in Boston (fifty-two floors) finally began construction in 1960 and opened in 1964. The breakthrough will be discussed later in this chapter.

[23] Walter McQuade, “Urban Renewal in Boston” in James Q. Wilson, Urban Renewal, op. cit., p. 264.

[24] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”, op. cit. pp. 138-39.

[25] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”, op. cit. p.147.

[26] Thomas H. O’Connor, “Building a new Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950-1970”, op. cit. p.147. The Vault became identified with private elite participation in economic development and urban renewal. But similar elite entities occurred in various forms in most other cities–many emulating Pittsburgh’s elite commitment. For example in Minneapolis “Business elites initiated and directed the city’s first downtown-centered redevelopment strategy from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Corporate leaders from the exclusive Minneapolis Club formed the Downtown Council (DTC) in 1957, which in turn coalesced diverse business interests into a single, driving force for redevelopment. The DTC took the lead in the city’s renewal effort by formulating a strategy with which it sought to revitalize the downtown retail sector to lure suburban shoppers back to the city …Denise R. Nickel, The Progressive City: Urban Redevelopment in Minneapolis” Urban Affairs Review, Volume 30, 1995, p. 358.

[27] Edward Logue is arguably the Age of Urban Renewal’s most acknowledged practitioner. I regard him as the personification of Big City economic development in that era. Born in Philadelphia, received his undergraduate and L.L. B. degrees from Yale and Yale University Law School. He married the daughter of a powerful Yale Dean of Academic Affairs and became the assistant to Connecticut Governor, Chester Bowles. When Bowles became Ambassador to India, Logue went with him for the better part of two years. He was alleged to have been close to John Bailey, JFK’s future Postmaster General and political advisor. He was not Hartford’s first urban redevelopment director, but when Yale University became interested in expansion, Mayor Richard Lee brought him on board in 1954. In a later section we will detail the Hartford urban renewal experience. In 1960, alongside his Boston experiences, , he and Mayor Lee wrote the urban renewal plank at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. After an unsuccessful attempt to be elected Boston’s mayor in 1967, Logue moved on, becoming  New York State Urban Development Commissioner under Rockefeller (1968-1975). Between 1978 and 1985 he was CEO of the South Bronx Development Corporation.. He died on Martha’s Vineyard in 2000.  His background is not housing or planning, but legal. His was a career suited to a Brahmin. He was always a political (and society) insider, skilled as an operative and administrator. His economic development linkage with municipal and state government CEOs exemplifies the centrality of economic development policy to those public officials.

[28] He also unlocked and completed construction on the underground parking garage beneath the Boston Commons. It opened on Thanksgiving 1961. The history of scandals associated with this project did not stop with Hynes (BTW).

[29] Thomas H. O’Conner, the Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001), p. 225.

[30] Thomas H. O’Conner, the Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001), p. 223.

[31] Essentially, the Government Center Project is a$30 million dollar City Hall surrounded by a massive often snow-filled, wind-swept, bitterly cold plaza with lots of steps, park benches and some flowers. Faneuil Hall is not literally a part of the Government Center Project-although it touches it, sort of. 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.

[32] Thomas H. O’Conner, the Hub: Boston Past and Present (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2001), p. 226.

 

 

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