80 THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019
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 brutal-
ist wasteland. It’s about as bad and de-
pressing as any public space
can be. It did, however, suc-
ceed at spurring downtown
development around it.
What defeated Logue’s vi-
sion in the magazines and uni-
versities 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 Whitman-
esque 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 al-
ready had a safe place in the West Vil-
lage. 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 ag-
onized racial politics of big cities. In
1967, Logue ran for mayor of Boston,
and, though regarded as a serious con-
tender, was squeezed between another
reformist candidate, Kevin White, and
Louise Day Hicks, a ferocious anti-bus-
ing activist. (Her slogan: “You know
where I stand.”) Determined to protect
Irish neighborhoods from interfering
outsiders who wanted to bus their chil-
dren, 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 Amer-
ica are a long-standing feature of the
American foundation.
Cohen makes a larger point about the
context in which Logue and his col-
leagues rose and fell. In the early years
of the Cold War, “expertise” was seen as
a powerful support of liberal democra-
cies. 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 up-
ended faith in experts. The
same people who designed
the Strategic Hamlet Pro-
gram, in Vietnam, had remade
downtown New Haven (and,
one could argue, on similar
principles: replacing the ex-
posed, organic village with a
secured fortress, the mall). The
expertise of the urban plan-
ner 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.I
n 1968, Logue, his reputation oddly un-
diminished by his Boston travails, was
appointed to head New York’s Urban De-
velopment Corporation, a Nelson Rocke-
feller initiative; the failure of urban re-
newal 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.
Logue’s most lasting monument puts
his vision to its more serious test: Roo-
sevelt Island, in the middle of the East
River. The original 1969 plan, by Philip
Johnson and John Burgee, with John-
son caught between his Miesian and
postmodern moments (“This is my Jane
Jacobs phase,” he announced), was, in
the touching way of architectural pre-
sentations, full of cheerful families cel-
ebrating life on the river. And the proj-
ect had all sorts of virtues, many of them,
as Cohen shows, killed off, in the famil-
iar pattern, by rising costs and impon-
derable 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 maywin the blue ribbon for the most bru-
tal 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 inspir-
ing plan for the island and its less than
inspiring completion can’t be put down
simply to a stylistic failure of the pe-
riod, or to inadequate funding. As Roo-
sevelt 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 entrepreneur-
ial 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.H
istoric figures are relegated to the
background and then, like anima-
tronic puppets in Disney’s Hall of Pres-
idents, are called upon to step forward
and speak again when they seem to have
wisdom to offer on a new problem. Fred-
erick Douglass, long a revered statue, has
become a living presence again, in the
light of the renewed sense of the central-
ity of slavery to the American experience.
Logue has clearly been summoned in re-
sponse to the current crisis of the Amer-
ican city: the crisis of affordable housing,
and, with it, the disaster of cities’ being
made monocultural by their success. The
new generation of residential towers, ris-
ing in their vertiginous narrowness and
affordable to only the elect, are the sym-
bols of our time: the wealthy giving the
finger to the city. They are as much the
visual symbol of New York now as the
great thirties skyscrapers were the symbols
of a romantic view of American indus-
try, or as the great buildings of Riverside
Drive were of middle-class New York in
its ascendancy. (My great-aunt, who
worked as a translator at the U.N., lived
in a ten-room apartment on 115th and
Riverside, but abandoned it in the eight-
ies, during the worst of the crime wave.)
We suffer these days from urban diseases
of affluence—too much money chasing
too little land—but we should remem-
ber what diseases of privation were like.
Now, a rational case can be made that