Remembering the man who destroyed the West End

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Moooooooooo - before there was Devin Nunes' Cow ... https://apnews.com/article/5bb8bfacb2490333de2440058b3ecf29

7500 people was a medium sized regional city where I spent much of my childhood. When a rural city is wiped off the map it makes headlines - displacement of just as many lower income city dwellers? Not so much.

for correctly reporting this asshole’s monstrously destructive impact on his city

if he even lived here

probably lived in the burbs

a pox upon his heirs, for eternity

Nearly hurled while reading it - they made it sound like destroying a vibrant neighborhood was a good thing. I was an Urban Studies major across the river in the late 1970s and, yes, the West End was major topic in several of my courses.

When Boston was an urban oasis.

Actually, Boston was very much a dying city that was experiencing massive disinvestment, and population loss. I once had a loan officer from a local bank offer 5 abandoned properties in a block in Dorchester for $20 thousand, total. I watched what I thought was construction activity from my porch. They were stripping the pipes and wiring from a 3 decker. Arson was a regular activity.

Businesses and people were scrambling to leave.

This was the situation faced by Hynes, Logue, Rappaport and others.

I won't defend the errors that were made, and there were many, but it is helpful to understand the problems Boston faced at the time that explains some of the decisions made and actions taken.

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

This is a really interesting discussion. I remember when "urban renewal" was universally considered a good thing, but also TV coverage of the people who were being moved out, who were in despair and furious. Property owners may have compensation but, as far as I know, the renters got nothing.

I also remember when Boston felt like it was bleeding out, so I can maybe see why Hynes and others were so eager to tear things down.

Urban renewal was great for different people. It gave local politicians the opportunity to feed their developer comrades. It fed into the stereotype that urban = bad (the suburbs would never have organized crime or strip clubs, would they?). Urban renewal permitted gutting cities, to make them even more ineffective. The massive projects of urban renewal was to sacrifice urban areas for the benefit of the new way of living, the suburbs.

Imagine JP today if the highway had gone through? That would have left a huge scar on JP and probably resulted in creating a new impoverished area. How long would people want to continue living near a highway that effectively slices a neighborhood in half?

Baltimore's versions of urban renewal included stabbing a giant knife in the oldest part of the city. Sacrificing a neighborhood that in some ways has a richer and more interesting history than wealthier neighborhoods. That attempt at city homocide failed thank goodness. And ironically that neighborhood (Fell's Point) and east of Fell's Point have actually increased in value.

The scar of I83 did a great job of carving a swath of dead asphalt from north to south. Made getting out of downtown easier (until it became another parking lot during rush hour). But again this was a highway not built for the benefit of the city but for the benefit of people who worked downtown and then disappeared in the evening for the burbs.

Finally the beauty marks of Robert Moses. Had Moses with his vision of urban renewal not stopped he would have sliced Manhattan in half. He already tried to slice The Bronx. Why not do the same with Manhattan?

When I've walked through the current West End I am always impressed by thin sense of life in the area. Tall buildings, public areas that look fairly clean and well tended. I am sure lots of people live in the buildings. Yet the area seems abandoned even at high noon. A lively dynamic neighborhood is like a body. The organs are the buildings, the veins and arteries are the streets. The blood that flows and nourishes the vitality of the neighborhood are the people on the street, visiting local stores, chats with neighbors, just being present on the street level. Street and stoop life.

In spite of an architecture that heavily favors developers the Seaport was at least designed to realize that a lot of tall buildings, without street life equals a dead area. Whether the Seaport can be a neighborhood for families, for creating local neighborly culture is another question. But at least its street life is alive instead of feeling like an area that was put in suspended animation as does the West End areas of big buildings and little to no street and stoop life.

So Mayor Collins could tear THAT down in his bid for the 1964 World's Fair.

Oversimplified but true

The large building at top left of the photo - near the North Station RR tracks and the future location of Nashua Street Jail - I see that in some of the old atlases as Massachusetts Department of Public Works.
I'm assuming this was the pre-Mass Highway DPW. It looks enormous for an area office (which one of my older neighbors was over on D Street), and 2002 Sanborn calls it State DPW offices. Was this a pre-Park Plaza headquarters?