Common Ground (41 page)

With remarkable speed, he forged his way into that small circle of mayors—Lindsay of New York, Carl Stokes of Cleveland, and Joseph Alioto of San Francisco—regarded as the spokesmen for America’s embattled cities. In July 1968, appearing on a panel with Alioto and Stokes, he challenged suburban whites to come out from behind their “stockades” to help demolish “the towering torture chamber” of the Negro ghetto. A month later, testifying before the Democratic Party Platform Committee, he warned that urban America was being financially “starved” by federal and state government. And in April 1969, he joined five other mayors in a visit to Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew at the White House. Agnew’s description of the encounter—“We didn’t have a nice exchange, but we had a frank one”—sharpened White’s image as a tough fighter for the cities, a man who would do battle with vested interests wherever they were.

But it was White’s evolving position on race that defined his administration and, by the end of his first year in office, put him at odds with many of his more parochial constituents. In his first State of the City address in January 1968, he said, “I cannot avoid a reference to perhaps the most disturbing of the city’s problems—its continuing ethnic divisions which seem to resist every effort at resolution. The highest aspirations of this administration will be to reconcile this city’s people. The finest contribution that we could conceivably make to this city is the creation of an atmosphere in which every man might recognize the human dignity and worth of every other man.”

It was a bold attempt to address Boston’s racial tensions, but it didn’t work. As the Mayor moved into his second year, he found that such words were well received in the affluent suburbs, but utterly rejected in the city’s white working-class neighborhoods. The pattern was almost reflexive. When Herbert Craigwell was promoted to Deputy Superintendent of Police, liberals in Wellesley and Weston welcomed the appointment as an act of courage, but white inner-city neighborhoods rang with racial epithets. The Mayor’s men reported that whenever they appeared at a community meeting in those neighborhoods, somebody invariably rose to denounce “that S.O.B. who’s giving everything away to the blacks.” Nearly every morning, hate mail showed up on Colin’s desk addressed simply: “Mayor Black, City Hall.”

Eventually this assault so disconcerted the Mayor that he ordered his staff to find out exactly where city dollars were being spent. Colin helped compare actual expenditures on parks, schools, playgrounds, streetlighting, garbage collection, and other city services in the black community with expenditures in white neighborhoods. Boston’s black community was small in comparison with most major Northern cities—16.3 percent in 1970—but the staff found no evidence that the Mayor was disproportionately concentrating funds in black neighborhoods, even on a per capita basis.

Such data made no dent in the conviction of white neighborhoods that they were being “screwed.” For what had changed was not so much the flow of cash or city services as City Hall’s attitude toward the black community, what Kevin White called “the psychological side” of government. In an interview ten months after he took office, the Mayor said that the black unrest of the mid-sixties—in particular the massive Detroit riot of August 1967—had helped focus attention on the psychological needs of the black community. “Detroit,” he said, “was a city with massive federal aid, low unemployment rate, black participation, and a progressive mayor, and yet its riot was the biggest holocaust, bigger than Newark or Watts. We wound up seeing that there was a psychological side which had been missed. Lindsay in New York was the first to see this. He then set out to provide it. We have tried to do the same thing here. I think we have given the blacks confidence.” It was this effort to make blacks feel they were full-fledged citizens of Boston that had made the white neighborhoods perceive themselves as victims; if the blacks were getting new attention, the whites concluded, it had to be coming from somewhere, it had to be coming out of their share.

Such resentments were inevitable, Kevin White and his aides came to realize, because the unmet psychological needs of the city’s neighborhoods—white and black—were so enormous. The neighborhood problem was rooted in the profound cynicism with which many Bostonians had come to regard their municipal government. A decade earlier, the extraordinary upset of State Senate President Johnny Powers by the relatively unknown John Collins in the 1959 mayoralty race had prompted a Boston University political scientist to warn of the frightening “alienation” of many Boston voters. In a book that made “the alienated voter” a catchphrase in Boston politics, Murray T. Levin argued that Powers had been defeated because many voters perceived him as the quintessential insider, “a leader of a powerful and corrupt group of politicians, businessmen and unsavory elements who govern the city for personal enrichment rather than for the general welfare.” Collins, in turn, was regarded as a spokesman for “the little man” against the politicians. “Angry, resentful, hopeless and politically powerless,” Levin wrote, such voters were “crying out, sometimes blindly, sometimes articulately, for candidates who make sense and for political life that has meaning.”

But in the long run, the 1959 election only heightened the neighborhoods’ alienation, for when Collins entered office, Boston was facing a fiscal crisis—a declining tax base, spiraling property taxes, a low credit rating, and a
business community that had utterly lost confidence in City Hall. A shrewd, able man, determined to “prove that all Irish politicians aren’t crooked or stupid, or both,” Collins gave the city prudent fiscal management combined with an ambitious urban renewal program designed to rebuild the city’s tax base. But as part of his campaign to regain the confidence of the business community, he struck an implicit deal with them, through the Vault, to give priority to the redevelopment of the city’s aging, decrepit downtown. Under Collins, the New Haven Railroad yards in the Back Bay were transformed into the Prudential Center, a vast, forbidding office and apartment complex erected around the fifty-two-story headquarters of the Prudential Insurance Company. Across town, the predominantly Italian West End, which had been demolished under Collins’ predecessor, John B. Hynes, was replaced with the sterile luxury apartments of Charles River Park. Scollay Square gave way to Government Center. Meanwhile, Collins reduced property taxes five of his eight years in office. As a result, while downtown gorged on plump new developments, the working-class neighborhoods were systematically starved. Few new schools, playgrounds, parks, or community centers were built during the Collins years. City services in the neighborhoods deteriorated. Boston’s voters got their revenge when Collins ran for the U.S. Senate in 1966 and lost twenty-one of the city’s twenty-two wards, leaving him so weakened politically that he dared not run for mayor again. But this didn’t mollify the neighborhoods. When Kevin White succeeded Collins in 1968, he inherited a refurbished downtown and a pack of aggrieved communities, utterly disbelieving of all politicians.

Determined to escape his predecessor’s fate, White began looking for ways to reassure the neighborhoods even before he was elected. His very first campaign position paper argued that the “fundamental problem” of Boston’s city government was “communications between government and the people.” To meet the problem, he promised to create a new Neighborhood Service Department, with offices in all city neighborhoods, to “assure each citizen of a voice in his community’s affairs.” Then he gave a promise shrewdly calculated to appeal to alienated voters: “The target area of the next administration must be the neighborhoods of this city.” Soon this evolved into a sort of campaign slogan, with White replacing Collins’ old theme of “The New Boston”—which had come to mean “The New Downtown”—with the more modest and appealing “City of Neighborhoods.”

White had little notion of how a Neighborhood Service Department would function, so after his victory in November he appointed a study group, headed by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, to transform the idea into a workable program. The group examined other efforts at urban decentralization, particularly John Lindsay’s Little City Halls and Urban Action Task Forces. The New York program focused almost exclusively on poorer—usually black—neighborhoods, and in that respect was a model for the “Neighborhood City Halls” recommended that winter by the Kerner Commission. Huntington’s study group quickly concluded that in Boston such a limitation
would be disastrous, that the program would work there only if it encompassed the white working-class neighborhoods as well. It also argued that, to alleviate neighborhood alienation, the operation had to be more than a citizen complaint and referral service; it had to have a role in framing city policies.

The Mayor accepted the recommendations and in March 1968 established the Office of Public Service to oversee fifteen “neighborhood centers” throughout Boston. Soon, like their forerunners in New York, the centers became known as Little City Halls. The first three were located in white areas—Italian East Boston, Irish Field’s Corner, heterogeneous Allston-Brighton. By the end of 1968, ten Little City Halls had opened, most of them in brightly painted fifty-foot trailers. The Mayor inaugurated each one with a full-dress ceremony, accompanied by high school bands and prancing drum majorettes.

Those rickety trailers may have been more potent symbols of Kevin White’s governance than the massive City Hall. For if the astonishing structure downtown represented White’s spirit of innovation, the Little City Halls proclaimed his willingness to listen to the people of the neighborhoods, to grant them a measure of self-determination.

Not every neighborhood welcomed the halls. Charlestown—still recoiling from its urban renewal battles—was so suspicious of municipal programs that at first it refused to accept a trailer, which it regarded as “the Mayor’s fifth column.” Not until a year later, after watching other halls function, did a Charlestown delegation petition the Mayor for one of their own. But such suspicions never entirely disappeared, for the Little City Halls were asked to perform multiple, often conflicting, functions. They were expected to improve the delivery of city services to the neighborhoods by funneling residents’ complaints about potholes or broken streetlights to the appropriate departments, or simply by leading confused, frustrated people through the municipal bureaucracy. They were also meant as catalysts for community action, mobilizing neighborhoods to tackle their own problems. But their most important function was to be the Mayor’s “eyes and ears,” monitoring the community’s fear and resentment, identifying problems while they were still manageable, alerting him to potential crises. White liked to tell his Little City Hall managers, “It’s not your job to come in and tell me your neighborhood is on fire. If you do, I’m going to throw you in the fire. You’ve got to tell me when the neighborhood is
going
to catch fire.”

Little City Halls could be effective tools in the political game, particularly when a shrewd manager identified a potent issue which the Mayor could exploit for his own purposes. The first such conjunction of circumstances came in East Boston, where street-wise Fred Salvucci became Little City Hall manager in July 1968. Despite his MIT education, Salvucci had never strayed far from his ethnic roots, still living in a Brighton three-decker with his parents downstairs. Speaking Italian as well as he did English, Salvucci was ideally equipped to understand the clannish Italians of East Boston. It didn’t take him long to identify Logan International Airport as the overwhelming issue in the community, one that threatened to erupt into a full-blown crisis.

For years, Logan had abraded nerves in “Eastie.” Huge jets swooping in for landings made sleep difficult and daily life distressing. Planes knocked down television antennas, stripped trees of their leaves, and so weakened a church steeple that it had to be razed. Service vehicles rattled through the streets. Then, as air traffic grew in the late sixties, the airport sought to expand its runways. By the time Salvucci arrived, the neighborhood’s patience was exhausted. Suspicion of all public “improvements” was so intense that many residents believed their new ice-skating rink was actually a hangar in disguise. Like Charlestown with its El and highways, East Boston felt abused by outsiders. “Why don’t you tear down all of East Boston and turn it over to the airport?” one resident asked at a community meeting. “Then you could have real long runways, all the way to Dover and the other suburbs—save commuting time for the travelers.”

Late in 1968, the Mayor assigned Colin to ride herd on the airport, and on the Massachusetts Port Authority, the autonomous body which ran Logan and the Port of Boston. For years, complaints had proliferated against the sprawling Authority and its strong-willed director, Edward F. King. Colin compiled a “laundry list” of charges against the Authority and prepared a hard-hitting press release, winning a rare accolade from the Mayor, who stopped him in the hall one day and said, “Hey, I didn’t know you had that kind of political instinct.”

But the bulk of the grievances came from East Boston, channeled to City Hall by Fred Salvucci. Superficially at least, Colin and Salvucci were about as different as two men could be, and, at the beginning, the advocate and the analyst eyed each other warily. The first few times Salvucci came to lay an Eastie complaint on Colin’s desk he found the young lawyer remote, even aloof, while Colin was taken aback by Salvucci’s urgency. There are a dozen neighborhoods out there, he thought, and I’m damned if I’ll be stampeded into devoting all my attention to one of them just because it has a passionate spokesman. Moreover, East Boston was hardly the kind of neighborhood for which Colin had intended to go to war. Salvucci and his people would have to wait their turn.

But, resourceful as he was ardent, Fred Salvucci invited Colin to tour East Boston one day. They met in Fred’s trailer and spent the morning trudging through the neighborhood around the airport. Stopping his ears against the screech of the jets, Colin marveled at the tenacity of the families who lived beneath those flight paths. Later, Fred regaled him with airport “horror stories” over lunch at Tony’s, an East Boston bistro known for cutting a customer’s tie off if he failed to finish his meal. Beneath hundreds of ties which hung from the rafters like multicolored spaghetti, Fred and Colin felt their way toward an understanding. Before long, they were close allies in the battle against the Port Authority. The more Colin learned about the airport’s encroachment on East Boston, the angrier he got. This was no struggle against a faceless bureaucracy; it was a personal duel with its director, and Ed King was an easy man to hate. One day, as Colin examined blueprints at the Authority, the director
himself walked in and fixed him with a glare “as cold as ice.” Colin returned to City Hall more determined than ever to teach the arrogant S.O.B. a lesson.