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Source: Philadelphia Daily News
Date: October 15, 2005
Byline: William Bunch

Truly, a man with a plan

Visionary planner who fought for city he loved, dies at 95

CANTANKEROUS, opinionated, and overflowing with ideas, Ed Bacon was the very epitome of Philadelphia, and for nearly three-quarters of a century, he applied all that energy to remaking and reforming the city that he loved.

A legendary urban planner who once graced the cover of Time magazine, Bacon's legacy was more than just the bricks-and-mortar of the projects he conceived, from the Penn Center to the Market East mall, or the neighborhoods he helped to revive, from Society Hill to Yorktown.

When the future of the American city looked bleakest in the middle of the 20th century, Bacon fought the conventional wisdom of the day – to rebuild sagging neighborhoods rather than raze them. He never lost sight of his broader vision, that cities were places where people came to interact with their neighbors, and to have fun.

The elderly Bacon – who donned a skateboard just three years ago in support of young skateboarders about to be kicked out of Love Park – fought for his radical ideas until the final days of his life. He died yesterday afternoon of natural causes in his home in Rittenhouse Square, at age 95.

"Philadelphia has lost one of its greatest citizens," Gov. Rendell, who is an honorary chairman of the Ed Bacon Foundation, said yesterday. "The landscape of this city would have been miserably different and decidedly poorer had Ed Bacon not chosen to be a Philadelphian."

To a younger generation of city residents, Bacon was known as the father of a Hollywood movie star, Kevin Bacon, and for his irascible nature and his sometimes obstinate views of what to do about the Ben Franklin Parkway or Independence Mall, which he had helped design in the 1950s.

"When you buzzsaw those trees and their sap oozes into the ground, so, too, will my tears," he angrily told a 1997 hearing on remaking Independence Mall. At a 90th birthday event in 2000, Bacon ripped into everyone from the Pew Charitable Trusts to a city cop he'd just seen chasing skateboarders. The event was called: "Ed Bacon Looks Toward the Future."

That, he always did. In his heyday – the 21 years that he was Philadelphia's planning director, from 1949 to 1970 – he was a tireless champion of urban life even as suburban flight accelerated and the Industrial Revolution gave way. His novel ideas for remaking the city included tearing down the so-called "Chinese Wall" – the aboveground railroad tracks and stone barrier that cut Center City in two – and reviving Society Hill, then largely a slum.

"In any other city, Society Hill would have been razed," said Gregory Heller, the president of the Ed Bacon Foundation, established just last year to preserve his ideas. Bacon compared the work to surgery – cutting out dilapidated slums while preserving what was historic and good.

Edmund Norwood Bacon's devotion to the city lasted a lifetime. He was born in West Philadelphia on May 2, 1910, when William Howard Taft was president of the United States. His family kept a home here and in Wallingford, Delaware County, where he attended high school before earning a degree in architecture at Cornell University.

He then studied with a renowned Finnish architect, Eliel Saarinen, and worked for a time in China. He later said Beijing's Forbidden City "taught me that city planning is about movement through space, an architectural sequence of sensors and stimuli, up and down, light and dark, color and rhythm."

His other inspiration was William Penn and the grid and five public squares that the city's founder had laid out. He never forgave City Hall for allowing skyscrapers taller than the William Penn statue in the mid-1980s.

Bacon came home to Philadelphia in 1939 as a reformer who pushed for public housing. He was a key player with Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth on the City Policy Community, the group that led to the eventual ouster of the corrupt Republican machine that ran Philadelphia for the first half of the 20th century.

After becoming director of the City Planning Commission, Bacon placed his imprint on Philadelphia in countless ways. For example, when the Far Northeast became the last section of the city to be developed, Bacon insisted that streets be curved to give rowhomes there a different look.

In the mid-1960s, urban renewal was suddenly in vogue, and Bacon was on the cover of Time in 1964 and Life in 1965. He was also ahead of his time in working on ways to improve inner-city neighborhoods, including Yorktown, the first planned urban community with a largely black population.

"He was a man for all seasons," said James Brown, executive director of the Parkside Historical Preservation Corp., who worked closely with him from the mid-1960s on and became a close friend.

Bacon also had many ideas that didn't pan out, and some that even he later acknowledged were not so great. He once pushed for a "Crosstown Expressway" that would have wiped out South Street, although the controversy inadvertently set the stage for the street's emergence as a hipster hangout in the 1960s.

Despite that, his love of urban life and his optimism about the future of cities arguably helped inspire the current boom of Center City, with its chic restaurants and its condo craze.

Late in his life, an interviewer asked Bacon his greatest achievement. He responded: "Philadelphia."

Bacon is survived by sons Kevin and Michael, a musician and composer; and daughters Karin, Elinor and Kira. His wife of 52 years, Ruth, died of cancer in 1991.

A memorial service is scheduled for 3 p.m. Oct. 23 at the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting at 15th and Cherry streets. Memorial contributions may be made to the Ruth Holmes Bacon Scholarship Fund at the Community College of Philadelphia or the Ed Bacon Foundation; all contributions may be sent to 2117 Locust St., Philadelphia, PA 19103.

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