THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 79
ing—has there been such a return of
the architectural repressed. It is even
possible to speak again in praise of the
brutalist style in which much of that
fifties and sixties public building was
done. When people begin to cast a
fonder eye on the Port Authority Bus
Terminal, it means an epoch has altered.
Ed Logue was the consensus villain
of the old urban planning. In a 2001
interview between the writer James
Kunstler and the sainted urbanist Jane
Jacobs, Logue was the subject of an ex-
tended hate:
Q: He went on to inadvertently destroy both
New Haven and much of central Boston by di-
recting Modernist urban renewal campaigns in
the 1960s. Did you watch these schemes un-
fold and what did you think of them?
A: I thought they were awful. And I thought
he was a very destructive man and I came to
that opinion during the first time I met him,
which was in New Haven.
Lizabeth Cohen’s new book, “Saving
America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the
Struggle to Renew Urban America in
the Suburban Age” (Farrar, Straus & Gi-
roux), is an attempt to salvage the vil-
lain’s reputation, mostly by putting it in
the Tragedy of Good Intentions basket
instead of the Arrogance of Élitist Cer-
tainties basket, albeit recognizing that
these are adjacent baskets. Cohen, an
American historian at Harvard, reminds
the reader, as any first-rate historian
would, that what look, in the retrospec-
tive cartooning of polemical history, like
obvious choices and clear moral lessons
are usually gradated and surprising. Logue,
whose career was more far reaching and
ambitious than that of any other urban-
ist of his time, helped remake New Haven,
Boston, and New York, and his ambi-
tions for city planning were thoroughly
progressive: “To demonstrate that peo-
ple of different incomes, races, and eth-
nic origins can live together... and that
they can send their children to the same
public schools.” Despite his reputation
as a “slum-clearer,” Logue was uncompro-
mising about the primacy of integration.
“The pursuit of racial, not just income, di-
versity in residential projects animated all
his work,” Cohen writes. ( Jane Jacobs, to
put it charitably, didn’t really notice that
her beloved Hudson Street, in the West
Village, tended toward the monochrome.)
Simple sides-taking exercises between
good guys and bad guys turn out to betray
the far more complicated fabric of big-
city life. Logue’s mixed achievement is a
testament either to the inadequacies of
his proposals or to the intractability of his
problems, and probably to both at once.I
n black-and-white photographs from
the fifties and early sixties, Logue has
a look that was once called Kennedy-
esque: square-jawed and confident, with
the slightly weary gaze, of a kind per-
haps more Bobby than John, of a good
man trying to elevate his countrymen
while being perplexed by his colleagues—
the kind of man who can use the phrase
“fellow-citizens” often and sincerely. The
patrician look was slightly misleading,
as it was for the Kennedys, too. Logue
was the child of an Irish immigrant fam-
ily, reared in Philadelphia in a family
that was strongly pro-union and pro-
New Deal. He went to Yale, where he
got into some hot water as an under-
graduate for helping to unionize the ser-
vice workers, and then got a law degree
there, in 1947. His first serious work as
an urban planner, still in New Haven,
was driven by impeccably progressive
purposes. “Logue had a clear political
position: pro-labor and anti-Commu-
nist,” Cohen writes. At a time when “lib-
eral Catholicism” was a movement, not
a contradiction, his faith tempered and
gave values to his progressivism.
In 1953, he was recruited by New Ha-
ven’s newly elected, reformist mayor,
Dick Lee. The two men devoted them-
selves to renewing the city, using mostly
federal money, some earmarked, in the
Eisenhower years, for building high-
ways. The problems that Logue and Lee
faced in the mid-fifties were not the
ones we face now: the idea that down-
town San Francisco and the lower-Man-
hattan 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 re-
motely as appealing as the suburbs to
people who had the choice to leave.
Since downtown New Haven was
obviously losing retail sales to the sub-
urban malls, Logue and Lee decided tobring the new-style retailers into the
center of the city. They wanted, as Cohen
writes, to get rid of “dated stores, mod-
est personal services, and cheap lun-
cheonettes,” and attract solid bulwarks
of secure retailing, like Sears, Roebuck
and Company and Macy’s. The result
was the Church Street Project, includ-
ing the Chapel Square Mall (planned
in 1957, although it didn’t open for an-
other decade), and it proved to be a di-
saster. 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 trag-
edy 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 proj-
ects. This story was repeated elsewhere
throughout the sixties and early seven-
ties: high hopes for urban revival, fol-
lowed by disappointing results, and then
fear of urban crime leading voters to re-
place reformist administrations with re-
actionary and pro-cop ethnic ones, usu-
ally 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 under-
stood 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 per-
sistence—that the city’s comparative ad-
vantage lay in its universities and col-
leges, in its identity as a “City of Ideas.”
Nor was he insensitive to preserva-
tionist concerns. His big central proj-
ect, Government Center, designed by
I. M. Pei, originally involved the de-
struction of two important small-scale
nineteenth-century buildings. When
protests against their demolition arose,