Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape by Elihu Rubin (review)

In 1957 the Prudential Insurance Company announced it would acquire the old Boston & Albany Railroad yards, a huge industrial hole in the tidy urban fabric of Boston’s Back Bay and South End, to build a massive new “city in a city” that would include its new regional headquarters. Over the next decade, company executives, city officials, transportation bureaucracies, and state courts tussled over the vision of corporate urbanism that would ultimately result in the Prudential Center. Critics began complaining about the Center’s aesthetics and functionality even before Prudential’s office tower opened in 1965, but the Prudential Center remains an important landmark of mid-twentieth-century city building.

Elihu Rubin’s Insuring the City examines the Prudential Center as an artifact of the postwar struggle to redefine what a city should be amid the developing automobile-based, suburbanized metropolitan region. Acknowledging the sizable existing literature on the design, planning, and politics of redevelopment efforts in the 1950s and 1960s, Rubin puts forward the Prudential Center as an example of a less understood aspect of urban renewal at this time: corporate investment. “This is a case study of the role of corporate aspirations, values, and pretensions in shaping the American city,” he advises us, indicating his interest in how the dynamics of capitalist real estate development helped determine midcentury urban form (5).

Rather than focusing on the bullying personalities of redevelopment officials or analyzing the changing nature of urban political constituencies, Rubin sets out to understand what motivated the people who controlled sources of private capital as they participated in urban development schemes in this period. By concentrating on the Prudential Center, he calls attention to the important economic role of insurance companies in the U.S. economy, citing a 1964 Fortune magazine description of Prudential as an economic “pump” that drew in individual premium payments and invested them in home mortgages, government bonds, and enormous redevelopment projects like this one.

Rubin’s prodigious research reminds us that huge veins of rich historical material sit in corporate archives waiting to be mined. Prudential’s files allow us to peer into the company’s halls and board rooms, where executives worked out corporate goals and game plans for structuring their operations and investing profitably in America’s changing built environment. Rubin asserts that Prudential had an “urban vision” that sprang from a postwar decision to decentralize its management among several regional offices and extended to a belief in its ability to improve urban life in America (27). The regional offices, which the company deliberately planned for locations within cities but outside their central business districts, offered “extra dividends” in the form of good public relations and investment returns, and Rubin explains how the initial developments in Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago provided valuable lessons for Prudential’s eventual efforts in Boston.

Two chapters on Boston’s history prior to the Prudential Center set up the author’s central contention that the project served as a modernist Great Awakening for a city still stuck in a nineteenth-century paradigm. Rubin describes the city as being in a depressed condition after World War II due to the political machinations of longtime mayor James Michael Curley, a conservative local culture that discouraged progressive thinking in architecture and city planning, and a tendency to cling to the old “dirty streets” of the preindustrial era. In this view Prudential’s forward-thinking corporate urbanism arrived just in time to inspire a new growth coalition—one that would update the old urban fabric using new tools such as tax breaks for a private venture justified by claimed public benefits and a new form of public redevelopment corporation invented precisely to undertake this complex task.

Rubin’s chapter on the design process for the Prudential Center provides an extensive analysis of the many elements that made up the initial complex. A...