Word: craning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Crane was a product of his times. It took three hundred years before the political setting was ready for its cog and for the powerful interest that revolved around him. And it was with the Harvard Square bushings that he meshed best...
...Under Crane that fieldon, stretching from the kiosk to the point where you couldn't get a New York Times at the corner newstand, was conveniently divided into powerful parcels with politicians, bankers, developers and a university monopolizing most of the tithes...
...wasn't always like that. There was a time in the early seventeenth century when the upper class, not yet concerted in its Brattle Street redoubt, ruled unopposed. In 1688, 16 of the 20 most prosperous Cantabrigians held elected posts. They were all alumni of Harvard but unlike Crane and many of his political cronies of a later day, being in the majority they didn't have to straddle the Harvard Yard fence. It wasn't political suicide if the politicians sided with Harvard...
...this vacuum that Crane decided to fill. The CCA backed candidate fought his way onto the council and with the help of political and collegiate pal Joseph DeGuiglielmo '29, a man with Crane-like credentials, wasted no time in manipulating Cambridge's first city manager, John Atkinson, into making 13 years of yes-man decisions...
...same time Crane began to call the key business friendships needed to exercise the necessary influence that his title of mayor could not provide. Frank Townsend, Chamber of Commerce president in the fifties--a man about whom Dyer says, "When I was selling Chamber of Commerce memberships to the city I was really selling Townsend,"--full into the Crane fold. He and the rest of the Harvard Square businessmen--at that time native Cambrigians, residences in Cambridge being perhaps the most important prerequisite to community power--played ball with Crane. And through Atkinson, Crane reciprocated, cutting taxes when every other...