Bernard Borman wrote a long opinion piece for the Globe in 1971 explaining why he thought Boston was declining. He listed 16 reasons in an essay that drew praise for drawing attention to a host of issues, and criticism for highlighting some off-beat theories.
In tightly woven observations, he argued that government corruption and disrespect for public servants were alienating voters and making civic spirit wane. And he didn’t think elite universities were of much help: “The typical Ivy League graduate has virtually no knowledge of how to get organized.’’ Meanwhile, he suggested that Boston’s proximity to “a beautiful natural environment’’ was undercutting civic engagement because potential activists were spending their off-hours “weekending at second homes or in other time-consuming and expensive recreation like skiing and boating.’’
What should Boston residents do? “Genuine introspection, analysis of ourselves and our civic processes, is a prerequisite to progress,’’ wrote Mr. Borman, a longtime attorney. “Initiating such a discussion would be the most difficult task of all.’’
Mr. Borman, one of the activists who successfully challenged the tall proposed towers for the Park Plaza project in the 1970s, died in Massachusetts General Hospital Dec. 13 of an infection. He was 85 and had lived for decades on Beacon Hill, where he had been president of the neighborhood’s civic association.
While representing that group and serving as chairman of the Park Plaza Civic Advisory Committee, Mr. Borman devoted hundreds of hours to meetings, research, and testifying at hearings. The project, which was proposed by developer Mortimer Zuckerman, called for a series of high-rise towers that would have cast shadows over the Public Garden and Boston Common.
Mr. Borman later told friends that he considered his efforts, which contributed to the project’s demise, to be his most significant accomplishment as an activist. Another high point occurred in the mid-1960s, when he worked vigorously to curb the powers of the Governor’s Council.
“There’s great strength in the truth. If you keep telling the truth, you’re going to get somewhere,’’ he told the Beacon Hill Times in 2015, when the Beacon Hill Civic Association presented him with the Beacon Award for his contributions to the community.
Over the years, he also focused on less lofty intrusions into the neighborhood’s quality of life. In 1972, he criticized the mayor, Kevin White, for vetoing a dog-leash law, telling the Globe that “Beacon Hill is an open sewer. People who put Fido out the door in a densely crowded city are giving the message they couldn’t care about the rest of us.’’
More than three decades later, he suggested in a letter to the editor that the city should do more than simply fine car owners who don’t move their vehicles on days when streets are cleaned. “Residents who receive parking tickets for street-cleaning violations should lose their residential parking stickers,’’ he proposed. “Inconveniencing these inconsiderate people will mean more to them than imposing money fines that are less than parking garage charges.’’
“He was very idealistic in what he hoped government would be like, and very realistic about what he saw,’’ said his daughter Jennifer of Cranston, R.I. “He had a unique temperament in terms of being curmudgeonly, and also very caring beneath that.’’
Bernard N. Borman grew up in Belleville, Ill., the older of two siblings. His parents, Abe Borman and the former Rose Seslan, ran a clothing store. As a boy, he helped out in the store, and he recalled the community’s anti-Semitism in an unpublished memoir, noting that he didn’t learn to swim as a youngster because “the only swimming pool in Belleville had a sign up ‘we cater to Gentiles only.’ ’’
Mr. Borman graduated in 1954 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he participated in ROTC, and then served in the Army as a second lieutenant, stationed in Korea. Near the end of his tour of duty, he was monitoring and analyzing radio transmissions for the Army Security Agency and contemplating his future. “All I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to work in Dad’s store for the rest of my life,’’ he wrote.
He took the law school admission test, which was administered in a bomb-damaged building in Seoul, in a second-floor room heated by a charcoal stove. He and the others in the room quickly took ill, some fainting due to carbon monoxide poisoning from the stove, which lacked proper ventilation. “My last memory was of the proctor scurrying around to pick up the tests lest someone take a copy away,’’ he wrote. “Army ambulances arrived.’’
After that unusual start to his legal career, he took the test at a different location and went to Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1959. Mr. Borman worked for one firm his entire career — Nathanson & Rudofsky, which became Lane & Altman, and then Lane Altman & Owens. Mr. Borman retired in 1999.
His marriage to Corinne Livingston ended in divorce. He lived most of his life in a house they had purchased on Rollins Place in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.
In the early 1960s, he began volunteering with the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and was elected president. He was among 11 people the chamber named in 1965 as “Outstanding Young Men’’ in Greater Boston, a list that included future governor Michael S. Dukakis, attorney F. Lee Bailey, and developer Thomas Flatley.
A couple of years later, Mr. Borman worked with the Boston Zoological Society in its efforts to reinvigorate the Franklin Park Zoo.
About 20 years ago, Mr. Borman and his longtime friend Shirley Hale collaborated on renovating a house they co-owned in Maine. Or rather, he provided most of the financing. Hale, who is known as Shoo, did most of the renovating.
“I needed a new adventure,’’ Mr. Borman told the Globe in 1998. “A law school roommate had just told me he had Alzheimer’s, and I was shaken and very saddened about this. It made me realize there was not much point in waiting any longer for anything.’’
He and Hale had dated years earlier, and were friends when he agreed to her proposal that he buy a house that she would renovate, and they both would share. “Knowing her as one of the wittiest persons on earth, I thought it probably would be fun watching her have fun,’’ he told the Globe. “Without her, that house is nothing.’’
In addition to his daughter Jennifer, Mr. Borman leaves another daughter, Emily Spurrell of Cranston, R.I., and seven grandchildren.
A memorial will be held at 11:30 a.m. Feb. 18 in the Harvard Club on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.
Spending time in Maine allowed Mr. Borman to relax, Hale said, though even in rural surroundings he was as intensely focused on the matter at hand as he was as a civic activist. “He didn’t notice what was going on around him,’’ she said.
One day he went for a walk in the woods, and the geese on the property fell in line behind him. When he emerged 45 minutes, the geese were still trailing along. “I said, ‘Bernie, the geese went with you,’ ’’ Hale recalled, “and he said, ‘They did?’ ’’
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
