When urban renewal ran amok

Even after the disaster of the West End, city planners continued to drool over proposals to replace large swaths of the city with the sort of visual assault that is today's City Hall Plaza. Paul McMorrow discovers this in researching an article on why half of Boylston Street in the Back Bay is subject to stringent architectural review and half isn't. He recounts how one architect wanted to replace the Comm. Ave. mall with high rises:

... The consequences of not doing so were dire indeed. Without condo towers, Richmond warned, Comm. Ave. would become "A region of rooming houses and eventually a slum, with all the attendant evils of a bad slum. ...