Edmund Bacon (architect)

Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005) was an American urban planner, architect, educator, and author.

He grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and graduated from Swarthmore High School in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania in 1928.

He attended Cornell University, where he studied architecture.

His senior thesis at Cornell made the case for a new civic center for Philadelphia that included an urban park where LOVE Park was ultimately built.

After college, while traveling the world on a small inheritance, Bacon found work as an architect in Shanghai, China in Henry Murphy's office.

He was responsible for designing the Nanking airport.

With Murphy, he visited Beijing, a city that exerted a deep influence on his thinking.

After a year in China, he returned to Philadelphia where he worked for architect William Pope Barney.

He soon was awarded a scholarship to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, with Finnish architect and planner Eliel Saarinen, who Bacon revered and whose theories about the city as a living organism as expressed in Saarinen's book The City were a basis for Bacon's later work.

Saarinen sent Bacon to Flint, Michigan to guide a WPA traffic survey.

This project transformed into a permanent position for Bacon at the Flint Institute for Planning and Research.

Bacon became very active in civic life in Flint, helping to establish the Flint Housing Association and reforming the city's Planning Commission.

During his time in Flint, Bacon witnessed the 1936-37 Flint Sit-Down Strike, and felt empathetic to the workers.

Bacon gained close contacts with individuals who were active in establishing the Federal Housing Authority, such as Catherine Bauer and Lewis Mumford.

Through these contacts he helped secure federal housing dollars for Flint.

However, the local real-estate industry came to see this Federal funding for public housing as a threat to their business, as was the case in several cities early in the history of the FHA.

The funding was turned down, and Bacon was effectively run out of Flint in 1939.

From Flint, Bacon returned to Philadelphia to serve as managing director of the Philadelphia Housing Association.

He served in the United States Navy aboard the USS Shoshone in the Pacific in World War II.

In 1947, he joined the staff of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission under executive director Robert Mitchell, and served as co-designer to the 1947 Better Philadelphia Exhibition in collaboration with Oscar Stonorov and Louis Kahn.

Bacon was also an early member of the City Policy Committee, a grassroots movement of young Philadelphians, established by future civic leader Walter M. Phillips, that was instrumental in Philadelphia's political reform movement.

During his tenure as the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped today's Philadelphia, the city of his birth, to the extent that he is sometimes described as "The Father of Modern Philadelphia".

He authored the seminal urban planning book Design of Cities.

Bacon was born in West Philadelphia, the son of Helen Atkinson (née Comly) and Ellis Williams Bacon.

In 1949, Bacon succeeded Mitchell as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission.

Serving under Mayors Samuel, Clark, Dilworth, and Tate, his work brought him national repute along with his counterparts Edward J. Logue in Boston and Robert Moses in New York City during the mid-century era of urban renewal.

The Center City Commuter Connection, a seemingly radical idea at the time, was conceived during the 1950s by Planning Commission staff member, R. Damon Childs, who succeeded Bacon as executive director.

Not all of the concepts that Bacon supported materialized.

One proposal that he inherited from Robert Mitchell was to encircle Center City with a series of expressways, including the so-called "Crosstown Expressway" (I-695) and the Vine Street Expressway (I-676) linking the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76) with the Delaware Expressway (I-95) via South Street.

Three of the four expressways were built; however, the Crosstown Expressway faced significant local opposition and was never built, while a scaled-down expressway was built at Vine Street.

As an unintended consequence, the Crosstown Expressway proposal depressed property values and rents in the South Street corridor, leading to a turnover of the neighborhood's character from largely Jewish-owned garment shops to the thriving commercial and nightlife center that it is today.

Members of the Committee went on to become leaders in Philadelphia government after 1952, when the reform Democrat and later U.S. Senator) Joseph Sill Clark was elected Mayor, Richardson Dilworth became District Attorney, and a new Home Rule Charter was instituted.

Other concepts conceived during Bacon's tenure, such as Schuylkill River Park, included in the 1963 Center City Plan, came into being many years later.

His face appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1964, and in 1965, Life magazine devoted its cover story to his work.

That same year, Bacon was appointed by President Johnson to serve as a member of the White House's Conference on Recreation and Natural Beauty.

In 1967, he wrote Design of Cities, still considered an important architectural text.

It is a seminal work on urban design that illustrates the relationship between historical and modern principles, as well as practices of urban planning, applied particularly to Philadelphia.

It was during his tenure at the City Planning Commission that Bacon and his staff conceived and implemented numerous large- and small-scale design ideas that shaped today's Philadelphia.

These design concepts became Penn Center, Market East, Penn's Landing, Society Hill, Independence Mall, and the Far Northeast.

After Bacon's retirement from the Planning Commission in 1970, he served as vice president for the private planning firm Mondev U.S.A., was an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Pennsylvania, from 1950 to 1987, and narrated "Understanding Cities", an award-winning series of documentary films describing the history and development of Rome under Pope Sixtus V, Paris under Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Regency London under John Nash, American cities, and cities in the future post-oil era.