(3 of 10)
Cutting Teeth. One man coordinates, advises and stimulates all this activity—and the array of civic groups, politicians, architects, builders and real estate men necessary to keep it going.
Edmund Norwood Bacon, 54, is a tall (6 ft. 2 in.), thin (160 Ibs.) Philadelphian with sharp blue eyes and an intensely intellectual air that hardly seems the right equipment for moving and shaking a major city. But his total dedication to his special art and to his native town—plus an impressive gift of gab—is changing the look and feel of the town that was once the butt of comedians as the sleepiest city of them all.
Bacon's concern for cities in general and Philadelphia in particular began early. His senior thesis, as an architectural student at Cornell in 1932, was on "Plans for a Philadelphia Center City." After graduation, he used a $1,000 legacy to bicycle through Europe, walk through Greece and sail up the Nile. He got his architectural start working as a designer under Architect Henry Killam Murphy in Shanghai. "It's a good idea to cut your teeth where the product won't be around to haunt you later," says Bacon. Back in the U.S. after a year, he wrote to the late great architect and city planner, Eliel Saarinen, asking for a fellowship at Saarinen's Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
"Eliel Saarinen was my great master and teacher," says Bacon. "He emphasized design as the relationship of form and space; so the real design problem is the city. Saarinen taught us that harmony of form and mass doesn't stop at property lines but continues." The Bacon generation at Cranbrook included such notables of arts and architecture as Designer Charles Eames, Sculptor Harry Bertoia, Eliel's late son Eero, and Designer Florence Knoll.
"At Cranbrook in our time, everybody was talking about what a wonderful thing the suburbs were going to be—discussing civic centers, working, shopping and living centers—that sort of thing," recollects Eames. "It was all quite new, and we were full of hope for the pastures. We were all gliding out of town on the freeways. But Ed Bacon looked at the first seep of city rot and saw the real crisis." After leaving Cranbrook in 1936, Bacon served for two years as a city planner in nearby Flint, then landed a job back in Philadelphia as managing director of the Philadelphia Housing Association. It was one of the earnest but powerless organizations that existed in many cities across the land before cities realized that their inner renewal and reshaping was not just a matter of esthetics but of vital budgetary economics.
By the 1950s, the city's businessmen recognized that Philadelphia was a city in a state of collapse, to use Bacon's phrase. Industries were beginning to move out, sales in the center city were declining, and stores were moving to the suburbs, or talking about it.