Environment: Downtown Is Looking Up

In the boom years of the 1960s, every American city resounded to the din of construction. No project seemed too ambitious; builders confidently razed vast downtown areas, and their architects just as confidently designed huge structures to fill the voids. The trouble was that instead of creating new life and vigor downtown, the projects were all too often sterile and uninviting—reason enough, though there were others as well, for businesses and middle-class city dwellers to opt for the suburbs. In 1966 Edward J. Logue, then the highly respected chief of Boston's redevelopment program,...