Mayor for a New America (26 page)

My impulse was to pounce: Picture those palookas streaming into South Boston after Pats games, filling the bars, peeing in the streets, groping the women, and infuriating the men. But I held my tongue, hoping fair-minded observers would empathize with Southie residents.

 

“It's getting to be show time,” Bill Weld said, turning up the heat on me. “We have the AFC championship being played here in Massachusetts and what's the host city? The host city is Providence, Rhode Island.”

The headline in the
Herald:
“NFL Snubs Hub.”

In a slap at Boston (and me), NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue named Providence, twenty miles down I-95 from Foxboro, the official pregame NFL headquarters.

“I guess Pawtucket was already booked,” I quipped.

“Boston has fumbled,” Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci crowed. “My feeling is that if you want to get in the game you have to suit up. . . . If Boston can't accommodate [Kraft], Providence will.”

“Some cities need a pro sports team to have people look at them,” I shot back, “but people want to come to Boston.”

Ten thousand fans turned out in the rain to welcome the NFL to its host city for a week. Merchants draped the Pats logo over their windows. A deli made sandwiches named after star players. It had taken 350 years, but for the first time “excitement” and “Providence” appeared in the same sentence.

Kraft's best argument for a new stadium in Boston was that the old one in Foxboro was falling apart. Well, wouldn't you know, in the AFC championship game the stadium lights at Foxboro went out for eleven minutes. The blackout “makes a point,” Kraft told sportswriters. “But we didn't plan it.”

With a group of friends, I watched the game at my City Hall office. When the lights went out, someone shouted what everyone suspected: “Whatddeedo, Kraft, throw water on a transformer?”

After Otis Smith gathered up a fumble and ran into the end zone for the fourth-quarter touchdown that sent the Patriots to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, I put my head in my hands and groaned, “Two more weeks of this . . .”

 

“As Super Bowl hoopla intensifies and the eyes of the nation turn toward New England, no seat will be hotter than that occupied by Mayor Thomas M. Menino,” the
Globe
wrote. “If the team leaves the city, it won't matter how many good things he does in office. If the Cleveland Patriots are in some future Super Bowl, Menino will always be remembered as the villain who forced the heroes out of our city.” Soon after that commentary ran, on a visit to the Franklin Park Zoo, Kobie, the four-hundred-pound gorilla, pelted me with his feces.

My patience was fraying. Especially with Bill Weld. He needed a win. Like Mitt Romney a decade later, Bill Weld saw being governor of Massachusetts as a launching pad to the White House. He'd wanted to be nominated as Bob Dole's running mate in 1996. That hadn't happened. He'd hoped to unseat Senator John Kerry that November. He'd lost by 9 points. Bill had fizzled out; his national political career seemed likely to end before it began. He needed a win. I understood. But his public needling that the Pats would leave the state if I did not budge was hurting me politically. So I unloaded on him in a phone call not for the ears of the nuns at St. Thomas ­Aquinas. But you can't insult a Weld. Maybe if my family once owned Readville I'd be unflappable too.

He made amends by inviting Angela to sit with his wife, Susan, in the State House gallery during his State of the State address. But he couldn't resist packing the speech with football references. When he declared, “Our commonwealth is bound for glory in the biggest game of all,” Democratic lawmakers sat on their hands. So Bill ad-libbed, “It gets better, or worse, depending on your perspective.” It got worse. Raising his fist, he shouted, “Jambalaya, Go Pats!”

From my point of view the substance of the governor's speech was worse than the tone. David Nyhan's suggested headlines got the gist: “Weld Croaks Convention Center” and “Governor Rules Out Mayor's Key Economic Goal.”

“We promised the citizens that we would not raise taxes—ever—for as long as we are on Beacon Hill,” Weld boasted. “And we have not raised taxes. And we never will.” Not even to help finance a public investment that would stimulate the Massachusetts economy for years to come.

The Democratic speaker of the House, Tom Finneran, was just as stubborn as Weld, but in the other direction. The state could not borrow the whole cost of the convention center. At least half had to come from user fees on conventioneers. “We haven't blinked and we're not going to blink,” Finneran declared. “There's going to be an increase in these taxes or fees or there is not going to be a convention center.”

Angela had a good time with Mrs. Weld, but I left the State House in low spirits.

They weren't raised any at the rally seeing the Patriots off to New Orleans. The crowd cheered Weld but booed when I was introduced and chanted “Sta-di-um.” The players laughed, egging the fans on . . . in my front yard.

I missed going to my first Super Bowl. A kidney stone insisted on being removed. From my hospital bed, I was enjoying the pregame festivities on TV until the camera lingered on a sign displayed by a Holiday Inn near the Superdome. It read
WELCOME BUDDY CIANCI, MAYOR OF PATRIOTS' HOME TOWN.

 

If the Patriots had defeated the Green Bay Packers in the Super Bowl and kept Coach Parcells from jumping to the New York Jets, things might not have gone downhill so fast for Bob Kraft. At least victory would have put the Pats owner and Jonathan Kraft, his son and point person on the stadium, in a better frame of mind.

Six days after the Super Bowl, talking to Charlie Sennott, a respected business reporter, Kraft asked, “What have I done that's so bad here?” He was puzzled by “all the haters in this town, all those who don't want to take risks.”

Mitt Romney talked like that during the 2012 GOP primaries. He was a “risk taker,” not a “vulture capitalist.” Similarly, a story Sennott told about a Kraft venture in Montville, Connecticut, recalls Newt Gingrich's attack ad about “the day Mitt Romney came to town”:

 

Kraft and his son Jonathan blew into town, promising to create 80 jobs by adding a state-of-the-art folding box plant next to two older plants that employed roughly 300 people. With the promise of jobs and tax revenues, Kraft's Rand-Whitney was awarded a permit to build the new facility, as well as improved road access and sewer hookups. But after the new plant was built, Rand-Whitney sold ownership of the two older plants to a company that in 1995 closed them down and laid off all 300 employees.

 

At the local Polish American Club, when the Patriots came on the TV, Sennott reported, “the old factory workers” rooted for the other team.

“The people in that Polish Hall don't know the facts,” Kraft said. “It's like South Boston. They're uneducated.” Kraft, a Columbia man, later claimed he meant “uneducated on the issues.” But that's not what he said.

The stadium was already on life support. But when I saw that quote, I knew Kraft had pulled the plug.

And reading on, I knew Bill Weld would do nothing to help.

A truck driver had dropped off a package at Kraft's office and was waiting by the elevator. He was wearing a Green Bay Packers hat.

“Hey, do you know where you are?” Jonathan Kraft asked.

“I know exactly where I am and I know who works here,” the man said. “And you can tell him he's never coming to South Boston so long as I live there.”

The elevator doors closed. Jonathan “rolled his eyes” and said, “More of the riffraff.”

Sennott asked me for a quote: “It's always hard for a business person to jump into the public arena. But this has been unbelievable.”

The people of South Boston opposed the stadium because it would harm their neighborhood. The Krafts didn't get that. As I told Sennott, “They think everyone is against them.” Jonathan Kraft wondered if it was because of anti-Semitism.

Three weeks after his damaging interview with Sennott, Bob Kraft generously took responsibility for “mishandling the whole affair, for not including community residents,” and withdrew his proposal to build a football stadium in South Boston.

Foxboro officials said they would find a way to keep the team there.

And I said: Amen.

 

“Kraft's decision gives the mayor's development agenda a major boost,” the
Globe
wrote. So long tied to the stadium, the convention center was free at last.

“Every day we wait on this, we lose another convention,” I warned. Macworld, held in Boston for thirteen years, drawing fifty thousand visitors who spent $60 million in the city, was the latest. It had to be split between two sites in Boston. But the Javits Center, in New York, was big enough to host it at one site. In 1997, Macworld was Boston's biggest trade show. In 1998, Macworld announced it would switch to New York.

Forging ahead with the convention center still wasn't easy. In Massachusetts politics, nothing is.

To jump-start legislation on Beacon Hill, I proposed that the city buy the C Street land. Tom Finneran and I then wrangled for months over what Boston should pay. Minutes before the legislature was scheduled to debate the proposal, we settled on a price.

“While this is an important economic development project for the city and the state, no mayor in history has been willing to come up with a nickel to help fund it,” Finneran said. “So Mayor Menino is to be congratulated for his willingness to commit the $157 million to make this new convention center a reality.” I said nice things about him, too.

To win veto-proof approval of the $700 million bond issue to pay for the Boston Convention Center, legislators from across the state were cut in on the action. Southeastern Massachusetts got $30 million for capital projects; Fall River's Kerr Mill site $3.5 million; Worcester's convention center $17 million; Springfield's Basketball Hall of Fame $25 million and Civic Center $14 million; and Lenox, on the western border, $2.5 million for the National Music Center. With something for politicians from the Cape to the Berkshires, the bill passed, and by enough votes to override the governor's veto (because of the hike in the hotel tax).

In 1994 my BRA had selected the site, estimated the benefits, and specified the taxes to finance a convention center in South Boston. In 1998 construction began at C Street.

Stuff (finally!) had got done.

 

We are facing some major challenges in Detroit. We're trying to reduce crime and build our neighborhoods, and we're here because we want to know what magic Mayor Menino is working.

 

—Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer, visiting Boston in January 2000

 

Boston's recovery plan had a neighborhood component, the Main Streets initiative to revive community shopping districts by tapping “uncaptured spending power.” That's econ-talk for a commonsense idea: Residents of even the poorest areas have money to spend, which goes uncaptured locally unless they have a safe place to shop. After 1995, the success of neighborhood policing began to change perceptions about neighborhood shopping. That was the first step in stimulating locally generated economic growth. The model describes a commercial chain reaction. Concentrated spending power attracts new businesses, which create new jobs, which support more spending, which attracts more businesses. I saw it happen in neighborhood after neighborhood.

Main Street is my baby. As a city councilor, I persuaded the National Trust for Historic Preservation to extend its Main Streets program, intended to revive commerce in rural America, to an urban commercial center. I had one in mind in my council district—Roslindale Square.

Angela remembers the square as a bustling place, with a drugstore that served ice cream sodas over a marble counter and a movie theater, the Rialto. One of the last movies to play there, in the early 70s, was a revival of
Gone with the Wind.
That's what happened to the square after the suburban malls captured the available spending power. In 1981 a four-alarm fire consumed a block of stores. Running for mayor in 1983, Dennis Kearney, the sheriff of Suffolk County, painted a dark picture for a Roslindale audience: “This year in Roslindale Square, there were eight auto thefts, nine burglaries and three armed robberies. Every candidate for mayor says Boston needs more jobs, but if you were opening a business, would you do it here?” Kearney lost big in Roslindale.

Campaigning for City Council that year, I tried the politics of hope. Speaking at a local Knights of Columbus hall, I said: “I have a master plan for Roslindale Square. We have to bring it back.” I might not have been so positive if I had looked around. Walking through the square after my speech, I counted thirteen pizza joints.

I was on the advisory board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and saw possibility for Roslindale in its National Main Street Center program, devised to revive rural village centers. My pitch was that cities were made up of villages. Roslindale Square even had a village green! Beneath the plywood faces of the shops were the bones of fine old buildings, constructed in the 1920s when Roslindale was a fashionable “streetcar suburb.” The square could be renewed by uncovering—and recovering—its past. Like so much else in my career, now that I can see it whole, saving Roslindale Square was a back-to-the-future project.

The Trust went for my idea. In 1985 it made Roslindale Square an Urban Demonstration Project and awarded the Roslindale Main Street advisory board a grant of $100,000 annually for three years. The Trust promised “to bring those techniques successfully developed for stimulating economic development in small towns” to the square.

Working with a locally hired (and partly city-paid) director, Main Street consultants pursue a four-part strategy of “improving storefronts, streets and sidewalks; promoting the district to residents, investors and visitors; creating partnerships among neighborhood stakeholders; and advising existing merchants and recruiting new ones.”