What a difference a year makes.
My brother, John, told me one of his friends had died and left him a substantial collection of books on architecture and urban design. John noticed that he now had two copies of Edmund Bacon's Design of Cities (1967, 1974), so he gave me one. (My copy says "ex lib Terry Williams.")
I don't know why I'd never read it before. Just one of those lacunae, I guess. I have a lot of them. Filling this one led me to poke around in more current work on Bacon, and I read Scott Gabriel Knowles, ed., Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (2009) and Gregory L. Heller, Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Philadelphia (2013).
I think I'll be writing several stories centered on Bacon, but I wanted to start with a little present that he left me in his book.
Two of Ed Bacon's major endeavors were Market West and Market East, and I'm not terribly fond of the way they turned out. I am, of course, not alone.
Perhaps in a later story I will get into why the design processes on these two stretches of Market Street, one on each side of City Hall, absolutely in the heart of the city, had such suboptimal outcomes.
But for now I want to focus on how good the original designs were. I'd gotten an inkling of this from Ken Halpern's Downtown USA (1978), but I don't think I understood the magnitude of what we lost until I read Design of Cities.
Market West
Below is a model of Market West before it went through the design meat grinder. (The picture is on p. 106 of Halpern's book.) City Hall is just out of the picture in the top right. What I want you to look at is the three high-rise slabs that run west along Market Street, which is to the right of the buildings. You'll notice there are a number of other, lower buildings that face the street fronts. And, if you look carefully, you can see that the three large buildings are straddling a lower space that extends through the length of the development, running parallel to the east-west streets.
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| Market West model, view from southwest. |
As Bacon explains in his book (p. 272), that lower space, open to the sky, is a shopping concourse. It was one level below the street, and because of the north-south orientation of the high-rises, it would have been flooded with sunlight much of the day. Hmm. Light, air, shopping. Sounds pretty nice.
This proposal dates from 1952. What happened next is, I think, best described as a travesty. Have a look at the drawing at the beginning of this story. It's from Bacon's Design of Cities, page 272. The 1952 proposal is on the left. In 1953 the Pennsylvania Railroad, owner of the property, came out with its design. It is on the right.
(And, yes, Bacon proposed demolishing all of City Hall except the tower. He had earlier recommended demolishing City Hall in his architecture thesis at Cornell in 1932. Paul P. Cret also recommended demolishing City Hall in 1924. See Heller, Ed Bacon, pp. 19, 100, and 246 fn. 15. I'm very happy this didn't happen.)
Anyway, in the 1953 proposal the north-south towers have been replaced by towers running east-west. This would have placed the shopping concourse in the dark almost all the time. If you want to know how dark, just visit today's JFK Boulevard, where the prevailing illumination is perpetual gloom. Those east-west towers did get built. But not to worry. The towers did not affect the illumination of the concourse. Instead, the railroad's design put a cover on the concourse, turning what had been designed as an open space of light and air into something quite different.
Bacon did convince the railroad to provide a few light boxes, or light wells, so that at least some natural light could filter into the concourse level. In my opinion, they do help, but not a lot. Here's one:
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| The light boxes do help. A little. |
The concourse, as built, does get a lot of use, and it has a bunch of stores, but it also has that unpleasant little-white-mouse-in-a-maze feeling that shows up in another Pennsylvania Railroad real-estate venture, Penn Station in New York City.
As for the cover, at street level, it is basically a no-man's land. You'd think somebody would use these spaces for open-air restaurants and cafes, but instead they just sit there. Some enterprising souls have turned a section into an informal parking lot.
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| I'm thinking a restaurant with an acre of outdoor tables. |
(Wait. Actually, there is a small open-air dining room at 17th street. Good start.)
Market East
Over on Market East the outcomes were similarly suboptimal. Bacon describes the original proposal on page 281 of Design of Cities. (The illustration below is on p. 280.)
"Here the basic concept was a pedestrian area punctuated by gardens one level below the street, accessible to the subway, and an extension of the underground commuter railroad system. The shops at street level were set back behind covered walkways, and above the street a continuous shopping promenade connected with the bus terminal and parking garages with their own ramps to the expressway."
What we got in the end, of course, was something quite different: "a commonplace suburban shopping center" (Guian McKee in Imagining Philadelphia, p. 71).
More recently, this mall has received a makeover, and what was called the Gallery at Market East has become Fashion District Philadelphia. I'm not going to talk about it here because I want to focus on the original designs and what they can tell us.
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| Market East, drawing by Willo von Moltke, 1960. |
Life in a Bubble
Looking at the original proposals for Market West and Market East, my reaction is simple: I wish we'd built them.
The story of why they didn't get built is complex, but I think the underlying reason is, again, simple: Ed Bacon was swimming against the tide. Bacon's assumption was that people like to be connected to the outside world. Since World War II, America has been creating a built environment that does its best to cut us off from the outside world.
It's quite possible nowadays to live your life in a series of hermetically sealed bubbles - wake up in a suburban house where the windows are never open in any season, drive to work in a car with the windows up, spend the day in an office tower where the windows don't open, go shopping in a mall that doesn't have windows.
And I know some people who like their bubbles. I don't like bubbles, and I think it's clear that Bacon didn't like them either.
It's possible that the coronavirus is giving many people a deeper appreciation of the outdoors, at least at dinner time. Will the blooming of outdoor restaurants prove a lasting phenomenon or a passing fancy? One thought - it's cheaper to put tables in the street than it is to upgrade an HVAC system or install windows that - gasp - open. As a friend of mine likes to say, Follow the money.
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| The view from underground. |
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