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City planning, Ed Bacon & family, Love Park & more

A TRIBUTE TO RUTH AND ED BACON: 4:00 pm Sunday April 6th at the Community Education Center, 3500 Lancaster Avenue.

When and where did city planner Ed Bacon first see his great vista? Was it as a 6-year old as he walked from his Powelton home at 3603 Baring St. to the Friends School at 35th & Lancaster? At the time, Lancaster Ave. continued all the way to Market Street, as did Woodland Ave., great urban radials that "brought the city to market." Or was it later, while attending college at Cornell, or in Michigan at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he studied with Saarinen, his "master and teacher", or still later when he bicycled from London to Rome en route to China...?

Gregory Heller can probably help us here. He's the Executive Director of the Ed Bacon Foundation and hard at work on a biography of Bacon, due to be published late next year. The book should tell us loads about Bacon the planner (often compared to New York City's brash Robert Moses) but also a lot about Bacon the boy (recall the elderly "boy" who in 1992 precariously skateboarded in Love Park, violating a City ban).

Renowned for the development of Penn Center, Bacon must have been touched, if not pleasantly baffled, by the popularity of Love Park as the unplanned Mecca for skateboarding, attracting boarders from all over the world who brought zest and radial flips to an otherwise static urban center. Many have argued that the resulting damage to the park was a small price to pay (essentially a maintenance fee) for such a windfall, international destination. Today at Love Park a historical marker salutes Ed Bacon and his work, while the ban on skateboarding remains.

What's special about Bacon, as devoted students have pointed out (Steve Hammell and others), is the mix of influences that converge in the planner's work. Bacon was greatly influenced by the redesign of medieval Rome, as envisioned by Pope Sixtus V in the 16th century. Much of Bacon's book, Design of Cities (Penguin, 1976) is devoted to things, movement and space. Medieval Rome needed those new obelisks, argues Bacon, as points of reference, coordinates.... As we walk through and discover a great city, let's not let fountains get in the way — stay focused, hold high the big picture! But Bacon is equally inspired and informed by the micro, delicate planning of John Nash in 19th century London (much of it later undone by the reckless proliferation of high-rises; see Bacon's chapter, "The Tragedy of London") and the Norrmalm towers of Stockholm which complement existing historical buildings. Fast forward to Society Hill, where Bacon brings in the bulldozers & architect I.M. Pei for his own famed towers, while creating the conditions for the incremental restoration and renewal of the surrounding, low-density blocks of historic homes.

Back to Powelton; The Community Education Center, at 35th & Lancaster, is not just the former Friends School that Bacon attended (circa 1915-18); it's also where his wife Ruth, in the early 1970s, nurtured hundreds of children and child counselors. Later, in 1984, the Powelton community hosted Ed & Ruth for the premiere of Bacon's film series, Understanding Cities. Randy Dalton, a CEC Board member and most dedicated volunteer, remembers them fondly, especially Ruth. A few years ago he arranged for a memorial bench to commemorate her work. On Sunday, April 6th at 4 p.m., a second stone bench will be dedicated to Ed Bacon. Daughter Hilda Bacon will be on hand as will Greg Heller. Dock Street's Rosemarie Certo will also be there, serving complimentary pilsner. When asked to cosponsor the event, she was pleased, recalling that Ed Bacon was one of the inaugural keg tappers when the Dock Street Brewery opened its 18th & Cherry brewer in 1990. Another co-sponsor, the Philadelphia Wine Company, will offer both "Ed Bacon" and "not a dud in the bunch" chardonnay, the latter celebrating Ed Bacon's remark about their six children.

Bring home the Bacons....

Actor Kevin and composer Michael Bacon will also be in town on Friday April 4th when they perform at Annenberg's Zellerbach Theater that evening {attention students: there're discount tickets for the 9:30 performance}. The event's a fundraiser for Bancroft NeuroHealth of South Jersey, an organization that works to help children & adults with disabilities. Hilda Bacon does their development & fundraising. Elinor Bacon, an urban planner by training, is now a real estate developer working on mixed-use projects in D.C., Ithaca, NY and elsewhere. The two other Bacon sisters, equally accomplished, are Karin, a New York-based events planner and Kira, an artist producing hand-hooked textiles (for more, visit their sites: karinbaconevents.com and kbofiberart.com). I had the pleasure of meeting all of the Bacon clan following a memorial for Ed Bacon at Friends Center in late October '05. The Bacon row house at 2117 Locust couldn't have been more packed, much the opposite from the way it looked in 1986 when my 7-year old son and I bicycled by. We had just seen the film Quicksilver, starring Kevin Bacon as a dropout stockbroker turned bike messenger (not the strongest screenwriting, but a fine glimpse into big city messengering and its extended bicycle culture). Afterwards, I biked over to Locust Street with Tim on the crossbar and pointed out the house where Kevin had grown up, just as the actor's father popped out the door.

We all have our memories of Ed Bacon — the crusty old soul and confirmed "cantankerous" (captured splendidly in the film, My Architect). I remember him especially in his later years as he often sauntered alone in Center City, his left eye seemingly at half-mast. He was clearly worn down. He had tried — unsuccessfully — to keep the height of Center City buildings no higher than City Hall tower, and felt betrayed when his friend Willard Rouse built the much taller Liberty Place. I spoke with him briefly at the first Car-Free Cities conference, held in New York in May of '91. He was exceptionally withdrawn, obviously still mourning the loss of Ruth. He later joined us on one of the first, current boat tours of the Schuylkill River, and on a walking tour of Powelton Village — visiting his birthplace at 3603 Baring. Prior to a talk he gave at the White Dog, I asked him if he wouldn't mind a little criticism. "Oh, I love my critics," he said, with a hand on my shoulder. I later pointed out that Mayor Dilworth, toward the end of his life, had lamented having allowed the Schuylkill Expressway to cut through Fairmount Park, a development facilitated on Bacon's watch. "Not so!" said Bacon, wringing his hands and twisting on his stool, "It was a carefully planned highway and greatly needed by the region...where'd you hear such a thing?"

Years earlier (1985) I had the pleasure of meeting author Jane Jacobs in Toronto during a conference on urban bicycling. When she learned that I was from Philadelphia, she asked about Ed Bacon. I gave her an update (on his films, awards, family...). She recalled with a wry smile how friends had demonstrated against him ("Fry Bacon," read the signs) back when Bacon tried to build an expressway along South Street (essentially a planned duplicate of the Vine St. Exp.), a project — like Robert Moses' lower Manhattan Expressway — that got stopped by popular demand. When I relayed her kind regards to him, he seemed puzzled. "I didn't know she was like that," said Bacon.

The architecture critic Paul Goldberger has described Bacon's work as a mixture of "the bulldoze-and-rebuild philosophy of urban renewal with the tentative beginnings of the historic preservation movement." The operative word here is tentative. Recall that when Mayor Dilworth built his now-famous house on Washington Square, he didn't consider saving and restoring the historic house that was already there. Similarly, in Powelton in the late 1950s, a new Powel School was being planned for the northeast corner of 36th & Powelton — the site of the huge, Victorian "Scattergood Mansion." I once asked Bob Folwell, a city planner who had worked for Bacon, why no effort was made to restore and reuse the mansion as a school. "That kind of idea," said Folwell, "just wasn't around back then."

And so we learn, grow and develop, and learn again.... "Admire Bacon," says architect David S. Traub, "but don't worship him!" Could the south-of-Market portion of Mole Street have been preserved and incorporated into Bacon's Penn Center? That's a question I didn't get to ask that night at the White Dog. But the question still resonates today as new developments challenge residents citywide. Will the 1900 block of Moravian Street, for example, be saved and incorporated in the Castleway plans for a new high-rise and retail complex? Will at least one of the few remaining historic buildings in the path of the expanding Convention Center be preserved and embraced by the otherwise unmitigated mass of the Center's Broad and Race Street facades?

Clearly, Philadelphia has plenty of "raw material", plenty of candidate-projects for design competitions. The Ed Bacon Foundation has sponsored several and will hold another competition in 2008. The deadline is mid-September with a cash prize of about $6000 (info@edbacon.org). Will UPenn's Locust Walk be eventually extended over the Schuylkill, connecting the campus with Center City with an exclusive bicycle-pedestrian bridge? Could that dark tunnel in front of the Art Museum be redesigned for more and newer users, complete with glass block skylight? Graduates of urban design, go for it!

A toast finally, to the Edmund N. Bacon who gave us block after block of a preserved Society Hill — complete with magnificent, mature trees — and to the 92-year old boy who supported skateboarding in Love Park. If we're to have a future monument to Bacon, in Society Hill or perhaps in front of his Center City home, how about simply 5 letters on a pedestal: Ba above the letters con, with the letter a slightly tilted, as in love....

A CEC salute to Ed & Ruth Bacon, Sunday, April 6 at 4pm; 35th & Lancaster Ave. Bench dedication with daughter Hilda Bacon followed by country blues music (Citywide Special) and refreshments (Powelton Pizza and Dock Street's pilsner). Suggested donation: $10. Even cosponsors: The Community Education Center, Dock Street Brewery, The Ed Bacon Foundation and Save Our Sites. For more information, call: 215 779-4566 or 990-7832.