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Ed Bacon is honored at right spot: LOVE Park

Everyone agreed yesterday that the late urban planner Ed Bacon would have loved it: official commemoration of his career at one of his proudest creations, LOVE Park in Center City.

To anyone who knew him, one other thing was equally clear: Had Ed Bacon been in attendance, he would have used the occasion to buttonhole Mayor Street and other officials one more time to try to persuade them to let skateboarders back in the park.

"With LOVE Park, his first-born, I don't think anybody — including Ed Bacon — had any premonition that this would become the skateboard capital of the East Coast," State Rep. Mark B. Cohen, a Philadelphia Democrat and son of the late City Councilman David Cohen, told the crowd of about 100 gathered at the northwest corner of 15th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard.

"I don't think he embraced it right away when skateboarders... started coming here. But finally it dawned on him that this was a major achievement for Philadelphia," Cohen added.

Bacon, who died Oct. 14 at age 95, lost the battle of the skateboards, though he gained a measure of immortality among the young by riding a skateboard in his early 90s.

Two of Bacon's six children, daughters Elinor and Hilda, joined Gov. Rendell, Street and other officials to unveil a sign from the state Historical and Museum Commission.

The sign praises Edmund N. Bacon as an "internationally known urban planner" whose design concepts "shaped Philadelphia's city landscape." It notes that during his term as city planning director from 1949 to 1970, he was responsible for Penn Center, Market East and the commuter rail tunnel, Society Hill, the Far Northeast, and Yorktown.

Yesterday's audience was filled with Bacon's friends and foes — and his career was so long that every city official got to play each role at one time or another.

Rendell noted that LOVE Park, formally JFK Plaza, and its stunning vista down the Parkway to the Philadelphia Museum of Art were Bacon's creation and did not exist before 1952.

It was then, to create Penn Center, that the city began demolishing the "Chinese Wall," the nickname of the massive, sooty stone viaduct, 16 tracks wide, that carried the Pennsylvania Railroad into the old Broad Street Station. The wall essentially divided Center City, north from south, from City Hall to the Schuylkill.

"I think Ed would have liked not only to have the marker, but he would have liked the selection of the site for the marker as well," Rendell said.