Twenty-Story High-Rises

The same attitude informs Vellucci's stand on the more formal recent programs designed to create new housing in the area. He is willing to admit the need for new housing so long as it doesn't upset present social arrangements; he has no interest in a new East Cambridge but a great deal of interest in an improved one.

And so he single-handedly defeated one of the earliest urban renewal plans for the area because of its promise of massive destruction of existingu buildings and massive dislocation of existing populations. Presently he finds his bitterest enemy in the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority for whom the best building that can be constructed in the city is one that generates the greatest increase in the tax base: twenty-story, high-income high-rises. At the same time he has been instrumental in championing the equally controversial Wellington - Harrington Plan, which would make federal monies available in the form of long-term, low-interest loans that present citizens could afford for private home building of the kind on which East Cambridge depends.

In fact, however, Vellucci feels distinctly uncomfortable with all of these long-range problems and prefers to see himself as the last of the old time ward-heelers dealing in an informal way with local issues as they arise. To keep the teenagers out of trouble but--ultimately--in East Cambridge, he and his wife established a marching band, the Don Juan Drum and Bugle Corps, made up of a series of complicated major and minor leagues designed to involve every child under eighteen in the most noisy and enthusiastic if not the best musical enterprise in the city. To keep the mothers happy he has carved a series of tot lots out of vacant back-yards and old oil dumps, and to keep himself happy (and elected) he has established the Al Vellucci Associates who meet periodically to honor him at dinner.

To get all of this done--and to do it in a way that doesn't involve others in what he regards as an essentially local operation--he works under what he refers to as "a series of disguises." Frequently this only means that he wheels and deals quietly and privately in order to get something for the neighborhood. When he wanted to construct a playground where the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority said that it couldn't be built, he went to the President of the Standard Towel and Tissue Company and offered to name the back yard of his own company after the President if he would allow the children to use it as a play area. He created a little more building space in the area by convincing two companies to re-locate.

But more often than not what that disguise involves is a rhetorical and usually very funny attack on institutions outside of East Cambridge which serves to draw attention away from what is actually happening in Vellucci's neighborhood and strengthens his own position as baiter of a common enemy. The very rich and the very powerful represent the most visible threats to the community, and, while Vellucci's attacks on the University always strike a responsive chord, they also increase the paranoia that is beginning to spread through the neighborhood. While Vellucci may refused in just to eat or drink at the annual Town and Gown Dinner given by the Presidents of MIT and Harvard for the City Councillors for