Common Ground (40 page)

In 1972, its first full year of occupancy, Methunion’s operating expenses ($182,024) were more than double those projected in its budget ($90,526). These deficits were further aggravated when some expected revenues failed to materialize. For more than three years, as Bobby McClain sought to develop a black-owned shopping center on the ground floor of one building, he turned away other potential commercial tenants; 9,260 square feet of space remained vacant and the project lost $30,000 a year in budgeted income. No wonder that a HUD internal memorandum finally conceded that Methunion’s original budget was “too low.” An official of the Codman Company put it more bluntly when he wrote in 1973 that “the amount of dollars allocated for operations [was] absolutely ridiculous even three years ago…. the project was doomed to failure at the drawing board.” Yet despite its financial crisis, the board made remarkably little effort to get HUD to raise its “political rents.” The deficits deepened. By May 1972, barely a year after the first tenants moved in, Methunion could no longer meet its mortgage payments. It staggered along for several months on extensions from the mortgage holder, the Government National Mortgage Association, but in December 1972—owing $97,000 in debt service and $60,000 in back taxes—the project went into default. In May 1973, HUD honored its pledge to buy the bad loan.

By then, with Richard Nixon triumphantly launching his second term, benevolence had gone out of fashion in Washington. While Methunion’s tenants were preoccupied with leaking roofs and backed-up toilets, HUD was deciding to “dispose of all acquired multi-family properties at the earliest possible date
at the highest price obtainable in the current market.” Even Rachel Twymon, with her close ties to Union Methodist Church, did not yet realize that this could mean foreclosure and sale of the property to the highest bidder. If that happened it would eliminate government subsidies, sharply raise rents, and force all but Methunion’s most affluent tenants onto the street.

S
ome called it a “chicken coop,” a “Mayan cistern,” or “Disneyland East,” but to Colin it was a symbol of the bold, imaginative Boston they were trying to build. It was different all right—a striking departure from the traditional school of municipal architecture and particularly from the old City Hall, that Second Empire pile of columns, pilasters, and arcades in which Colin had labored all that sweltering summer and through the fall. The old Hall, Boston’s seat of government for 103 years, was redolent of the inflated rhetoric, ethnic warfare, and outright corruption that had been the stock ingredients of Boston politics during much of that era. In The Last Hurrah, his fictional account of the city’s political combat in the age of James Michael Curley, Edwin O’Connor wrote of the old Hall: “… this inefficient tangled warren [was] the perfect symbol of municipal administration…. In its old, high-ceilinged chambers, the elected and appointed officials of government slumbered, mused or conducted the affairs of the city; in this they were guided by the opportunities afforded them and, to a somewhat lesser degree, by the strictures of conscience.”

The new City Hall had risen from the rubble of Boston’s sleaziest quarter—Scollay Square—with its cheap saloons, penny arcades, shooting galleries, pool halls, and “girlie shows.” For generations the matrons of the Watch and Ward Society had inveighed against this “sinkhole of depravity,” but not until the city planners added their weight did the Square finally give way to the gleaming new Government Center.

As conceived by its architect, I. M. Pei, the Center focused on a broad, fan-shaped plaza, flanked by the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building, two state towers, three private office buildings, a new police station, and a parking garage. But its highlight was the new City Hall which loomed like an inverted Aztec pyramid at the plaza’s southeast corner. Built around a huge interior court—“a great agora, a place that proclaims the majesty of government
by the people”—the Hall was divided into three levels reflecting the separate functions of city government. At its base was the public square, symbolized by the red brick floors which carried the pedestrian plaza inside. There, around the central court, were brick walkways lined by counters and offices where the public could purchase licenses, pay assessments, and make inquiries. On the top level, behind a massive, stepped cornice, the architects placed the agencies which dealt least with the public, the faceless bureaucracy. In between lay the “ceremonial” functions—the monumental City Council chambers and the elegant Mayor’s office. As the base was rooted in the red brick of old Boston, so the upper reaches soared in shafts of gray precast concrete and exposed, roughly textured cement walls. Although the design was received with some skepticism in Boston, it was applauded by international critics. Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York
Times
pronounced it “a structure of dignity, humanism and power [which] will outlast the last hurrah.”

The Hall aroused such expectations of immortality that in December 1967 outgoing Mayor John Collins moved into the still incomplete structure for his few remaining days so that he could be the first mayor to occupy it—and promptly contracted pneumonia from the chill winds that blew through his ill-heated office. Kevin White prudently remained in the cluttered jumble of the old Hall for another year. Only in February 1969, when the new Hall had been in use for a month, did the Mayor schedule a week-long inauguration of the edifice, which he plainly hoped to appropriate as a symbol of his new administration.

On the eve of the inaugural ceremony, the heaviest snowstorm in years swept through New England, forcing a twenty-four-hour postponement. The next day, February 10, huge drifts concealed the plaza as five hundred guests took their seats in the great central court, decorated for the occasion with Oriental rugs and tubs of greenery. From the first landing, Senator Edward M. Kennedy addressed the assemblage, deliberately evoking memories of his brother’s time in a speech touched with urgency. “Urban life in the United States has come to a critical point of decision,” he said, “caught between the narrowing walls of change and decay on one hand and, on the other, priorities created for another age…. If the city of Boston becomes a city filled with crime, if it becomes a city lived in only by the very rich and the very poor, if over the next fifty years it gradually becomes an all-black city rather than an integrated city, then our problems will overcome us.”

Kevin White struck a more hopeful note. “It is not just an architectural event which we celebrate this morning,” he said. “For, if you believe, as I do, that architecture both portrays and shapes men’s lives, then you will agree that this building’s major significance will be its effect on the people who use it…. Today, though our cities are beset with incredible problems, this building exhorts all of us to do better than we thought we could in dealing with them—to be hospitable to change, to try new ideas, to bring people closer to government.”

Gazing up at the Mayor, who stood there in his tailored suit and blue-and-gold
tie, his head thrown back, his blue eyes crackling in that beaming Irish pol’s face, Colin was proud to be working for the man. The speech itself came as no surprise—Colin had contributed some ideas for it—but he found himself swept along by the lofty phrases. For Colin believed—as the Mayor had put it to Robert Coles the previous summer—that there was “no more time for politics as usual, not in 1968, not in our cities.” He believed that, with strength and compassion, government could do something about the cities’ problems. And he believed that Kevin White had the qualities necessary to lead the most successful assault ever launched by an American city on racial discrimination, poverty, and decay. As the Mayor concluded his remarks, Colin joined in the applause, and thought to himself, God, I’m glad to be here at this moment, doing what I’m doing, instead of showing some corporation how to save money on its taxes.

But then Colin checked his enthusiasm. He thought back to that other speech of the Mayor’s, the one which had brought him to City Hall in the first place. He and Joan had laughed about that many times. A few days after he started work, he’d encountered the Mayor in a corridor of the old City Hall.

“Hey, Colin,” White had said. “Is it true that you’re here because you took my speech at the
Law Review
banquet as a personal invitation?”

“Well,” Colin stuttered, “yes, I suppose I did.”

The Mayor chuckled. “I don’t think I really intended it that way. But it brought you here, and we’re damn lucky to have you.”

The place they had found for him was anomalous, not quite fitting any table of organization. His title was assistant to the Mayor; in fact he was assistant to an assistant—specifically to Sam Merrick, the Mayor’s Special Counsel. At fifty-four the oldest of White’s aides, Merrick was a Main Line Philadelphia lawyer who had spent most of his life in government labor relations, first with the National Labor Relations Board and then as the Labor Department’s man on Capitol Hill. In September 1967, he had left for a year of “decompression” studying urban policy at Harvard, and late that fall he remarked casually that “it would be fun to work for the city of Boston” (in much the same tone as “it would be fun to go slide in the snow”), but when Barney Frank heard of his remark he called Sam’s bluff. Soon Merrick was handling a package of special responsibilities for the Mayor: making sure the city was getting all the federal funds it was entitled to, dealing with the Labor Department and the Office of Economic Opportunity, and overseeing collective bargaining with city employees.

Colin was assigned a desk in the corner of Merrick’s cramped office and set to work accumulating a library on federal funding so that he could advise city agencies on available resources. But there wasn’t much to do. Merrick was an independent operator, keeping his own counsel, requiring little staff assistance.

Gradually, Colin began working for others in the Mayor’s office. His study of federal funding led him into a general brief on the city’s fiscal problems. Except for Budget Director Dave Davis, he became the mayoral staffer most
familiar with state aid, federal aid, new forms of taxation, any source of funds the city might tap to narrow its budget deficit. He devised plans for getting revenues out of the staggering array of tax-exempt institutions—universities, hospitals, churches—which owned nearly a fifth of the city’s real estate. He examined increased fees for municipal services. As a lawyer, he was a natural resource for legal work in the office. Although the Mayor had a separate Law Department, Colin was soon overseeing preparation of the Mayor’s annual legislative package.

Despite his increasing responsibilities, for the first year or so he had little direct contact with the Mayor. He wasn’t in the inner circle, which included Barney Frank; Sam Merrick; Bill Cowin; Hale Champion, Ed Logue’s replacement as director of Redevelopment; and Corporation Counsel Herb Gleason. Colin was at the next level together with other young assistants like Jeff Steingarten, Rick Borten, and Paul Oosterhuis. When the Mayor’s staff moved into the new City Hall in December, Colin and Steingarten shared a small suite just down the marble corridor from the Mayor’s office where they were available to receive assignments from the Mayor himself or from Barney Frank, who was not only Kevin White’s chief of staff and principal policy adviser, but his alter ego and, in many technical areas,
de facto
mayor. Frank had achieved his preeminence at age twenty-seven through a combination of intelligence, energy, and a caustic wit which, though it alienated some, lashed others on to prodigies of accomplishment. In a City Hall still populated principally by amiable Irishmen, Barney was an anachronism: a Jew from Bayonne, New Jersey, who delivered his stinging wisecracks in a thick “Joisy” accent, through billows of smoke from a cigar which looked like one of Hoboken’s belching smokestacks. With his massive belly draped in perpetually rumpled suits, Barney did not
look
impressive, but few people could skip so nimbly through the corridors of Massachusetts politics.

Barney was a doctrinaire liberal, whose message to those around him was “Dammit, we can change things!” As he proselytized for change, his most important convert was the Mayor himself; for, despite appearances, Kevin White, when he took office in January 1968, was a remarkably non-ideological man. The general impression to the contrary was almost entirely a function of his having drawn Louise Day Hicks as his opponent in the runoff, for her stolid resistance to change and her racial innuendoes could only make him seem, by contrast, a trailblazer of the Great Society.

Once White took office, several factors encouraged him to follow through on his rhetoric about the urban crisis. Because he saw himself running for governor, not for reelection as mayor, his audience was different from his constituency; he was governing the city, but his actions were tailored to impress not just Boston’s working-class Irish or Italians but the liberal suburbanites of Brookline and Newton, whose votes would be critical in the gubernatorial race. Moreover, White quickly realized that urban issues were “sexy,” providing an opportunity for the coat-over-the-shoulder crisis management which John Lindsay had demonstrated in New York. The city’s pressing
problems—dramatic, tangible, out on the streets for everyone to see—genuinely intrigued the problem solver in White. And Barney Frank, constantly moving toward the boldest, most progressive position, pushed the Mayor still further along the path of social change. Finally, Martin Luther King’s assassination forced White to give the race issue top priority.

The Mayor responded to the assassination with a blitzkrieg of attention to the black community: Lindsayesque walks up Blue Hill Avenue, with stops along the way to bounce a basketball; efforts to refurbish Franklin Park, the major green space in Boston’s ghetto; creation of the Mayor’s Office of Human Rights, headed by a black director; and the promotion of Herbert Craigwell, Jr., a black detective, over hundreds of white officers, to the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police.