Wikipedia Article
Currently, there is no Wikipedia page dedicated to the Columbia Point Housing Project. Although a page exists for the peninsula itself, the sparse information about the housing project does not tell the story of the tenants and complicity of the city of Boston in its demise and policy of benign ignorance. My next steps will be transferring information from this site and my seminar paper into the Wikipedia page. I found this important to do due to the larger audience I will be able to reach with Wikipedia. I think the lives and housing conditions of Columbia Point are often left out of the narrative of New Boston, and their struggles and activism deserve more attention in the history of Boston.
Below is a screenshot of the draft of my Wikipedia page. It is currently under review, but I believe it will need more edits in the coming weeks to transpose the text from this webpage into a more objective, 'encyclopedic' tone for writing. It is my hope that this Wikipedia article will be filled with images that illustrate the lives of the tenants, but of the peninsula over time more broadly.
Historiography of Urban Renewal in Boston
Thomas O’Connor’s Building a New Boston from 1993 shows the urban renewal in Boston in the 1950s through the 1960s. Connor’s book analyzes the political aspect of urban renewal, including key figures in Boston and the convergence of economic, political, and religious leaders. Anyone familiar with Boston before the 21st century knows how involved the Archbishop and Cardinal were in Boston.
Jim Vrabel’s A People’s History of the New Boston, written more than twenty years after O’Connor’s book, reorients the current understanding of Boston’s redevelopment. We often think of people like Ed Logue and Mayor Collins in those iconic photos standing in front of Boston maps as the key players in redevelopment, with utmost authority. Vrabel says actually, no, the story of urban planning in Boston very much comes from the “underclass” which would be women, people of color, and low-income people in Boston. The activism reflected at Columbia Point corroborates Vrabel’s argument, as well as brings more agency to those tenants, not as solely activists, but as change-makers.
Lizabeth Cohen’s recent book, Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age shows the struggle of trying to bring an aging city into modern times, while the nation was increasingly moving toward suburbanization. With that, Cohen is trying to provide a more positive light to urban renewal - that these urban planners held tenets of New Deal liberalism, and extended that to “saving cities” all while trying to do right by the masses of Boston. Cohen is trying to articulate that there were “genuine success and goals” of urban renewal, not solely bureaucratic shortcomings.
Further Reading
Archival Collections
UMass-Boston Historical Documents
Newspapers
Bay State Banner, Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Washington Post
Secondary Sources
- Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower : How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. First edition. New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2021
- Cohen, Lizabeth. Saving America's Cities : Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. First edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019
- O'Connor, Thomas H. Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950-1970. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993
- Roessner, Jane. A Decent Place to Live: from Columbia Point to Harbor Point : a Community History. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.
- Vrabel, Jim. A People's History of the New Boston. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.