New book about Ed Logue

Plen-T-Pak

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The story of the postwar American city as refracted through the life and career of the urban planner Edward J. Logue
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.
 
I found this (warning: very lengthy!) Boston Globe review to be an excellent primer.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2...dern-boston/Qea8g6aTtu0415mQHwliYJ/story.html

tl; dr: we construct grossly and dangerously oversimplified multi-decade narratives about development politics that don't come remotely close to grasping the extreme nuances and complexities that suffuse this convoluted, murky, continuously morphing environment...
 
Sounds like any attempt to draw general conclusions from history. Plenty of opportunity to observe trends, but often breaks down when you dig into the details
 
When I was a teenager in the 1960s I thought Ed Logue was awesome. Clearing out the old, replacing it with futuristic complexes such as GC and others. We all know at the time Boston was fearful of going into an irreversible spiral of decay as the suburbs had risen so high in popularity. No one could foresee the future when yuppies and older people would eventually begin to move back to the city in the 1980's and beyond. In hindsight it would have been perfect to retain the old neighborhoods (the West End and the GC area), as they probably would have become like the North End. But anyway, Ed Logue had a lot of vision and courage, given the assumptions of the time.
 

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