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Respect for Dowling's business acumen carried the day. But Dowling felt the office buildings would have to cover 45% of the ground space to produce enough rent to make them pay, instead of the 30% envisioned by the Bacon-Kling plan. The extra 15% would not permit the office buildings to be oriented on a north-south axis across the sunken esplanade, and the concourse would have to be covered. "We were very crushed by this," says Bacon, "but instead of sulking, we tried to figure out how much we could salvage." In the end, he managed to get a series of holes punched through to the underground. A skating rink fills one of them; a pleasant garden facing a subterranean restaurant occupies an other. The city is now filling a third with a landscaped garden next to the Penn Center subway station. Subway passengers will step out into a garden as their entrance into the central city.
The Idea. Penn Center was not everything Bacon had wanted it to be.
But it was a great beginning, a source of what he calls — capitalizing the words as he says them — the Power of an Idea.
A valid planning idea, he feels, has a life of its own. His hero is Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), who was inspired to erect an obelisk before three of Rome's churches of obligation for pilgrims and to connect them with roads. These obelisks established axes and "thrusts of space" that hundreds of years after Sixtus' death were still shaping the ideas and actions of Rome's architects and builders. Bernini constructed his marvelous colonnade around the one that Sixtus had planted outside St. Peter's.
Axis for the Old. Old Philadelphian Bacon starts with a vision and a memory. His memory is of William Penn's "greene countrie towne." It was laid out on a grid at the narrowest point between Philadelphia's two rivers (see map) and anchored by an axial crossing of the two central arteries, Market and Broad streets, where City Hall now stands. In each of the resultant quadrants Penn placed a park. Latter-day developers enhanced this basic plan with the dynamic diagonal Benjamin Franklin Parkway, leading from City Hall to the 4,076-acre Fairmount Park.
Bacon's vision cherishes the old and adapts it to the new. He particularly likes the baroque City Hall as the pivot of the city. His planned vistas swing from it; his planned parks set it off. He gazes with delight, bouncing up on his toes with excitement, as he looks through a two-story-high window in Kling's new Municipal Services Building at City Hall and the complementary facade of the Masonic Temple.
His new plan keeps Penn's axis and provides new anchors. One anchor is the three Pei towers on Society Hill, which he thinks of as an equivalent of Pope Sixtus' obelisks. Another, still unbuilt, will be the Port Tower at the Bel aware River. The tower will command the eye of any traveler down Market Street, and also provide the focus for a redevelopment area, which Bacon hopes will restore the waterfront to Philadelphians as a place to saunter, sun themselves, or just watch the bustle of a busy harbor.