Available to the public for research and we host an ample number of programs. Thisevening , Anthony Pangaro who is a good friend of the Historical Society will do the honors of introducing our speaker. I wanted to take a moment to greet everyone and welcome you to the massachusetts Historical Society so without further ado i turn it over to Anthony Pangaro. [applause] good evening everyone, thank you gavin. Gavin has put together a terrific number of programs at massachusetts historical including definitive conversations about the era well over ayear ago which is where i first met liz. Its a pleasure for me to have a pleasant task of introducing liz and the book. How to begin . This is a book about a lifetimes work, about a career based in the strong premise that cities were important and vital to civilization,vital to this country, not only the world and i think liz has captured it. Ill let you her tell you about the book but ill tell you one story about it which lets you know how i felt about him. The first time i met ed i was 25 years old working in my first week atthe urban Development Corporation in new york city and i had worked at the bra but ed had already left. He had lost the primary for mayor so i never met him here although i do the Agency Working here out of graduate school and i was anxious to go to work for him again and meetthe man. It happened on a very odd day in an elevator. We were working on the 46th floor of the building which in the book is called the burlington house. We were the only tenant in the building at the time because the fisher brothers couldnt find anybody to sign the lease in a difficult time and the time was 1970 and they were reluctant to sign the lease with the state agency because god knows what that credit might be like especially since it was only issuing paper that were bottle obligations. That particular day, everybody was carrying around , everybody who works in dc at least, a copy of the New York Post which had run a frontpage story about the extravagance of someone named logue who had set up the agency in this private building on no lower floor than the 46th floor in central park and to say the least it wasnt like a building in albany with green walls any more than the one that is in the new bra which you will know about. Everybody had the newspaper, ed had the newspaper. I had never met ed and i said to him out of pure brashness, i was only that age, this story is really not right and he said how does it make you feel the work here . And i can only summon one word and it was an express elevator, it took a while to get to the 46th floor and i said really good. He put his hand on my shoulder and said its supposed to make you feel that way. And that in a nutshell is what and felt about the people who worked for him. He wanted them to feel good, he won them to be knowledgeable which was not to say he was easy to work for the book will tell you that story. Let me tell you about liz. Liz cohen received her a. B. From princeton and her mb at the university of california berkeley and in 1986 she became an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon and moved to nyu where she became a full professor. She joined in 1997 the history departmentof Harvard University where she is a presser of american studies. 2011 in addition to those duties she became dean of the Radcliffe Institute for advanced studies, a job she did until 2018. Shes been published in the new york times, washington post, boston herald. I dont see anything about the New York Post here. Her books include making a deal, Industrial Workers in chicago with one the prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Another book was a consumers republic politics in mass consumption in postwar america which is a widely used college textbook. The american passing with David Kennedy and shes a member of the American Academy of arts and sciences and i would say one other word and that is you should read this book from cover to cover. Dont be put off by the fact that it has hundred and 15 pages offootnotes. There is more content and fun in those footnotes than in any book i have everread and you dont have to be a scholar to get it. These are not oped, these are stories in and of themselves and their worth reading. Lizabethcohen. Thank you. [applause] thank you very much tony. Couple things just to say one is that headline about the office of the udc in new york , they talked about it as a low loss layer and i just want to thank tony not only for introducing me here today but for giving me many hours of interview and youll see if you read the book how much i depend on his memory and his take and his analysis of what went on, particularly in that udcperiod. Very nice to be here. Accu for coming. I see a lot of familiar faces which is wonderful and some new faces, i am glad for both and i look forward to sharing with you this book that i have worked on for a long time, as some of you know because there are people here whove been help me helpful to me over the years. Its been approximately 14 years of working on this book with delayed for seven years by that deanship at the Radcliffe Institute for advanced study and that was a delay, but when i look back on it, i think it was also an inspiration in many ways really encouraged me to value writing or a broad public because we get a lot of public programming at radcliffe. So i want to start giving you some background onwhy i wrote this book. Im not a biographer. Im a social political and urban historian of the United States in the 20th century. This is a very different kind of book than what ive written for. Let me see if i can get this working area i think maybe its not on. Gavin, i dont think i see the green light i once saw when testing this. Okay. Great. No . Not changing. We just put a new battery in. Right, okay. Here we go. Thats the one i want. So this is a very different kind of book and what i wrote before. In most of my earlier work as a social historian, i was writing the history of groups of ordinary americans, first and Second Generation immigrants, factory workers, africanamericans had moved from the south to northern cities, middleclass homeowners and consumers and so forth and that kind of history is generally referred to as history from the bottom up so you might wonder why ive written a biography about a powerful white male city builder like ed logue . I first decided i wanted to write a book about postworld war ii city i wanted to grapple with the changing physical built environment as well as how those changes came about. As i put it in the books introduction, i aim to understand whosin charge, who should have a say , who benefits and who pays the bill. I determined that focusing on the life of someone who was personally engaged with the struggle to revitalize postwar American Cities at a period when as many of you know mass area was booming would be a promising way to frame this book engage readers, i hope in what i thought was animportant story. I consequently became attracted to this new challenge of putting an individual with power at the center of my book and in a sense i was writing history on the top down, what i was trying to bring to it the analysis that social historians have. Theyre concerned with the importance of social identities like class, gender, race, ethnicity and so forth. In my previous book consumers republic the politics of mass consumption in postwar america i had written about the rise of mass suburbia, an increasingly important price for residents, work and commerce after world war ii and their explored what i call the landscape of mass consumption, the carving of new Housing Developments out of farms and forests. And the rise of Shopping Centers at new highway intersections and in that book i implied that cities were being displaced by suburbia but that wasnt really what my subject was. So i set out to write what became saving americas cities and i wanted to understand better what this decentralization of american metropolitan areas meant or cities, particularly the older established ones that had thrived with industrialization and immigration during the 19th century and into the early 20th century but were now in decline. I also felt from the start that we had a limited, fairly simplistic understanding of how postwar americancities had developed. Essentially dismissing all efforts at redevelopment as disastrous urban renewal. That assumption seemed to equally all interventions in cities with the work of villains like the notorious robert moses and in contrast, the ideal of postwar cities was thought to be best articulated by the more saintly jane jacobs with her message of antiplanning, hands off, let neighborhoods and cities develop organically on their own. Surely i thought the story must be more complicated than a clash of these two very extreme and often caricatured positions. I certainly knew that urban renewal from the late 1940s into the 1970s had some quite the flaws such as excessive demolition and dislocation of residence were often africanamericans and other minorities. A problematic in the sub separating residents work and retail, imposition of urban car oriented screwed schemes on downtown and highways that slashed through neighborhoods but on the other hand, i also knew that many American Cities were truly in trouble by the late 1940s and in need of help. After a decade and a half of a devastating Great Depression followed by the deprivations of wartime, cities were bleeding people, jobs and much more to the booming suburbs. My final motivation in writing this book was that as a city dweller and a city lover, i was increasingly alarmed with what i was seeing around me. The shocking deterioration of urban infrastructure as well as a worsening crisis in Affordable Housing. Everywhere in the United States, to the point where no rent apartments are fast disappearing, evictions and homelessness are growing and more than a third of american households are paying over 30 percent of their income on shelter and in many parts of this country, people are paying over 50 percent. Moreover, a drastic divide has developed between cities that are flourishing and cities that are failing so we have have and havenots among cities not only within them. So i wondered how did we get here . I also wondered where were the resources that once had made the us a country with a highly functional mass transit, that has a significance in boston, i think. And well uptodate engineered roads and tunnels and where was the commitment that had led the nation to at least assert in the housing act of 1949 a responsibility and i quote, to provide a decent home and a suitable Living Environment for every american family. Mike mike there not be something to learn from probing how we got to this place . So why and logue . I started looking around for an ideal subject for my book and i had a checklist of things i was looking for but most importantly i sought an individuals life would allow me to tell to intertwined stories, both how a person in a nation went about trying to revitalize American Cities and the mutual influence they had on each other and on American Cities. It didnt take me long to stumble upon ed logue. I taught a course in harvard on a book on history so i knew from that he had had a great influence during the 1960s in turning around along deteriorating book. Soon however i discovered that logue had left an enormous cash of papers at his on themother of yale , that he given many interviews over the years so that i would be able to hear his own voice. Even though he was no longer alive. That no one else was writing a book about him and i did some checking, you can be sure. Though there were historians who had consideredit. And many of his associates from the cities where he had worked and im pleased to say quite a number of them are here tonight were still very much alive, in touch with each other and had even lost, launched a website called friends of Edward J Logue and these friends proved a great resource to me so i thank you again for that. I was also fortunate that logues family was still around and supportive of my book. Without being intrusive and they were generous with their memories, their contact and their family papers. In time i would figure out that the span of logues career offered me an amazing way of tracking shifts in urban redevelopment over four decades because logue worked in new haven in the 1950s and boston in the 1960s and in new york state from the 19, from the late 1960s to the mid1970s and in the south bronx from 1978 to 1985 and the last 15 years of his life he taught courses at mit, ran a small consulting business in urban redevelopment in boston, tried unsuccessfully to write his memoirs, left one direct chapter. He was a doer, not a writer. He died in 2000 in Marthas Vineyard at theage of not quite 79. So why is ed logue a compelling protagonist for this book . Logue grew up caring deeply about cities. He was born in 1921 and raised in philadelphia, one of five children of a widowed kindergarten teacher. He did not have manyfinancial resources. He went to yale college on scholarship and Yale Law School on the g. I. Bill where he became engaged with the city of new haven, particularly with his work with workingclass residents, many of whom he got to know working in the yale dining halls and who he later helped to organize into yales first labor union. When logue married margaret devane, the daughter of the dean of yale college, his roots in new haven grew even deeper. I paint a portrait of logue as a complicated figure, loved and admired bysome , deeply disliked by others who from his earliest days was most comfortable being what i described as a rebel in the belly of the establishment beast. What i mean by that is that he repeatedly over his lifetime made his way into bastions of power and then fought hard to improve what he judged to be there damaging deficiencies. Logue became committed, the second point i would make about why logue is a good program protagonist is a he became committed to renewing cities as part of his progressive politics which runs counter to many assumptions that we make about who urban renewal were actually were. They are often portrayed as part of a probusiness growth machine that put Corporate Investment over people. He stood in stark contrast to that stereotype. As i said he worked as a labor organizer and trained as a labor lawyer. He fought mccarthyism and discriminatory quotas that yale. He argued strenuously that white, not black america had a race problem to overcome and he had no illusions that the private sector would do anything but prioritize profit over serving the public interest. In the late 1940s and 1950s, logue bought that the problems of cities should be the next frontier of Franklin Roosevelts new deal and that extensive federal dollars and expert knowhow should now be applied to the challenge of saving americascities. A typical pronouncement of logue was and i quote , the publicsector created the new boston and the Public Sector must control it. Third, logue came to believe early in his career that physical improvements in the built environment could have larger social and political benefits and hes discovered this in a surprising place. Logue served as assistant to Chester Bowles who was an American Ambassador to thenew nation of india in the 1950s and was himself a former new dealer. He had headed roosevelts office of Price Administration and in india, logue observed the Us Government and the Ford Foundation investing in what was then called community development. Improving the physical infrastructure of villages with roads , wells, housing, schools in hopes of creating a more equal, a more democratic and importantly to them, remember this is the cold war, anticommunist india. Logue brought lessons from what was then called the third world back within his work in first world American Cities and note this is not the usual direction that we assume influence goes. Logues time in the developing world was the first example of how he learned from and participated in the transnational circulation of ideas about planning and architecture. And he had many, he learned many things. He was very much influenced by the social housing that was taking place in your and later in his career, very much taken with the creation of european new towns work which were a strategy to deal with the devastations that had followed world war ii in many European Countries and forth, upon returning from india in the fall of 1953 he began a career in urban redevelopment that would unfold in 4 ask over four decades. As i follow his personal story in the book, we see that the urban renewal process was not at all static but rather that it continued to change over time. To experiment with different approaches in response to its own admitted failures as well as the shifts in National Policy and National Politics and implement him surprisingly progressive ideas. So urban renewal in my telling is not that one huge disaster of popular but a much more complex evolutionary response to American Cities in crisis. Im not going to take you to all the details of this long book as tony indicated, though i should say that one of the reasons why the footnotes are as robust as they are is that my editor said i really like this book but you need to cut 30,000 word up so i wasgreeted with this news. I think it was good he told me to do that and i think the book is better for it but a lot of that stuff and it up in the footnotes. But i am going to give you sort of the highlights of these four acts. So act i is new haven. From 1954 and 1961, logue teamed up with the newly elected reform democratic mayor Richard Seelig to try to turn around a city in big trouble. Old industries were closing while many successful industries were no longer feeling very loyal to new haven and were abandoning their original homes. And this was leading to the disappearance of many good workingclass jobs. This was happening just as African Americans were were arriving from the south with with hopes of making a better life and a Better Living in the industrial north. At the same time , middleclass white residents were moving to new haven suburbs in search of newer housing, better schools and other aspects of modern living and in some cases quite explicitly fleeing a city that was becoming more nonwhite and finally, the i95 highway was threatening to bypass downtown new haven which they knew would be a death knell for the citys role as the Retail Center or the region. It was already facing competition from new Shopping Centers that were opening up in the suburbs to the important point to make here is that cities like new haven were truly struggling. Logue and lees agenda consisted of using newly available federal funding from the housing act of 1949 and 1954 to make new haven a National Laboratory or physical renewal as well as innovative social programs, many of which had job retraining would actually make their wayinto lbjs great society. In the end, new haven got more dollars per capita from the federal government and any other city and was widely viewed as ground zero for urban renewal. Lee and logue had successes but this first phase of federal urban renewal turned out to be deeply problematic. In new haven and in many other American Cities, for many reasons that i go into in the book. Most egregiously, urban regulars here and elsewhere tore down the poor low Income Neighborhood to put a apartments that were aimed at keeping the middleclass and the city and highway that would connect downtown to i95 and they introduced a power oriented Suburban Shopping Center into downtown. I also probe the way that urban regulars consulted with Community Residents and i discovered that they felt that they were being democratically minded experts who were protecting thepublic good , but their approach sought input mostly from representatives of established Interest Groups and Community Organizations and i call this approach pluralist democracy, drawn from analysis that yield political scientist robert dall involved in his classic work in Political Science which was based on new havens urban renewal. So i conclude that phase i of urban renewal during the 1950s with its massive clearance and pluralist democratic form of Community Consultation was deeply flawed. In new haven as well as many other cities including boston where the destruction of the immigrant west ends follows much the same pattern. Okay, asked to. Boston. 1960 1967. In 1960 logue was hired as a consultant and then as head of a much expanded Boston Redevelopment Authority which we knew as the bra. I another new mayor, this time john collins who had ambitions to turn around his own near bankrupt and politically paralyzed city. In boston, logue learned from his mistakes in new haven and those that had taken place under the previous mayor john hine, he came in waving a flag of planning with people and vowing never to undertake the kind of demolition that had happened in the west and neighborhoods. Examine two dimensions of his work in boston, downtown and theneighborhood. The heart of downtown urban renewal was the creation of Government Centers to revitalize bostons stagnant downtown , to greatly expand jobs there and to pressure and reluctant yankee Business Elite to finally commit to the city that it had been ignoring for decades. Instead they wereinvesting elsewhere , anywhere but boston and seeking to control bostons Democratic Party machine under James Michael curley from the massachusetts state house. The Government Center creation story is a fascinating one where logue and the collins made full use of the federal purse and federal power. As the boston globe wrote in 1962 in reviewing the just revealed design for city hall , and i quote, it is nothing but a wholehearted affirmation of a new time , no social needs and the new technology and new aesthetics to declare they in the civic instrument of government. And the architects of city hall meant its almost guard modernist design to send exactly that message aboutthe integrity of government. As michael kendall, one of the architects but it many years later, he and his partners had a tremendous feeling that government was not just a Benevolent Institution but was the institution for social change. City hall should be the peoples palace, the symbol of opengovernment. The Government Center project marked another crucial evolution in logue thinking. Here he came to recognize, kicking a little bit, the importance of preserving bostons Historic Structures like the sears presence in the Quincy Market to create a mix of historic and modern buildings that still characterized boston today. He learned that he needed to broaden the base of support for his program and hence he sought a wide range of allies , of influential allies including the Catholic Church , you hear Cardinal Richard cushings. Newspapers like the boston globe. Influential retailleaders like the jordan marsh , local architects and the integrationist oriented black middle class of roxbury who could own houses in very few boston neighborhoods and hence welcomed both attention to renewing Washington Parks with open arms. His efforts to revitalize bostons other neighborhoods were more contentious. In either downtown or Washington Park in roxbury but in the end, logue learned that just as he had had to negotiate between a modern and a historicboston , so to be had to negotiate with key neighborhood groups to achieve his renewable and i look at five boston neighborhoods. Washington park and madison park in roxbury, charlestown, south bend and the north harvard area of allston. When i discovered is that every neighborhood had its own story. Attitudes based in class and race played important roles, but the outcome i learned moved much more complicated, more varied and unexpected than the common assumption that urban renewal can simply be reduced to middleclass white grabbing neighborhoods fromlowerclass blacks. Moreover i argue that over the course of these years, through the urban renewal experience, neighborhood residents develop important skills of negotiating with cityofficials. Through what a participant observer who at the time was an mit graduate student later became a professor there, langley keys called the rehabilitation planning game. Ultimately boston citizens would apply these skills to gaining more Affordable Housing and seating the southwest expressway and internet highway project in the 1970s experiences of fighting urban renewal in the 1960s i suggest contributed to a new expectation or what that democratic process of consultation City Redevelopment should entail. As in other social movements of this era like civil rights , antiwar politics, grassroots participatory democracy is what i call it became a requirement. And this marked a very big shift from the expectations for Community Consultation in the 1950s, if you recall that i call pluralist democracy. Logue was widely credited with bringing about the citys turn around as the new boston, but his boston years ended with another surprise and tony gave you some sense of that. A failed effort in 1967 to run or mayor of the city when collins announced he was stepping down. It became clear however that logue was better suited for the administrators back room than the mayors front office. He proved a terrible campaigner, ive learned this from many people i interviewed but also suffered from a 10 person race where the frontrunner was school segregationist hicks which encouraged understandably her opponents to rally around one candidate that was a wellknown secretary of the massachusetts commonwealth kevin white. Act iii, new york state. From 1968 to 1975. Logues next act came about when liberal republican governor Nelson Rockefeller was frustrated with the difficulty of getting new york state voters to approve bond issues which were required to build subsidized housing in the state so he came up with an ambitious workaround, a statewide urban renewal super agency with enormous power and he hired ed logue to head it and i do have a line in the book where and the chapter after the election, logue gets a position at bu for a year and he hires janet murphy who is sitting in the front row to be his assistant and she knocks on the door and says the governors on the phone and and says which governor and she says Nelson Rockefeller. It was called the new york state urban Development Corporation, udc for short and it was funded by an innovative combination of state funds , dwindling adderall dollars and in a very unique move , bonds to be sold to private investors. In recognition of the difficulty of this job, rockefeller gave a udc and logue tremendous authority including the ability to acquire property through Eminent Domain is most controversially to override exclusionary local zoning outdated building codes. Getting the new york state approval for this was not easy, particularly the part about overwriting local zoning but it only came about very reluctantly rockefeller argued after Martin Luther king was assassinated that new york needed and i quote, a true memorial may not of stone but of action and it should also be said that rockefeller was very good at twistingarms so thats basically how he got it. But udc had many successes. It built 33,000 units of housing over 6 and a half years. It salt alternatives to demolition style urban renewal by creating new towns , that was the inspiration i mentioned earlier. On undeveloped land, there were two in New York Island and there were plans deliberately to be mixed income, mixed race and mixed age communities and it experimented with Architectural Designs and Building Technologies such as lowrise, low density alternatives to highrise Public Housing and i want to point out that in the picture on the upper right in the corner, its tony , a discussion with ted lehman and others about this new housing of Marcus Garvey park in brooklyn which was to be this high lowrise, high density project. The udc became a leader in affirmative action hiring in the state. But the udc came tumbling down when logue tried to build modest amounts of Affordable Housing in nine well off westchester suburban communities. What he called a Fair Share Housing Program and then to make things more difficult, president nixon turned off the federal spigot and implemented a moratorium on all spending on housing as part of his new federalist agenda to reduce the role of the federal government. As a result udc came to a dramatic collapse including having anchors handling bond sales accused the udc of putting its social mission before itsresponsibility to investors. In february 1975, the udc defaulted and was, logue was forced to resign. As he put it and i quotehim, it was too good to last. Thats why i so cordially dislike bankers. They feel threatened that i was engaged in, bankers said this, social engineering as if thats a mortal sin. I was proud of the land that Roosevelt Island was a total piece of socialengineering. Final act, and youre watching this man as he ages through life in the south bronx from 1978 to 1985. Logue became president of the south Bronx Development organization known as the sbd oh, his last major urban redevelopment job. Here logue sought to rehabilitate himself after that udc failure as he sought to rehabilitate one of the poorest areas of the nation with less power, you were tools and a smaller amount of funding and he had ever had before you had nixons cuts in federal appropriations for cities and housing continued under carter then took a huge dive under reagan. We 1981 and 1987 federal housing programs were slashed by two thirds, more than any other part of reagans budget. The federal government was going out of the business of supporting urban redevelopment and in its place was actively promoting private Market Solutions. As president of the small scrappy sdb o, logue constantly scrambled for resources and once again he shifted strategy out of necessity. Often seeking ways to take advantage of this new orientation to private Market Solutions by developing Industrial Parks and also partnering with private lenders to build houses. His Signature Program there was Charlotte Gardens consisted of 90 ranchstyle prefabricated angle family homes constructed in the middle of one of the most troubled neighborhoods in new york city. They were heavily subsidized for purchase with the goal of attracting lower middleclass homeowners to anchor the revitalization of the neighborhood and the idea was multi Family Rental housing was expected to follow. To the surprise of many skeptics, Charlotte Gardens proved a huge success with hundreds of black and puerto rican residents, transit workers, security guard, fire and police, nurses, teachers eager to buy the kind of suburban type house that they either couldnt afford or wasnt available to them as people of color in new yorks mostly white suburban communities. A few aspects of this sdbo period are worth mentioning. Here logue abandoned his previous prioritization of innovative Architectural Design in favor of a conventional style that would appeal to prospective local buyers andprivate funders. Second Charlotte Gardens and other sdbo housing provided a blueprint for the more expensive 10 year housing plan that follows and that would lead to several hundred thousand new units of housing and into new york city stock and third and most notably, after a long career of paying lip service you could say to his mantra of planningwith people , here in the south bronx logue actually did it, working closely with Community Planning board and neighborhood cdcs like the men bronxdesperados as he came to recognize how necessary they and their constituents were to achieving success. In conclusion, let me highlight a few points that i think we can take away on this deep dive into and logues career. Over time, logue learned a lesson that many liberal dogooders in other policy realms learned, the work of the urban redevelopment expert, a new profession that logue had worked hard during the 1950s and 1960s to promote had serious limitations. More grassroots participation i Community Members greatly matter. But how to avoid ordinarily focus on one single corner of the city without considering the whole of the city remains a challenge i think for cities today. Minimally, i think we can learn from this history that planning for a neighborhood or city future requires and that all interests be at the table area officials at all levels, planners, architects, investors and residents. Second, throughout his career he struggled to figure out ways of doing two things, that proved very difficult for him and they are still very hard for us. First, how to create socially Diverse Communities by income, race and age which he felt was the, and he felt this deeply was the best insurance that low and moderate income americans, often minorities would get decent and Equitable Services such as schools, transportation, Retail Stores and the like as well as greater opportunities in the future themselves and their children area in a society where your residential location often dictates your life chances and middleclass whites are often best positions to demand the best, he promoted socially integrated communities, but he frequently lacked the tools to promote to do this and still today i think we struggle with for example how to keep existing residents in neighborhoods that are gentrifying, how to provide sufficient numbers of section eight vouchers for low income people who do want to move to better serve communities or how to bring the larger scale requirements that developers of market rate housing must include affordable units must contribute to their building elsewhere in the city. Second, the other hard not to crack for logue was how to involve all metropolitan areas in solving the housing, schooling and other problems facing low income city residents. Logue fruitlessly tried to make this happen in new haven and in boston and he hoped that finally when he got to a statewide position with the udc that he would be able to make this happen in new york state, but in the end that effort contributed to the downfall of the logue and udc and metropolitan problemsolving remained mostly elusive today. Finally, probably the greatest disappointment and disillusionment in his career was a decline in the role and responsibility of government, particularly at the federal level for financing the revitalizing of cities and subsidizing of Affordable Housing. Over his career he watched federal support steadily shrink and responsibility shift to the private sector which he considered a very serious mistake. He anticipated what we too often encounter today, cities fourth deals that in the end cost them and future tax revenues undue burdens put on Public Services and races to the bottom between cities where they all lose out. Amazon being of course the latest example and what its not obvious how the private sector might profit, such as in Building Public infrastructure or civic spaces, too often muchneeded projects go unaddressed and conditions amply deteriorate. Toward the end of his life logue said in sad resignation and i quote, the basic responsibilities of subsidizing housing for the low and lower income families it is everywhere in the developed world used to be with us. Most importantly even if we acknowledge that urban renewal was at best proverbial mixed bag, we can still i hope admire and seek to recapture the spirit of commitment and experimentation that propelled people like logue and others in this room who worked with him rather than content ourselves with accepting the limited palette of possibilities that has come to dominate since the 1980s. As i write at the close of my book and so ill and im quoting myself, this would be the legacy of urban renewal that and logue would want us to honor and that he would consider, the highest tribute we could pay to his lifetime of public service. [applause] so we have 10 minutes for questions . [inaudible] my name is ann burke, i live in jamaica plains. To what extent did he work with William F Callahan on the mass pikeextension into boston in the mid60s . He very much believed in highways. I did not really come across any major conflicts he inherited the southeast expressway situation and he and collins both regretted that terribly for how it cut the city off from the waterfront and many of the other problems. I didnt really see much about that but tony told me my interview some funny stories about his, after he had left boston and you came back as i remember to work after the southwest expressway was ceded to work on the alternative parks. He used to joke with him and he would teach you and say you were undoing all his work but you said that you felt that at some level he recognized that the days of highways as the only solution was over. And partly you made the point that at that time, there really wasnt, they were going to have a transit in the middle of the highway, it was the only way to get it accomplished but he was focused on saving the city. He accepted in new haven, he thought that the answer would be to try to keepmiddleclass people in the city. But by the time he finished in new haven, he felt kind of a losing game so he came to boston and recognize serb urbanization and taken off. And that they were going to reverse that so instead, what he focused on was trying to keep jobs downtown rather than having them move out to 128 and out of the city so he was very, he saw those roads as bringing people back to work in the city, kind of forgot go bothdirections. So i dont have anything pacific to say. Maybe somebody else in the roomdoes. Anyone else . Bill. And logue work throughout his career in urban Boston Redevelopment Authority, various authorities which gavetremendous power to him. Currently in boston theres a fight going on as to whether the Boston Redevelopment Authority should be abolished or continued, take its powers away, does not represent democracy as we know it today area how would you respond . I knew that question would, area and i should just point out that the globe story that came out and in the ideas section on sunday was basically, i have had the interview with courtney humphreys, the author a couple of weeks ago. Nothing, the report hadnt come out. Then of course the report came out from counselor who and so she came back to me and said now my editor wants to make sure that we take this into account what do you think . Obviously theres a lot more to learn. I had read the report. I dont know, i havent followed the history of the bra with the same kind of attention after logue left as when he was here so i dont really feel wellinformed enough to say that i really know what which is now the bpa has been up to but i would pointout a few things. In the report when the report completely trashes urban renewal, there are very few distinctions made over time and thats one of the point im trying to make here, that in the example to given the reports are basically the west and new york streets which was the 1950s first phase of urban renewal which were terrible and disastrous. And as i tried to show you, there was an evolutionary process here so that is, i did say that it was, that moved into the globe story. I also would remind us that sending the issues back to city council does not necessarily the best solution. And one of the things that logue, i go through this whole history of city council and how it had evil and when logue was trying to sell his renewal plan, the city counselors were all at large and this was supposed to be a kind of fixed or the very specific neighborhood base of most of them before the charter change. But they still represented very clear constituencies in the neighborhoods and there was tremendous amounts of politics involved there so i think we need to really think hard about what is the best solutionhere. Its certainly understandable that people would feel that the prosperity that boston had been going through is not widely shared. We know that. We know the Affordable Housing crisis is terrible in the city and there are other problems with transit, there are other services, schools still struggling so there are definitely problems but we need to think through what the best solution to that and obviously, we need to make sure the bdpa is accountable. They feel that they have and golden quoted in the article as well but i feel good about the topic coming up because i think its ahealthy discussion for the city to have. As this gap just seems to grow between the haves and havenots but i hope we will look at a full range of remedies. Yes. Is coming. This is cspan, a taping here i didnt live here when he ran for mayor you said it was a poor politician. To some extent, the lack of success lyrically reflect a referendum on him of his activities in redevelopment or was it his lack of campaigning ability . I think its both and other things too. In terms of being a terrible campaigner somebody named bob lipke and worked with him but many other people, he was in boston with ed and went to the edc and work for the city of new york and he even helped ed when he was in the south bronx. He told me they would walk in the northend and it was just awful. And would go up to someone and just say hi and he would say ed, you need to say im ed logue, im running for mayor, these are the things i care about and he was not oriented that way. The people who worked for him know that he got to the point that he was blunt. He just was not cut out for that. So he wasnt a goodcampaigner. I do think there was a sense that he didnt have deep roots in the city that many people had. Kevin white came from a family with a great political pedigree on his side and his wifes side. Sears was running also from egan hill from that neighborhood, john sears had a very long pedigree in the city and logue, the carpetbagger. And he obviously had been a controversial figure in urban renewal in the neighborhood. One of the things he was proud of was there was a group called architects for logue. He got support from architects who knew that there was work coming in i think he was viewed as a liberal candidate. The problem is there were 10 candidates and people were worried that the vote would be divided and more specifically, whites, sears and logue were all from base beacon hill so the constituency was divided among them and theres one more thing that i talk about in the book, that when and had to make a list of the biggest, when he was trying to write this book, not very successfully he made a list of the biggest mistakes of his career and number one was the north harbor alston situation which you have to read the book to sort of figure out what a disaster that was but then they really did not negotiate. He learned a lesson there that that was a real mistake but the other thing, number two was is challenging of white petitions. So what happened was that they all took signatures on petitions and probably there was some funny business in kevin white petitions but the logue campaign and a very poorly and they had somebody make the complaint was from the campaign who then disappeared into the word work and in the end it really worked against logue rather than against kevin white and the last thing i would say is that you had a strong feeling forthe people he worked with, for his brothers and thats something i talk about in the book. These fraternal relationships and some of the people i think who still thinks so well of him did feel that bond with him and he brought his brother frank up to run his campaign. That was a very big mistake. Frank didnt know anything about boston and some of the people i interviewed who were hardcore boston political operators said we offered to help and frank said they didnt need our help sowe backed off so there were a lot of mistakes made. You describe the udc as failing and some other things but they actually built a whole pile of buildings. Yes, 32,000 units and many other Civic Projects and the three new towns. You say fail. How many people live in housing that ed logue is responsible . I met a lot of people who were the logue veterans when there was an exhibition of udc housing and the biggest creators of the exhibition went back to the projects like Marcus Garveys lowrise high density and Roosevelt Island and photographed how people were living in the housing today the reason why i said it failed was only one explanation given which was the westchester project so after that, state legislature got its chance to kill the udc and took away its powers of overriding local zoning everywhere but in the city but that was one defeat. The other way in which it was a difficult process was that there were also a lot of accusations that the udc had not handled its finances responsibly enough and part of that was the bankers wanting the investors to start thinking about the udc as an investment and logue thought of it as another source of resources and there was never any mismanagement. It was a big marlin act commission for over a year to investigate, janet worked with ed to build his defense. Never any mismanagement but they were so driven. He was so driven to make this work and to build as much housing as possible that there was sloppiness that was ultimately decided in the way they managed the books. If i could get your thoughts when you brought up the subject of, and then focusing on boston because thats where ive spent all my career. So why started slightly before and ive been involved with every mayor and developer, administrator ever since, some of which i wouldnt speak about it until a few more pass away. [laughing] but when they hear about it they would be surprised at some of the assumptions that are being made. But two things that were touched on. One was that with some chuckling when the discussion became about the city council in boston, and its true. Way back when, when, not only when roe was around and survey during most of the regime of ed rowe, the city council were jokingly called clowns, okay . It was a very Different City Council as you know from just reading the paper. The city council today is far more representative of boston. It has a lot of just wonderful women, independent, very smart, et cetera. One of the problems that you can trace urban renewal, and i know you had to stop because you did your book on rove and then went to new york. You have that half but not the other half. The other half is what all these different mayors came in after him, and a degree less than kevin at least follow through on a great deal of even he fought them in the campaign, he followed a great deal of what took place in vra when the vra was a Redevelopment Agency with damn good architecture, huge staff that was paid by the city and, therefore, went other mayors came in the basically took over and took the attitude of private development as a panacea to solve problems. If you look at whats happened, the one big example Everybody Knows and everybody can see it is really the seaport district. Thats an example where private Development Im not saying that all bad guys. Thats an example where private development really ran the show. They are still trying to run the show and thats a problem when you get to Affordable Housing. I will just add one thing about, your point is will taken up city council. I will say use the phrase of the clown. Part of the issue was felt that the charter that was ruling the structure of government at the time gave most of the net power to the mayor. And so the only way that the city counselors got any attention was when they did these antics. To some extent the structure sort of forced them into that position. They couldnt initiate anything in the budget. They could only veto things. It was very much a mayor centered system. So granted we are dealing with a very Different City Council today. It still the same charter its just that the people who have been elected, okay, dont take the attitude of the clowns. They are in there and they are focusing the attention which is why theres concern about how the bra and the new epa, the p was for planning but when you look where is the planning its hard to find even in todays i agree with you but the seaport. So im getting the message from gavin we are done. [applause] thank you. The new cspan online store now has tv product. Go to cspan store. Org to check them out. See what is new for booktv and all the cspan products. We are here to hear about she came to she came to slay the life and times of Harriet Tubman. When we booked this talk a little while ago i didnt know that everybody would be talking about Harriet Tubman. I did realize it was a movie to passut, totally like because like gray, a book about Harriet Tubman. That sounds great. Im super excited that theres a National Conversation about Harriet Tubman going on right now. I think for folks who live in maryland and folks in baltimore who are fielding a connection to that history, i dont think people have stopped talk about Harriet Tubman. What are my Favorite Places in the city isn. A place called tubman house