Logue, Edward

Few individuals played a greater role in shaping the postwar American city than urban renewal czar Edward J. Logue (1921–2000). Born in Philadelphia, Logue studied at Yale University and served as a bombardier in the Army Air Force during World War II. The many hours he spent peering down on European cities made him highly skilled at analyzing and interpreting the urban landscape and—ironically—prepared him well for a career implementing massive redevelopment projects.

After the war, Logue returned to Yale to study law, and in 1954, he was appointed New Haven, Connecticut's development administrator by Mayor Richard C. Lee. Logue and Lee spent most of the next decade resuscitating a city crippled by a middle-class exodus to the suburbs. Urban renewal in New Haven did not come painlessly; some 25,000 people were uprooted as extensive “slums” were cleared. The Wooster Square redevelopment alone displaced 2,700 households in what had been a thriving Italian American community. But New Haven's program also set standards for a more temperate approach to renewal, soliciting community input, recycling historic structures, and providing citizens with such amenities as affordable housing, new schools, libraries, and senior centers.

Logue's next challenge was Boston. Like New Haven, Boston's economy had been gutted by the flight of jobs and population to the suburbs. Several attempts had been made to lure the middle class back to the city, including the disastrous West End urban renewal project. In 1961, Mayor John F. Collins recruited Logue to head the Boston Redevelopment Agency. Logue soon completed the transformation of honky-tonk Scollay Square into Government Center, organizing a major public competition for the design of a new city hall. He undertook renewal projects in the South End, Roxbury, Charlestown, and the Back Bay, where he helped build the Prudential Center over the old Boston and Albany rail yards. Logue also succeeded in reconnecting Boston to its waterfront, in part by turning long-neglected Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market into a hugely popular “festival marketplace.” The project, a collaboration with real estate visionary James Rouse, inspired similar efforts around the country. Logue's Boston years, the most fruitful of his career, helped set the stage for the city's resurgence as part of the “Massachusetts miracle” that transformed the regional economy in the 1980s.

Logue left Boston after an unsuccessful bid for mayor in 1968 and was asked by New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to head his new Urban Development Corporation (UDC) Unfettered by local zoning codes and flush with federal money, Logue and the UDC built more than 30,000 units of affordable housing and three new towns before going bankrupt in 1975, when federal housing subsidies ended. The best known of Logue's UDC work is New York's Roosevelt Island, a highly successful “new town in town” that Logue considered his proudest achievement. Logue ended his career in the South Bronx, turning the devastated Charlotte Street neighborhood into a model of inner-city homeownership.

Edward Logue is often compared to that other titan of urban renewal, Robert Moses. Whereas Moses was disdainful of the urban underclass, however, and routinely ignored the needs and wishes of communities affected by his projects, Logue struggled to make urban renewal a positive force in the lives of city residents. Emphasizing the importance of “planning with people,” Logue actively sought citizen input. He was also an early advocate of historic preservation and pioneered the use of architectural design review in the redevelopment process. Logue's vision of the new American city was grand but inclusive, reflecting his lifelong commitment to equity and social justice.

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