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Coming Full Circle In funding the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the longtime political activist, developer and philanthropist hopes to create a vehicle for improving the governance of the region. That is exactly where his career began more than a half-century ago when he organized students at Boston universities in John Hynes's successful 1949 campaign for mayor against the notorious "rascal king" of Boston politics, James Michael Curley. The Rappaport Institute is a unique vehicle to engage the Boston area's public officials, academics and students, policy professionals and stakeholder groups. The Institute will conduct applied research, convene a wide range of forums, coordinate executive training and provide useful information on its Internet site and in other media outlets. Meanwhile, the creation of internship and fellowship programs at the Kennedy School and Suffolk Law School offer a rare opportunity to bring the talent of Boston's best and brightest to bear on the challenges of the Boston metropolitan area. The Harvard and Suffolk initiatives were begun in the fall of 2000. But their real roots are found in the reform movements of Boston and Cambridge in the late 1940s. Beginnings John Hynes's victory in the 1949 mayoral campaign opened a new era in Boston history. For years, the city's politics were mired in scandal and decline. Hynes had served as acting mayor when both the mayor and the city council president spent time in jail and were therefore ineligible to run City Hall. When Hynes decided to seek the mayoralty in his own right, the campaign offered a choice between modern reformist politics and the old legacy of corruption and cronyism. Boston selected the path to reform. Jerry Rappaport - a native New Yorker who earned a B.A. and a law degree from Harvard by the time he was 20 years old - was already active in public affairs when he joined the Hynes campaign. Rappaport was the founder of the Harvard Law Forum, which brought a wide range of public figures to Boston - from the legendary socialist Norman Thomas to members of the U.S. Senate and the United Nations. The speakers addressed issues like civil rights, labor law, arms policy and international affairs. The Forum still operates today. While at Harvard, Rappaport also helped to organize the New England University Radio Group and founded the program "What's It To You," a weekly documentary on urban problems. It was written, acted and paneled by faculty and students at greater Boston universities. A program entitled " Prejudice," produced by Rappaport, won a Peabody Award in 1947. After completing his bachelor's and law degrees at Harvard, Rappaport became assistant campaign manager for John Hynes in his successful campaign against Curley. By organizing young people, he took away one of Curley's critical constituencies. The campaign was important not only for retiring Curley for good, but also for the successful effort to change the city's form of government. The city council was restructured and the mayor given greater powers to govern the city. As personal secretary to Mayor Hynes, Rappaport not only coordinated administrative and policy issues but also served as the chairman of an internal commission appointed by Mayor Hynes to restructure city government. The body was the local version of the famous Hoover Commission that oversaw an overhaul of the federal bureaucracy under President Harry S. Truman. In 1950, Rappaport also formed the New Boston Committee, a broadbased citizens' committee to encourage and support candidates for the City Council and School Committee under the new charter. The Committee also conducted research on critical issues facing the City, and provided a citywide forum for engaging public officials, academics and other people interested in revitalizing Boston. The New Boston Committee was successful in electing a majority of the City Council and School Committee members in the first two Plan A elections. In 1952, Rappaport formed the Greater Boston Area Council consisting of citizen representatives from 49 Boston communities. The Council took a leadership role in the enactment of a metropolitan planning agency and was instrumental in the establishment of Channel 2 as one of the first public television channels in the country. In 1953, the National Municipal League gave an award to Rappaport to honor the City of Boston and the outstanding work of the New Boston Committee. That same year, Rappaport was named Outstanding Young Man of the Year by the Massachusetts Junior Chamber of Commerce. A very prestigious award at the time, the winner the year before Rappaport was John F. Kennedy and the winner the year after was Robert F. Kennedy. After spending four years in the public sector, including a stint in the city's legal department, Rappaport left government to start his career as a developer and businessman. This stage of Rappaport's career is perhaps most famous for the controversial Charles River Park urban renewal project. Rappaport led the development team that created a community of high-rise apartment buildings in the old Boston neighborhood of the West End. The first major initiative of the newly created Boston Redevelopment Authority was the redevelopment of the West End neighborhood of Boston. A polyglot community of working class people, as portrayed in Herbert J. Gans's classic The Urban Villagers, the BRA took the land by eminent domain. At that time, the project was supported by the city, state and federal governments as well as the Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO, the Retail Trade Board, the Archdiocese and all the Boston newspapers. When the BRA made a request for proposals to redevelop the 48 acres that they had already cleared, Rappaport and two business partners, Pete Bonan and Ted Shoolman, responded. The development became controversial because a largely residential population was removed from a centrally located neighborhood to make way for middle-class residents. Residents at first did not believe that their neighborhood faced the bulldozer, and their fight against the redevelopment plan was too late to make an impact on the planning process. Only after the neighborhood's buildings were leveled did members of the City Council express skepticism about the redevelopment strategy - but by then it was too late. The development is also controversial because of its embrace of Corbusian design - the placement of towers in a landscaped park - but it won prestigious architectural awards at the time. The noted architect Victor Gruen designed the complex as a pedestrian-free zone, similar to a college campus, which would be connected to the larger metropolis by arterial roads. Gruen, a designer of shopping malls, argued that such safe and controlled environments were essential to bring the middle class back to the city. By the standard that urban planners set when they adopted urban renewal in the West End - bringing the middle class back into the city, and creating more life in the city center - Charles River Park is a success. Its 2,400 units - 1300 luxury rentals, 800 condos and 300 low and moderate income units for the elderly - are almost all occupied. The development also includes two office buildings, doctors' offices, two shopping plazas, a hotel, a health club, two pools, tennis courts, a school, day-care facilities and a house of worship. According to the 1990 Census, the median family income in the development was $74,000 and some 62 percent of all residents held college degrees. Most residents walk or take public transit to work. Before Charles River Park, Boston experienced a deep slump in construction. No significant new building had gone up in the previous half-century. Developers shied away from Boston because the city was considered an economic basket case, with steeply declining population, manufacturing and other businesses in flight, poor urban services and soaring tax rates. Whatever the merits and flaws of the modernist style of development that Charles River Park represents, Jerry Rappaport points out that few developers even made a bid for the project. "The lack of faith in the city was monumental," he said. "The only reason we did it is that I was from New York and Pete was from Connecticut and we didn't understand how risky it was and we believed Boston could become a vibrant city." In a way, Charles River Park was a laboratory for large-scale redevelopment. Much like the federal government's space and defense initiatives, the project helped to identify the opportunities and problems associated with larger redevelopment efforts. "This was a first. No one knew the consequences of large-scale relocation. There was no understanding of tenants' rights. The biggest projects that had been done were highways and public housing. This was different, but we were basing plans on what we knew from these kinds of projects." Charles River Park was the first stage of a long and successful real-estate career. Among several highlights, he was responsible for the development in the early eighties of the first commercial to be remodeled in the Charlestown Navy Yard and developed the first high-rise luxury apartment building in Brighton at 2000 Commonwealth Avenue. In 1993, with sons Jerry Jr. and Jim, the Rappaports founded New Boston Fund, Inc., one of New England's leading real estate investment, development and management companies, now owns and manages 9 million square feet of office space, worth some $1 billion. For over four decades, none of the Rappaport real estate companies has defaulted on a single property. Rappaport attributes this record to good fortune and a disciplined investment strategy. A Civic Vision Over the years, Rappaport expanded his political and civic involvement. He has served on the boards of numerous charitable and civic organizations, including the Boston Opera Company, the Charles Theater, the West Roxbury YMCA, the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, City of Boston Fair Housing Commission, Brigham and Women's Center for Neurological Diseases and the Randall G. Morris School. He has also created a number of civic and research programs, including the Rappaport Urban Fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Rappaport Scholarship Fund at the Harvard Medical School, the Rappaport Research Scholarship at Massachusetts General Hospital and a scholarship program for teaching assistants at Hampshire College. Rappaport's family has long been active in business and civic affairs. His son Jerry Jr. is president of the New Boston Fund and was a recent President of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. His son James, former chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party and G.O.P. candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1990, serves as vice president of New Boston Fund and is a Trustee of Dana Farber Cancer Institute. His daughter Martha Robertson is a third-term Minnesota State Senator. His wife Phyllis was elected member of the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional School Committee for seven years and then represented Lincoln Schools for seven years as DeCordova Museum Trustee. Son-in-law Juan Arambula was elected to the Fresno, California School Committee for several terms and is now a second-term County Commissioner there, always winning with the energetic support of his wife, Amy Rappaport. In 1997, Rappaport and his family created the Jerome Lyle Rappaport Charitable Foundation to promote the values of public life. The Foundation, chaired by Jerry's wife Phyllis, seeks to identify and assist people in the Greater Boston area with leadership capacity who have demonstrated their potential and committed to a vision that addresses difficult issues facing the region. Three of their children are members of the Charitable Foundation Board and over time several other children will rotate onto the Board.
In 2000, Jerry Rappaport, through the Rappaport Charitable Foundation, made important new commitments to Harvard University and Suffolk University to promote excellence in public service. First, the Foundation granted $2.7 million to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to create the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. The Institute aims to improve the governance of the region by encouraging young professionals to enter public service, conducting high-level applied research, offering a wide range of public forums and conducting executive training for people in the public sector. The Foundation's gift also covers the first five years of new internship and fellowship programs for ten students of high merit and six outstanding recent graduates of graduate-level programs at Boston-area universities. At the same time, the Foundation granted $785,000 to the Suffolk University Law School to create the first five years of new internship and fellowship programs for ten highly qualified students at various Boston law schools. "I don't think working in the public sector should be like entering the priesthood," said Rappaport. " But I would like to see the government benefit from the best young people, and I would like young people to benefit from government service, whether they stay in public service or move to the private or nonprofit sectors." The Harvard and Suffolk initiatives mark a completion of the circle for Jerry Rappaport. Fifty years ago, the young Harvard-educated lawyer played a critical role in the defeat of a corrupt political regime in Boston and the creation of the "New Boston." Now, the Rappaport Institute and the new internship and fellowship programs at Harvard and Suffolk provide new opportunities to tackle the challenges posed by Boston's growth and prosperity. "It's a new period, and there are new issues and problems that we need to deal with. The metropolitan issue is still important. We have an open-ended development process that gets in the way of good development. We need to look at the changing role of libraries and other cultural institutions - the arts aren't supported effectively and there aren't enough places to gather. School enrichment programs need help. We need to take a look at our hospital system. That's just a start." The Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Suffolk University Law School are two places where that regional agenda can find a home. |
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