As Boston marks the tenth anniversary of former Mayor Tom Menino’s death by lighting City Hall green Wednesday night — an homage to the color Menino used on signs and buttons in innumerable campaigns — the vast political network he left behind is reflecting on his life and legacy.
Menino became acting mayor in 1993, when then Mayor Ray Flynn stepped down to become President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the Vatican. Menino then won election outright and served for two decades, until declining health led him not to seek a sixth term in 2013. He was Boston’s first, and so far its only, Italian American mayor.
“Driving around with him in the car, every street, every block had a story, and every part of the city mattered,” said Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who interned in Menino’s office while she was in law school.
“I just remember him pointing out [that] this little corner was going to turn into an area for urban farming, and they had just rewritten the zoning code to make that possible. And this shopping center only happened because the city stepped in and insisted that residents in that neighborhood needed access to a grocery store and amenities.”
When he was frustrated, Wu said, Menino could flash a sharp temper. She recalled a meeting at which Menino displayed his ire at the slow redevelopment of Roxbury’s Bolling Building, which now houses the Boston Public Schools headquarters as well as restaurants and other businesses, and was previously known as the Ferdinand Building.
“His voice got quite heated, and he kind of pounded the table and threw everyone out of his office,” Wu said. “Everyone skittered out the door, and I went quickly back to my desk. And I looked up not five minutes later — he was standing there with a big smile on his face and said, 'How’d I do, kid?’
”It was his way of showing he could be tough when he needed to be tough in order to move things along for Boston residents, [but] at heart he was still this big, loving, goofy, huge-hearted man who really just cared about his community.“
Other notable political figures got their start working for Menino as well. State Rep. Aaron Michlewitz (D-Boston), the House Chair of the Massachusetts Legislature’s Ways and Means Committee, took a part-time public events job with the Menino administration after his freshman year at Northeastern and worked full time in City Hall after graduating. He describes Menino’s work ethic as remarkable.
“He definitely set the baseline for me in the political world [for] how an elected official handles his or her job,” Michlewitz said. “Obviously I watched him directly, day in and day out — not necessarily making policy decisions at that point in time, but certainly how he treated the job itself. And he was a tenacious worker.
”Really loved the city of Boston, loved his job,“ Michlewitz added. ”And it showed every day how much he cared, how much he brought to the job on a daily basis. It really was something ... remarkable and special.“
Former state Rep. Marie St. Fleur, who served as Menino’s chief of advocacy and strategic investment after leaving the Legislature, describes Menino’s love of Boston as both all-consuming and all-encompassing.
”This man got up, went to sleep, got up, went to sleep thinking about the city of Boston and what will happen with it and how to take care of it,“ St. Fleur said. ”He was a steward for this city. His vocation was being mayor.“
St. Fleur, who was the first Haitian American elected to state office in the United States and now runs St. Fleur Communications, recalls Menino showing up to City Hall after a late-night or early-morning drive with marching orders for employees: perhaps a particular spot of graffiti needed to be cleaned up, or that the flowers that were supposed to adorn a median in a certain neighborhood were missing and needed to be planted.
That encyclopedic attentiveness extended to the city’s residents, she added.
”He understood the city of Boston like the back of his hand, from precinct to neighborhood to street,“ she said. ”And he understood the growth of the city, the diversity of the city, the different ethnicities were coming into the city, and made a point of making certain that he had contacts in every corner of the city. I don’t think that has been replicated.“
Boston City Councilor John FitzGerald served on Menino’s mayoral youth council as a junior and senior in high school, and credits that experience with ”opening my eyes up to the world of how a city runs.“
”He would come and talk to the mayor’s youth council about twice during the year,“ FitzGerald recalled. ”[I] remember ... going to the Eagle Room [in the mayor’s office in City Hall] and sort of sitting there, waiting for him to enter. And when he did, the man certainly had an aura about him. And you realized you were in the presence of a fantastic city leader, and someone who had a great understanding of the way people work.“
FitzGerald later worked at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which is now known as the Boston Planning and Development Agency. He describes Menino as accessible to the city’s development community, but not beholden to it.
”He was always willing to talk with developers, knowing that they, probably over the length of his career, [would have] many different interactions on many different projects,“ FitzGerald said. ”His fairness and ability to strike a compromise on how to get a project done, and make it what is best for the community as well as feasible for a developer ... was something I always admired.”
Conversely, FitzGerald said, Menino “wasn’t afraid to tell people, ‘Hey, not today.’ He wasn’t afraid to say no to a developer, and say, ‘This isn’t going to happen, and here’s why, and we’ll talk on the next project.’”
District 5 Boston City Councilor Enrique Pepén, who holds Menino’s old seat on the Council, never worked for the former mayor but he describes two interactions with him as formative.
As a third grader growing up in public housing in Charlestown, Pepén says, he saw Menino give a press conference after a shooting at Charlestown High School — and then watched in subsequent weeks as more resources were allocated to the community and violence dropped.
“From a very young age, I understood that his leadership was very important,” Pepén said.
Later, as an eighth grader, Pepén wrote to Menino to invite him to his graduation ceremony at the Hurley School in the South End. Menino wrote back to say he would attend, and subsequently spoke at the ceremony. But what really stands out, in Pepén’s telling, is the way the then-mayor interacted with him when they spoke afterward.
“He shakes my hand, he thanks me for the invitation,” Pepén said. “I think I was 14 at the time. He looked at me like I was just a regular resident, not a kid. He made me feel like I was seen. And I think that’s what people really admire about him.”
”That’s what people still say, is that he made you feel seen,“ Pepén said. ”He had this way of dealing with people that made them feel like he was truly speaking to you, listening to you.”
According to Wu, that approach extended to the policy realm as well.
“At a time before many politicians were thinking about multicultural, multilingual, inclusive outreach, Boston already had an immigrant advancement office, and what was then called the Elderly Commission, and the first LGBTQ community liaison,” she said. “Many of the traditions that we have now date back 20-plus years, because he was really committed to making sure that City Hall would get out of City Hall [and] into the neighborhoods.”
“There’s so many ways that you can see and feel his legacy in the built environment of the city,” Wu added. “But most of all, it’s the idea that Boston will always be a place where people come first.”
