Mumford, Lewis. Speech to Boston College Citizen Seminars.

[1959-BGL] In it, Mumford declares, “[Boston’s] backwardness is its principal asset.” He goes on to suggest that the city’s poor economic condition in the 1890s has turned out to be an asset. “That stagnation left you with fewer skyscrapers, with fewer new buildings, with fewer new economic enterprises in the heart of Boston than were created in other cities like New York and Chicago and Minneapolis,” he says. He adds, “If Boston avoided some of the economic prosperity of the years that followed the ‘90s, it also avoided some of the mistakes. If Boston had been prosperous, Boston would have been uninhabitable by this time.”