It’s been one incredible love fest in the local press lately for Thomas M. Menino, who just wrapped up two decades as Boston’s mayor.
With a notable exception or two, the media coverage too often has been more intent on lazy myth-building than attempting any accurate assessment of Menino’s time in office.
Contrary to all the fawning, Menino did not single-handedly build modern Boston. In fact, he did not build anything, nor did his minions at the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
Rather, the city’s skyline was built by private developers, with private capital, often risking everything on a dream of putting up the next condo tower or high-rise.
And by no stretch of the imagination did Menino turn around a troubled city when he took office at Boston City Hall in the early 1990s.
Instead, Menino built upon the pioneering work of other mayoral administrations who guided Boston in what were frankly more challenging and tumultuous times.
Dumbed Down Reporting
Most reporters and editors coming up the ranks having covered local and state politics, buying into the idea that whatever blowhard has the podium is actually calling the shots.
Frankly, it’s terrible training for covering any part of the business world, including real estate development, which, after all, is the engine that drives the country.
I really have no other way of explaining to reporters who suggest, or state flat-out, that Menino or the Boston Redevelopment Authority was somehow responsible for the building boom taking place in the Hub right now.
You have to hand it to Menino, though. He was a relentless promoter of this fallacy, orchestrating groundbreakings for new high-rises and towers where he was the big cheese and the developer and his team the supporting cast. Developers who wanted to build in Boston knew they couldn’t get anywhere without paying homage to the mayor, with almost scripted praise for Menino’s sage leadership.
Yet by its very nature, Menino’s power was the power of no, the ability to reward developer friends and punish builders perceived to be of suspect loyalty through the machinery of City Hall. Play by Menino’s rules and you got your permits; buck them or make a side comment, and find your project stuck in bureaucratic limbo.
Sure, he could provide tax breaks, and did, doling out countless millions, but lost in all this was the simple fact that Menino and City Hall weren’t building these projects, and, if anything, were too often the main impediment, through an onerous and highly political review process.
It was Boston Properties, Steve Samuels and Joe Fallon – and yes, Menino naughty list denizens Don Chiofaro and John Hynes as well – that built the billions in new towers and developments that have taken shape since Menino made the leap from City Council president to mayor. And that’s just to name a few.
No Master Architect
Menino also is getting lazy media credit of late as some sort of master architect, with one radio interviewer seeming to suggest the mayor was a kind of grand designer, using his superior aesthetic skills to craft the Boston skyline.
God save us all.
Globe architectural critic Robert Campbell bravely takes apart that idea in a recent piece.
In fact, the two cases where Menino tried to play developer directly were a complete shambles.
Menino forced Boston Properties to put a decorative cap on its 111 Huntington tower in order to get it through the City Hall permitting process back in the late 1990s.
Campbell derides it as an “ornamental perfume bottle,” while others have suggested a cruder association with a popular prophylactic device.
“Tommy’s Tower” was another big Menino brainstorm. That half-baked proposal called for a 1,000-foot tower in the heart of downtown Boston where a crumbling Federal Street garage now stands.
No real developer took it seriously, though few, if any, dared to criticize this foolishness on the record – another downside to Menino’s Boston. After all, if the monstrosity ever got built, it would have dropped the real estate equivalent of a neutron bomb on the Financial District, dumping a million square feet of empty office space on an area that has lagged significantly during the Menino years.
Cost Of Cronyism
It will take some time to sort out the cost to Boston of Menino’s micro-management of development.
Needless to say, there was a real opportunity cost in terms of developers and creative ideas that either never got proposed or were driven away by a legendarily thin-skinned mayor determined to be at the center of everything, especially development, at all cost.
There were also some real dollar costs.
Developers who were loyal to Menino were able to get their projects through the city’s convoluted review process and emerge with millions in tax breaks.
Often they got discounts as well on affordable housing fees, with the Globe recently tallying the damage at as much as $57 million. Not so hot for a mayor who constantly promoted himself as the champion of subsidized housing.
Had It Easier?
The most outrageous part of the emerging Menino myth is that somehow he created the modern, successful Boston that we see today.
New Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, to his credit, is beginning to bring some balance to that picture, mentioning Menino just three times in his inaugural speech and pointedly praising other past mayors like Ray Flynn and the late Kevin White.
Menino built upon achievement of previous mayoral administrations, sometimes capably, and sometimes not so capably, but he did not turn around an ailing city.
Instead, Menino inherited a Boston already well into a comeback whose roots can be found decades ago.
Mayors Hynes and Collins jumpstarted a stalled and decaying Boston, helping pave the way for developments like the Prudential Center and the Hynes conventional hall.
Along with grappling with busing and a racially divided city, Kevin White’s administration saw the rebirth of Faneuil Hall and the construction of the soaring Hancock tower, arguably the centerpiece of Boston’s skyline.
The Flynn years saw Rowes Wharf and a number of new towers in the Financial District.
A lot was built during Menino’s years in office, but nothing as iconic as those projects.
That certainly should be troubling for anyone rushing to deify Menino and proclaim him the greatest mayor of all time.
Scott Van Voorhis can be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
