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As a result-of Bacon's highly articulate proselytizing, Philadelphia's urban renewers can count on a wide variety of voluntary civic groups to pitch in on specific aspects of the multifarious job. Says Banker Gustave Amsterdam, chairman of the Redevelopment Authority: "It's fashionable in Philadelphia to be interested in the city. I'm only one of dozens of men getting a great exposure to city problems. It's a delight to see them inspire one another." On the Table. Across the U.S., planners are carving up other U.S. cities, with varying degrees of success but invariably accompanied by cries of civic outrage (the cheers may come later). "After all, you are operating on a live patient," says one planner. "And the longer you keep him on the operating table, the worse it is for him."
In Boston the patient almost died on the table. In 1960, when newly elected Mayor John F. Collins called Edward J. Logue to be the head of Boston's redevelopment, the city was clearly in a bad way. Its symptoms included: 1) a central business district tottering toward skid row, where 14,000 jobs and $78 million of taxable assessment had evaporated in a decade; 2) a moribund waterfront; and 3) two fumbling attempts at renewal by Collins' predecessor that had turned out to be unmitigated disasters.
One disaster was the bulldozing of a 38-block, 41-acre low-rent neighborhood to put up a tasteless cluster of high-rent apartment houses. The other was the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway built by the state. This concrete homage to the automobile effectively screened the city from its historic waterfront, as though the sight of running water were something obscene.
Logue, who began life as a lawyer, made his mark in urban renewal by running New Haven's topnotch, $200 million program for Mayor Richard Lee. He is an expert at using the ins and outs of the Federal Housing Act to finance a big program with a little cash. The public cost of the projects he now has in the works will come to about $180 million, of which the Federal Government will put up about $120 million and the state of Massachusetts about $30 million. Boston's share is the other $30 million, and the city is getting a considerable run for its money. Items: > A multimillion-dollar Government Center to replace the flophouses, burlesque theaters, bordellos and tattoo parlors of the Scollay Square area with a complex of handsome federal, state, city and private office buildings.
> The rehabilitation of many of the century-old granite buildings on the waterfront, converting them into handsome apartments which command a superb harbor view.
Like most planners, Logue blames many of the city's woes on the automobile—aided and abetted by federal construction of highways and superhighways that encouraged people to move out of town. But he feels that automotive overcrowding at shopping centers, commuter stations and the approaches to town will bring them back to their own two feet and the city again, if the planners play their cards right.