Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

Reviewed by Daniel Cumming

In the pantheon of urban developers, few figures have shaped our collective consciousness more than Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Whether in Robert Caro’s The Powerbroker or Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the neighborhoods cleaved apart for the Cross Bronx Expressway or the “eyes on the street” in Greenwich Village, most New Yorkers have understood midcentury debates about cities as embodied in Moses and Jacobs. Indeed, a villain-and-hero morality tale has become standard fare for urban renewal.

This narrative obscures a more complicated history. As historians have shown, a range of public and private officials, transnational influences, economic interests, political ideologies, and local residents shaped federal intervention in cities between 1949 and 1974. Nonetheless, popular accounts remain fixed on a binary plane. From both ends of the political spectrum, critics reduce urban renewal to “an abstract contest between unstoppable urban-growth machines and the defenseless communities that became their victims,” argues Lizabeth Cohen.[1] In her new book, Saving America’s Cities (2019), Cohen makes the case for “an alternative, more nuanced history of postwar American city building,” by tracing urban renewal as a set of policies and practices that evolved, even improved, over time, while still accounting for its successes and failures.[2]

At the center of the story is Edward J. Logue, a rather unknown but incredibly influential renewal official. Cohen features Logue for a political biography since he was at the forefront of nearly every important shift in urban renewal policy. As the head of redevelopment agencies in three major cities, his distinctive profile allows Cohen to write a “history from the top down,” while keeping in the frame “history from the bottom up.”[3] By following the career of “Mr. Urban Renewal,” as the New York Times dubbed him, Cohen integrates local, national, and international histories of urban renewal, examining the personal and political struggle of renewal professionals who lobbied Washington for money and then negotiated with residents to spend it.[4]

Neither a top-down bruiser like Moses nor a grassroots organizer like Jacobs, Logue embodied the promise and peril of urban renewal. A principled bureaucrat and racial liberal, Logue coordinated renewal programs in New Haven, Boston, and New York between the 1950s and 1980s. His agencies razed neighborhoods, to be sure. But they also rebuilt downtowns and rehabilitated cityscapes. While Cohen acknowledges James Baldwin’s evergreen criticism of urban renewal as “Negro removal,” she aims to present Logue’s career as a counterweight, one that in motives and outcomes suggests a more complex record of federal intervention. Readers experience urban renewal from Logue’s perspective, and Cohen’s core argument unfolds gradually as Logue moves from city to city: “Urban renewal,” Cohen asserts, “was driven as much by improvisation as by orthodoxy.”[5]

Saving America’s Cities is divided into three sections: New Haven in the 1950s, Boston in the 1960s, New York State in the 1970s and the South Bronx in the 1980s. In reconstructing Logue’s career, Cohen integrates an array of archives, journals, and papers. She also interviewed several key people involved in his life personally and professionally, adding a depth that a less accomplished scholar might have easily neglected.

Logue’s career, according to Cohen, represented a “new kind of postwar professional.”[6] Beginning with his childhood in Philadelphia, his union activism at Yale and New Haven, and his work with the state department in India, Cohen delves into Logue’s past to chart the emergence of an “urban redevelopment expert.”[7] Logue played a formative role in developing this new professional. Staffing his agencies with idealistic white-collar workers, Logue’s magnetic personality attracted graduates from top universities. With a staff of mostly white men, Logue fostered a culture of fraternal masculinity in his renewal agencies; the staff members even modeled their professional attire and personal habits after their boss. In turn, Logue saw himself as a “rebel in the belly of the establishment beast,” in Cohen’s phrasing.[8]

Though Cohen describes the new professionals as “liberal New Dealers,” these experts also represented an emerging “professional middle class” tasked with managing the structural conflict between labor and capital. Deploying their professional expertise as a primary means for revitalizing battered cities—and in the process absorbing the threat of social rebellion, while also fending off an impending urban crisis—Logue and colleagues aimed to solve the largest problems facing the postwar metropolis: deindustrialization, tax base erosion, urban blight, and white flight to the suburbs. Part embedded rebel and part establishment official, Logue would leave a lasting footprint on the twentieth-century metropolitan landscape.

Cohen introduces three key concepts to illustrate urban renewal’s change over time. The first is “pluralist democracy,” which Cohen uses to describe the representational form of public input Logue developed in New Haven. Consulting a large advisory board with public and private members, Logue and the New Haven Redevelopment Agency viewed their coalition as representative of the public interest. Between the 1950s and early 1960s, this first chapter of urban renewal helped bridge liberal state-building programs of the New Deal and Great Society. Nonetheless, Logue’s “planning with people” left much to be desired. By 1967, local fractures had split wide open. Emerging from protests against racist police, school curriculums, and housing authorities, the Hill Parents Association confronted the Redevelopment Agency’s exclusion of African Americans from planning their own neighborhoods’ futures.

The grassroots protests represented an important turn toward including local communities in renewal projects, what Cohen calls “participatory democracy.” By this time, however, Logue had moved on to Boston. Mayor John Collins hired him in 1961 to lead the Boston Redevelopment Agency (BRA), which soon became the largest redevelopment agency in the country. Logue’s pluralist ideals proved less applicable in a large city with deep political antagonisms and a disastrous start in renewal, including the razing of Boston’s West End. Still, the BRA had all the components Logue needed: a committed mayor, federal funding, and expert staff, or “mini Logues.”[9] Even so, Boston turned out to be a mixed bag. The BRA’s successes with Government Center and Faneuil Hall, among others, were tempered, if not offset, by firestorms of protest in several residential neighborhoods.

Cohen explores a third concept through Logue’s work Boston: the “negotiated cityscape.” Learning from experience, Logue emphasized rehabilitation among myriad competing interests, including historic preservationists, brutalist architects, downtown businesses, and resistant homeowners. Under negotiation, some neighborhoods were saved, such as the middle-class African American neighborhood of Washington Park in Roxbury; however, other neighborhoods planned for renewal were roiled by community resistance during the late 1960s, particularly in working-class Charlestown and South End. “Planning with people,” it turned out, was but a figment of the technocratic imagination.

When Governor Nelson Rockefeller offered Logue a job as president and CEO of a new state-level urban renewal agency, the New York Urban Development Corporation (UDC), Logue helped formalize a final stage of urban renewal governance. The $6 billion public benefit corporation was organized independently in the public-private mold of state authority. It had the power to issue its own tax-exempt bonds, enabling it to purchase, build, and own its renewal projects. It thus could avoid direct public scrutiny. Indeed, one would have to squint long and hard to see “planning with people” in the structure of the UDC.

The final section situates the UDC within Nixon’s rollback of urban renewal. Cohen focuses on successful brick-and-mortar projects: an amazing 117 housing developments across the state, 69 commercial, industrial, and civic projects, and three New Town communities, including Roosevelt Island. She also accounts for struggles, such as the origins of the Harlem Urban Development Corporation following activists’ occupation of a State Office Building in 1969, and the UDC’s failed integration of wealthy suburbs in Westchester County under the Fair Share Housing program. Most importantly, Cohen pays close attention to the UDC’s financial problems, which stemmed from overselling short-term bonds and fast-tracking projects reliant on federal funding. When Nixon announced his moratorium on housing subsidies in 1973, the UDC was doomed. The agency soon defaulted on $105 million in short term notes and $30 million in loans, and then folded for good in 1975, with Logue resigning in disgrace. Parsing through the aftermath, including a federal investigation, Cohen identifies a fundamental contradiction between the UDC’s social mandate to build and its fiscal mandate to not add a public tax burden. The UDC, Cohen concludes, was less a public-private experiment gone awry, and more the best option available in an increasingly hostile political and fiscal climate.

As urban renewal collapsed at the federal level, Logue was still in the prime of his career. Embittered but determined to tackle big projects, he got one final crack at saving a city. The final chapter follows Logue as director of the South Bronx Development Office (SBDO). At the dawn of a new era in market-oriented urban policy, the former expert of large-scale federal projects worked closely with nonprofit community development corporations, such as the Mid-Bronx Desperadoes and Father Louis Gigante’s South East Bronx Community Organization. The results were successful, especially Charlotte Gardens, a low-cost, suburban-style housing development built amid heavy industries and high-rise buildings. Cohen, however, is not entirely sanguine about the afterlife of urban renewal. Assessing the SBDO’s relationship with private foundations, Cohen argues that balanced public-private partnerships had become a thing of the past. By the 1980s, private interests were now at the helm. Logue’s work with the SBDO effectively foreshadowed a later reliance on market-based solutions to a growing housing crisis. Unlike ambitious government interventions of the postwar era, today cities are forced to entice housing developers with vouchers, tax credits, and other neoliberal handouts.

Unlike accounts that slide into reductive moralizing, Saving America’s Cities illustrates that nuance matters, both in policies and in the lives that shaped them. In addition to the oft-repeated maxim “all politics is local,” we might indeed add “all politics is personal.” However, Cohen’s close attention to one person’s career struggles to fully overturn the “great man” narrative of midcentury urban planning. As a result, Cohen reifies the genre by adding a middle-ground figure to the well-worn dyad. Moses and Jacobs remain just off-stage, even occasionally stepping into the limelight to engage in their long-running feuds with Logue.

The singular focus on Logue highlights another curious theme: the strange career of racial liberalism in American cities. Early in his career, Logue aligned his projects with black integrationists as “symbolic racial politics,” ignoring a deeper reservoir of black opposition.[10] Though urban renewal evolved, Logue’s penchant for cautious integration did not. For example, UDC strived to engineer an ideal social mix by income: 70 percent subsidized middle income, 20 percent low income, and 10 percent elderly. Balancing market returns with housing needs, racial liberals gave no shelter to people falling below calculated thresholds. Even if Logue planned for public input, in practice low-income African Americans disproportionately bore the costs of urban renewal long after the experts had moved on. Their simmering frustrations hardly entered into Logue’s political calculus, much less the psychological trauma and theft of generational wealth that communities suffered under their neighborhood’s destruction. By following the peripatetic career of a powerful figure, readers end up evaluating federal intervention largely on Logue’s terms. Cohen nuances standard accounts of urban renewal in compelling ways, but her emphasis on the muddled intentions of professional planners effectively sidelines the local consequences of its outcomes. As Logue moves between cities, so does the book’s narrative, which ultimately leaves behind the communities targeted by liberal reformers. Readers might be left asking: were the cities actually saved, and if so, for whom?

Lingering questions aside, Saving America’s Cities offers a sweeping history of urban renewal told through an important career. Expertly weaving narratives familiar and new, Cohen adds fascinating personal details to a political history that is local, national, and international in scale. She also offers thoughts on the necessary level of federal commitment and participatory planning to address—and perhaps finally ameliorate—an enduring housing crisis.

Daniel G. Cumming is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at New York University. He is writing a dissertation on the political economy of health, housing, and racial inequality in twentieth-century Baltimore. He is a Michael E. DeBakey Fellow in the History of Medicine at the National Library of Medicine, and a Henry Belin du Pont Dissertation Fellow at the Hagley Museum and Library.

[1] Lizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 2019), 12.

[2] Ibid., 10.

[3] Ibid., 12.

[4] Ibid., 6.

[5] Ibid., 397.

[6] Ibid., 12.

[7] Ibid., 12.

[8] Ibid., 31.

[9] Ibid., 172

[10] Ibid., 132.

Reviews, Urban Planning, Housing & RealtyGuest UserJanuary 2, 2020Comment