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The businessmen did not wait for the Federal Government. They organized themselves into the Citizens Council on City Planning. Bacon and Architect Oscar Stonorov mounted an elaborate display of their notions for reconverting downtown Philadelphia in a complete-scale model with animated parts. The exhibit drew 385,000 people when put on display at a downtown department store. Bacon personally visited 13 public schools and encouraged schoolchildren to work up models of how they would like their local district to look. Result was a climate of enthusiasm for improvement and change that ranged through the whole community, from self-interested businessman to self-interested slum dweller.
In 1949 Bacon was made executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission.
Fallen Wall. But Bacon's breakthrough happened only by chance—or at least by the kind of chance that only total preparation makes into a real breakthrough. The 1952 election installed a new, reform-minded mayor, Democrat Joseph Clark, and a new city charter, in which the planning commission was given real authority. A few months later came an announcement from the Pennsylvania Railroad that it had at last decided to tear down the inner city's historic eyesore: the old Broad Street station and the mile-long stretch of elevated tracks behind it that had been known as "the Chinese Wall." At the same luncheon when the railroad announced its decision, Bacon presented what he called "a challenging proposal" for development of the entire area. "If you wait until someone else does a plan, you're licked," says Bacon. "We always have a proposal ready." The plan, worked out with a young architect named Vincent Kling, called for a sunken garden concourse three blocks long, lined with shops, bridged by the cross streets and straddled by three 20-story office buildings.
In those less planning-conscious days, this scheme seemed like something out of Jules Verne — after all, the railroad owned the land, which was already zoned for profitable high-rise office buildings. But prestigious Robert W.
Dowling of New York, successful developer of Pittsburgh's Gateway Center and Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, came to the rescue. Called in by the railroad as a consultant, he approved the superblock with underground connections to the rail transit outlets — the Pennsylvania suburban station and a stop on the Market Street subway — and added the idea of a bus terminal at the west end of Penn Center to anchor it.