In 1953, he was recruited by New Haven’s newly elected, reformist mayor, Dick Lee. The two men devoted themselves to renewing the city, using mostly federal money, some earmarked, in the Eisenhower years, for building highways. The problems that Logue and Lee faced in the mid-fifties were not the ones we face now: the idea that downtown San Francisco and the lower-Manhattan factory districts could become the Park Place and Boardwalk in the game of American Monopoly would have seemed to them absurd. They lived in a world in which suburbanization seemed an irresistible force, and the emptying out of cities an unstoppable problem. Their concern wasn’t to make downtowns affordable to people other than the rich; it was to make cities remotely as appealing as the suburbs to people who had the choice to leave.

Since downtown New Haven was obviously losing retail sales to the suburban malls, Logue and Lee decided to bring the new-style retailers into the center of the city. They wanted, as Cohen writes, to get rid of “dated stores, modest personal services, and cheap luncheonettes,” and attract solid bulwarks of secure retailing, like Sears, Roebuck and Company and Macy’s. The result was the Church Street Project, including the Chapel Square Mall (planned in 1957, although it didn’t open for another decade), and it proved to be a disaster. It walled off the New Haven city core, and was attractive neither to city dwellers nor to repenting suburbanites.

Although Logue left New Haven for good in 1961, to work for the new mayor of Boston, Cohen tells us how the tragedy of New Haven unfolded after his departure. With the urban riots of 1967—New Haven had some, though not the worst—the old political machine, briefly stayed by Lee’s reformism, reawakened. In 1970, an Italian machine politician became New Haven’s mayor, and ended the city’s remaining urban-renewal projects. This story was repeated elsewhere throughout the sixties and early seventies: high hopes for urban revival, followed by disappointing results, and then fear of urban crime leading voters to replace reformist administrations with reactionary and pro-cop ethnic ones, usually Italian—Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia was the same kind of politician as the New Haven guy, with Giuliani, in New York, a lagging indicator.

In Boston, as Cohen points out, the worst had been done for Logue: the West End renewal project, of the early fifties, was already universally understood to be a disaster. Racial conflict was secondary to the ancient Brahmin-Irish one, with Jews and Italians caught in the crossfire. Logue, who headed the Boston Redevelopment Authority, was far from the bulldozer-in-a-blue-suit stereotype. Soon after he arrived, he grasped that a tech-and-educational core was the golden ribbon of Boston’s persistence—that the city’s comparative advantage lay in its universities and colleges, in its identity as a “City of Ideas.”

Nor was he insensitive to preservationist concerns. His big central project, Government Center, designed by I. M. Pei, originally involved the destruction of two important small-scale nineteenth-century buildings. When protests against their demolition arose, Logue made sure that they survived.

Designed in 1962, and finished at last in 1968, Boston’s City Hall Plaza, the heart of Logue’s Government Center project, is still hard to love. The preserved elements have been poorly absorbed into the newer ones, and the plaza, built with visions of Venice’s San Marco in mind, has become one more windswept brutalist wasteland. It’s about as bad and depressing as any public space can be. It did, however, succeed at spurring downtown development around it.

What defeated Logue’s vision in the magazines and universities was the rise of Jane Jacobs and the conservationist left. For Jacobs, “dated stores, modest personal services, and cheap luncheonettes” were the city. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), she showed a generation how small enterprise helped sustain the complex ecology of mutual unplanned effort that makes cities work. Logue and Jacobs once had an onstage debate, in which Logue needled Jacobs about her highly romantic vision of her West Village neighborhood—he’d been out there at 8 p.m. and hadn’t seen the ballet of the street that she cooed over. (Jacobs was an instinctive Whitmanesque poet, not a data collector: you don’t count the angels on the head of a small merchant.) Logue also made the serious point that the emerging anti-renewal consensus was fine for someone who already had a safe place in the West Village. For those who didn’t, it was just a celebration of other people’s security.

But what defeated people like Logue on the ground was the increasingly agonized racial politics of big cities. In 1967, Logue ran for mayor of Boston, and, though regarded as a serious contender, was squeezed between another reformist candidate, Kevin White, and Louise Day Hicks, a ferocious anti-busing activist. (Her slogan: “You know where I stand.”) Determined to protect Irish neighborhoods from interfering outsiders who wanted to bus their children, and from “the element”—that is, minorities who wanted to take over their beloved blocks—Hicks is a reminder that the fault lines visible now in America are a long-standing feature of the American foundation.

Cohen makes a larger point about the context in which Logue and his colleagues rose and fell. In the early years of the Cold War, “expertise” was seen as a powerful support of liberal democracies. This was the expertise of engineers and architects—and of a growing class of professionals who had been able to go to colleges that their parents could not attend. The traumas of the sixties upended faith in experts. The same people who designed the Strategic Hamlet Program, in Vietnam, had remade downtown New Haven (and, one could argue, on similar principles: replacing the exposed, organic village with a secured fortress, the mall). The expertise of the urban planner was undermined as well, by the new prestige attached to the preservationist, which, for good or ill, remains undiminished. As the next generation of development would show, however, what tends to replace expertise is not the intelligence of the street. What replaces expertise is the idiocy of the deal.

In 1968, Logue, his reputation oddly undiminished by his Boston travails, was appointed to head New York’s Urban Development Corporation, a Nelson Rockefeller initiative; the failure of urban renewal having become abundantly clear, the new notion was to build from scratch, in undeveloped spaces, rather than tearing down and starting over in the same place.

“It’s only sexy if the faucet isn’t on your side.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping Cartoon by Julia Bernhard

Logue’s most lasting monument puts his vision to its more serious test: Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the East River. The original 1969 plan, by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, with Johnson caught between his Miesian and postmodern moments (“This is my Jane Jacobs phase,” he announced), was, in the touching way of architectural presentations, full of cheerful families celebrating life on the river. And the project had all sorts of virtues, many of them, as Cohen shows, killed off, in the familiar pattern, by rising costs and imponderable problems. What was to be an open plan with broad vistas to the river got closed in as it became plain that the project wasn’t financially viable at its original scale. The closest thing to a civic building that Roosevelt Island has is a giant parking garage, which may win the blue ribbon for the most brutal brutalist building in the city, a highly competitive category, with the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the running.

The difference between the inspiring plan for the island and its less than inspiring completion can’t be put down simply to a stylistic failure of the period, or to inadequate funding. As Roosevelt Island was going up in the mid-seventies, SoHo was, so to speak, coming round. The old loft buildings were made into a shining village of art that was an ideal urban environment of galleries, residential and working spaces for artists, restaurants, and entrepreneurial startups, until it was lost to money and homogenization. The choice in housing seems to be between something like Roosevelt Island, which doesn’t quite work and lasts, and something like SoHo, which does work but can’t last.