Special Program – Saving America’s Cities
A SPECIAL PROGRAM CELEBRATION ED LOGUE AND THE DEVELOPMENT
OF ROOSEVELT ISLAND
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Saving America’s Cities:
Ed Logue, UDC and the Creation of Roosevelt Island
by Robin Lynn
In the early 1980s, I invited Ed Logue to my home on Roosevelt Island. I knew of his role as the former president and chief executive of the NY State Urban Development Corporation (UDC), the agency that Governor Rockefeller formed in 1968 to build subsidized low- and moderate- income housing throughout New York State. I wanted to meet the mastermind behind the audacious plan that created our “new-town-in-town,” allowing me to live in the middle of the East River, raising my three children among appealing open spaces, with an unlikely form of mass transit—the tram—connecting us to 59th Street.
To my surprise, Logue accepted my luncheon call. “Residents never invite you back,“ he said to my husband Larry, and I had. Now, Lizabeth Cohen has published Saving America’s Cities , Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). This fascinating book tracks Logue’s work, not just in developing Roosevelt Island in the 1970s (as head of UDC), but redeveloping New Haven in the 1950s, Boston in the 1960s, and the South Bronx from 1978–85. Cohen, the current Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the History Department at Harvard University, brings Logue’s backers and foes to life, while focusing on his vision to revitalize post-war cities. She spends considerable time documenting the rise and demise of the UDC, which had transformed Welfare Island into Roosevelt Island.
Cohen’s meticulously researched and accessible volume, which won the Bancroft Prize for history in 2020, delves into the complex world of city planning through the lens, as she states in her introduction, of “who’s in charge, who should have a say, who benefits, and who pays the bill.” Logue, Cohen writes, was enormously proud of his work on Roosevelt Island. He aimed to create what he called a “socially engineered community,” which embodied his goals for successful post-war urban living: a mixed-income, mixed-race, handicapped accessible community, with buildings designed by progressive architects working to build housing for all and using innovative building technology.
Logue couldn’t come over to the island often enough while it was being built. Cohen quotes a New York Times reporter’s description of him as, at least once a week, “plunging in his bear-like way around the site—old corduroys, green Shetland sweater, shirttail hanging out and no hard- hat covering his stack of grey hair; slow-speaking, fast-thinking, an interesting mixture of charm and combativeness.” Cohen helped put Logue’s comments to me—those that I remember, lo, these many years later—into context. But I wanted more. And although I could not invite Lizabeth Cohen over to schmooze about her book, I could contact her for the Roosevelt Island Historical Society.
Robin: Thank you for letting me email questions to you. For those who don’t know Edward J. Logue, could you please introduce our island’s planner and tell us why he is important.
Professor Cohen: Ed Logue may not be a familiar name to most people today. But in his own time, he was well known as a leader in the effort to revitalize American cities which were under severe threat from the explosion of suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. And it was not just residents who were fleeing. So too were business headquarters, manufacturing plants, and retail stores, which meant that many jobs and urban attractions were relocating to more decentralized metropolitan areas.
In New Haven, Boston, and New York, Logue took advantage of federal funding for what was then called “urban renewal.” Many of the efforts undertaken to save cities ultimately proved terribly damaging to their survival: for example, when working-class neighborhoods were torn down to make way for new highways or housing that would retain and attract middle-class residents. I have no interest in whitewashing the worst abuses of urban renewal. But I argue in the book that we are mistaken if we assume that urban renewal meant the same thing everywhere from its establishment in 1949 until the mid-1970s, when the federal government under President Nixon withdrew funding for housing and cities. Instead, I suggest, someone like Logue made mistakes, but he also learned on the job. And over time, he experimented with new, less damaging strategies for saving cities, which he deeply valued and felt were in grave trouble. The UDC’s three New Towns, of which Roosevelt Island was one, were a way of doing things better.
Not all urban renewers were like Logue, of course. I show how, for example, his goals were much more progressive than Robert Moses’s. Roosevelt Island was so precious to Logue because it embodied his hope that city neighborhoods could be made more diverse in income, race, age, and accessibility, with affordable housing and good schools available to all who were living side-by-side. To his mind, financial support from the federal government was key to achieving this rather utopian goal of a more socially and economically integrated America.
Robin: Every morning as he shaved, Logue would look out his window onto Welfare Island, and that was how, he said to me, he became curious about the place. (From Cohen’s research I learned that his apartment was at 1 East End Avenue). With all the affordable housing projects he had under construction across the state (eventually, 115), and the pressure he was under to quickly complete them, why was he so intent on building an entire new town? What lessons did Logue learn from his work redeveloping New Haven in the 1950s, and Boston in the 1960s that determined his approach to developing Roosevelt Island?
Cohen: The New Town strategy arose out of Logue’s growing recognition that demolition-style urban renewal was not the answer. His earliest efforts in New Haven had suffered from this clearance approach. He sought alternatives in Boston. But the real breakthrough came in New York State. As he told colleagues in 1970, “We cannot…put all the emphasis on rebuilding, tearing down and rehabilitating in the inner city.”
So, instead, he sought available land where new housing could be constructed. “I don’t have to condemn it. I don’t have to relocate families. I don’t have to demolish any buildings,” he explained. He also broke with the modernist orthodoxy of separating functions, and sought to combine living, working, schooling, shopping, and recreating in one planned community.
Robin: I remember that Logue said he hired many different architects to develop Roosevelt Island so that no one firm could dominate his project. Logue, you make clear, liked to be in control. What were Logue’s criteria for selecting architects? Why was he a champion of modern architecture? Why did he equate “social engineering” with the modern movement in architecture?
Cohen: Logue wanted as much as possible to ensure that his projects avoided the cookie-cutter look—an alienating experience-of public housing. That goal included seeking alternatives to high-rise “tower-in-the-park” buildings. The UDC’s Marcus Garvey Park Village project in Brooklyn, for example, innovated what was called “low-rise, high density housing,” achieving the same number of units by designing the structures differently.
Interestingly, just when the UDC was collapsing in 1975, it was in the midst of sponsoring an architectural competition for a new, more promising prototype for high-rise-style subsidized housing on Roosevelt Island. In selecting architects, Logue wanted to attract a mixture of up-and-coming and established architects. He hoped to encourage them to make housing design more of a priority. But he was also wary of letting architects do too much of their own thing and, in that way, was a demanding client. He said, “If you leave architects alone, they will make a statement.” So he established mechanisms like the UDC’s famous “live-ins,” where architects and staff alike had to stay over in projects nearing completion to learn what worked and what didn’t.
Robin: When I moved to the island in 1980, I was only vaguely familiar with UDC and Logue’s social goals. I was more taken with the physical presence of Roosevelt Island’s river walks, open spaces, plazas, green areas, playgrounds and communal rooms, which provided a space for joint activities to take place and a community to form.
What is the role of open space in “social engineering?” Is there anything you can add about Logue’s attitude regarding how open space advances social engineering?
Cohen: That’s an interesting question. Logue liked sports and relished playing tennis and football, for example. So creating recreational facilities mattered to him in planning a community like Roosevelt Island. But even more importantly, he saw the river walks, open spaces, playgrounds, community centers, and the like as a way to advance the social mixing he advocated. Given that the buildings themselves were specified as market-rate or subsidized, there would be little social mixing there. And the most expensive units benefited from the spectacular skyline of Manhattan, while the others looked at industrial Queens. Those walkways and the mini-schools, he hoped, would be scattered throughout the many buildings (that ambition got scaled back) would be the public spaces he expected would bring people together. They would allow everyone to share the best views and a common social experience.
Robin: One of the goals of UDC was to build quickly, to fast-track construction. One of Logue’s goals for UDC was to find ways to use innovative building technology to make that happen. Can you point out innovative technological means used in constructing the island’s buildings?
Cohen: From the start, the UDC was committed to promoting innovation in building methods to make housing construction more efficient and affordable. Pre-assembly of building materials off-site cut down on the unit cost of objects, which also translated into savings in on-site labor expense. An example was the pre-assembled and presumed technologically-advanced electrical wiring panels developed by NASA.
Sometimes these efforts went awry, such as when UDC was convinced by Con Edison to install electrical heating with bulk metering on Roosevelt Island at a big savings per unit, only to find itself footing a huge bill when the energy crisis hit in 1973–74. But Logue was proud of other technological innovations on the island, such as the free electric minibuses that transported residents, the vacuum sanitation system that whisked trash under the streets to a central refuse disposal site for compacting, and, of course, the tramway. It became a necessity once it was clear that the subway would not be finished on time. And it soon became the icon of Roosevelt Island.
Robin: To build quickly, UDC was also allowed to use such tools as eminent domain to acquire land and to overrule local zoning and building codes. I’m not a big fan. I realize that my duplex apartment in Rivercross has no egress from its bottom floor where we sleep. I’m not sure I would have moved into that apartment if I had been savvy enough to realize this at the time.
Why was he given permission to override local laws and was this his undoing when he tried to build affordable housing in Westchester?
Cohen: Logue understood that zoning and antiquated building codes were often used, particularly in suburbs, to keep out affordable housing. (And they still are today.) He had battled the problem in New Haven and Boston, but there he had no jurisdiction over areas outside of the city limits. Moreover, he felt strongly that the economic and social needs of underserved urban populations were not only the responsibility of cities. An entire metropolitan area, where many workers who profited from cities lived, needed to be involved.
When Logue was offered the statewide position heading the UDC, he thought he would finally have the authority to promote metropolitan-level solutions to housing, schooling, transportation access, and the like. So he pushed for the power to override local zoning and building codes if necessary. But when Logue proposed what he called a “Fair Share Housing Plan” to build 100 units of affordable housing in nine Westchester towns, he was met with violent opposition—ultimately leading to the demise of his UDC. It was a dramatic story that I tell in great detail in the book.
Robin: The island was never built out as Logue had planned. In 1975, a little less than half of the 5,000 proposed units were complete when UDC went bankrupt and construction stopped. What happened?
Cohen: The UDC had plans to keep building up Roosevelt Island. As I mentioned above, it had even sponsored an architectural competition to develop a new prototype for subsidized housing in 1974–75. But everything stopped when the UDC disastrously defaulted on notes and loans and Logue and many of his team were forced to resign. There were multiple reasons for the UDC’s default on $104.5 million in maturing short-term notes and $30 million in bank loans in February 1975. This collapse took place, of course, at a time when New York State and New York City were close to bankruptcy, so the UDC’s troubles must be put in that context as well. In fact, it was a very complicated convergence of factors, all of which are explained in Chapter 8 of my book.
Robin: Nevertheless, the truth is that none of us would be living here if Logue hadn’t conceived a plan that this “island that nobody knows”— as Welfare Island was called in 1969—could be a desirable housing haven for all. Yet there’s no place here that bears Ed Logue’s name. He should be remembered; your book fills a void, but what about recognizing him on Roosevelt Island?
Let’s ask the Roosevelt Island Historical Society readers how we can commemorate Edward J. Logue. Please send suggestions to Judy Berdy, President, Roosevelt Island
Historical Society, at rooseveltislandhistory@gmail.com.
Editor’s note: Dr. Cohen’s book, Saving America’s Cities , Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), is available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com. You can hear Cohen speak on the topic on Tuesday, May 18 at 7:00 pm on Zoom. Watch for the registration link in your email as the date approaches.
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