2007 Closing Session

The Legacy of Edmund Bacon

By Meghan Stromberg
Senior Editor, Planning magazine

The 99th annual APA planning conference in Philadelphia — one of the best attended conferences ever — concluded with a tribute to Edmund Bacon, the planning visionary whose legacy stretches much farther than the city he loved and where he served as the executive planning director of the planning commission for 20 years.

The informative and moving "Legacy of Edmund Bacon" featured presentations by Eugenie Ladner Birch, FAICP, chair of the University of Pennsylvania's City and Regional Planning department, Elinor Bacon, president of E.R. Bacon Development in Washington, D.C., and Robert Paternoster, FAICP, director of community development in Sunnyvale, California.

Click here for pictures from the session

Birch elaborated on some of the many ways Bacon shaped Philadelphia and planning in general, and his daughter Elinor Bacon talked about the man's home and family life — including his manner of speaking to and treating his six children no differently than he did adults, while also welcoming the opportunity to see the world from their perspective.

Paternoster, who met Bacon while in graduate school and was later his employee, revealed what it was like to work for the opinionated and intensely passionate — and equally punctual — man. (He said that everyone was expected to be at staff meetings on time and that he would arrive 30 seconds later, usually "with a twinkle in his eye."

Bacon's Philadelphia

Bacon, who died in 2005 at the age of 95, grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, attended architecture school at Cornell, traveled the world, and worked in Flint, Michigan, before returning to Philadelphia in the early 1940s. He came back to a city that was dirty, gritty, crowded, and "above all a 19th century city with 19th century systems and improvements," Birch said, as she began talking about the context of bacon's work.

She said that there are three things one thinks about when remembering Bacon: the ideas he had, the people he influenced and how, and the places he shaped. His one big idea, she said, was that "the city had to be transformed from a 19th century city to a 20th century city."

"Few thought of the city as systematically and as holistically as Ed Bacon," she continued, noting that he realized that the city needed to be beautiful, efficient, just, and green. He sought to change the economic engine of the city, from a manufacturing-based economy to one centered on service and culture, saw the importance of housing, and worked to enhance the intersection of nature and the city, Birch said.

Birch used maps and photographs to take the audience through the city of Philadelphia, covering the familiar places associated with Bacon as well as some of the more nuanced concepts and systems he helped to create. She focused on Bacon's vision of a varied, interconnected, and balanced system of transportation that underplayed the affects of highways while respecting their importance and strove to give gave pedestrians equal footing using a series of above- and underground pedways and a network of greenways that help link key areas and structures.

"He created spaces for the new economy," she said. He created "the spaces for the choices that would need to be made in the future." She used downtown's Gallery shopping center, which can be accessed at street level, by train, and via an underground pedway, as an example of how Bacon thought about creating transit and commerce-rich communities. "We think of TOD as a new thing, but he was thinking about it in the '50s," she said.

And, she said, "these places had to have light. If the 19th century city was dark and dingy, the 20th century city was full of life and nature."

Outside the center city, Bacon advocated for dense, affordable workers' housing built in a circular pattern around green areas rather than in the grid style of downtown. While Birch often mentioned that the architecture of the places Bacon created may not be to everyone's liking, she was able to tell and show planners how very innovative the concepts he advocated were.

Bacon at home

Looking back, Elinor Bacon said she sees how her father's passions — for cities, nature, and people — were passed on early to his children. While overseas in the military, he would send home books he had written and illustrated for his children, including one about Sonny Sunbeam and his family of sunbeams and one on building a house —including the permitting stage and the steps in its construction.

He was interested in the thoughts and ideas of his kids, she said, "and didn't distinguish between adults and kids."

He was "tender and caring" as a father and a professional, "even crawling around on the floor with his baby grandson so he could see the world from his perspective." She said he would often exclaim, without explaining himself, "Oh, the beauty of it all!"

Bacon took his family on frequent field trips to "see what was happening in Dad's city," she said, and later, when the family moved downtown, she said, "we were the only kids in central city and our playground was the street." She spoke about an "extraordinary, challenging, and intimate up bringing."

Elinor Bacon, who worked as an inspector of restored housing in Baltimore early in her career — "not a grand and glorious planning job" — said her father loved that she was working house by house to make a better city, even though at the time, she didn't necessarily understand how she was following in her father's footsteps. Later, as she worked on HOPE VI projects (a program important to Bacon) and other urban development issues, she said she began to recognize the "deep connection that was our own because we loved and worked in cities."

"He challenged me to see what I was doing in a larger context — and at HUD I finally got this," she concluded.

Working for Bacon

During graduate school, Robert Paternoster and other "planning nerds" spent their spring break traveling to East Coast cities. In Philadelphia, they scored an interview with Bacon. While the students came to the meeting in a light, jovial mood, Bacon arrived all business, immediately showing the young planners he was "highly opinionated" and had a very healthy disregard for planning education, Paternoster said. "He was someone who challenged us to have the guts" to do something important. A few years after that meeting, Bacon offered Paternoster a job.

Paternoster, now a planner in Sunnyvale, California, said that "Ed would arrive at meetings with a twinkle in his eye," that meant he had a good meeting at city hall or had had a new idea. Sometimes those new ideas were jotted on the small pad he kept in his bathroom. At least once, Paternoster said, his sketches were accompanied by a blob of shaving cream.

He "ran meetings like an architectural design studio," he said, adding that he was a "tough critic" who was concise and precise, favored good reasoning and evidence, and valued passion.

Paternoster described Bacon's idea acceptance chart, on which he placed "acceptance" on the Y axis and "time" on the X axis, to track concepts over time. He had a fierce respect for great ideas. Paternoster also spoke of a working atmosphere of creative tension and Bacon's notion of the importance of "thrust" — of buildings and of ideas. He said that Bacon thought that planners should stay put in one city for a while.

Each of the speakers expressed the notion that, as important as Bacon's contribution of wonderful places was to Philadelphia, so is his legacy of a genuine love for cities and the life they support and embody. Paternoster reminded planners that Ed Bacon advised planners to "persistently pursue our commitment to improving the urban condition."

Jeffery Brubaker contributed to this article.

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