It’s hard not to see a conspiracy of private greed and municipal culpability when you stare at the obscene pile of junk that materialized like a developer’s middle finger at the Cooper Street site where a venerable Black church stood proudly for more than 130 years.
We’re left wondering just why the city seemed to be blind to protecting this property as a fox salivated over the churchhouse. Could it just be that the city now has a developer-in-chief, aka Mayor William Cogswell?
But given the facts in the case and after watching Cogswell’s city hall in action for almost three years now, we’re thinking less in terms of conspiracy and more about Krauthammer’s Razor, a version of which says: In explaining any puzzling government phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.
Yes, what happened on Cooper Street is sad, irresponsible and just plain wrong.
But frankly, the strange, chaotic process we’ve seen play out at 52 Cooper Street this month looks less like a carefully hatched plan and more like The Gang That Couldn’t Demo Straight. As Cogswell prepares to enter his reelection year, it’s worth examining why.
Here’s what we know:. In 2021, the developer received city approval for a rehabilitation project that would convert the former church’s interior into six apartments while preserving the basic structure and exterior. And then? Nothing. No stabilization, no rehab, no apartments. Just five long years of rain pouring in through a large hole in the roof. And eventually, so much damage that in August of this year, the city’s chief building official signed a demolition order, citing the risk of “imminent collapse.”
All of which brings us to last week’s extraordinary events, when the public — apparently along with the mayor, his staff and the local councilman — finally learned of the plan, and the inevitable blowback slammed into city hall. Which in turn led Cogswell to publicly halt the demo on Monday evening — only to let it proceed on Wednesday morning, reportedly on public safety grounds.
In short, nobody seemed to be watching while the historic church decayed. Nobody apparently knew a city building official had signed a demo permit in August. And then, nobody quite knew what to do when the permit hit the fan, leaving the mayor to look feckless as his work stoppage collapsed along with the church.
Two years ago, we argued that Cogswell’s insistence on building a new layer of bureaucracy between himself and most city department heads was a clear mistake because it left several high-ranking officials reporting to a new “section chief” instead of the mayor. And then maybe, at some point, Cogswell would be told what was going on.
Perhaps indicative of this new, staff-driven approach to city management: When the city issued a mea culpa Wednesday night admitting that “our own process gaps” contributed to the loss of the church, the statement was attributed to a city communications staffer — not the man we elected to do the job.
Which, a cynic might suggest, may have been the real purpose of the so-called “city reorg” all along — a mayor freed not just from dreary day-to-day management duties but from the accountability that comes with them.
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