Tag Archives: Olympics

Going for the mold

So we didn’t go for the gold after all. Instead we retreated to moldy old Boston where you wouldn’t want to do anything brash, imaginative or interesting. “We have our hats,” said the old Yankee lady, but Boston’s other tribes share her attitude. We don’t need anything new.

I am usually an optimist, which affected my support of the Olympics. Is it a big job? Yes. The effort’s leaders were smart, effective and used to big jobs, even if they weren’t the world’s greatest marketing people. They were not corrupt, as too many leaders were when I first moved to this city. To top it off, they were doing this to make Boston better, not for financial gain or status for themselves.

But, since it is Boston, there were class issues. The promoters were rich, heaven forbid. Too big for their britches, the nasties said. How dare they tell us, the real people of Boston, that we should do something dramatic? How dare they appropriate our city for improvements we might actually like but we hadn’t thought of ourselves? They did not pay enough obeisance to city councilors, state house functionaries, university presidents or most Globe columnists. Those powers were annoyed that someone else was leading a particular charge, when they were too timid to lead any charge.

Since we’re talking timidity, that played big too. The games were too risky. There might be too much traffic. The spectators might tear up some piece of grass. Some taxpayer might have to pay real money. The number of times the word risk was unfurled by the opponents was embarrassing. Isn’t this city, with its so-called world-renowned innovative companies and research institutions, all about risk?

But again we’re back in moldy old Boston, where you keep your principal, and never dip into it, even though it gets divided among subsequent generations until there is nothing left. If someone had dipped into the principal to start a new business, there might have been more for everyone.

Then it’s on to taxpayers. This has to do with risk avoidance too, but it has another meaning—that spending money on a big deal is foolish. Remember the naysayers before the Big Dig began? Sure our taxes are high. That’s because we can afford it. This is one rich city, as studies continually show. When someone spends $20 million on a Back Bay mansion and then spends another who-knows-how-many-more millions renovating it, it shows we can afford all kinds of things we say we can’t.

Ironically, taxpayers alone are now going to have to foot the bill for improvements in places like Franklin Park. We won’t have any Olympics money to help us.

Which brings us to spending money on the needs opponents said we should be funding instead of the Olympics. Does anyone think that will happen?

Already we’ve learned that, despite last winter’s MBTA debacle, the legislature can’t come up with enough money to fix the T or expand it. We’ve decided to apply only a patch. We’re building affordable housing, but we’re still arguing over tax breaks for a downtown project for “working families” that shouldn’t get the breaks, some say, because it is not in a blighted area. Keeping to that principle means no “working families” could ever afford to live downtown, which is discriminatory and wrong.

It would be nice to think because we won’t have the Olympics’ risk looming over our heads, we will spend money on Franklin Park, the T, housing all homeless families, installing kindergarten for four-year-olds across Massachusetts and rebuilding the Northern Avenue bridge. Dream on.

Instead we’ll go back to our desultory ways. Those ways were highlighted this spring when Mayor Walsh kicked off Boston 2030. There was the familiar panel, the recognizable audience, and the sappy tributes to Boston’s universities, research, hospitals, innovation, etc. Except for the speakers’ fondness for the word “millennials,” the forum could have been held 20 years ago when I first started covering such gatherings. The issues were the same. Little had been fixed. It was depressing.

That doesn’t mean Boston 2030 will fail, but an Olympics deadline would have meant we would have worked harder and faster to make it happen. You know that when you throw a party, you clean your house, paint the door and fix the step that broke last year.

The biggest effect of the Olympics failure might be on the most vocal opponents’ careers. Would you hire a risk-averse person who can’t support big efforts?

Boston won’t die because the Olympics died. We’ll still have universities, hospitals, yadda, yadda. We’ll still have a city in which living downtown, the characteristic that first brought me here years ago, is wonderful when it hasn’t even been possible in most other American cities.

But not being able to pull off the Olympics pretty much cements the fact that we’re not world class in any way. We’re just a small provincial city up in the corner of a big country—a city with more than its share of charm, but still with a lot of mold.

The more things change . . .

Larry DiCara remembers his first encounter with Mayor Kevin White. It was 1971. DiCara was newly elected to the Boston City Council. The mayor phoned. Would DiCara meet with him?

The young DiCara, outfitted in his best suit, entered the mayor’s office at the new city hall. White stood at the window overlooking Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. White said he had two goals—depress the Central Artery and fix Quincy Market.

White accomplished one goal while still in office. In 1975 Quincy Market and later the North and South Markets opened to immense excitement, bolstering Boston’s downtown success.

But accomplishing that task was much like the Olympics effort today. The knives were out. Pessimism ruled. Doom was predicted. Costs rose. A bold, perhaps transforming plan was mocked, scorned, condemned and denounced.

What saved it was a visionary, a prime mover, a deadline and a tough mayor.

Architect Benjamin Thompson articulated his vision for a successful city when his contemporaries were designing big empty plazas.

“Of all the pieces in the urban puzzle, the marketplace is the most fundamental, most civically important—and most neglected,” he wrote in the Boston Globe, July 4, 1971. “Historic marketplaces, springing up at intersections of navigation and trade routes, were the seed and heart of cities.”

Thompson cited the “natural pageantry of crowds.” He predicted that the crumbling Quincy Market and its flanking buildings could be brought back to life, recreating their original purpose in a contemporary way.

After a false start with one developer, Thompson found the Rouse Company. Rouse developed shopping malls, but also had created Columbia, Md., where housing was built around old-fashioned town centers instead of the usual suburban sprawl.

James Rouse was the prime mover. The Globe’s real estate reporter Anthony Yudis quoted him: “We should always examine the optimums and forget about feasibility. It will compromise us soon enough. Let’s look at what might be and be invigorated by it.”

White was excited by the plan. He wanted Quincy Market completed by Boston 200, the city’s bicentennial celebration, set to begin in 1975. Rouse would fund a portion of the celebration. Out-of-towners Chase Manhattan Bank and what is now called TIAA-CREF put up half the money or $10 million. Boston banks would provide the rest.

The critics erupted.

The meat, cheese and produce purveyors that occupied Quincy Market complained they would be displaced, and the renovated building would be unaffordable. Rouse’s promise they could return for three years with the same rent they were paying in the old building did not move them.

White’s own staff put up a fight. DiCara remembered that Herb Gleason, White’s corporation counsel, supported a scaled-down proposal by Roger Webb, admired for his reclamation of Old City Hall.

As city property, the markets needed approval from the city council for any deal. Yudis reported there was little interest in either proposal. Only three councilors attended the hearing at which the two were presented. The councilors were too busy fussing over the proposed Park Plaza. Yudis wrote, “Some urban experts think the Faneuil Hall-markets plan is the ‘sleeper’ in the future Boston that could have just as much significance as, if not more than, the Park Plaza concept.”

DiCara said it was a tough sell. Dapper O’Neill, Joe Tierney and Freddie Langone opposed the market’s redevelopment, but the proponents were finally able to get six councilors, including DiCara, to vote for it, mainly because of Rouse’s good reputation.

Remarkably, the BRA worked against the Rouse proposal even after the company was designated in 1973.

It took the BRA two years to sign a lease. The BRA board chair predicted the whole enterprise was foolish. “Only one sour note was expressed — several times following the lease signing,” Yudis reported. “The chairman of the BRA, Robert T. Farrell, made it clear to those connected with the project that, in his opinion, the project never will be carried off. Time will tell whether this was an astute observation.”

The BRA director, Robert Kenney, had no faith either in Rouse’s plan. Three months before the market opened he was still working to change it, trying to get a Hyatt Regency hotel into the mix, with the lobby in the rotunda, reported Ian Menzies, a Globe columnist. Rouse was having none of that.

Thompson said putting a hotel into the market was like the recently completed Harbor Towers on the harbor—a way to keep the public out.

Then there was the money problem. Boston banks refused to come up with their share of the financing. By early February 1975 Mayor White had had it. He called the heads of the local financial institutions to his office, recalled Budge Upton, Rouse’s project manager, who, with Rouse, was at the meeting. White told the banks they had 24 hours to arrange the local financing or he would pull the city’s money from their institutions. By the next day White had $10 million from the First National Bank, John Hancock, New England Life, State Street Bank, New England Merchants, National Shawmut, Charlestown Savings, Union Warren, Commonwealth Bank and the Mass. Business Development Corp.

A few months later, Faneuil Hall Marketplace opened. Among many last-minute snafus, said Upton, was awaiting the delivery of 80 wheels for the pushcarts. They arrived at Logan three days before the opening. No one knew if the rehabilitated market would attract any notice.

But on the first day 125,000 people showed up. Menzies then started writing about how the Central Artery had to go—another effort fraught with negativity. It goes to show—conventional wisdom is sometimes just conventional. It isn’t wisdom at all.