Return to Bacon In the News Index

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Date: October 16, 2005
Byline: Inga Saffron

An Appreciation: Flaws and all, Edmund N. Bacon molded a modern Philadelphia

Edmund N. Bacon, who died Friday at 95, was a planning visionary who dragged a declining, smoke-blackened Philadelphia kicking and screaming into the modern postindustrial age.

But he was also an ideologue so entranced by his own vision that he couldn't always tell when best to leave stodgy old Philadelphia exactly as it was.

To understand Bacon's huge accomplishments and huge failings, it is worth remembering that he was born in 1910 and grew up in a Philadelphia teeming with crowded slums, horse-drawn carts and fetid open sewers. Like Le Corbusier and other socially progressive modernists of his time, Bacon was committed to bringing order, hygiene, open space, and 20th-century automotive technology to dense, dark, industrial-era cities.

For Bacon, razing the railroad viaduct known as the Chinese Wall and replacing it with Penn Center's gleaming white towers and granite plazas represented the triumph of a rational, humanist policy. Though the finished design is badly flawed, the project remains one of his great accomplishments. At the moment when Philadelphia businesses were first weighing whether to stay or leave, Penn Center provided Philadelphia with the foundation of a modern, high-rise office district.

But Bacon's weakness was that he held fast to his rigidly modernist view of cities long after those ideas were challenged and discredited in the 1960s by such groundbreaking social critics as Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte. They argued that urban clutter and density were essential ingredients in successful cities. Plazas might look beautiful on paper, but in practice they were usually lifeless zones.

Bacon's magnum opus, Design of Cities, is still taught today in university urban-studies courses, but Jacobs' philosophy is far more influential among the general public and young city planners. Bacon lived long enough to see a new generation of urbanists repudiate his overly formal, overly sanitized city plans in favor of quirkier, mixed-use environments. Despite all that Bacon accomplished, Philadelphia struggles today with too little density rather than too much.

The philosophical shift was thrown into relief for me one day during a conversation with Bacon about the Pennsylvania Convention Center. I expressed some regret that many 19th-century industrial-loft buildings had to be sacrificed to make way for the vast exhibition hall.

Sputtering in astonishment, Bacon bellowed back: "Don't you understand? There used to be people selling vegetables on the streets there," in front of the old factories.

To Bacon, street vendors were a symptom of poverty and disease. But to someone who came of age when cities were struggling to regain their purpose, vendors are a charming example of vibrant street life.

Bacon had his own strong, sometimes conflicting, opinions about what was charming in cities. Appalled in the 1950s by the tight mix of Victorian mercantile buildings that crowded around Independence Hall, he supported a project that eventually clear-cut eight full blocks of the city. Three of those blocks became Independence Mall, a formal composition of arcades and allées that overwhelmed the little Colonial hall. As the years went by, the massive mall became empty and windswept, except during programmed events.

When the National Park Service devised a plan to fill in the mall's emptiness with museums and grass, Bacon objected mightily. He insisted that its formal composition was a work of art that was worth preserving.

Yet when Mayor Street decided to ban skateboarders from JFK Plaza – another of Bacon's failed efforts – the planner defended their role in enlivening a dull public space. While Bacon had a weakness for formal, symmetrical designs, more than anything he wanted to see Philadelphia succeed as a city.

It is not too much to say he invented planning in Philadelphia. After World War II, he returned home from several years of traveling and working elsewhere and helped draft the bill creating the city's first Planning Commission. With his appointment as executive director in 1949, he dominated all discussions about the city's form and function until his retirement in 1970. No planning director since Bacon has been so influential, and today Philadelphia suffers from too little planning.

Bacon's single-minded vision played a giant role in saving Philadelphia from the fate of other old cities, such as Detroit or Cincinnati.

For Philadelphia to compete in the modern world, he understood that it would need to upgrade its urban infrastructure. During his 21 years as the city's chief planner, he forced Philadelphia to create a modern, high-rise office district (Penn Center), a modern retail center (the Gallery), and a modern downtown neighborhood (Society Hill).

Too often, Bacon's grand visions didn't turn out as well as he hoped. The Gallery was never meant to be a blank-walled, suburban-style shopping box. The Market Street office corridor was never intended to be devoid of shops. According to Gregory Heller, who runs the Ed Bacon Foundation, Bacon focused more on the big picture than the details.

Sometimes, Bacon's conflicting visions undercut one another. He was way ahead of his time when he proposed converting Philadelphia's dying industrial waterfront to a leisure area called Penn's Landing. Then, just as it was being completed, he allowed I-95 to cut off the new waterfront playground from the city. He was similarly prepared to strangle Center City with the South Street Expressway, which thankfully was never built.

Society Hill is generally considered Bacon's greatest and most influential achievement. During the '60s, when other cities were using federal money to level their historic cores, Bacon rejected wholesale clearance. He adopted a more sensitive plan to prune the Victorian structures and leave most of the Colonial ones. The city used various strategies to encourage urban homesteaders to renovate the surviving structures. Today, Bacon might be faulted for creating a fiction that the area was entirely colonial.

It is ironic that Bacon's greatest projects – Society Hill, Penn Center, the Gallery – are flawed. It's one of the things that makes it so infuriatingly hard to evaluate his historic legacy. He was imperfect, but it is hard to imagine what Philadelphia would be like without those imperfections.

Return to Bacon In the News Index