Politics and Public Relations--Or, How to Relocate the BRA

Modern democracy is something like a jet plane. It will do what it's meant to, but you have to have a certain amount of training to know what buttons to press and what levers to pull. In other words, you gotta be a PR man to fight City Hall.

Edward L. Bernays, the retired "father of public relations" who directed the battle "to save the sycamores" from succumbing to a proposed underpass on Memorial Drive, demonstrated this fact to the Cambridge community last year. And the residents of the tiny North Harvard neighborhood behind the Business School brought it home again last month, when, after a three-year battle, they changed the Boston Redevelopment Authority's urban renewal plan for their community from one of demolition to one of substantial rehabilitation.

Elements of War: Persistence and PR

Their success is a tribute to persistence, a fascinating case study in democracy, a lesson in public relations and guerilla warfare--and a minor miracle.

The battlefield in their war stretched from the kite-shaped six acre plot where they live, to the Saint Patrick's Day parade in Boston, to Beacon Hill and the corridors of power in Washington, and to the paddy wagon and the jail cell.

They took their allies where they found them--the John Birch Society, Students for a Democratic Society, CORE, The League of Women voters, the UAW and the Teamsters, the Massachusetts Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, sympathetic city planners; and the Mafia.

Their weapons were resourcefulness, perseverence, and a good press.

The enemy was the BRA.

In the words of one of the campaign's leaders, Stevan Goldin '64-4, "our strategy was straight from Mao--to win the hearts of the people." One of the hardest "hard core irresponsibles," as the leaders of the North Harvard Neighborhood Association proudly and defiantly label themselves, Goldin describes the whole three-year battle as "a classic study in guerilla warfare."

"You might look on our neighborhood as the NLF, the Neighborhood Liberation Front, fighting against the social injustices imposed by the ruling class," Goldin explains, smiling like an Asian revolutionary looking back at the good old days in the hillside caves.

The informal insurrection started in 1960 when Judge John C. Pappas presented the BRA with the proposal of Pappas and Pappas Realty Corporation to develop the area by razing the present frame buildings and putting up 280 units of high rise, high rent ($175-$275 per month) apartments oriented towards occupancy by Harvard personnel.

Harvard had been acquiring property there since the 20's and at the time owned 40 per cent of the land and ten of the 52 buildings on the site. It was reasonable to assume that the University would continue to acquire property, taking it off the tax rolls. The Pappas plan would supposedly increase the tax return ten-fold, from $15,000 to $150,000 a year.

After Pappas met with the Authority, the BRA began to prepare preliminary plans for the project. By June 1962, matters had progressed far enough so that the Pappas Brothers and Maurice Simon, a Boston real estate developer, presented an application for consent to form a corporation to carry out the project under urban renewal law. The wheels were rolling.

On June 1, 1962, the BRA released a general plan for the New Boston outlining the major projects it was going to undertake. Included as a "smaller-scale project ... independent of the over-all program" was the renewal of North Harvard, with a tentative ground-breaking date of Spring 1963. Hearings for the project were to be held in four weeks.

Until this announcement, residents of the neighborhood maintain, the BRA had not even told them that the site was going to be renewed, much less consulted them about the future of the area, as residents in other major projects had been. (The BRA's motto is "planning with people.") The first inkling they had of the project, they claim, came from radio broadcasts.

At any rate, the announcement was taken as a declaration of war and the first battle was the hearing.

It was a raucous affair. As a matter of fact, the residents carried out a little demolition plan of their own--they destroyed the mock-up of the project the BRA had brought to the hearing.

The BRA never forgot that hearing; whenever the subject of North