Press
April 2006
Ed Bacon's Legacy
The story of a Philadelphia planner.
By John Bauman
Last October 14, Ed Bacon died quietly at his Locust Street home. He was 95.
Described at times as visionary and at others as autocratic, Bacon had a profound impact on the form of his native city. So strong was that impact that admirers and critics alike rank him with Robert Moses, Daniel Burnham, Georges-Eugene Haussmann, even 16th century Pope Sixtus V, as an individual whose imprint indelibly affected the fabric of his city.
My interest in Bacon goes way back. I grew up in a changing Philadelphia and later, as a historian, studied his work. I interviewed him at his home in 1983 and met him again at the Society for City and Regional Planning History's 2001 meeting in Philadelphia.
Making of a legend
Ed Bacon was born in 1910 to a Quaker family that traced its roots in America to William Penn's arrival in 1682. After his 1932 graduation from Cornell University, with a degree in architecture, he used a small inheritance to travel around Europe and points east — eventually landing in China and finding architectural work in Shanghai, then in the midst of a building boom. At the Forbidden City in Beijing, he wrote later, he discovered "a continuum of memorable sensory experiences" that left him permanently changed.
Back in Philadelphia, Bacon worked briefly for the architects Pope Barney and Oscar Stonorov, and in 1937 won a scholarship to study under Eliel Saarinen at the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit. Saarinen blended the arts and crafts style with functionalism, and stressed the importance of what we now call contextual design. He got his young disciple a job overseeing a Works Progress Administration traffic study in Flint.
That job led to work with Flint's Citizens Housing Council, where Bacon's political skills and tenacity soon became apparent. He helped the city win a $3.5 million public housing grant from the U.S. Housing Administration, a huge amount for the time. But he was soon in trouble, accused of being a "commie." He was fired in 1939.
His first job back in Depression-scarred Philadelphia was for Walter Phillips, a Princeton-educated lawyer whose mission was to transform the city's political power structure. He engaged Bacon and Stonorov, an unabashed modernist, to design a house in the Torresdale section of Philadelphia. That was followed by a job with the Philadelphia Housing Association.
Young Turks
Bacon became part of a group of "young Turks" that included Phillips and Stonorov, G. Holmes Perkins, Joseph Clark, and Richardson Dilworth. It succeeded in mobilizing public opinion in favor of an ordinance creating a new city planning commission to replace the nearly moribund body founded in 1911. The ordinance was approved in 1942, a year before Bacon enlisted in the Navy.
Even in the Pacific, Bacon continued to work on behalf of planning, which he and others considered a fairly noncontroversial way of bringing about urban reform. He corresponded with Stonorov about a proposal for a "Better Philadelphia Exhibit" that would be modeled after Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
The Philadelphia model finally unveiled in 1947 at Gimbel's Department Store was a flashy exhibit that vividly contrasted the grimy industrial city of the past with the glittering modern Philadelphia of 1980. It incorporated Bacon's vision of greenways in Society Hill and a mall fronting Independence Hall. Visited by thousands of Philadelphians, young and old, the exhibit, as Bacon and Stonorov had hoped, made planning the centerpiece of urban reform.
Two years later, Bacon became executive director of the revamped planning commission, a position he held until 1970. In 1951, a new city charter was approved and a year later Joseph Clark, now a key reformer, was elected mayor. The new charter empowered the commission to produce an annual capital improvement budget, giving Bacon a greater voice in the future development of the city.
The power of an idea
Bacon's planning and urban design philosophy had already been formulated by this time, honed by his travels in Europe and Asia, and his experiences at Cranbrook and Flint.
Central to that philosophy was his oft-cited belief in the power of a compelling design concept. His examples were drawn from history: William Penn's idea for Philadelphia of five green spaces on the flat plane between two rivers; James Edward Oglethorpe's orderly arrangement of open spaces in Savannah; Sixtus V's powerful use of obelisks in the 1585 baroque redesign of Rome; Haussmann's wide avenues in 19th century Paris. All the examples suggest the power of a singular idea to inspire a consensus that will direct future development.
For Bacon, the planner's role was to come up with the design idea, then to step back and inspire others to adopt the idea as their own. Public opinion, fiscal constraints, and technology would dictate the ultimate form of the design. Although critics sometimes compare Bacon to New York's planning czar, Robert Moses, his approach, which used persuasion to stimulate the public imagination, was far more democratic.
Bacon's views should also be distinguished from those of the International Style modernists such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Louis Kahn. Unlike them, he was sensitive to historical memory as the force giving ultimate direction to urban design. In Philadelphia, that meant recognizing the value of Penn's Central Square; the siting of the baroque city hall at the axis of two great avenues; and the significance of landmarks like Independence Hall and 18th and early 19th century neighborhoods like Society Hill.
As a student of Saarinen, Bacon's sympathies lay more with the work of architects like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, who incorporated ornamentation and symbolism in their designs. He deplored the Corbusian style of blanket slum clearance to make way for "towers in the park."
Still, he never fully repudiated modernism, and he believed that comprehensiveness and efficiency should guide the physical development of cities. He disdained the mottled urban land-use patterns and general disorderliness of the old mixed use neighborhoods left over from the industrial era and had little sentimental attachment to the corner taverns, odiferous stables, and coal yards that some preservationists later would view as quaint.
As a rationalist, he believed that order equaled beauty, and sometimes that order might even include a formal arrangement of Corbusian towers, as in Philadelphia's Triangle renewal area adjoining the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Indeed, Bacon worked closely with Stonorov, Kahn, I. M. Pei, and other modernists, and his 1963 plan for Center City Philadelphia and his Market Street East design were clearly of their time.
In the end, Philadelphia's central city landscape reflected both Bacon's modernist tendencies and his historical sensibilities. On one hand, thousands of buildings were sacrificed during his tenure, including many attractive Victorian piles. At the same time, he pushed hard for revitalization, as opposed to clearance, of the central city, including the African American row house neighborhoods surrounding the downtown. By 1957, these "gray areas" were slated for "conservation," meaning spot clearance, rehabilitation, and scattered site public housing. Alas, his wish remained unfulfilled, and today, most of the areas remain gray.
Four successes
Bacon's principal legacy was embodied in four areas: Penn Center, Society Hill, Market Street East, and the Far Northeast.
In 1953, after years of promising to do so, the Pennsylvania Railroad finally announced that it would demolish its Broad Street Station and the gargantuan "Chinese Wall" adjoining it. With no particular authority, Bacon seized the opportunity to design a replacement, Penn Center: three office towers linked to city hall and the Market Street corridor by a submerged esplanade, gardens, and shops.
At a luncheon sponsored by the chamber of commerce and the Citizens Council on City Planning, Bacon touted Penn Center as signaling both the revival of Philadelphia's commercial life and the advent of a modern "movement system" — a multilevel transportation network accommodating pedestrian, commuter rail, and subway traffic. For him, Penn Center, although not built exactly to his design vision, set the direction for the future revitalization of the city.
The complex punctuated one end of an axis that terminated at the Delaware River, adjacent to Society Hill. There Bacon imagined a cleaned-up 18th century neighborhood graced with greenways, winding footpaths, and small parks. In 1956, under another reform mayor, Richardson Dilworth, the city took advantage of the federal Housing Act of 1954 to make Society Hill an urban renewal area. The mayor himself became one of the first pioneers to move into the neighborhood.
Ultimately, Society Hill's fabric of greenways and historic buildings would be complemented by plans for a waterfront park, a marina, and key segments of Bacon's movement system, including the Delaware Expressway (I-95), parking garages, and the Market Street East project.
Market Street East, part of the 1963 Center City plan, combined pathways and mass transit with commercial revitalization. Its seven-block-long commercial complex, Gallery I and Gallery II, aligned along the historic Delaware River-city hall axis, featured multilevel shopping, office, hotel, and transportation functions, including access to commuter rail, subway, trolley, and bus lines, and to automobile parking.
In 1966, Bacon lured James Rouse to manage the Gallery complex, which transformed the shabby Market Street area into a thriving shopping district. Spinoffs included the transformation of the old Reading Terminal into a marketplace and the creation of a hotel in the streamlined Philadelphia Savings Fund Society tower. The city converted the terminal's dilapidated train sheds into a convention center.
Like many other cities, Philadelphia lost many affordable housing units to urban renewal. But mindful of the experience of other cities, and of Philadelphia's history as well, Bacon took pains to preserve neighborhoods and to scatter small-scale affordable housing units around the city. Alas, the pace of deindustrialization and suburban flight overwhelmed the powers even of a Bacon to stem the tide of poverty and neighborhood decay that degraded urban life in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Blemishes and all
His critics charged Bacon with being arrogant and autocratic, and accused him of recklessly demolishing historic housing stock and, in Society Hill, of favoring the rich over the poor. His 1963 plan for an expressway loop surrounding the downtown, which would have uprooted bustling South Street, inflamed architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Bacon dropped that idea.
In his later years, a sometimes cantankerous Bacon complained that his ideas were no longer taken seriously. In 1980, he lost a battle with Baltimore developer Willard Rouse over the great height of the Liberty Center office tower, the first building in the city to rise above city hall and the buckles on William Penn's shoes. In 1996, he excoriated the National Park Service for its plans to make Independence Mall more tourist-friendly by destroying Bacon's formal tree-lined allées. He lost that one, too.
In 2002, a 92-year-old Bacon mounted a skateboard to express his defiance of Mayor John Street's new rules for Love Park, which banned the sport. As a Cornell student, Bacon had conceived of a park at that location to complete Jacques Greber's 1917 design for Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
Today, however, even as Liberty Center dominates the skyline, Bacon's legacy remains strong, blemishes and all. Students all over the world know him for his 1967 book, Design of Cities. And a rejuvenated Central City Philadelphia has become a popular convention destination, a mecca for tourists, and a residential destination for suburbanites. All that is a tribute to the power of Bacon's idea.
John Bauman is a visiting research professor of community planning and development at the MuskieSchool of the University of Southern Maine in Portland.
More thoughts. To share anecdotes and memories of Ed Bacon, write to websiteeditor@planning.org.
Ed Bacon Foundation. More information about Ed Bacon may be found at www.edbacon.org.
Images: This photo of Ed Bacon at Centre Square accompanied the announcement of his designation as an AICP planning pioneer in the March 1993 issue of Planning.
Shanghai, Ithaca, and the Movies
By Porus Olpadwala
In 1985 I was director of Cornell's Program in International Studies in Planning. Professor Hou Ren Zhi, one of China's foremost geographers, had invited a delegation from the university to consult on historic preservation planning in Beijing.
Professor Hou telexed me to say that vice premier Wan Li had directed us to include alumnus Ed Bacon. A former mayor of Beijing, Wan Li was a fan of Ed and his work. (He was also George H.W. Bush's tennis partner in the mid 1970s when the future 41st president headed the U.S. Liaison Office in China.)
I knew that Bacon had been in China because of the chapter on Beijing in Design of Cities. He worked in Shanghai for a couple of years after his graduation from Cornell in 1932. His employer was the American architect Henry Murphy, who designed the campus of Qinghua University in Shanghai and the Harvard-Yenching campus, later incorporated into Peking (Beijing) University.
But when I phoned Ed to invite him to join our delegation, he refused in no uncertain terms. He had sworn never to return to China after the "awful Communists" destroyed the beautiful country that he had known and loved. The gravelly, forceful voice at the other end of the line went on at length. I reported his demurral to Professor Hou, who urged me to tell Ed how much the vice premier wanted to meet him. And when I called Ed back to implore him to do this for his love of China and the old school tie, he finally agreed.
We met up at Tokyo's Narita airport. Ed was already 75 years old, but he was still tall, lean, and ramrod straight, with a good head of fluffy white hair. An overhung brow and a slightly lazy eyelid, which gave him the piercing gaze of a hawk or eagle, together with his strong jaw, made him a presence to contend with, even before his booming voice came into play. He also turned out to have the energy of the youngest among us.
We were exceptionally well looked after by the most senior officials. And one muggy August afternoon, we were invited to meet the vice premier at the Forbidden City.
Wan Li received us in the reception room made familiar by scores of photos of Chairman Mao with visiting dignitaries. To our surprise, he spent most of the time complaining about the horrendous traffic jams caused by Beijing's bicycles and expressing his hope of replacing the bikes with cars. Ed led us in spirited opposition to this idea, but Wan Li was not to be moved. It may have been one of the few times that Ed was bested in argument.
Given Ed's initial reaction to this trip, I had prepared myself for more anti-Communist diatribes. Instead, he became increasingly positive as the trip progressed.
Our work had us crisscrossing Beijing from early morning until late night for eight straight days. Ed remarked upon the improvements in infrastructure, hygiene, and general orderliness, compared to the deprivation he had known 50 years earlier.
With the glaring exception of the Ming city wall around Beijing, an attempt had been made to preserve antiquities in the best way that a poor country could, although the quality of restoration at some sites was not high. "Oh my, oh my," Ed would say at such times, and go on to tell us what impressed him.
He commented more than once that the city was so much greener. He recalled a slow and dusty bus trip from Shanghai to Beijing across the treeless North China Plain. The city that emerged seemed to be in the midst of a desert, he said. Now there were trees everywhere.
He also was struck by the change in the way ordinary people were treated. He recalled Saturday excursions on the Huangpu River with his office colleagues, when servants rowed, cooked, served, and cleaned as Ed and his mates lounged on deck with companions from what today would be called escort services. On this trip, our drivers ate with us, even in the most expensive restaurants.
Soon after our return, I invited Ed to Cornell to lecture on the China experience. Instead, he talked about planning in U.S. cities, particularly his work in Philadelphia. I found out later that the switch was not unusual, and, worse, that he had given essentially the same talk in our college the year before.
During question time, Ed was asked for his impression of China. His answer: The awful Communists had spoiled everything.
Movie review
I kept in sporadic touch with Ed after our trip and saw him a number of times. On one occasion a couple of years ago, my wife and I were in Philadelphia for a long weekend and decided to see My Architect, the documentary made by the son of the great Philadelphia designer Louis Kahn.
It turned out that of all his father's contemporaries Nathaniel Kahn interviewed in the film, Ed's is the only critical voice. At one point, he tries to explain why he rejected Lou's designs for Philadelphia's renewal. Growing more exasperated by the minute by Nathaniel's questions, Ed finally says something like "your father did not get it then and neither do you now."
The next morning, I called Ed to see whether he had time to meet us. He walked into the hotel lobby an hour later, dapper as usual in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, but using a rolling walker. He was distinctly more frail, his step unsteady, yet his spirit was unchecked. Mentioning the movie was enough to start a harangue. He repeated almost verbatim everything he had said in the film.
We went on to the Penn Campus. He had not been there for a long time, he said, and stopped every few paces to comment on the area, pre- and post-Ed. We collected a shifting entourage of students as we walked, and more gathered in clumps to clog the walkways when he paused to offer more opinions.
Stopping to see the new Wharton business school building, Ed was not impressed by its outward appearance and grumbled copiously about the large internal spaces (all this has to be heated and cooled). He was more appreciative of the smaller breakout spaces and an interior garden, and quite amazed by the creature comforts we lavish on our students these days.
We drove Ed home to Locust Street, and I took his walker out of the trunk. He declined my offer to see him to his door, and we left him on the street outside his house in the late afternoon sun. I stood outside the car until he crossed safely, and then drove away. That meeting was to be our last one.
Porus Olpadwala is a professor of city and regional planning at CornellUniversity. He is the former dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.
Travels with Ed
By James Pratt
My memories of Ed Bacon go back to a Saturday morning in 1959, when I found myself in his office, sent by Oskar Stonorov. I was looking for a speaker on planning for my own city, Dallas, and I was aware of Bacon's highly successful post-World War II exhibition, which had created a new vision for central Philadelphia.
His office floor and couch were strewn with pairs of mockup pages for Design of Cities. He said he could communicate his ideas better if he related visual ideas across facing pages.
Later, we were in Washington when the design of Pennsylvania Avenue was a hot topic. One morning, we walked the avenue's entire length, beginning on the Capitol terrace. But first he marveled at what he called that great "thrust of space," the Mall.
We examined the intersections of each crossing, debating ideas for sharpening their clarity and dominance over side streets. We passed the White House and Lafayette Park, never stopping until, hours later, we found ourselves in Georgetown as daylight played out.
Another time, in the mid-1960s in Philadelphia, he walked me past Society Hill's new town houses, pleased with their transition between the 18th century buildings and the new high rises. Once we lunched at the top of one of the Penn Center buildings, overlooking Bacon's spaces around city hall. Back on the ground, he showed me proudly where he had brought daylight down to the subway.
In 1966, he invited me to his symposium, "The City as a Work of Art," at the American Academy in Rome. After the sessions, we careened down the Janiculo to reexamine the city's piazzas. Excursions took us as far as Urbino, passing through the Abruzzi to experience the arcaded medieval town square at Ascoli Piceno. In Tivoli, we debated the character of civic design over lunch with Steen Eiler Rasmussen and Jurg Spiller.
Over the years, there were visits in Dallas, when Bacon came to see his brother. On one weekend in 1969, he asked for a tour of Texas courthouse squares, and we went looking for "thrusts" and "points demarking space," two of his favorite expressions.
In 1976, he looked at I.M. Pei's 10-acre public space in front of the new Dallas City Hall and declared it too big. "You need to put a building across one end of this one to give the space the right scale," he said. The city's new mayor, a former football player, responded to Bacon's luncheon speech by saying, "I didn't understand a thing he said."
Later, Bacon was invited down to lecture by Dallas cultural mavens, who made him a "fellow" and listed him on their letterhead along with Holly White. But in a subsequent visit in the late '80s, his blunt candor caused the same group to remove his name from the list of the anointed. He probably never knew and certainly did not care.
Never one to pull punches, Bacon in 1990 critiqued a partially finished plaza that I had designed. He pointed out that I had made an important mistake by not spending enough money on containing the edge. He was right.
The last time we met, in 1997, I arranged to spend the day with him in Philadelphia. He walked me from the 32nd Street Station through the post-Bacon additions to Penn Center, where he pointed out the wrong design decisions recently made. At Market East, a new station had brought together the two rail lines, as he had championed, and a convention center had been built just beyond the Reading Terminal Market. A hotel was under construction. All this put visitors as well as commuters in an ideal close relationship to East Market Street and the city center.
He was proud of keeping the Wannamaker and Strawbridge-Clothier department stores from decamping to the suburbs — but other things made him bitter. He was disappointed in the politics of the then mayor and the commission of his city.
Bacon was a sharp, articulate planning voice, an exuberant urbanist. His fascinating depiction of the evolution of city design in Design of Cities was the first effort to chart the rich history of both Eastern and Western settlements. It is still the only such work I know that joins aesthetics with process. As such, it is a lasting guide for designers and a true monument to Bacon's passion and genius.
Time, in its 1964 cover story on Bacon, quoted classmate Charles Eames: "In the '30s everyone at Cranbrook thought the suburbs were going to be wonderful except Ed Bacon, who saw the crisis in city decay approaching." Saarinen, his great master and teacher, emphasized design as the relationship of form and space, causing Bacon to see the real design problem as the city.
"I don't see things the way other people do," he said. "I see everything in terms of vectors and dynamic forces." He responded to the power of a baroque axis with infectious enthusiasm. "Absolutely" and "exactly" became his adverbs of choice.
He thumbed his nose at Raymond Lowey's earlier plan for Penn Center, and he fired Lou Kahn for not thinking big enough. He enlisted architect Vincent Kling to flesh out his ideas. He supported the idea of uniting the Reading and the Pennsylvania railroad stations in Market East, guiding the massive changes to better Philadelphia's core over 30 years.
Ed Bacon was my hero because he represents a generalist tradition, spanning urban design, architecture, art, landscape, and planning. He came of age as a planner before our professions became compartmentalized. He deserves our appreciation.
James Pratt is an architect and urban designer based in Dallas. He is the winner of three national urban design awards
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