Edmund Bacon

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This article is about the architect. For the British businessman, see Sir Edmund Bacon, 13th Baronet.

Edmund Norwood Bacon (May 2, 1910 – October 14, 2005) was a noted American architect, urban planner, educator, and author. As the Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped today's Philadelphia, the city in which he was born.

Bacon was educated in architecture at Cornell University, and subsequently studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art with renowned Finnish architect/planner Eliel Saarinen, whom 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 work on the ground later. While traveling the world on a tiny inheritance, Bacon found work as an architect in Beijing, China a city that exerted a deep influence on his thinking, and Philadelphia, eventually becoming a city planner in Flint, Michigan. He was present in Flint during the historic 1936-37 Flint Sit-Down Strike, and felt empathetic to the workers. His advocacy of better housing in Flint possibly cost him his position there. From Flint, Bacon would go on to serve as 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 then-Executive Director Robert Mitchell (not the Canadian politician), and served as the P.C.P.C.'s liaison and as a contributing designer to the 1947 Better Philadelphia Exhibition in collaboration with Louis Kahn and Oskar Stonorov. Bacon was also an early member of the City Policy Committee, a grass-roots movement of young Philadelphians that was instrumental in Philadelphia's political reform movement. 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.

In 1949, Bacon succeeded Mitchell as Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Serving under Mayors Clark, Dilworth, and James Hugh Joseph Tate, his work brought him national repute along with his counterparts Edward Logue in Boston and Robert Moses in New York during the mid-century era of urban renewal. His face graced the cover of TIME magazine in 1964, and in 1965, Life magazine devoted its cover story to his work. That same year, Bacon sat on the White House's Panel on Recreation and Natural Beauty. In 1967, he wrote Design of Cities, still considered an important architectural text.

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

Not all of Bacon's designs materialized though, as one of his proposals was to encircle Center City with a series of expressways, including the so-called "Crosstown Expressway" linking the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76) with the Delaware Expressway I-95 via South Street. The proposal depressed property values and rents in the South Street corridor, though after the proposal was canceled property values began a slow and tedious rebound, especially in the area east of Broad Street. This fluctuation in property values led to a turnover of the neighborhood's character from largely Jewish-owned garment shops to the thriving bohemian commercial and nightlife center that it is today.

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, Paris, London, American cities, and cities in the future post-oil era. He vociferously but unsuccessfully opposed the development of skyscrapers in Center City Philadelphia taller than Philadelphia City Hall, which until 1984 set the informal height limit for downtown at the brim of the hat on the statue of William Penn. That custom, known as the "Gentlemen's Agreement," was broken forever by architect Helmut Jahn's One Liberty Place, a break with the past that has, to some minds, invoked the Curse of Billy Penn on the city's professional sports teams. The New York Times correctly noted Bacon's opposition to the project, but it was incorrect in saying that "in opposing the skyscraper One Liberty Place, Mr. Bacon refused to attend the tower's 1986 groundbreaking and stopped speaking to his friend Willard G. Rouse III, who built it. I think it's very, very destructive that he and he alone has chosen to destroy a historical tradition that set a very fine and disciplined form for the city, Mr. Bacon said at the time." Bacon was present at the groundbreaking, which took place in May 1985. Then-Mayor W. Wilson Goode (whose approval of the project was of course requisite, along with that of City Council, notwithstanding Bacon's crediting it fully to Rouse) did not attend because the ceremony occurred simultaneously nearly to the minute with the catastrophic confrontation between the Philadelphia Police and the organization called MOVE.

Bacon won numerous honors including the American Institute of Planners Distinguished Service Award, the Philadelphia Award, and an honorary doctorate from Penn. From 2004 until his death, Bacon served as an Honorary Director of the foundation that bears his name, The Ed Bacon Foundation.

Bacon continued to actively assert his vision for Philadelphia's future in his later years. During the 1990s he proposed new concepts to improve Independence Mall, Penn's Landing, and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In 2002 at age 92, he skateboarded in LOVE Park, the plaza he designed at Cornell in 1932, as a protest against the City's ban on the sport. In 2003 he appeared in the documentary My Architect: A Son's Journey about Louis Kahn, a Philadelphia architect. In September 2006, at the northwest corner of 15th Street and J.F.K. Boulevard, by LOVE Park, The Ed Bacon Foundation and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission dedicated a state historical marker honoring Bacon's memory and commemorating his work.

Bacon is the father of actor Kevin Bacon and musician Michael Bacon, and four daughters, Karin, Elinor, Hilda and Kira. His wife was Ruth Hilda Holmes, a teacher and liberal political activist. His friends included Buckminster Fuller, James Rouse, and Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis.