If this is the first time for you to visit a special welcome to you. We have a fabulous library which is available to the public for research this evening tony from the Historical Society will do the honors so well take a moment to greet everyone and now we will turn it over to tony. [applause] thank you gavin has put on a number of programs here including some definitive conversations well over a year ago which is where i first met him. Its a pleasure for me to have the task of introducing. Before i began its a lifetime of a career based in the premise vital to civilization and i think liz has captured that i will tell you one story about ed how i felt about him. The first time i met him i was about 25 years old the first week in the urban Development Corporation although i knew the agency and very anxious to go to work for him again. It happened on a very odd day we were working at the Burlington House we were the only tenants in the building at the time because the fisher brothers couldnt find anybody else to be set a very difficult time of year. So they elected to sign a lease with the state agency. But that particular day that had run a frontpage story to set up the private building from the 46th floor. [laughter] and to say the least its no more than what you would know about if you read the book but everybody has a newspaper. I never met ed and i said to him out of brashness this story isnt right. How does it make you feel to work here . He looked at me and put his hand on my shoulder and said it supposed to make you feel that way. [laughter] thats what he felt about the people who worked for him. Which is not to say he was easy to work for. Receiving a d from Princeton University and phd at university of california berkeley in 1986 she became assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon and then a full professor in 1997 the History Department and the professor of american studies 2011 in addition became dean of the ratcliff institute a job she did through 2018. I dont see anything here about the New York Post here. [laughter] her books include making a deal which won the bancroft prize the other was a consumers republic which is a widely used college. And matt which she coauthored is also a member of the American Academy of arts and sciences. Reading this book from cover to cover it has 115 pages of footnotes. There is more content and fun in those than any book i had ever written. These are stories in and of themselves. [applause] thank you very much. One to say is the headline of the office in new york talk about it and i just want to thank tony for not only introducing me today but giving me many hours of interviews and you will see if you read the book how much i depend on his memory and his take and analysis of what went on in that. Its very nice to be here. Thank you for coming. I see a lot of familiar faces which is wonderful. I look forward to sharing with you this book i have worked on for a long time as you know because people who have been very helpful to me over the years it has been approximately 14 years working on this book delayed a seven years by that deanship at the ratcliff institute. It was a delay that when i look back i think it was an inspiration in many ways because it did encourage me to value writing for a broad public because we did a lot of public programming at radcliffe. I want to start by giving you some background via wrote the book. Im not a biographer. Social political historian of the United States in the 20th century. This is a very different kind of book than what i have written before. Is this on . I dont think i see the green light to that i saw before when we were testing this. So this is a very different kind of book than what i wrote befor before. Is my early work as a social historian with groups of ordinary Americans First and Second Generation factory workers, africanamericans middleclass homeowners and consumers and so forth and that kind of history is referred to as history from the bottom up but you might wonder why i did a biography about a powerful white mail like ed. I decided i wanted to write a book for world war ii cities and i want to grapple with the changing environment as well as how those changes came about and with the books introduction i aim to understand who should have a say and who benefits and who pays the bill for quite determined focusing someone who is personally engaged with the struggle to revitalize those postwar cities when mass suburbia was booming the way to frame the book and engage readers and what i thought was an important story. Consequently we became attracted to the new challenge to put in the power at the center of my book and as i was writing history from the top down with the analysis that social historians have with the importance of social identities with race and ethnicity in professions perk when my previous book the politics of mass consumption i wrote a rather wrote about the rise of mass suburbia. And then the landscape of Mass Construction of new Housing Developments and the rise of sharp Shopping Centers and the intersection with the highway. So i surmise and then they are displaced. In what became saving americas cities with that decentralization for what it actually meant for cities. With that odorous older established ones. And now in this post world war ii. And how postwar cities had developed essentially dismissing all efforts with the disastrous urban renewal. That seem to equate all intervention with the villain notorious as robert moses and by contrast the idea of postwar cities by the more saintly jacobs with the message of anti planning and handsoff let neighborhoods and cities develop organically on their own. Shirley i thought the story must be more complicated than extreme positions. I certainly know 40s through the seventies had some flaws such as excessive demolition and dislocation of residence often africanamericans and a problematic belief in separating the residences work with retail and those schemes on downtown and highways that go through neighborhoods. But on the other hand i also knew that many were truly in trouble and in need of help. With half from the Great Depression followed by the deprivation of wartime with leaving people and jobs and much more to the suburbs. My final motivation to write this book was that as a city dweller and city lover i was increasingly alarmed with what i was seeing around me the shocking deterioration of the urban infrastructure as well as a worsening crisis of Affordable Housing. To the point lowrent apartments are fast disappearing evictions are growing in more than one third of american households pay over 30 percent of their income on shelter and in many parts of this country people pay over 50 percent. Moore over a drastic divide has developed between cities that are flourishing in failing. We have the haves and the havenots. And then to make us of mass transit. With roads and bridges and tunnels and then to at least assert of 1949 to provide a decent home for free american family. And probing how we got to this place. So why ed . I started to look around for an ideal subject and i had a checklist. But most importantly i saw an individual whose life would allow me to tell to intertwining stories how a person and a nation went about to revitalize American Cities and the mutual influence they had on each other and on American Cities. It didnt take me along to stumble upon ed i knew from a book in history he had a great moment in the sixties to turn around the long deteriorating process but then i discovered he had left an enormous stash of papers at yale and had given many interviews over the years so i could hear his own voice even though he was no longer alive nobody else was writing a book about him and i did some checking to be sure. There were those who considered it that many of his associates i am pleased to say quite a number of them are here tonight were still very much alive and in touch with each other and even launched a website called friends of ed long ed logue so thank you again for that. I was also fortunate that ed logue family was still around and supportive of my book without being intrusive and generous with their memories and contacts and family peepers per cry would figure out the span of his career offered me an amazing way to track urban redevelopment over four decades with his work in new haven in the sixties and boston in the sixties new york state through the sixties or seventies. The last years of his life with the urban redevelopment to try unsuccessfully to write a memoir and then he died in 2000 at his vineyard at the age of not quite 79. So why is ed logue a compelling protagonist . He grew up caring about cities born in 1821 and raised in philadelphia one of five children of a widowed Kindergarten Teacher with not much final resource on Financial Resources went to yale on the scholarship on the g. I. Bill he became engaged with the city of new haven and thats how he got to know in the yale dining hall and later organized into the labor union then married the daughter of the dean of yale college and then admired by some to be deeply disliked by others and most comfortable to be what i describe as a rebel in the belly of the establishment. What i mean over his lifetime at the bastions of power. And logue became committed to renewing cities as progressive politics running counter to many assumptions that we make with urban renewal and portrayed as part of that work machine with that investment and logue stood in stark contrast working as a labor organizer and trained as a lawyer but those discriminatory quotas that white not black america had a race problem to overcome and add a private sector would do anything but prioritize to serve the public interest. In the late forties and fifties and that would be the net next frontier of Franklin Roosevelt and expert knowhow. In to save americas city. And then the Public Sector must control it. He was early in his career believing to have larger social and political benefits and discovered this in a surprising way. Serving a special assistant and then was a new dealer from Teddy Roosevelt from the administration to observe the Us Government to invest what was called Community Development to improve the infrastructure rivers and wells and housing in hopes of creating a more equal and democratic and importantly to them the communist india. Then what was called the third world in American Cities thats not what we assume with influence and this is the first example how they learned and the transnational circulation with planning and architecture. He learned many things and very much influenced taking place in europe and later taken with the creation of european new towns with a strategy that followed world war ii in many european countries. And upon returning in 1953 he began a career in urban we development to unfold over four decades as a follow the personal story in the book we see the urban renewal process was not at all static but would continue to change over time with different approaches in response to its own failures to shift the National Policy and to implement with these progressive ideas so urban renewal is not the one huge disaster but a much more complex evolutionary response. Going through all the details so i should say my notes are as robust as they are my editor said you have to cut 30000 words. So its good he told me to do that and the book is better for that but a lot of it ended up in the footnotes. [laughter] but i will give to you the highlights act i is new haven. 1954 through 61 logue teamed up with a newly reform democratic mayor to turn around the city Old Industries were closing many were not feeling very loyal to new haven this was leading to the disappearance of many good workingclass jobs this was happening just as africanamericans had hopes of making a better living. At the same time middleclass white residents moving to the suburbs with other aspects of modern living quite explicitly to field one flee the city and finally the i 95 highway that they knew would be a deathknell and a Retail Center for the region already facing competition from new Shopping Centers. So the important point is cities were truly struggling. Logue agenda use newly available federal funding from the acts of 1949 to make new haven a National Laboratory for physical renewal as well as innovative social programs many of which like Neighborhood Legal services and job training would actually pave their way into society. In the end new haven got more dollars from the federal government than any other city per capita and was used as ground zero for urban renewal. There were some successes but overall the first phase of urban renewal was problematic. Is new haven and many other American Cities for many reasons i go into in the book. Most egregiously the urban renewal here and elsewhere tore down a poor but viable low Income Neighborhood to put up apartments aimed at keeping the middleclass in the city and a highway to connect downtown to i95 and introduced a car Oriented Shopping Center into downtown. I also probed the way urban renewal consulted with Community Residents and i discovered they felt they were democratically minded experts protecting the public good but their approach sought input for him representatives of the special Interest Groups and Community Organizers i call it that pluralist democracy drawn from analysis that robert dall developed in his classic work which is based on the new haven renewal that summer. So i conclude phase one during the fifties had a massive clearance and pluralist democratic form of communication was deeply flawed so many other cities including boston with the destruction of the immigrant west and follow the same pattern. Act ii was boston. 1960 through 67. 1960 logue was hired as a consultant and then head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority by another new mayor this time john collins who had visions to turn around his own near bankrupt and politically paralyzed city. In boston logue learned his mistakes from new haven and those taken place under the previous mayor to come in waving a flag of planning with people and vowed never to undertake the kind of demolition that happened of the west and neighborhood. By then two dimensions were boston and the neighborhoods. The heart of downtown was the creation of Government Center to revitalize the stagnant downtown and to pressure a reluctant yankee business and lead to finally commit to the city that they had been ignoring for decades investing elsewhere and anywhere but boston and seeking to control Boston Democratic Party machine from the massachusetts state house. The Government Center creation story is fascinating where boston collins made federal use of power as the boston globe wrote in 1962 with the plans for city hall, nothing but a wholehearted affirmation of a new time in new social needs a new technology and aesthetics where faith in the civic instrument of government. And the architect of city hall this modernist design says that message with the integrity of government. As the architect but it many years later he and his partners had a tremendous feeling government wasnt just a Benevolent Institution but the institution for social change. City hall should be the peoples palace and the simple one symbol of urban government the project marks another crucial evolution and here he came to recognize the importance of preserving the structure like Quincy Market to have a historic and modern building that still characterizes boston today. He also learned he need to broaden the base of support for his program and had he sought a wide range of influential allies including the Catholic Churc church, newspapers like the boston globe, retail leaders like the president of jordan marsh, architects and the black middle class and those who could own houses and very few boston neighborhoods and to bring attention with open arms. Those efforts to revitalize bostons other neighborhoods for more downtown in Washington Park so just as they had to negotiate he also had to negotiate with the key neighborhood groups i look at five boston neighborhoods Washington Park and madison park, charlestown south and in north harvard area. What i discovered is every neighborhood has its own story. Added to its base in class plays an Important Role that the outcome i learned is much more complicated and varied than the common assumption of urban renewal can simply be reduced to a middleclass grabbing neighborhoods from lowerclass blacks. Moreover i argue over the course of these years through the urban renewable renewal experienced neighborhood residents felt the important skills of negotiating with officials one observer at the time was an mit graduate student later became a professor called the rehabilitation planning game. Boston citizens would apply the skills to gain more Affordable Housing and to beat the highway project in the seventies. These experiences of fighting renewal contri