The Architect of Society Hill

I met Ed Bacon in 1996. His first words were: “How could you have written so well about me without ever talking with me?” He was talking about my book, The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t.

As Philadelphia’s chief planner in its most challenging decades, the ‘50s and ‘60s, Ed was the hero of three chapters of that book. I told him that I had walked in Society Hill during every season of the year, at every time of the day. He said that it was about time we go for a walk together. 

Society Hill is a 120-acre section of downtown Philadelphia, just west of the Delaware River. The Free Society of Traders purchased it not long after William Penn and Thomas Holme established the city plan in 1683. The houses built there were called “Society houses,” thereby providing half the area’s name. Once, as we were walking up Second Street, I asked Ed what accounted for the rest of the name. He looked at me incredulously and said: “Society Hill Towers at the end of the street are at the crest of the hill.” The most obvious explanations are often the best ones.

The city’s produce market had been in the area since the 18th century. At first, proximity to the market was a great asset. But as Philadelphia’s population mushroomed, so did the number of the wharfs, warehouses, and wholesale establishments that became known as the Dock Street Market. By the end of the 19th century, most families who had a choice had moved away from the noise, filth, odors, and early morning traffic.

Despite the presence of 700 Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival row houses, more and more people thought of Society Hill as a slum. The creators of the 1947 Better Philadelphia exhibition, which tackled plans for the future of Philadelphia and was attended by 385,000 people during its two-month run, targeted Society Hill for clearance and redevelopment. But Bacon, at the time a designer for the Philadelphia Planning Commission, believed that the market and the activities that it generated were the reason people had been moving away. By removing the produce market, Society Hill’s historic assets would attract people back to the neighborhood. Rather than simply creating a plan for what had to be removed, Bacon also identified what needed to be preserved: the area’s lovely old brick row houses and landmark structures, such as Independence Hall, which embodies the early American republic.

Bacon additionally proposed a public framework around which Society Hill would be revived. Removing incompatible structures and dilapidated buildings, Bacon observed, would leave gaps in the neighborhood fabric. Instead of filling these holes with new buildings, Bacon proposed linking them together into a network of pedestrian paths that ran through whole blocks. This network of “greenways” would provide shortcuts and tie together the neighborhood.

At the time of the Better Philadelphia exhibition, there was no way to pay for such a massive redevelopment project. Two years later, Congress enacted the urban renewal program, which paid two-thirds of the cost of property acquisition, clearance, site preparation, and losses from the resale of development parcels. But there was still no way to finance new construction or rehabilitation in an area officially designated as a slum, so Bacon’s vision for a revitalized Society Hill stalled.

In 1954, Congress amended the Housing Act to offer federally guaranteed mortgage insurance for banks that lent money for new or rehabilitated housing in urban renewal areas, making Bacon’s plan feasible. Three years later, Society Hill—officially known as the Washington Square East Urban Renewal Project—was approved for federal funds.

When I first came to Philadelphia in the early 1960s, the Dock Street Market had been relocated to south Philadelphia. New residential developments, including the Society Hill Towers and scattered new row houses, were going up in its place. Over the next three decades, I would return again and again. Each time the area was lovelier than before.

Federal renewal funds paid for new granite curbs, brick sidewalks, reproductions of old gas lamps, street trees, and well-maintained small parks. Residents used the money from federally-insured mortgages to finance the rehabilitation of existing row houses. In other places, developers filled in missing teeth with new residential buildings.

Ed and I began our first walk at Independence Mall, turning down an east-west greenway between Market and Arch Streets. Because it was not within the urban renewal area, I had previously ignored it. This greenway provided access to Temple Mikveh Israel and Christ Church. I had known already how much Bacon disagreed with architect Louis Kahn’s approach to urban planning. But now, he expressed his admiration for what Kahn had been trying to achieve in his never-built plan for this synagogue, and his disappointment that an inferior building by another designer had been built on the site.

When we reached the end of the first two blocks, we turned south. We crossed bustling Market Street and passed through an opening that led to Franklin Court, the center of a museum complex celebrating Ben Franklin. As we turned, Ed stopped to explain the processional element of the greenway system: each time a pedestrian comes to a destination, he or she turns 90 degrees and heads for another landmark. Ed had come across this orientation system in China, where there is an ancient belief that by constantly changing direction people can shake off any evil spirits that may be following them.

As we continued, walking past Carpenter’s Hall (1770-74), the 2nd Bank of the United States (1818-24), and other historical structures around Independence Hall, I realized that we still had not entered the Washington Square East Urban Renewal Project Area. More importantly, I saw that Bacon never intended it to be a separate island. From the beginning, the project had been conceived as an integral part of downtown Philadelphia.

Once we were in Society Hill, Ed began talking admiringly of small parks and gardens that had been added during the decades since he had retired from city government. Only then did I understand that the greenway system was intended as a growing network of open space that would continually change as the city evolved, rather than an artifact to be maintained precisely as it appeared when Bacon had completed his work.

Ed does not consider the revitalized Society Hill solely his creation. He had always been eager to accept changes that improved the basic concept. In fact, the realized plan for Society Hill Towers by developer William Zeckendorf and architect I. M. Pei was quite different from what Bacon had proposed in 1947 or in the late 1950s when the city sought proposals for the site.

Bacon’s initial plan consisted of a cluster of mid-rise residential slabs in a green superblock. Later versions attempted to enclose large open areas with mid-rise buildings, extended the site eastward to the Delaware River, and placed taller buildings where they could offer stunning riverfront views. The Zeckendorf-Pei scheme consisted of single-family row houses lining local streets and three towers placed on the crest of the hill in an asymmetrical cluster where they terminated the axes of Locust and Second Streets. Without question, as Bacon emphasized during one of our walks, Pei’s design was superior. The towers provided a beacon visible to residents throughout the neighborhood, to downtown visitors, and to commuters on nearby highways and bridges.

In 2001, Ed agreed to take some of my Yale students on a walk through Society Hill. Like many bright students, they were skeptical of any unproven assertion, whether by Ed, me, or anybody else. But one incident gave them complete faith in Ed.

A middle-aged woman came up to Bacon, introduced herself, and explained that although they were not acquainted she had to speak with him. She told him that although she now lived in the suburbs, she and her family used to live along one of the greenways in Society Hill. “Those were the happiest of times,” she said. “We loved the greenways. You made our lives so wonderful. I just had to say thank you, Mr. Bacon.

http://www.alexgarvin.net

Alexander Garvin. “Philadelphia’s Planner: A Conversation with Edmund Bacon.” Journal of Planning History. Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 2002). 58–78.

Alexander Garvin. The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t. New York: Geneva McGraw-Hill, 2002. See especially pp. 101-102, 262-266, 527-530