For nigh on fifty years, it has been fashionable to denounce mid-century urban renewal projects, as well as the planners and politicians who brought them into being. Even as the bulldoze-and-build movement reached its zenith in the 1960s, many Americans began to develop posthumous nostalgia for quaint, tumbledown neighborhoods that were rent asunder to make way for superblocks, highways, and modernist behemoths. This widespread sentiment gave rise to a cottage industry of screeds against urban renewal.

Happily, the invective of a previous generation is now being displaced by more judicious analyses. To that end, architectural historian Elihu Rubin’s Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape provides a refreshingly evenhanded assessment of one of Boston’s most conspicuous renewal projects. While not whitewashing his subject, Rubin ably shows how, despite its faults, Boston’s Prudential Center stemmed the tide of decay in an ailing city.

For subterfuge, intrigue, chicanery, drama, and complexity of plot, the story of the Prudential Center rivals grand opera. Even the setting seems the stuff of fiction, since for many Bostonians today, living in a vibrant, politically stable, economically prosperous metropolis, it is hard to imagine a time when their city was in dire straits. Yet sixty years ago Boston was, as one magazine put it, “dying on the vine.” Wealthy and middle-class residents were relocating in droves to the suburbs; industries were moving south; and the city’s excessively high, arbitrary, and corrupt property tax structure was inimical to investment in downtown real estate.

Furthermore, with the exception of a handful of avant-garde designs cropping up on college campuses in the area (including Alvar Aalto’s 1946 Baker House dormitory at MIT and the Architects Collaborative’s 1948 Graduate Center at Harvard), remarkably few new buildings of quality had been constructed in Boston since the Great Depression. Practically none of these were modern designs, which were proliferating throughout other major American cities during the postwar years.

Making this unenviable situation even worse were the crooked politicians who ruled the city for the first half of the twentieth century. Among these was Boston’s infamous four-term mayor James Michael Curley, who also served two terms in prison. While cultivating loyalty among the city’s burgeoning Irish American population by providing jobs and municipal services, Curley antagonized the business elite. The brazen graft, political patronage, and fiscal mismanagement that characterized Curley’s reign appalled conservative “Boston Brahmins,” who were understandably loath to invest in the city so long as it remained under such unscrupulous leadership. Likewise, state and federal agencies refused to provide much-needed aid to Boston for fear that the funds would be stolen or misspent.

Change began in 1949, when John B. Hynes defeated Curley in the mayoral election. Throughout the next decade, Hynes worked tirelessly to revitalize the city’s economy and remove the stigma of municipal political corruption. He believed that a series of large-scale building projects was the surest way to convince the world (and its own citizens) that Boston faced a bright future. Early projects, though, were faltering and piecemeal. The demolition of a working-class neighborhood to make way for high-rent high-rise apartment towers in the city’s West End met with disdain from many who resented the heavy-handed approach that left hundreds of families homeless. Victor Gruen’s aesthetically lackluster design for the Charles River Park complex that dominates the new West End also did not win many admirers. A similar project in the New York Streets area of the city’s South End replaced an African American neighborhood with industrial tenants. This project was regarded as at once too small to have an appreciable effect on the city’s economy and, like the West End, too harsh on the displaced residents. Moreover, throughout his mayoralty, Hynes wrestled with the persistent legacy of his disreputable predecessors as he fought an uphill battle to win the trust of the city’s business community. One local bank president summed up his peers’ apprehension toward Hynes, observing, “Nobody had ever seen an honest Irishman around here” (80).

Having described at length the city’s woes, Rubin thus sets the stage for the hero’s dramatic entrance. On January 31, 1957, the Prudential Insurance Company of America announced plans for a multi-use development comprising apartment towers, convention center, hotel, shopping arcades, and public plazas surrounding an iconic office skyscraper in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. The entire complex would rise from a rail yard being vacated by the Boston and Albany Railroad. In unveiling these plans before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Prudential’s president, Carrol M. Shanks, waxed optimistic about the revitalizing effect the project would have on Boston’s economy.

While Boston is Rubin’s principal focus, this is not merely a local tale. Boston’s Prudential Center was but one of seven regional home offices constructed throughout the United States and Canada during the mid-twentieth century as the insurance giant decentralized its corporate governance. Rubin offers significant background explanation of Prudential’s history and its vision at mid-century. He also describes in detail three of Prudential’s other regional hubs—Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago—in order to provide several points of comparison with Boston. The stories of these other Prudential buildings, while interesting in their own right, come off as sub-plots—foils for the central drama of the Boston Prudential Center.

From the beginning, both Prudential and the City of Boston were committed to seeing the Prudential Center to completion, yet significant obstacles remained. The most seemingly insuperable of these concerned a vestige of the Curley era: property taxes. To avoid the kind of vexatiously arbitrary tax assessments that had long beset downtown property owners, Prudential insisted on tax concessions from the city. While Mayor Hynes readily agreed to this arrangement, the state’s highest court twice ruled the deal unconstitutional. The problem was solved when the Massachusetts legislature essentially rewrote urban renewal laws and conferred on Prudential the status of a redevelopment corporation working in the public interest.

In discussing the Prudential Center’s design, Rubin spills much ink on Charles Luckman, an architect about whom many would agree the less said the better. Earlier in the 1950s, plans for a multi-use development atop the Boston and Albany rail yard had emerged from a group of internationally renowned local architects, including Walter Gropius, Pietro Belluschi, Hugh Stubbins, Carl Koch, and Walter Bogner. When Prudential spurned this group in favor of Luckman, critics (who generally regarded him as an aesthetic philistine) bristled. Luckman enjoyed a more favorable reputation among many corporate executives, due to his having been a successful businessman himself. President of Lever Brothers at age thirty-seven, Luckman’s business acumen did not diminish when he transitioned to a second career in architecture. He always strove to complete projects on budget and on time. Prudential executives, who valued the bottom line more than aesthetic virtuosity, understandably admired this approach. Unfortunately, the illustrations in this chapter are too scant and minuscule to reveal the significant differences between Luckman’s design and the earlier proposal. In fact, for a book dealing largely with visual culture, there is a surprising lack of illustrations throughout.

The Prudential Center is not the only feature of Boston’s mid-century renewal that Rubin discusses. A parallel plot emerges in the story of a contemporaneous project: an extension of the Massachusetts Turnpike through downtown Boston. Like Prudential, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority also took advantage of the opportunity offered by the defunct Boston and Albany rail yard, as its right-of-way provided the path of least resistance for a new highway. While initially the goals of the Pike and the Pru were at odds, given that both plans centered on using the same Back Bay parcel for disparate purposes, the two projects eventually became interdependent, physically and legally, when the Massachusetts legislature sought to solve the constitutional problem of tax concessions by statutorily linking the Prudential Center to the turnpike.

This tale of urban renaissance features a rich cast of characters. In addition to Hynes, Shanks, Luckman, and the indomitable Massachusetts Turnpike Chairman William Callahan, there are scores of supporting actors from city and state government, the Prudential bureaucracy, Luckman’s office, and local citizen groups. Indeed, the number of strong personalities involved, and the magnitude of the project, makes it all the more remarkable that the Prudential Center was completed at all. Far more modest proposals, with smaller casts, have landed in the rubbish heap of urban history.

As the story concludes, the reader is not altogether certain whether the ending is happy or tragic, for an assessment of the Prudential Center’s legacy is decidedly mixed. Architecturally, the design won few admirers among critics and historians. The Boston Globe’s Robert Campbell, for example, created an eponymous “Pru Award,” which he bestowed annually on the city’s worst new building. Criticism went beyond mere aesthetic objections. Functional deficiencies inherent in the windswept outdoor shopping arcades and ill-advised moat-like water features became apparent soon after completion. In the 1990s, the arcades and public plazas underwent a soup-to-nuts remediation that transformed the entire ground level into an indoor shopping mall. Some latter-day critics also lambasted the design for not tying together two neighborhoods—the Back Bay and South End—long separated by the rail yard. But the Prudential Center was never intended to be an urban suture; rather, its developers and designers deliberately envisioned a city within a city, insulated from the din and dirt of the surrounding streets.

These and other objections notwithstanding, the Prudential Center had immediate beneficial effects. A concerted and conspicuous investment from a major national corporation infused the city with much-needed civic pride and optimism. The Prudential Center represented an important show of corporate confidence in the city’s future and no doubt catalyzed similar projects by reassuring business leaders who might otherwise have been skittish about constructing a new building in Boston.

There are more than a few loose ends that Rubin does not satisfactorily tie up, and the book can be tortuous and sprawling as it follows threads that stray far from the main subject. The text moves swiftly, and not altogether nimbly, from the history of insurance companies to Boston’s politics and economy, railroads, architecture, highways, urban renewal, and beyond. While to some extent this structural deficit reflects the inherent complexity of the subject itself, many of these seemingly tangential discussions are more distracting than informative and should have been sacrificed at the altar of concision and focus. The Massachusetts Turnpike Extension, for instance, is a fitting topic for its own monograph; appended awkwardly to a history of the Prudential Center, though, it renders an already complicated saga even more unwieldy.

The book’s considerable assets, however, more than mitigate these gripes. To begin with, Rubin explores an under-studied subject: the role of corporations in urban and architectural history. As such, the story of the Prudential Center provides a practical model for municipal governments in ailing cities seeking to work with private industry in order to spur economic growth. The book also shows how corporations can—dare I say, should—embrace a greater civic role beyond mere fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders.

The remarkably equitable treatment of so controversial a subject is perhaps the book’s greatest strength. Rubin discusses the Prudential Center’s accomplishments without ignoring its shortcomings. Indeed, for historians of architecture and cities, Rubin provides a paradigm of judicious analysis. Those who cast gratuitous aspersions on reviled buildings, Rubin observes, “do not acknowledge that they operate with 20/20 hindsight. Many of us today regret the foisting of large corporate estates on the urban landscape; we long for the architectural diversity and mix of uses in the city they replaced. But we do a disservice by ignoring the perspectives of planners—municipal and corporate—who were fearful in the 1950s that American cities were dying” (26). Historians of all types would do well to follow Rubin’s example in recognizing the honest purposes of their forebears and resisting the temptation to impose twenty-first-century value judgments on people who could not reasonably have anticipated the mores of a future generation. Only then will we do justice to the past.