Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City

Introduction: Revisiting Edmund Bacon’s Vision for the City

Introduction: Revisiting Edmund Bacon’s Vision for the City When Philadelphia’s iconoclastic City Planning Commission director Edmund Bacon looked into his crystal ball in 1959—imagining his city fifty years in the future—he saw a remarkable vision, Philadelphia transformed into ‘‘an unmatched expression of the vitality of American technology and culture.’’ In that year, Bacon painted a word picture in an essay for Greater Philadelphia Magazine, ‘‘Tomorrow: A Fair Can Pace It,’’ originally titled ‘‘Philadelphia in the Year 2009.’’1 He saw a vision of a city remade in time to host the 1976 Philadelphia World’s Fair—an event that would necessarily take place alongside the national Bicentennial celebration of that year. Basing his optimism on the success of the Better Philadelphia Exhibition of 1947 and his knowledge of previous world’s fairs, he was undertaking one of the great sales pitches of his long career: the Bicentennial and a Philadelphia World’s Fair as catalysts for a golden age of urban renewal in a major American city. What Bacon did not predict was that Philadelphia was about to enter a long, bitter period of economic decline, population dispersal to the suburbs, and racial confrontation and violence, and that by 1976 the nation would be far less inclined than usual to celebrate, with the memories of Watergate and Vietnam still fresh. As such, Bacon’s ‘‘2009’’ essay comes to us as a time capsule, a message from one of the city’s most influential and controversial shapers, opening the way to discussions of what might have been and how certain pieces of Bacon’s vision have in fact materialized in the intervening half century. ‘‘Philadelphia in the Year 2009’’ opens with a brief history lesson, a paean to the long-lasting genius of Quaker founder William Penn’s grid design for the city. Then Bacon delivers us to the city of the future, the Philadelphia he predicts can and must rise from a post-Depression, postwar inertia—from the old industrial city. Among the many projects he describes in the essay are Washington Square East, ‘‘buttressed by a continuous band of good housing extending from the Delaware to the Schuylkill River,’’ and the Delaware River Marina, ‘‘a magnet for visitors . . . the point of departure for the launches that take visitors to the Navy Figure 1. Map of Philadelphia by Thomas Holme and William Penn, 1683. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. Figure 2. Map of proposed 1976 Philadelphia World’s Fair Grounds, Philadelphia City Planning Commission, 1964. Courtesy of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. 4 Introduction Yard for trips through aircraft carriers and cruisers, and a stop at Old Fort Mifflin.’’ Chestnut Street will be barred to automobile traffic, allowing ‘‘open-sided electric cars’’ to traverse this ‘‘Midway . . . [where] stores have removed their front windows and carry on outdoor activities, loggia-like half in and half out of the building.’’ The east bank of the Schuylkill River is redeveloped, as is the area north of the Spring Garden Bridge, for world’s fair buildings. Underground streets must be built to serve the parking terminal at Broad Street, with a moving sidewalk, and the East Market Center will ‘‘amalgamate the Pennsylvania and Reading commuter railroads into one system’’—a project that ‘‘involves the rebuilding of much of the north side of Market Street.’’ At the regional level, we can expect a metropolitan transportation authority that will integrate rail, subway, and bus lines, and an expressway system. Heliports must be built on both rivers. Factories must be ‘‘well kept and in good surroundings. Industrial Parks have become both a name and a fact.’’ Last, in the area of housing, Bacon sees a rehabilitation of home values down deep into South Philadelphia, while Temple University anchors a revitalized North Philadelphia, just as the ‘‘University of Pennsylvania and Drexel Institute of Technology are helping to create a university atmosphere in residential sections of West Philadelphia.’’ Bacon predicts the victory of the well-built brick row house over the ‘‘newer but less well built suburbs just over the city line.’’ In fact, he sees suburbanization leveling off and the morale of Philadelphians rising in every neighborhood: ‘‘By the year 2009 no part of Philadelphia is ugly or depressed.’’ At the broadest level, he advocates land-use planning that will preserve ‘‘Open Country’’ districts beyond the city limits, with regional parks...