Roosevelt Towers Burns While Bureaucrats Fiddle

IF YOU THINK Cambridge is someplace between the Coop and President Bok's mansion up on Brattle Street, you ought to take a walk in the other direction down, Cambridge Street, past Inman Square to Roosevelt Towers.

Roosevelt Towers may be Cambridge's worst public housing development. Last month the city's Health Commissioner, James Hartgering, threatened to condemn the project's 96-unit tower building. He called the tower "unfit for human habitation."

Hartgering said that housing inspection reports and unreleased police statistics on juvenile crime in the project provide strong reasons for closing the eight-story tower. John E. Donovan, Assistant Executive Director of the Cambridge Housing Authority, opposes the closing of the tower, and he has claimed that Roosevelt Towers accomodations were not substandard.

Built with state aid in 1950, the project fronts on Cambridge Street between Windsor and Willow Streets, on one side bounded by a rambling old factory building, and on the other by rows of peeling two-story frame houses. Most of the Towers' 228 apartments are in five three-story lowrise buildings grouped surrounding the tower.

The tower looks out on a large concrete courtyard, too big for small groups to gather in. Instead, knots of kids gather on the stoops or in a gazebo-like structure in a small play area. Two mangled basketball hoops and a few backless benches fill the deserted concrete space.

In the high rise, the hallways smell of urine, and blasts of grafitti blur the walls. Chinks of light pinpoint holes in the apartment doors. Mailboxes have been ripped from the wall, probably by thieves looking for checks.

In the lower buildings, the situation is dramatically better, if not completely so. The mailboxes are intact; only the buildings' outsides are covered with grafitti. Rows of plywood windows--signs of burned out apartments--appear only in the tower.

TALK OF CONDEMNATION prompted an intra-governmental controversy over the use of money previously appropriated for the project. After Hartgering's statement, the State Department of Community Affairs inspected Roosevelt Towers. The State claimed that a $500,000 January apportionment for repairs and renovation of Cambridge public housing, including $161,000 for Roosevelt Towers, was never spent.

Reginald Guichard, Executive Director of the Cambridge Housing Authority, said that "red tape" held up spending the money.

Thomas Atkins, Secretary of the State Department of Communities and Development, opposes the demolition of the tower. Atkins has suggested spending more money for maintenance and renovation, reducing the number of families living in the tower, and possibly restricting the tower to elderly residents, to cut down on vandalism.

Roosevelt Towers has been plagued by violence. Three times in the past three weeks, over 100 youths have battled with pipes, bottles and bricks on the development's grounds.

On September 1, after a project resident was assaulted, four private security guards hired by the Cambridge Housing Authority left their jobs for two days. The guards' supervisor, quoted in The Cambridge Chronicle, said, "It looked like there was a riot coming, and I thought it would cool off the situation if our men left.

With the guards present, rival black and white factions fought at the Towers September 5, leaving 6 youths injured, and causing several small fires.

Much of the violence has been blamed on "outsiders." Commenting on the September 5 incident, Mayor Barbara Ackermann said, "Based on past experience I assume these are probably kids from other parts of the city converging on East Cambridge and complicating the problems of the Towers."

Some residents said that the incident began with a quarrel between a black youth and a white youth and then mushroomed.

RACIAL TENSION FEEDS the violence at Roosevelt Towers. Blacks are a small minority in the project. George Yuse, of the Cambridge Housing Authority, estimates that blacks are about 10 per cent of the project's population, while Cambridge is close to 7 per cent black. However, some public projects in black neighborhoods, like Putnam Gardens, are as much as 40 per cent black.

When asked why the Roosevelt tower is in worse shape than the low rises there, one white youth replied, "because the niggers live there."

Roosevelt Towers' blacks are concentrated in the tower building. Conditions in the tower make turnover there the highest, so vacancies are most likely to occur in it.

Yuse said last week that between 25 and 30 apartments are vacant in the project--about 20 of them in the tower.

The Housing Authority will be able to fill the vacancies, Yuse said, although newspaper publicity and the popularity of the city's rent subsidy program make the task more difficult. The subsidy program allows aid recipients to live in scattered privately-owned buildings instead of massing them into public projects.

Yuse attributes much of Roosevelt Towers problem to a change in the population living in the public housing. Complete families are moving out of the projects," he said. And families without male adults replace them. "Almost 80 per cent of our applicant pool is now broken families," Yuse said. "In Roosevelt Towers we are concentrating a group of low-income families in a small area."

Drugs share part of the blame for the project's problems. Many observers hold junkies responsible for much of the development's crime and vandalism. One resident claimed to know "four or five families" in the high-rise who "make their living selling the stuff."

Some Towers youths complain of harassment by police and security guards. One claimed that a security guard had cooperated with Cambridge police to trump up charges against a friend of his who the police "wanted to get."

A PERVASIVE DEFEATISM accompanies life in the Towers--a feeling, at least among whites, that conditions are steadily deteriorating. A resident who had lived in the project for nine years said that the rapid decline began "two or three years ago."

An old woman, a resident of the tower building for 15 years, shivered as she recalled what had happened in her home. "Things used to be better." Asked to explain why, she just repeats, "Things used to be better."

In 1950, Roosevelt Towers seemed to be an answer for a city crowded with homeless veterans. The main speaker at the Towers dedication ceremony was Congressman John F. Kennedy, a backer of the 1949 Federal Public Housing Act, which committed Federal money to public housing.

The subsidy program, which integrates the poor into existing neighborhoods, may be an answer to the problems of public housing. But no one has an explanation for the project's failure convincing enough to lead to the outline of a solution.

The project's general decline and the Tower's particular misery remain a mystery. The closing of the tower, while motels sprout near the Square, would be a chilling but not unique demonstration of urban failure.