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Penn Center: Site Description and History

Site Description

Penn Center is the development of buildings, plazas, and underground connections between 15th and 17th Streets, bounded by Market Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard. Its buildings are oriented along the edges of the blocks, with entrances from both the street and public plaza. Penn Center is located within easy walking distance of City Hall, LOVE Park, the Avenue of the Arts, and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

At 15th Street, the Penn Center plaza is adjacent to a five-lane road encircling City Hall, which is highly visible from this eastern end of the Center. The corner of 15th and Market Streets opens onto the public plaza. At approximately the mid-block of 15th and 16th Streets, entrances to the underground concourse break the plane of sidewalk. Modern, headhouses (above-grade roof structures) cover passages to the below-grade transportation concourse.

Dilworth Plaza, City Hall's western apron, is connected to the concourse underneath 15th Street. Dilworth Plaza has an arcaded lower level with grand curving stairs linking the concourse with the plaza level above.

Penn Center Plaza and its concourse are owned and maintained by private developers who also own the surrounding buildings. The concourse headhouses are owned and maintained by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA). The City of Philadelphia owns and maintains Dilworth Plaza and City Hall.

History

Prior to 1952, what is now Philadelphia's central business district along Market Street was occupied largely by the "Chinese Wall" — a massive masonry viaduct, cutting across downtown and supporting the Pennsylvania Railroad's elevated railroad tracks. The Chinese Wall linked the railroad's Broad Street Station with its new station at 30th Street. It created a profound rift between the north and south sections of the downtown, occupying otherwise prime real estate. In the spring of 1952, the railroad announced its plans to demolish the Chinese Wall, bury the tracks, and develop the site.

Thinking about the future of this site far predated the Railroad's announcement. As early as 1942, when the Philadelphia City Planning Commission was founded, the redevelopment of this parcel was considered instrumental to the revitalization of the downtown area. In 1947, the City and business community sponsored the massive Better Philadelphia Exhibition — occupying two floors of Gimbel's Department Store, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. The exhibition, designed by Edmund Bacon, Louis Kahn, Oskar Stonorov, and Robert Mitchell featured an impressive model of Center City showing the Chinese Wall replaced by a complex of commercial buildings and civic amenities.

In 1949, Bacon became Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, and in 1952 the Pennsylvania Railroad announced its decision to demolish the Chinese Wall and the adjoining Frank Furness-designed Broad Street Station, which sat directly across from City Hall. Developers were interested in purchasing pieces of the newly vacant land, but Bacon believed it was important to ensure that the site was developed as a cohesive whole, to coordinate business, retail, transportation, and public space.

Although the City had no control of the privately owned land, or responsibility for its planning, Bacon engaged Philadelphia architect Vincent Kling to help him devise a plan in order to demonstrate the site's potential. The Bacon-Kling plan created a three-block sunken pedestrian concourse, linked to the subway and train connections, and lined with retail shops. The concourse was open to the sky, straddled by three office buildings, oriented north-south, with entrances both from the sunken concourse and from the street level. Bacon expressed that his plan created a dramatic movement between a sequence of spaces for the pedestrian, and often added that it imitated principles he had learned from the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Though the Bacon-Kling Plan was met with great skepticism by the real-estate community, the Railroad promised to consider it. The plans for Penn Center were discussed for years by many parties but no real development contenders surfaced. Eventually, the Railroad brought in Robert Dowling, a New York real-estate broker, who announced he had a new scheme that borrowed some core ideas of Bacon's concept, but changed other key features. The Dowling plan called for six thirty-story towers enclosing (rather than straddling) a public plaza. The plan kept the below-ground shopping concourse, but covered it with a roof.

Bacon was very unhappy about Dowling's design, but reached a compromise with Dowling that included small garden openings, and a staggering of the east-west oriented buildings to allow more sunlight into the plaza. The important piece is that the design still called for a unified, cohesive development that could become an iconic modern commercial plaza.

Unfortunately, developers would not buy into the idea. Investors shied away and the Railroad grew apprehensive. Eventually, Philadelphia real estate broker Frank Binswanger interested Uris Brothers, a New York City-based development company. The time was right, and the Uris Brothers bought one block of the four block development opportunity with plans to build two office buildings, adhering to the Bacon-Dowling design for the overall site.

The railroad established a review committe of Bacon, Dowling, and George Howe to ensure the dignity of the design. Additionally, Mayor Joseph Clark established a Citizens Board of Design, including Louis Kahn. The Uris Brothers were required to keep 50% of the land open and preserve an open court between the buildings. Thus began one of the earliest instances of a major private-public partnership to develop a downtown urban site. There were a number of disagreements and conflicts between Uris Brothers and the Board of Design. After several disappointments and near fatal errors, Penn Center finally began to emerge.

Uris Brothers engaged architect Emory Roth to design the main Penn Center buildings. The Railroad developed the below-ground shopping concourse, and selected Vincent Kling to design its headquarters at Penn Center's western end.

By the end of 1953, Penn Center was bustling with construction activity and the first tower was fully occupied. In 1956, while Penn Center was under construction Time magazine published a rendering of the completed project — a stunning vista from the air looking through the building corridor with City Hall rising up prominently in the background. Time proclaimed that Penn Center was a "gleaming triumph." The project was written about widely as one of the nation's most significant downtown developments, and as a successful example of how good planning can guide private development.

The Penn Center story is emblematic of Bacon's career. Relying on the power of his design concepts to inspire others and attract investment, he raised public consciousness in projects that were previously unimaginable. Without Bacon, it is likely that Penn Center would have been developed piecemeal instead of as a coordinated set of public and private spaces that contribute to the civic landscape. Before Bacon's involvement in the future of what would become Penn Center, there was much talk of building departments stores and other commercial structures on the site. Bacon ensured that Penn Center became a mixed-use, office and retail complex, with significant amounts of public space, views of City Hall, and an intrinsic connection to mass transportation.

While Bacon never truly had control of the outcome of the project, he was able to inspire powerful players with a vision and a set of components to be incorporated into the plan. Penn Center did not turn out the way Bacon had originally hoped. Nonetheless, as a result of his planning, Penn Center today is a cohesive project that creates an important public space at the foot of City Hall. While currently underutilized by the public, Penn Center holds great promise for future designers and civic leaders to build upon the foundation that Bacon created, to develop a Penn Center that works for Philadelphia in the 21st century.

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