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

by Lizabeth Cohen

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good.

It wasn't always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America's Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the "New Boston" of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State's Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City.

Logue's era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America's Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Urbanism, Cities, Politics, Urban Planning, Urban

560 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2019

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Currently ploughing through books on mid-century American big planning, and this is so far the most interesting. Logue was a new deal democrat and administrator (rather than planner or architect) who ploughed through some very Jane Jacobs-antagonising stuff in New Haven and Boston; but what I found most interesting was his later work in New York, where his Urban Development Corporation did some very impressive 1970s late modernist social housing in a Park Hill/Camden Council/New Belgrade vein before being done in by the financial crisis and suburban racism, and later in the attempts to salvage parts of the destroyed South Bronx through prefab detached houses. Cohen doesn't always have as good a sense for architecture as the book sometimes needs but tells a fascinating rise and fall and reinvention story very well.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lizabeth Cohen is a really clear and cogent writer, which makes her a great fit for something as byzantine and multi-faceted as urban renewal. I think her reasons for choosing Logue as a subject make a lot of sense--he was distinctive in that he worked in several major cities over a long span of time and his approach evolved in a way that very much reflects broader changes in urban planning in those years. That being said, while it didn't totally detract from the merits of the book I do think there's something that feels a little off kilter here--because of the focus on Logue as an individual there's only intermittent discussion of the interplay between federal, state, and local government, there's intermittent talk of the opposition to urban planning, and especially there's only intermittent dealing with the disjuncture between Logue and other urban planners' conception of themselves as progressive reformers and the often destructive impact of their work.

I went to a talk Cohen gave at the Brooklyn Historical Society and someone stood up in the audience and talked about growing up in New Haven and feeling that Logue was a much-hated person there because he had spearheaded so many bad projects and ugly designs, and Cohen didn't really have an answer for that because so much of her work is focused on Logue's papers, writings, and interviews with his colleagues. So while this is an interesting and valuable book there is a choice of scope that leaves a lot of the really contested things about urban planning unresolved.

[Gerry Connolly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saving America’s Cities is the grandiose title of Lizabeth Cohen’s biography of urban planner Ed Logue. A progressive, integrationist and forceful visionary Logue had a four-part career in New Haven, Boston, New York State and in the South Bronx. His modus operandi in the first three was to hitch his wagon to reform minded powerful politicians (mayor Richard Lee of New Haven, Mayor John Collins of Boston, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York), collaborate with establishment community groups, identify gobs of federal money and hire myriad architects to design modern, functional buildings with a growing focus on affordable housing. He was gruff and a hard driver who could and did alienate local politicians and community groups to his own detriment. Initially taken by modernist (brutish) designs like Boston’s City Hall Logue evolved his thinking away from demolition and new construction to more integrated approaches that preserved old spaces while creating new ones. He revolutionized urban planning but fell victim to Nixon’s federal housing moratorium. His legacy includes reviving Faneuil Market in Boston, redeveloping Roosevelt Island in NYC and rejuvenating a devastated South Bronx with Charlotte Garden. A kinetic doer of big things his weakness was failing to understand and engage in more parochial politics thus ensuring enemies who in the end caused his downfall. A defining figure in mid-20th century urban renewal in America.

[Stephen Meyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saving America's Cities is a thoroughly researched biography/history of Ed Logue, a prominent leader in urban renewal and redevelopment. Logue began his career in rebuilding cities in New Haven, moving on to head the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC) before ending his career in the South Bronx, He was a domineering personality, but unlike Robert Moses, Logue was focussed on improving the quality of life of the poor and less affluent, including racial minorities.

This book was of particular interest to me as someone who earned a degree in city planning in the Boston area shortly after Logue left for New York. In reading the book, I found names of instructors from whom I'd taken courses or who I otherwise recognized. After graduation I interviewed for a job in New Haven (which I did not get), so Logue's name was one I recognized.

Cohen does a nice job of presenting the high and low points of Logue's career. Her chronological approach makes it easy to follow and her description of particular redevelopment efforts and projects are followed by objective discussion of their merits as seen by "experts," politicians and neighborhood residents. The extensive referencing includes views both favorable and critical of strategies and projects initiated by Logue and his team of young experts and professionals.

This book is a good contrast for those who have read Robert Caro's "The Power Broker," his highly engaging and Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, sometimes called "the master builder" of New York. Moses, like Logue, had a very strong personality. And both were somewhat blind to the adverse effects of their efforts. But Logue was a liberal by his time's standards, and he learned, sometimes after significant stumbles, the importance of listening to those who would be the beneficiaries of his efforts. Because Logue viewed himself as an experimenter, he was more open to criticism of his redevelopment projects.

While Cohen provides a good deal of information about the architecture and the style of urban renewal and redevelopment during Logue's career, she does not go beyond his time to the "New Urbanism" that is the style of development preferred by most of today's urban experts and city residents. She does, however, afford the reader good insight into the failures of early urban renewal, and the shortcomings of the top-down redevelopment efforts and style of Logue and his contemporaries, both of which are a path to understanding the current popularity of the "New Urbanism."

Frankly, today most would characterize many of Logue's early projects as examples of "brutalist" architecture, notwithstanding the top architectural professionals Logue engaged. The architecture profession and Logue were too hung up on exterior appearance and creating monumental architectural statements. For all its benefits, Boston's Government Center is a far cry from the pedestrian friendly, mixed-used type of development favored today by both experts and end-users. Logue learned this lesson and embraced the importance of rehabilitating and preserving usable existing buildings in a more traditional urban fabric. One criticism is that there could have been more time spent discussing the interior design of the various projects Logue undertook. After all, buildings are habitations and their exteriors are simply their public face. Cohen does this in describing Logue's last efforts in the South Bronx, but there is much more that could have been said about some of the other projects that preceded it.

The book also provides a great sense of the importance of politics and policy at the federal, state and local level in influencing urban redevelopment activities. I particularly enjoyed Cohen's descriptions of the relationships Logue had with the various Mayors, Governors and federal officials with whom he worked. His ability to utilize those relationships to generate funding, a continual challenge, is well documented. Perhaps the most fun part of the book for many will be the difficulties Logue and his team faced in working with neighborhood residents. Cohen does an excellent job of explaining the shortcomings of Logue's initial "we are the experts" approach. The challenges to his authority provided by residents of the neighborhoods in which he worked lead him to change his perspective and recognize that planning and redevelopment can be most effective and beneficial when it is most responsive to the desires of area residents and property owners. That Logue learned this lesson is a testament to his professional growth and capability to adapt to achieve his goals of a better life, including better housing, for those with moderate and low incomes regardless of race.

I want to thank NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to receive a pre-publication copy in exchange for this review. I hope the final printed book includes photographs and drawings that clearly illustrate the various plans and projects developed by Logue, his associates and his design and other consultants.

[Russell Belding · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always wondered if anyone would ever write a comprehensive history of American urban renewal. This is perhaps the closest we will get to such a thing. Ms. Cohen notes, "I have taken a biographical approach in this book in hopes that it will help engage readers." Ed Logue's career serves as a good framework for an urban renewal history. I think that most people who think about the topic at all remember unwelcome intrusions of "experts" into communities, who tore down neighborhoods in the interest of removing "blight," and replaced them with empty lots or big, ugly buildings. The truth, unsurprisingly, is somewhat more nuanced.
This book helps me to appreciate the motivations (at least in Mr. Logue's case) behind some of the catastrophic and not-so-catastrophic products of urban renewal. It also serves as something of a corrective to Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" in providing a balanced portrait of a larger-than-life individual who should loom large in American planning history.

[Eddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never heard of Ed Logue, but this book does a good job of presenting the story of someone who turns out to be one of the most important American urban planners of the 20th century

[Frank Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lizabeth Cohen's careful and sympathetic biography of Ed Logue, for years the preeminent symbol of urban renewal in America, is sorely needed. Urban renewal has long been lambasted by both the right (for its wasteful government spending and expropriation of private property) and the left (for knocking down functional poor communities and engaging in "Negro removal" as it was known at the time.) Not only have those critiques left urban renewal with few defenders, they have also obscured its varied history and circuitious courses. Urban renewal was never one thing, and this biography of Logue shows that even the same man could engage in varied kinds of "urban renewal" throughout his life, with consequences that still reverberate today.

The thing I most longed for in this book was a more dramatic telling of Logue's arc. After all, the story is almost too perfect a tale of rise, fall, and redemption, almost too perfectly transposed onto the history of mid-century America. A poor, Depression-era Irish Catholic boy from Philadelphia worked his way through Yale Law School and became the young head of urban redevelopment at New Haven, which became the locus of urban renewal in the 1950s (about 20% of the whole population had to move!) just as the decline of urban centers became a national news story. Logue's (and his boss's, Mayor Richard, Dick, Lee's) Thanks to including Yale, New Haven also became the symbol of a post-New Deal "pluralist" democracy to those in academia. Logue then graduated to the bigger stage of Boston at the beginning of its integration crisis, where he worked more to integrate renewal and preserve neighborhoods in the more activist 1960s. Logue then graduated again, this time to the statewide scheme of New York's Urban Development Corporation, which became the symbol of the 1970s municipal crisis when it defaulted on its bonds in 1975. A semi-disgraced Logue then worked with the small scale South Bronx Development Office to bring a handful of single-family houses to a neighborhood that was internationally-famous for being devestated. Although seemingly a denial of his massive urban schemes of the past thirty years, Charlotte Gardens and the small scale work he performed in the South Bronx would be perhaps Logue's most beloved creation.

There are many myths about urban renewal busted here. Logue was not the urban renewal bogey-man of many leftist imaginations. He was a consummate left-wing New Dealer who cared almost nothing about real estate interests and by all accounts was devoted almost exclusively to the public sector. He was a die-hard believer in integration and the necessity for urban African-Americans to get their share. (His attempt to push a "Fair Share" scheme of subsidized housing in nine Westchester towns was probably his biggest political failure.) Through most of his career he, and urban renewal, were not imposed upon cities from the outside, but were wildly popular. By the time he left New Haven he, and Mayor Lee, had approval numbers of the seventies and eighties. Lee had to face election ever two years and won with overwhelming majorities. In Boston, when Logue engaged in his ill-fated run for mayor, after his patron Mayor John Collins, retired, he won the highest precentage of votes in the poor, black Roxbury district, not in the well-off ones.

Cohen's book is a careful, well-organized and spritely retelling of Logue's arc. It should not be too much of a critique of the book, however, that it left me wanting much more. Logue's story warrants both a dramatic telling and a sharp analysis of what went right and wrong, but the straightforward nature of Cohen's book left both obscure. Too often I wanted to know more about how, say, the Wooster Square development in New Haven, one of Logue's first schemes that involved true renewal rather than bulldozing, turned out, or why exactly the UDC came a cropper and defaulted. I also wanted more of the pure drama of Logue's rise and fall, which in its scale rivals anything in the history of Robert Moses or other mid-20th century giants.

But the best sign of a good book is wanting more of it, and Cohen's book left me wondering how much more I could learn about Logue and the still-underappreciated history of urban renewal he represented.

[Harald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surprisingly engaging book about urban development.
In its form, this is a biography of one of America's most prominent urban planners, Ed Logue. In practice, it is the story of urban renewal in the USA in an important period from 1950 to 1985. The period begins with a sharp increase in public efforts to build housing to replace buildings that were considered part of the slums in urban areas. In particular, it is the federal authorities who put money on the table and set guidelines for what can be built.

On a daily basis, however, local planners and politicians decide what is to be implemented. That is, until citizen groups demand decisive influence. The book covers in turn removal and reconstruction projects in three East Coast cities: New Haven, Boston and New York. All three were affected by a loss of population and jobs, at the same time that a larger proportion of the inhabitants were newly immigrated from the southern states and Puerto Rico.

More than housing
Urban renewal in all cities therefore aimed to combine housing development with the creation of new jobs and the strengthening of public services. The author goes into detail about which alliances between different groups and decision-makers were necessary to realize these ideas at a high pace with a minimum of bureaucratic and political obstacles. Nevertheless, conflicts were not to be avoided. This story is exciting and well told. This is where Ed Logue's stated visions and negotiating skills come into play, but also his will to use the power he was assigned.

The downfall
The turnaround came with the rightward drift in American politics under Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Then federal funding for urban renewal eventually disappeared, and the UDC, which led urban renewal in New York with Ed Logue as head, went out of business in 1975. In the years that followed, more and more emphasis was placed on urban renewal taking place under private auspices.

Ed Logue appears as a power-conscious idealist. He changed his views on architecture and spatial planning along the way, but he held fast to the ideal of social and ethnic integration, even if this goal was difficult to implement in a divided country such as the U.S.

[Zak Yudhishthu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great biography of a figure who is surprisingly unheard of in contemporary urbanism discourse. But if Logue doesn’t have nearly the name recognition that Robert Moses has, this book still serves as a solid sequel (of sorts) to The Power Broker.

Cohen’s biggest historical intervention is to show that urban renewal was much more complex, changing, and well-intentioned than we might commonly understand it to be. Overall, she uses Logue very well to tell this story. I greatly enjoyed learning about the ways that Logue’s planning approach developed through his career as he responded to criticisms and backlash to top-down urban renewal efforts. Especially useful for seeing Logue as a foil to Moses were his many devoted efforts to plan racially and economically integrated communities using the urban renewal tools of his day.

I will steal my two critiques from Noah Kazis on Twitter. For one, it’s sometimes really hard to know whether many of these urban renewal projects worked. How much did Logue stem the tides of urban decline? Cohen says surprisingly little about how his projects have fared decades later. Doesn’t this seem important for assessing whether Logue’s different approaches worked?

Second, we could’ve used a bit more social history. The adaptations described in this book just stem from Logue learning after each successive urban renewal attempt, but Cohen didn’t tell us a lot about larger intellectual and professional trends among urban renewers in this era. While Logue seems to be a good representative example of these trends, it might have been more convincing to see the ways that Logue’s various approaches interacted with the bigger urban renewal scene.

Overall, this was a great read that made me rethink some important judgements about urban renewal. I’d love to read more work that answers the second question above.

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great companion volume to Caro's "The Power Broker," this study re-examines urban renewal through the life of Ed Logue, who led renewal efforts in New Haven, Boston, and New York over four decades. Cohen's thesis is that the standard narrative, that urban renewal was a disaster resulting in travesties like the destruction of the West End in Boston, is insufficiently nuanced. She points to the work of Logue to show that urban renewal efforts were ultimately a mixed bag. She also points out that Logue's approach to urban renewal and his interactions with local residents evolved over time. Lastly, she notes (over and over) that the federal government's retreat from funding renewal efforts beginning with Nixon has resulted in small scale patchwork renewal efforts funded always with a mix of public and private sources. In fact, Cohen argues, the problem is sufficiently large in some places (but certainly spilling outside municipal boundaries to become regional issues) that the feds ought to get back in the renewal business ... but perhaps with a greater respect for local determination. While Logue is Cohen's lens, this is not really a biography; he comes off a little one-dimensional because Cohen is more interested in urban renewal politics than the man (in contrast, for example, with Caro's treatment of Robert Moses). And the repetition mars the book: how many times can you say that the South Bronx was a godawful mess when Logue arrived? Saying it ten times doesn't move the narrative forward. But overall, this is a very solid study of a very vexing problem, and it will resonate particularly with Bostonians, on account of the different treatments different neighborhoods received due to local politics and conditions and how that plays out in today's Boston.

[Mariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cohen delicately balances the line between historical biography and monograph, but I confess to having less patience and overall affection for the historical biography genre. This is far from a Caro style micro portrait, but is still at its strongest when situating Logue's actions in a broader context. Overall, the text lacks the readability of Cohen's other monographs while its contributions remain significant. Ultimately, Logue wasn't a Moses style tyrant, but he was undeniably a product of the era of big renewal and acted as such even when the power and funding eluded him. Cohen concludes that the story of urban renewal isn't one of total undifferentiated crisis but more an ebb and flow of successes and setbacks, some of which could be expanded on and replicated with less harm and some of which couldn't. The payoff is in the last paragraph, where she traces the connections between the pro-home ownership ethos of the mid-century planners and politicians to the financial collapse of 2008.

The last chapter would be the most effective one to use for Urban History or NYC History, but the whole text would probably be too much to assign. But I love the way it adds nuance to the story of urban renewal, and it might pair neatly with Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City by Pierre Christin.

[Stuart Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Urban renewal efforts to create decent housing for all Americans from the late 1940s through the 1970s are generally considered to have been failures, often motivated by racial prejudice; an unwillingness to invest in public transit versus building more auto expressways; and a belief that modernist architecture will always be preferred over historic styles thereby justifying wholesale "slum clearance", often over the objections of local residents. The author believes this may be an over-simplification of what were very complex situations. By focusing on the career of one of the most powerful urban redevelopment administrators of the period--Ed Logue who worked in New Haven, CT, Boston, MA and New York--Cohen makes an argument that there were both redevelopment successes and failures and that some negative outcomes were not intentional. Given the ongoing lack of affordable housing for all in today's urban areas, this is a timely re-evaluation of how the U.S. has attempted to create livable cities and what lessons we should learn from these past efforts. Extremely well written, this scholarly work will be of interest to anyone interested in U.S. urban history or local community development.

[Raven · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well researched history and a good corrective to overly broad critiques of urban renewal (especially in its later, slightly more enlightened guise when many of it's practitioners had heard and mostly internalized the critiques about racism, displacement, and neighborhood destruction). Not for general interest but recommended for planners and developers. Some good history about Logue's work, his sincere desire to create desegregated, mixed income cities and neighborhoods, and his successes and failures in that aim. It's also interesting how similar these debates are to the ones that happen today - we really are still stuck in a 1960s debate about urban development. Thought the chapter on New York's UDC (now the Empire State Development Corporation) and how it was basically doomed by a financing model that required it to build very below market rate units without explicit subsidies was fascinating. Also enjoyed the history of Logue's work in the South Bronx. Altogether a useful, nuanced take but a bit dry, even for someone who is extremely interested in the subject.

[Thomas Lipp · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was initially drawn to this book having spent substantial time in high school researching the Church Street redevelopment project in New Haven of which Logue was a part. My research was primarily through Mayor Richard Lee's archives and focused more on his interactions with the developer Roger Stevens so it was fascinating to read a different side to those events.

I was concerned that once the New Haven portion was concluded I would not find the read as interesting, although I certainly preferred reading about my hometown, "Saving America's Cities" ended up being a fascinating portrait of the changing attitudes in America towards affordable housing. It ended up being an insightful look into the history that lead in part to the current housing crisis that so many of America's cities face, and offered a historical context of which I was not fully aware.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a really long review on this Twitter thread, but the gist of it is that this is the project we need but not the book to do it. What we need is a new look at the breadth of urban renewal, to expand and complicate our vision of what was a changing and contested set of policies over a 40-year period. What we got was basically a biography, without the intellectual or political/legal context that would make it really work.

https://twitter.com/n_kazis/status/11...

[BACsop · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very readable chronicle of federal, state, and local urban renewal practices in the US from the 1950s to the 1980s, centering on the life of Ed Logue, who worked in New Haven, Boston, and NYC.

One of the best books I've read on urban issues and housing politics. Definitely a great and arguably more nuanced supplement to staples of the genre like Jacobs' "Death and Life" and Caro's "The Power Broker."

Highly recommended.

[Chelsea Mullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a little weary of Cohen’s attempt to illustrate more nuance in urban renewal through the career of Ed Logue at first, but this book is excellent. It’s such an endearing portrayal of a highly flawed character in urban development and I loved watching how Logue’s perspective and approach evolved with the changing landscape of urban planning in the late 20th century.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the hundred of books I have read about cities, urbanism, political affairs and the like, this is easily on the top five list. Exceptional presentation of post war urbanism though the of a man whose career mirrored the second half of the 20th century. He was an innovator in getting the the public and private sector to partner snd work together to build cities and serve society.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was especially interested in the history of Roosevelt Island development (including that the tram exists because there were delays in construction of the subway station that allowed the island to open to housing) and the utopian ideals of the New Town movement that it was part of.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The demi-god is here to save the stupid humans from themselves. Now, the fact that the situation was generated by other demi-gods with equally shallow and well-intended hopes, that is for another book written by another writer.

[Jeramey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the best overview of the “urban renewal” era that I’ve ever encountered. Contrasts well with Robert Moses’ biography The Power Broker.

[Jeff Rosa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always enjoy reading about urban planning but really appreciated reading about 2 locations (New Haven & New York) that I spent a lot of tjme in.

[Emily]

To paraphrase a child's book review from 1944, this book gave me more information about Ed Logue than I care to have.

[Eric Papetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, nuanced history of one man's career in urban renewal, a must read for anyone from Boston.