BIG CITY URBAN RENEWAL
An Overview: Big City UR is a Many-Splendored Thing
By 1962 New York, Chicago and Philadelphia (with New Haven in the early lead) captured the most federal bucks—Cleveland, Buffalo and Cincinnati the least. Public housing and neighborhood slum clearance were almost totally dependent on federal monies. CBD-focused redevelopment, often as not, relied on private funds, with federal dollars in a supportive role. Local governments also had to ante up. By the mid/late fifties “eds and meds” and industrial districts entered the picture, as did cultural programs and a surprising number of sports stadia. All shared at least one common purpose: to modernize the central city and enhance its competitive position against the ever-growing suburbs. In some way, and to some degree, every northern and midwestern Big City played the UR game.
Each city developed its specialty or balance among project types. Projects concentrated on what would later be called “gray areas”; low-income, minority areas with limited vitality and more than their fair share of “pathologies”—but still home to those who lived there. A diversity of functions was critical if central cities were to compete effectively. Luxury housing, in particular, countered decentralization; but such housing contrasted starkly with high-rise, mega-public housing complexes, and offered little to those displaced by their construction. Downtown, however, required a middle-class workforce, and removing congestion meant limiting commuters through highways. UR projects ironically yielded increased tax revenues (despite tax abatement). That was faint praise as the slum housing they displaced produced next to nothing.
Some cities got off to an early start; others like St. Louis didn’t get going until 1959 (Gateway Arch, Plaza Square Apartments). Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle was the acknowledged leader in CBD redevelopment. NYC pioneered using federal funds for high-rise luxury housing (Kips Bay, Washington Square), and its Lincoln Center (1962) opened the doors for culture, concert halls, museums and luxury housing. Minneapolis (starting in 1958) focused on removing blight in its CBD and a general redevelopment of its waterfront, demolishing older structures and skid rows and replacing them with high-rise apartments, bank headquarters and a Sheraton-Ritz hotel. Cleveland and Boston had a tough time getting started. Cleveland started with the 163-acre Erieview, designed by I.M. Pei: a mix of uses, including high-rise housing, office buildings, parks, shopping malls, residential and luxury housing, and entertainment. Cleveland hoped Erieview would trigger private investment in surrounding areas.
Cities began noticing a suburban “exodus” of jobs and industry—hindsight suggests it was less exodus than closing obsolete, less productive/profitable facilities and moving (to the Sunbelt as well as the suburbs) to modern factories and new markets. Central cities lacked usable space for new facilities; industrial parks met that need; federal money paid two-thirds of the cost. Central city industrial parks, Philadelphia an early pioneer, picked up steam over the two decades. Highway construction opened areas to trucks, and planners liked industrial parks because they were compatible with usebased zoning. One of the largest, Cincinnati’s Kenyon-Barr project, transformed 400 acres into 13 superblocks, each with parking surrounding a light manufacturing core. Restaurants, banks and shopping were also included. Philadelphia’s 2500-acre Eastwick, intended to be a “city within a city”, combined moderate-income housing and shopping centers with industrial development.
There was a raft of neighborhood-related project types. Philadelphia’s high-income Society Hill, St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe and Boston’s Roxbury housing projects were some of the more well known. Several cities preferred housing and neighborhood projects: St. Louis doggedly stuck to its housing rehabilitation strategy; Baltimore, an early leader, backed away and moved to the CBD Charles Center project. The tragedy for public housing initiatives in the Big Cities is that it meant massive complexes full of high-rise units. Pruitt-Igoe competed with Chicago’s Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green as the poster child of mega Le Corbusier, high-rise public housing complexes. They were torn down in later years.
Neighborhood projects, by definition, hit low-income households and minorities, and hardest, in greater numbers than the more sparsely settled CBD projects (destruction of small businesses was always a key issue). From the get-go, these projects generated all kinds of opposition from residents. Displacement, compelled relocation and no alternative housing resulted in moving people from one low-income neighborhood to another—disrupting adjacent neighborhoods, causing flight and neighborhood succession in the process. Later battles concerning school busing inherited the legacy of neighborhood change and fear generated by neighborhood UR. To make matters worse, even moderate-income housing failed to satisfy expectations; suburbanization did not abate, and demand for new central city housing was lackluster.
If some CBD projects left little more than empty lots, neighborhood projects suffered from exceedingly high vacancy rates that threatened any private funding associated with the projects. Many failed. But still new projects came on line, generating more controversy and mixed to poor results. The average Joe lost faith these projects would accomplish desired ends—bond referenda increasingly failed. The second phase of Cleveland’s Erieview project lost its bond referendum. By 1960 lost bond referenda were common in Big Cities: “The euphoria of the 1950s … was waning” (Teaford, 1990, p. 160). It didn’t take Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) to dispel UR as the miracle solution for neighborhood revitalization.
Big Cities were grappling with their own set of problems: “their context,” which combined a surprisingly active progressive business and planning elite; adherents of the physical redevelopment paradigm that confronted for the first time the specter of Big City decline evidenced in unremitting suburbanization, ceaseless in-migration of low-income, predominantly Great Migration blacks with no place to go other than already-devastated slum neighborhoods with obsolete, deteriorated and crammed to the brim housing.
To compound these issues obvious obsolescence, epitomized in loss of downtown retail by new suburban malls, and the actual departure of corporate headquarters to the suburbs and the fear “eds and meds” would follow meant CBD redevelopment competed with neighborhood redevelopment and slum clearance. Off to the side was growing evidence of woes in the jurisdictional economic base’s manufacturing sector that, while still unnamed, was leading to plant shutdowns and relocation. While southern piracy captured its fair share of blame for the last factor, it was also evident that something structural was going on that required local ED involvement. Make no mistake, the context underlying Big City urban renewal was the fear and the reality of decline. That decline, if not alleviated, almost certainly meant an end to Big City primacy of the metropolitan hinterland—it involved, as Jacobs so aptly titled it, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
The severity of each of the above issues, as well as the degree of progressivism within the business community, varied from city to city. But a common dichotomy typically manifested itself to some degree in each city as neighborhood redevelopment, housing and slum clearance (community development/planning/public housers/housing authorities) competed with corporate, business and real estate sectors for redevelopment of CBDs and adjoining “gray neighborhoods”. The latter group, often chamber-reliant and led, also assumed responsibility for leading, planning and mostly financing the CBD redevelopment, with the mayor and his administration providing key powers and associated physical support and (federal) financing, mostly through his redevelopment agency. The CBD business nexus also provided support and pressure to target efforts at addressing the “unnamed” structural program through newly created public business assistance EDOs, strategies and programs.
This “struggle, competition and coexistence” of two rival approaches to urban renewal gathered strength through the 1950s and early 1960s. Eventually, the community development approach succumbed to both the ineffectiveness of its strategy and the incredible opposition generated by neighborhood residents—a critical mass of which was generated by the intrusion by state highway departments in tearing up immense swathes of neighborhoods for urban interstate bypasses and highways. The CBD approach continued; but it too, in Part III, will face its own set of problems. That coexistence and struggle between the two wings poured the foundations for a new order, the contemporary Big City economic development system that will begin and develop in the chapters of Part III.
Accordingly, two cities, out of many possible candidates, have been selected to present a flavor and an outline of how our Big Cities responded. Boston is in many ways an outlier, its contemporary image of urban renewal almost the reverse of the one presented in this chapter. Partly its selection is based on the need to understand Boston and Massachusetts generally for the new order developed in Part III: partly because I lived in it and drove a cab through it during those years, but mostly because it demonstrates the internal political and cultural dimensions behind the approval and implementation of UR. UR was not a federal/academic program; it was local, and rested on local roots, judicial cultures and political antics. Philadelphia is more typical (and more innovative), and variations of its themes can be found in most Big Cities—Chicago for instance. It supplements earlier examples of Pittsburgh, NYC and Baltimore, which also provide a flavor.
BOSTON’S URBAN RENEWAL POLICY SYSTEMS
Boston, Ed Logue and Faneuil Hall are synonymous with UR—which is ironic in that UR left a controversial and complicated legacy. UR got off to a relatively late, clumsy and frustrating start that reflected not only the state and the city’s political culture and politics, but also the legacy of its ethnic machine policy system that long had run the city. The role of the state and the city’s business community should be noted—as well as the role of the mayor and his “expert” czar. Boston suffered from intense suburban pressures and noticeable CBD decline, but gravitated toward divisive and fiercely resisted neighborhood/housing UR projects. UR left in its wake an eastern-style progressive policy system headed by long-time mayor Kevin White. White mixed CD and ED strategies/goals typical of future contemporary East Coast policy systems.
The principal lessons from the Boston case study include outlining the transformation of the city’s policy system from ethnic, charismatic mayor/ethnic ward boss to a new charismatic mayor and ethnic machine/boss contemporary policy system. Obviously “we kid,” but that is what happened—from James Curley to White and his so-called “new machine”. We will finish the story in another chapter, but the bitter hostility between business and ethnic politicians, between neighborhood and CBD, the constant involvement of state government in municipal affairs and UR itself—all were expressed within Boston’s UR policy during the Transition Years. It is ironic indeed that Boston today is known for the form of UR (CDB with a “growth coalition” composed of strong mayor, corporate/business leadership and expert/professional management) that “lost” out to neighborhood redevelopment/housing community development—the reaction against which brought White into power at the end of this section.
In this tale one can see that Boston wears its political culture on its sleeve during these years, and how political culture prevented Boston’s political leadership from moving into an alliance with business for a sustained downtown revitalization. Instead, with the exception of the famous Government Center project, Boston’s UR initiatives are out in the neighborhoods or on the edges of its compact, loosely defined downtown—where they had been in the Curley, Tobin and Hynes years. In the past (not now) Boston had a tough time dealing with its CBD, and there have been extended periods when someone threw away the key to the “Vault” and locked its denizens out of the policy system. This is for the most part lost in the smush of today’s UR paradigm.
Charismatic Mayor, Ward-Base Machines = Anti-CBD, Pro-Neighborhood
Boston’s dominant political figure in the first half of the twentieth century was James Michael Curley, the Frank Skeffington of Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel The Last Hurrah. First elected mayor in 1914, Curley served four, four-year terms and retired (unwillingly) from the Boston mayoralty in 1951 (with half his last term spent in federal prison). He served as governor and saw several terms in Congress. Curley presided over a decentralized, mostly Irish, ethnic ward-based, city council-dominant machine. He shared power with ward bosses the like of the proverbial Martin Lomasney.
He also fought a bitter war with the city’s business and corporate leadership, pushing the Yankee Protestant Brahmins out into nearby suburbs. The Brahmin elite, however, retained its leading position in Massachusetts state politics. Brahmins dominated the state and CBD, and the machine ran the neighborhoods. The war between the two explains Boston’s CBD decline—why Thomas O’Connor (1993) called Boston a hopeless backwater and McQuade described it 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” (McQuade, 1966, p. 260).
The Massachusetts legislature resisted Boston home rule vigorously, directly controlling much of the city’s day-to-day administrative and policy-making power. Budgetary and fiscal powers, for example, were exercised by the legislature; the city’s civil service system and police administered by the state. Curley and business engaged in a sadly comical war of not picking up the bank president’s garbage and the city not securing buyers for its bonds. Real estate taxes rose to such levels that a 1950 comparison between Boston and 20 other large American cities placed Boston as the most expensive.
Curley left the inner city to wallow in its Puritan self-righteousness while he turned his attention and his municipal favors to those in the “other” Boston who never failed to give him their loyalty—and their votes. While he showered the various neighborhoods with libraries, health units, parks, playgrounds, and bathhouses, he neglected the downtown section of Boston and allowed it to fall into a state of such disrepair than many native Bostonians began to give up all hope of its eventual recovery. (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 12–13)
Pre-1950 UR
The Boston Housing Authority (BHA), established in 1935 and empowered by 1933 Massachusetts enabling legislation, built Ickes New Deal NIRA/PWA housing starting with South Boston’s Old Harbor Village in 1935. The city’s first public housing project opened in 1938 (Vale, 2007). The BHA participated in eight prewar Housing Act projects. Combined with 1937 Housing Act projects, Boston “had the largest number of units per capita built anywhere in the country” and in absolute units was second only to New York City (Bratt and Broadman, 1983, p. 5). Curley and Congressman (later Speaker) John McCormack greased the public housing skids. Public housing was a Depression-era political plum, providing homes and employment. The BHA apparently did not enforce income standards, and housing was a “ward boss’s opportunity,” allowing over-income families (and city employees) to live in public housing (Vale, 2007, p. 193).
Boston also enjoyed its fair share of federal temporary housing during the war; the shipyards in Quincy, for example, required federally funded units and areas were cleared. Immediately after the war, to accommodate returning veterans, Massachusetts passed Chapter 200, a program to build projects for veterans. In short, Boston was aggressive in clearing areas for public housing.
In 1951 a former “hack”, John B. Hynes, ran against Curley—and beat him. Hynes was then mayor for two terms (until 1961). His city council, horribly factionalized, contained any number of potential rivals, and candidates for employment. State government conducted a permanent guerrilla war on their Irish adversaries in city hall. Under the Housing Act of 1949, the BHA launched a second series of neighborhood public housing/slum removal projects. Three major public housing complexes were developed (Columbia Point, Bromley Heath and Mission Hill Extension). All were dense, high-rise, Le Corbusier style.
Public housing slum removal proved so controversial and politically unpopular that, after 1954, Hynes shifted into CBD urban renewal (O’Connor, 1993, p. 77). Why? First, maverick anti-machine Hynes abandoned the past BHA policy of ignoring income guidelines. Worse, over-income city employees were forced out of existing public housing. Second, shorn of their corrupt middle-class tendencies, public housing came to be seen as “a dumping ground for those uprooted by [highway and other slum clearance], and they became linked in the public mind to racial conflict and poverty” (Bratt and Broadman, 1983, p. 7).
Highways as a solution to Boston’s decentralization was set on its “path” in 1942 when Washington-based CED planners and Boston’s corporate elite developed, separate from city hall, comprehensive plans to minimize decentralization and revitalize the metro area’s stagnant economy: “There had been a planning competition in 1944, a highway plan in 1948, and a general plan for the city which appeared in 1950” (Mollenkopf, 1983, pp. 142–3). These ideas were incorporated into the eligibility plans required for housing act funds. With perfect timing (1954), Mass DOT approved a new expressway (the Central Artery project) cutting through the city’s length. Earlier, in 1953, another state expressway cut through Boston’s Chinatown, stirring up negative neighborhood reaction.
The Central Artery project uprooted over 900 businesses, prompted vigorous business opposition (“Save Boston Business”) and crystallized neighborhood residents to form a “Save the North End” association (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 77–8). During the 1950s the CBD lost 14,000 downtown jobs and $78 million of downtown-based tax assessments (McQuade, 1966, p. 261).1 UR-style expressway demolition, displacement and non-relocation inflicted by the state created a nasty legacy for future UR.
Hynes’s CBD-UR “Bulldozer”
John B. Hynes embraced CBD urban renewal as Boston’s salvation. In the switch to the CBD, however, Hynes inadvertently ran afoul of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, initially over tax abatement—gifting to business—more than eminent domain per se. As it persisted through the decade, Hynes’s inability to secure court approval for a hybrid public/private EDO proved his undoing. Hynes’s first opportunity came with a major project proposed by the John Hancock Corporation.
In 1953 the John Hancock Life Insurance Company started negotiations to build a 26-story office building in Copley Square.2 This would have been the first major postwar office building in the CBD; it soon became the symbol of Boston’s hope for a viable future. Five years later, however, the project was still hung up over negotiations on tax abatement. The issue was two-fold: the court held a long-standing Puritan belief that private business should not benefit from tax abatement; and the Massachusetts Supreme Court followed that theme by enforcing its equally long-standing series of decision precedents forbidding such benefits. The John Hancock Tower, now 60 stories designed by I.M. Pei, never opened until 1976.
An even worse fiasco involved reconverting a major railroad yard project anchored by Prudential Insurance. That project also was befouled by tax abatement. Tax abatement was critical because Boston’s downtown property tax rates were “far and away the highest of any major city in the U.S. … more than twice as high as in New York [City] and Chicago … Commercial valuations in Boston were very high, frequently above market value.” (McQuade, 1966, p. 262) On its own without a tax deal (1957), Prudential acquired the site and kept the project alive. No sooner had the property been acquired, the Massachusetts Supreme Court outlawed tax abatement for redevelopment. Still, in March 1958 a tentative backdoor abatement agreement was achieved: Democrat Governor Furcolo stepped in, using the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority as an intermediary owner to abate taxes. Prudential, in January 1959, held a ground-breaking ceremony on Boston’s first commercial urban renewal-style project. At this critical juncture the court rejected that solution as well—construction ceased. In 1961 Prudential was a big, quiet hole in downtown Boston.
A Bridge over Troubled Water
The business community was skeptical about Hynes. It needed a bridge-builder and that role was played by Boston College’s new (1953) Dean of Business Administration, Father W. Seavey Joyce. Joyce organized a conference, “Greater Boston’s Business Future”, in May 1954. Attended by over 200 key business elites, the conference touched off a newspaper and informal dialogue on tax abatement and Back Bay development. The “good father” followed up with private conversations and dialogue between private and public leaders, including many of the “right” people (Bill Sullivan, the Boston Patriots owner, Governor Hynes, taxpayer groups, Boston Citizens’ Council, the chair of the First National Bank and the Urban Land crowd). As the dialogue grew more action-oriented, the participants agreed to meet regularly and formulate an action agenda. A public–private advocacy group (the Citizen Seminar Group) resulted (O’Connor, 1993, p. 119).
In October 1954 the group held its first public seminar, at which Hynes put tax assessment, tax abatement and redevelopment on the table. He presented his image of a redeveloped Boston downtown, a new World Trade Center along with the stalled John Hancock and Prudential projects. In early 1955 business leaders traveled to Pittsburgh and met with Mellon, Lawrence and the Allegheny Council. Speakers included Mumford, whose low-rise, anti-skyscraper perspective was warmly appreciated. With grants from the Ford Foundation, the group staffed up a research bureau and a public television series. Under the leadership of Gilbert (president of the Gillette Corporation), the Citizens’ Seminar spun off the research group to become the Boston Bureau of Public Affairs. The Seminar Group heard and endorsed Hynes’s view on how UR should be conducted: “The only way that decay and blight may be uprooted [Hynes asserted] is by a complete physical change in the affected neighborhood or area” (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 157).
At his second inaugural speech (1956), Hynes outlined an aggressive CBD redevelopment plan, including a Boston Common garage and new housing and neighborhood projects by the Buffalo Housing Authority. Hynes acknowledged Boston was facing financial collapse, and that to address looming fiscal disaster the city needed enabling home rule legislation giving it control over its tax base and budget. Senate leader John Powers (Hynes’s defeated mayoral opponent) never agreed to any such package. Hynes’s plans were dead in the water—again.
In the midst of this debacle, the Boston Housing Authority had all it could do coping with public housing and slum rehabilitation projects it was pursuing. The harried and isolated commercial urban renewal program, buried within the BHA, languished. So the Citizens’ Council, Chamber of Commerce and corporate leaders pressed Hynes to set up an independent urban renewal bureaucracy. The city council agreed, and amazingly the state concurred; in September 1957 the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was born.
Late in 1959 Moody’s lowered Boston’s bond rating to Baa, “making Boston, among cities in the United States with over a half million people, the only one assigned this poor rating … the city headed toward the shameful specter of municipal bankruptcy (O’Connor, 1993, p. 147). The prospect of financial default was the final straw. Chaired by Safe Deposit and Trust Company’s Ralph Lowell and CEOs from Forbes, First National Bank, John Hancock, New England Telephone two big-name Boston law firms and the Harvard Business School dean, Boston’s city fathers gathered in a boardroom adjacent to the vault of the Safe Deposit and Trust Company. The “Vault,” otherwise known as the “Boston Coordinating Committee,” was born.
The West End
In the meantime BRA had started working on its first mixed-use urban renewal project: the West End. Noted architect Victor Gruen was retained to plan and design the Charles River Park. Media/Policy World opposition was loud, but residents believed that, like almost everything in Boston, the project would sooner or later implode and they need not worry. BRA proved them wrong, and on December 10, 1959 Hynes announced its initial project, developer and financing.
Slum removal wiped out the entire neighborhood—38 blocks, 41 acres, 9000 residents. An entire low-rent, low-rise, Italian tenement neighborhood was gone—in its place high-rise, high-rent housing for the affluent: “The West End symbolized all that was wrong with city planning in the 1950s … because it bulldozed the homes of poor people and replaced them with an enclave for the wealthy” (O’Connor, 1993, pp. 138–9). Appalled at the heartless way residents—mostly elderly, many refugees or displaced persons from World War II unable to speak English—had been uprooted from modest apartments, the visceral reaction to the West End project paralyzed Hynes/ BRA’s second project, the Government Center-Scollay Square project. It didn’t help that a prominent leader of the New Boston Committee and financial supporter had been named as principal West End developer (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 150), marking the end of UR under Mayor Hynes. His heritage is the Freedom Trail—a tourism masterpiece.
Collins and Logue: The Dynamic Duo
On January 4, 1960 a new mayor was sworn into office. Maverick Democrat John Collins had won an unexpected victory. Collins advocated an even more aggressive redevelopment agenda than Hynes, and he was not associated with the dying Curley policy system. Confined to a wheelchair, Collins conveyed an FDR New Deal image to Boston. BRA stole Ed Logue from New Haven to jump-start the stalled Hynes redevelopment projects and implement his signature campaign theme: “the New Boston”. Set up as BRA czar (also head of the mayor’s office for development, housing and planning), Logue prepared a comprehensive ten-project “Ninety Million Dollar Development Plan” in January 1961. Shortly after, the federal Urban Renewal Administration (URA) approved $30 million, matched by $30 million from the state to implement the plan—the Vault had done its job. Boston reopened stalled projects and commenced slum clearance for CBD and neighborhood housing.
Logue designated the Prudential as ‘blighted”, breaking the logjam over the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s opposition to tax abatement. Prudential started design (using a Le Corbusier-style skyscraper motif) and the project opened early in 1964. Alongside the Prudential, the Hynes Auditorium and the Sheraton 29-story hotel established the site as Boston’s principal civic convention and tourist center. Nearby, in a “contagion of improvement”, the First Church of Christ Scientist received UR funding “that included administration buildings, apartment complexes, merchandise marts, and a seven hundred foot long reflection pool that lit up approaches to Massachusetts Ave and Symphony Hall” (O’Connor, 1993, p. 225). Tufts New England Medical Center also conducted significant redevelopment of a “rundown” neighborhood with Logue’s assistance.
On the seventh day, however, Logue didn’t rest. He turned his attention to the last stalled project: the Scollay Square/Government Center. Whatever its architectural merits (Government Center has been described as the “crate that Faneuil Hall came in”; others asserted its “Mycenaean or Aztec overtones”), Government Center became the symbol of the New Boston—opening the way for development of the waterfront.3
In 1963 Collins was overwhelmingly reelected, carrying 19 of 22 wards. At that point the New Boston and UR was no longer a failure.
The Worm Turns
Scollay Square was bulldozed, and only after intense Brahmin opposition was a key historic building (Sears Crescent) saved; Boston’s working class supported saving the old burlesque hall (the Old Howard), but it was torn down. These were hints of what was to follow when Logue left the CBD and moved UR into Boston’s neighborhoods. Old, working-class neighborhoods with wooden two- or three-story apartments, tenements and single room occupancies (SROs) would not do.
The city’s new program was designed to transform these valuable locations into clusters of attractive and income-producing communities with the kind of shiny new townhouses and modern apartments that would bring middle-class families and well-to-do professionals back to the city. (O’Connor, 1993, p. 226) In these five short years, Boston UR tore down several neighborhoods and started replacing them with middle-class/professional housing, destroying in the process much of the political and social fabric of the city.
After 1963, stressed by the proposed neighborhood projects, the city polarized; class/racial war followed. Community neighborhood organizations formed. Residents demanded involvement in decision-making. Local groups stopped some projects (Southwest Corridor) and opposed and delayed many others. Starting in 1965 and continuing for several years, a series of mostly racial riots burned down sections of the inner city. In 1966 voters elected another mayor, with a new approach to urban governance and a new way to provide development to Boston; it came in the form of a new style of community development.
Ron W. Coan 