Eleventh in a series

Ed Logue emerged from his first year in Boston as the all-powerful director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority – a man with a clear mission to bring urban redevelopment to Boston, not just its downtown but to the neighborhoods as well. Mayor John Collins and Logue announced an ambitious $90 million development program in the fall of 1960. It was a plan that included seven of Boston’s neighborhoods as well as the downtown. Including specific plans for neighborhood revitalization was a tricky bit of business, as the memories of the destruction of the West End and New York Streets neighborhood under Mayor Hynes remained fresh in the minds of city residents. But Logue was nothing if not bold – his vision for a renewed Boston was broad and all encompassing.

It was true that the neighborhoods were begging for attention. The housing stock was old and still too often substandard, and the city needed to demonstrate that it was both a place for business and for residential living. But redeveloping primarily residential neighborhoods is a vastly different exercise than the redevelopment of downtown business districts. Logue understood that, but he did not fully understand Boston’s parochial neighborhoods, or the stubborn and nostalgic attachment of their citizens to the status quo, even if that meant living in substandard housing conditions.

Boston residents were understandably wary of promises of improvement through renewal. Improvement in the West End had meant the wholesale demolition of a neighborhood. In East Boston it had meant a neighborhood split in two by an insensitive elevated highway approach into the Sumner Tunnel. The proposed Callahan Tunnel would take even more property, causing more disruption in the close knit neighborhood. Projects that may have been accepted in the past by an immigrant community not inclined to make waves were now being viewed skeptically by their sons and daughters. It was, after all, the 1960s, a time when American citizens nationwide were not inclined to simply sit back and trust their government. And when that government proposed large scale redevelopment in the form of tearing down entire neighborhoods, the people decided that “progress” needed to come in a different, more people-friendly form.

Logue began with a proposal to change the face of Charlestown – an ambitious proposal that in its first iteration planned on demolishing some 60 percent of all existing homes in that neighborhood. Logue called the homes “slums as bad as any I have ever seen,” which may have been true but was not an opinion shared by the locals who were deeply connected to the familiar, albeit shabby and substandard, housing that they had known since childhood. Logue’s plan was eventually revised to focus on roughly 10 percent of Charlestown’s housing stock. This paring down of his plan did nothing to ease the anxieties of some Charlestown residents, who organized as the Self-Help Organization/Charlestown (SHOC) and who brought their loud and persistent message to Logue and City Hall: “not in our town.” After many community meetings and with the strategic intervention of Catholic Church leaders, Logue eventually got his plan through, with a promise to remove the old elevated train line along Main Street.

Logue encountered greater resistance in Allston-Brighton, where the BRA had targeted a large tract behind the Harvard Business School for demolition and renewal. The BRA held many boisterous community meetings to find support for its North Harvard Street project, support that never emerged as angry residents and sympathetic Harvard students began a long fight against what they viewed as big government driving them out of their neighborhood by use of force. Opposition turned to anger and violence, with Boston police being called in to arrest demonstrators and evict tenants. Once again Logue prevailed, and the BRA’s plan was put into place, but at the expense of a reputation that was increasingly tarnished by a sense that his “planning with people” program was simply window dressing.

Citizen activism in Boston was not confined to opposition to the BRA. Residents observed what had taken place in Charlestown and Allston-Brighton, and learned from those experiences. In East Boston and in the South End, citizens organized to oppose insensitive state transportation planning designed to respond to the increasing mobility facilitated by the automobile, regardless of the cost to or impacts on residential neighborhoods.

Boston’s mid-century mobility plan was focused on the idea of an “Inner Belt” surrounding the city, with a superhighway running right through it. Such a grand vision would facilitate suburban mobility in and out of, and through, Boston. It would require tearing down a considerable swath of many established Boston neighborhoods – primarily in Roxbury and the South End – and it would irrevocably divide the city with massive highway systems. The regional planning effort also included provision for a second harbor tunnel, and expansion of Logan International Airport. These expansion efforts would require the demolition of homes and separation of neighborhoods in East Boston, degrading further the quality of life in that community.

The sheer destructive force that these transportation “improvements” threatened to have on Boston’s neighborhoods finally pushed average citizens to become citizen activists. These people were not against progress, nor were they against improved mobility. What they did oppose were transportation planning efforts that disregarded and degraded the value of their homes, and the quality of life in their communities.

The citizen pushback in East Boston began with the “Battle of Maverick Street” shortly after Collins and Logue had left city hall. The protest began when Massport refused to reroute a caravan of over 600 fuel and dump trucks that made their way each day down Maverick Street to Logan Airport. The women of Maverick Street were worried and they were angry – worried about the safety of their children who played on the sidewalks and streets, and angry at the truck noise and the gasoline exhaust fumes from the parade of trucks each day. On Saturday September 28, 1968, a day when truck traffic was particularly bad, the mothers decided they had enough. Caryl Rivers, recounting that day, wrote that the women of Maverick Street “went out into the street wearing their house dresses, some clutching their children by the hand, and blocked the road with their bodies.” Massport went to court to stop the protestors, but the mothers were determined to fight. Massport’s attempt to fight the residents collapsed when state and city political leaders forced Massport to find an alternative route on Massport property. Soon the trucks were re-routed.

East Boston was not alone in its citizen advocacy. In 1969, activists from the South End and other neighborhoods formed the Greater Boston Committee on the Transportation Crisis – the GBC – a combination of citizen activists, politicians, and academicians that became an effective advocacy group, armed with data and substantive, policy-based arguments. The GBC was determined to halt the Inner Belt project, whose construction would virtually wipe out the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Roxbury and the South End, as the highway would connect to the inner belt through an eight-lane elevated interchange.

The great mistake of the Inner Belt plan, and the great opportunity for effective community activism, was that it had serious negative impacts in more than one community, and it therefore brought together both white and black citizens in a potent alliance. There was truly power in numbers and in the diversity of voices that made their case to legislative and executive branch leaders. The potential destruction of suburban conservation land brought new voices to the discussion, and a new generation of leadership in the African-American community brought both a savvy understanding of the impacts of insensitive transportation improvements on their community, and a strategic understanding of how citizen activism can leverage change.

Ultimately, Gov. Francis Sargent understood that he must give ground, and he put a halt to the Inner Belt. Sadly, much damage had already been done prior to the governor’s declaration of a construction moratorium. Sargent’s reversal of the Inner Belt proposal came after over 470 homes had been bulldozed in the South End and Roxbury, displacing 326 families. It was too late for those citizens, but the gubernatorial decision represented an important milestone in the changing direction of transportation planning in Massachusetts.

The East Boston, South End, and Roxbury activists learned their lessons by observing what had happened when Collins and Logue tried to bring urban renewal to the neighborhoods. But the difficulties faced by Logue as he brought his vision of redevelopment and renewal to the people should not detract from the magnitude of his achievement in refashioning Boston as a modern city capable of competing with the best of American cities. Despite their failure to win the hearts and minds of Boston’s neighborhood activists, Collins and Logue were highly successful in building the platform upon which the New Boston would grow and flourish. The building of Government Center in the 1960s was a singular achievement, remaining today an enduring symbol of the New Boston, and a daily lesson in what went right and what went wrong.

The grand civic plaza in Government Center has never been fully embraced as a vibrant meeting place, and several attempts to put it to more active use have failed to succeed in any lasting way. There has been discussion in this year’s mayoral race of replacing City Hall – a building much (and in my view unfairly) scorned. City Hall has been controversial since its design was first rolled out following a national competition in 1962. The building sits on the site as a rugged example of modernism- — designed to invite the public in on lower levels where citizen interaction would take place, with grand spaces for the mayor and council hovering at either end of the building, and the beehive of city bureaucracy at the top levels. It was creative and well-conceived, and as much as anything else it became a symbol of the changing face and attitudes of Boston. This was new, this was cutting edge, this was world class – this, after so many years of parochialism and buttoned-up attitudes and design timidity, this was the New Boston.

The new City Hall was completed just in time for the mayor who would take office in January 1968. That person would not be John Collins. Collins observed the political terrain before him as re-election approached, and decided not to run for a third term. His administration’s neighborhood renewal programs, so vital for the future of the city, were not well received by city residents, who were angry at the BRA’s redevelopment efforts, and angrier still at a variety of social ills beyond the power of Collins or any mayor to fully control. When he ran in 1966 for the Democratic Party nomination for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Leverett Saltonstall, Collins was humiliated by a 22,559 vote drubbing in Boston at the hands of former governor Endicott Peabody. Incredibly, Collins lost 21 of the city’s 22 wards. He had worn out his welcome with Boston voters, and perhaps he was relieved not to be at the helm as the city moved toward one of the more turbulent times in its history.

The election of 1967 loomed large. There were rumblings that threatened to break up the city, tremors that started gently but gradually took on more force as the city confronted what may have been its most consequential crossroads – a time for decision making when the stakes were at their highest, when the very soul of the city was at stake. Racial tensions were high in Boston, erupting into violence as a protest by welfare mothers in Roxbury’s Grove Hall triggered several days of unrest, looting, destruction of public property, and clashes with the police.

The issues in 1967 were fundamental: what kind of city would Boston become? How would Boston respond to racial inequities and deep class divisions that had long been unspoken and ignored? As the Collins administration waned, the rising fortunes of other politicians began to take shape. A young political leader with deep roots in Boston politics plotted his pathway to higher office; the quintessential outsider, Ed Logue, decided to take a fateful leap from appointed to elective office; a Brahmin Republican described by historian Thomas O’Connor as an “indefatigable public servant” considered whether it might once again be time for a member of his class to lead; and a tough, determined woman from South Boston looked upon 1967 as her moment, a time when politics and personality would meet and present her with an historic victory. The winds of change were drifting through Boston, and every little breeze whispered: “Louise.”

Jim Aloisi is a former state secretary of transportation. His most recent book is The Vidal Lecture.