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Chapter Five Philadelphia in the Year 2059 Harris M. Steinberg Philadelphia: A New Hope, from Broad Strokes to Choke Holds For nearly 300 years, Philadelphia had a brilliant run. From its founding in 1682 by William Penn as a proprietary colonial capital through the heady, federally funded urban renewal days at the end of World War II, Philadelphia was often at the forefront of national and international trends in city planning, public works, technology, industry, and the applied arts. Straddled by two great rivers, the Delaware and the Schuylkill, Philadelphia’s rise to prominence was fueled by the confluence of ideals, leadership, natural resources, and location. Powering America’s ascendancy as the ‘‘workshop of the world’’ from the end of the Civil War to the dawn of the Cold War, a prosperous and expanding Philadelphia was at the epicenter of the American experiment .1 At the beginning of the new millennium, the city was fighting bankruptcy , its factories were shuttered, and great swaths had succumbed to blight. Disinvestment that had begun decades earlier was reaching crisis proportions.2 Overcome by autocentric suburbanization, high taxes, white flight, failing schools, and poor city services, the middle class was gone to greener, suburban pastures, and the city was left a hollowed-out and vacant postindustrial core. This extraordinary sweep of urban history is best embodied by two city planners standing at opposite ends of three centuries marked by invention , expansion, growth, and contraction. At the beginning stands William Penn, a questioning aristocrat, an egalitarian who converted to Quakerism and imbued his young colony, granted by King Charles II of England for a debt owed his father, with bedrock values of tolerance, patience, pragmatism, and mediation. Pennsylvania, along with her principal city of Philadelphia, was an Enlightenment-era religious experiment and a significant real-estate undertaking—paving the way for cul- Philadelphia in the Year 2059 113 ture and commerce to coexist and flourish along the banks of the Delaware River.3 At the end of this period stands Edmund Bacon, a charismatic and willful urban planner who imparted a late twentieth-century modernist order on Philadelphia. Dismantling the messy remnants of the city’s great industrial age with federal urban renewal funds and state-granted condemnation privileges, Bacon aimed, as the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, to position Philadelphia as a ‘‘prestige’’ city at the dawn of the Cold War.4 His planning concepts were abstract and formal, not value-based like William Penn’s. Bacon’s ideas were shaped by the imperial processions of Beijing’s Forbidden City, the works of Pope Sixtus V in Rome, and the Paris of Baron George Haussmann .5 These were men who remade their cities through slum clearances and the creation of grand, baroque axial lines of power and privilege. Between Penn and Bacon are intellectual, artistic, and entrepreneurial leaders who fostered Penn’s legacy. These are the people who built Philadelphia. They are the giants of city planning and design upon whose shoulders we stand today as we struggle to revive her at the dawning of the twenty-first century. Penn’s vision for Philadelphia balanced the concept of protecting the public good with private gain. His 1682 city plan, first published in 1683 to market the colony in London, was a simple Cartesian grid of streets stretching from the Delaware to the Schuylkill River and framing five, generous public squares. It privileged no single person; in essence, it was the nonhierarchical design of a Quaker meeting house on a city scale. What Penn called his ‘‘greene country town’’ was laid out by his surveyor general Thomas Holme to reflect the highest safety and public-health standards of the day. With lessons learned from the 1666 Great Fire of London, Penn created ample-sized city lots that were originally intended to be four acres in size for light, air, fire protection, and orchards, with the brick London townhouse serving as the standard for fireproof construction . Penn bordered the north and west of his city with verdant liberty lands, a green belt around the city in which ‘‘First Purchasers’’ received land both outside the city proper and a city lot. This established the precedent for the city’s incomparable park system and started Philadelphia on a trajectory of national and international leadership in the integration of the natural and the manmade. Most notably, his five squares, modeled on the ‘‘Moore-fields’’ in London, were leading-edge public spaces in an era...

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