BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER: THE NOBLE EXPERIMENT
On March 30, 1909, at the prestigious Boston City Club, the opening speaker, Edward Filene,13 tasked his audience of 230 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. (Heath, 1998; see also Scott, 1969, pp. 110–17)
A later speaker, board member George W. Codman,14 offered further 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” (Heath, 1998).
Soon labeled “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 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 the latter’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 comprised 16 points to be achieved by 1915, including:
+ Structural reforms—expert accounting for the city, reduced government waste and a new charter for Boston.
+ Progressive reform—the best public health department in the nation; comprehensive system of wage-earner and old-age pensions; an increase in 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”; growth in existing industries; and the introduction of new enterprises.
The Boston Plan was a two-pronged initiative. The first of the prongs began in 1905 with the formation of the Good Government Association (GGA) whose membership totally overlapped the membership of the Boston 1915 Plan.15 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 whole of 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 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 was passed (52 percent); Storrow lost, but business candidates secured a majority on the city council. Honey Fitz was elected mayor, the first 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. 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 16-point plan. The mayor brought in an 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/ commissions. Curley 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, they 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 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 200 exhibits were 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 were 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 1910 Expo targeted the gazelle of is day, the glamorous aircraft industry, complete with actual planes, including a Curtiss; models of the Wright Brothers’ plane; and the winner of Europe’s aircraft race. It was so well attended that a second “aero industry” Expo was held the next year at Harvard Aviation Airport (60,000 attended). That 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 also figure prominently in our history: we have already discovered that 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 twenty-first-century HEDO.
Coastal and international trading as well as maritime industries (fishing/whaling) 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 1840s transatlantic passenger routes meant ports ventured into tourism. Ports housed naval facilities and forts as well as immigration-processing centers. Port facilities included piers, wharves, channels, customhouses and 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 and Walder, 2000, p. 10).
Nineteenth-century port facilities were privately owned or controlled by monopolies of railroads, power utilities and mining corporations. These old-style Privatist ports were devoid of public powers and were more a vehicle to transfer railroad and marine assets into non-taxable 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 had it with railroads/ shipping firms’ 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 the British Parliament in London. 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). This was a radical, indeed revolutionary, innovation in hybrid EDOs. The London model offered the added benefit of “insulat[ing] 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; and 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 in Progressive Washington/Oregon, and Boston, municipal and state policy systems retooled and repurposed the port authority to: seize control of 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 1850s 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, in 1911 the Boston Chamber 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 were also included in the bill, as was a large appropriation. 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 on its transatlantic passenger route. More to our interest, monopolistic access to 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 was constructed, another pier modernized and some marshy flats reclaimed for potential development (Sturges, 1915, pp. 242–6). 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.
Boston successfully lured the annual meeting of the International Congress of Chambers of Commerce to the city in 1912, the first time that body had met in the United States. That achievement was the result of a 1911 chamber-organized tour of 75 European cities, in the course of which formal invitations were dropped off in each city. The International Congress arrived with 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 to South America and the 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 boathouse 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; 15 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 New Boston—“A Suburban Town Built on Business Principles”—that reflected the status of the housing movement led by the Russell Sage Foundation, calling for Forest Hills-type planned communities in the suburbs of Boston. 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” (Heath, 1998).
In 1911 the Boston Plan submitted to the Massachusetts state legislature an initiative calling for the creation of a metropolitan district whose purpose was to provide Boston (and the 40 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) and 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 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 was 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 that the metropolitan district was the first step to future annexation. The Massachusetts legislature shortly after passed its own long-range housing program run 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 January 1914. But that was it. In January 1914 a new mayor, the aforementioned James Michael Curley, began his first term as mayor of Boston.
Within a year the Boston Plan 15 organization collapsed and disappeared.
Ron W. Coan 