Renewal Foes Blast 'Boston Bulldozer'

About 300 greater Boston urban renewal foes heard calls for a united front against "the Boston bulldozer" last night at an "urban renewal teach-in" sponsored by the Mission United Neighborhood Improvement Team (MINUT).

Leaders of anti-renewal groups from North Harvard. Dorchester, East Boston, South Boston, and Charlestown described the latest battles in their fight with the Boston Redevelopment Authority and heaped vilification on renewal kingpins while the audience clapped approvingly.

Held in Mission Hill Church, the meeting was aimed at fostering closer cooperation between different anti-renewal groups in the city and developing electoral support for a slate of anti-renewal candidates endorsed jointly by neighborhood groups throughout Boston.

The endorsed candidates are Katherine Craven, George F. Foley, John J. Concannon, Gabriel Piemonte, and Perlie Dyar Chase.

The recurring themes of the speaker's charges were that the BRA engineered sham committees to represent neighborhood occupants, bulldozed neighborhoods that could be rehabilitated, and robbed the poor to line the pockets of the rich.

In order to foil the BRA, John Harrington, President of SHOC, Self-Help Organization Charlestown, called for a defeat of pro-renewal City Council members, and the enactment of a law that would allow a neighborhood to veto an urban renewal project.

The Rev. Vincent Kelly, pastor of Mission Hill Church, outlined the "latest encroachments by the Harvard group on our neighborhood." He was referring to a proposal to build a blood research center which would be part of a new medical complex to be built on the land the Boston Redevelopment Authority proposes to redevelop.

Harvard is only one of a group of affiliated hospitals including Peter Bent Brigham, Massachusetts Mental Health, and Beth Israel, that would benefit from the land taking, but it has been the one singled out for attacks by the Mission Hill group.