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W  8 Things We Shoul d Fight For [ 1945–1968 ] With the end of World War II, America’s postwar economy took off just as it had done following the Civil War eighty years earlier. The automobile whisked people out to Americans’ presumed suburban dream: a house and lawn on one’s own piece of land. Americans still worked downtown, but increasingly they commuted there from somewhere else. “The old town has become a mere stopping-place for commuters,” wrote a Philadelphia architecture critic in 1953, “a place to traffic in and get out of.” As for Rittenhouse Square, it was “habited only by sitters in the sun and those melancholy young men who lead dogs on their matutinal walks.”1 In Philadelphia the newly created City Planning Commission went right to work, with plans to demolish the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station . The infamous “Chinese wall” along west Market Street was to be replaced by a maze of boxlike modern high-rise office buildings seated atop a submerged The Perfect Square [ 132 Suburban Station, so commuters could travel to work and home without even glimpsing the city outside. Rittenhouse Square had seen better days. Very little had been done since its 1913 remake. Fairmount Park, with some money from the Rittenhouse Square Improvement Association, did its best to maintain the Square, but in any case city parks occupied a low priority in the municipal budget. Around the Square, buildings were going commercial. The Pennsylvania Athletic Club’s high-rise on Eighteenth Street was now an office building occupied by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. (The club itself had moved up Eighteenth Street to the old Van Rensselaer mansion on the corner of Walnut.) Commercial offices had invaded the Wellington on Walnut. The twin-towered Rittenhouse Plaza Apartments on Walnut Street were about to be sold to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for offices. No one living on or near Rittenhouse Square could be certain where commercial development would spread from there, but the Square area seemed a likely candidate. To many residents in June 1950, “the Square was doomed to become a commercial center,” one of them later recalled.2 So in 1950, when a development firm called Underground Garages, Inc., made a proposal to build a parking garage beneath Rittenhouse Square, it might have signaled the beginning of the end of the Square as Philadelphians had known it for the past century. Instead, the garage crisis became the rallying point for a new civic organization and indeed a revived vision of urban life (Figure 8.1). Like the Rittenhouse Square Improvement Association a generation earlier, a new organization was inspired by a Philadelphian’s dismay upon returning from abroad. When Clark Hanna came home from World War II, he was appalled at the condition of his old neighborhood and organized an informal residents’ group that pressed the city for improved upkeep of the Square. This group formed the nucleus of a September 1946 meeting at which nearly three hundred neighbors jammed into the Art Alliance to create the Center City Residents Association (CCRA), a formal organization for residents living between Broad Street and the Schuylkill River.3 Things We Should Fight For [1945–1968] [ 133 The association’s first president was Walter Hudson, resident manager of the Embassy Apartments on Walnut Street.4 Unlike an earlier generation of neighborhood leaders, Hudson harbored no sentimental attachment to the status quo. Instead he sought to influence the area’s inevitable business transition in the direction of arts and culture rather than industry and commerce. One of CCRA’s early brochures promoted the notion that “there’s more to Center City than Rittenhouse Square.” “One tie that links the whole area,” Hudson argued, “is a common interest in the things that are distinctively a part of city life—music, the theater, lectures, the libraries, the museums. Call it culture, for lack of a better word. And, of course, ■ Figure 8.1 The 1950 plan for the underground garage that would galvanize the residents into a strong civic organization. (Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.) The Perfect Square [ 134 the shops and the general air of activity.”5 This “activity,” Hudson contended, allowed Center City “to hold to its personality despite the crumbling of ancient mansions, the steady march of commerce and outward change in the social status of its population.”6 Still, CCRA galvanized only modest support until the underground garage proposal surfaced. Rumors of the garage first reached...

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