Ask most people who lived in Philadelphia during the second half of the twentieth century who was responsible for downtown Philadelphia and they will answer correctly: Edmund Bacon. But when you ask them what he did and how he did it, they usually cannot answer. Ask them about his work outside downtown and even fewer have anything to say. This book, for the first time, provides the answers. This is particularly important because Bacon, like Robert Moses in New York, worked hard at creating a legend that helped him to get things done, but has muddied the waters ever since....

The November 6, 1964, issue ofTimemagazine appeared on the newsstands with a cover featuring a portrait of Edmund N. Bacon—Philadelphia’s chief city planner. Bacon was shown in a dark suit with neatly combed hair, a firm jaw, and steely blue eyes staring determinedly off into space. Behind him was a backdrop of the Society Hill Towers—designed by I. M. Pei and recently under construction—and an image of the faux-colonial “Franklin” street lamps installed as part of the redevelopment of the historic Society Hill neighborhood. It was an intriguing composition, reinforcing the message that Philadelphia had...

Edmund Bacon would become known primarily for his work as planning director in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 1960s. However, Bacon’s first significant experience with planning, urban housing, and public policy came in the 1930s in Flint, Michigan, where he worked for the Flint Institute of Research and Planning, carrying out a traffic study that he parlayed into a larger comprehensive planning and housing reform effort. Bacon’s service in Flint came during a unique period of American history, when cities across the U.S. were starting to see the trends of urban decline and suburban flight that would exacerbate after World...

After leaving Flint, Ed and Ruth Bacon traveled through Europe, Russia, and Palestine, arriving back in Philadelphia in August 1939, just weeks before Hitler would invade Poland, effectively starting World War II. Bacon was unhappy in Philadelphia, viewing his hometown as a corrupt and backward place that he sought to escape as quickly as possible. He applied for jobs all over the East Coast, but finding one was difficult.¹ He also unsuccessfully applied for a scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to finish his work from Flint.² Ruth had a trust fund that helped make ends meet—important...

After World War II, urban leaders across America saw cities in crisis, with declining neighborhoods and infrastructure, new suburbs outside the city drawing white, middle-class families away from the urban core, and the emergence of black ghettos. The federal government under President Harry Truman passed a groundbreaking federal act, providing new instruments and significant funding sources enabling cities to undertake what became known as “urban renewal.”¹ At the same time, semi-suburban parts of cities and areas outside cities saw massive new building in the post-World War II era.² In the early 1950s, Bacon would be involved in both types of...

By the time he became executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission in 1949, Bacon seems to have grasped that the success of city planning depended on bringing together politicians, business people, civic groups, developers, and communities to support a vision of development. Nothing could be achieved without building a team that could carry through that design in all its complexity—and inspiring that team to come together around a shared set of goals.

The process of convincing stakeholders, the media, and the public was the psychological side of the planning process that fascinated Bacon—the way that ideas...

Penn Center was just one component of Philadelphia’s downtown, and in Bacon’s mind he saw projects not as separate entities but as pieces of the same puzzle of an overall approach to reviving Center City. Other important pieces included Society Hill and Market East. Society Hill was one of Philadelphia’s oldest neighborhoods, fallen on hard times. Bacon believed this area could be revived, its historic houses restored, and middle-class residents lured back from the suburbs. Market East was the name given to a major redevelopment project conceived to help an important downtown commercial corridor compete with suburban shopping malls. These...

During Bacon’s tenure as city planning director, much of Philadelphia’s regional highway system was constructed, including the Schuylkill, Roosevelt Boulevard, Vine Street, and Delaware expressways. Another major planned highway, the Crosstown Expressway, was never built. Highway construction accelerated dramatically after the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, under President Dwight Eisenhower. These highway projects were decades in the making, and planning for them began years or even decades before Bacon joined the City Planning Commission. Yet they were largely realized during Bacon’s tenure as planning director. In highway development during the 1950s and 1960s, the Planning Commission’s role...

By the 1960s, the changes to Philadelphia’s urban landscape already had gained considerable attention in the media. An article in theSaturday Evening Post, for example, recounted the civic projects from Penn Center to Society Hill, stating, “Today a visitor to Philadelphia would hardly know the place.”¹Progressive Architecturebestowed two national awards on Philadelphia projects in 1962 for Vincent Kling’s Municipal Services Building and Robert Geddes’s Penn’s Landing Plan.² In November that year, theNew York Timescalled Philadelphia “the city with the best urban redevelopment record to date.”³ In March 1963, Colin D. Buchanan, of the British Ministry...

By the end of the 1960s, Bacon was tired and increasingly finding that he was out of touch with shifting trends both in Philadelphia and in his profession. When he retired from the Philadelphia City Planning Commission in May 1970, cities across the U.S. were entering a period of financial hardship, with a scarcity of federal funding to support any large-scale work. At the same time, the planning profession shifted to a more consensus-based approach, to counter what was seen as top-down planning of the urban renewal era. A series of political corruption scandals erupted in the administration of Mayor...

Edmund N. Bacon passed away on October 14, 2005, at age ninety-five. Obituaries in national publications like theNew York Times, Architectural Record, andMetropolishailed him as one of the most influential planners of the twentieth century. TheNew York Timescalled him “a leading postwar urban planner who remade much of Philadelphia.”¹ Several obituaries included comparisons to Robert Moses, and Bacon was frequently characterized as a “visionary.”² However, when writers tried to pin down exactly what Bacon actuallydid, it became more challenging. InMetropolis, Philadelphia journalist Inga Saffron noted that “some Philadelphians may have been a little...