Abstract
This article analyzes the intersection of historic preservation and city planning in post-WWII Philadelphia. Using over forty-five area plans, the city’s 1960 Comprehensive Plan, and contemporary media reports, the article explores the relationship between the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and the Philadelphia Historical Commission, the first citywide preservation commission in the United States. The article debunks the conventional wisdom that midcentury clearance and redevelopment strategies galvanized the historic preservation movement. Rather, the Philadelphia case demonstrates that the preservation community adopted a narrow definition of “historic,” while a rehabilitation ethic permeated the Planning Commission’s conservative approach to renewal, ultimately resulting in the retention of existing buildings, the integration of older fabric with modern infill, and the implicit preservation of much of the city’s residential built environment.
Traditional histories focusing on mid-twentieth-century urban renewal paint a relatively black-and-white picture. One of the most powerful and entrenched narratives about the era is that demolition prevailed over preservation. Emanating out of this belief, many scholars and practitioners argue that the modern preservation profession developed in direct response to the destructive policies and practices of midcentury city planning. As Birch and Roby note, “[A]fter 1949 [preservationists] would gain more momentum in the face of innumerable threats from urban renewal administrators whose heavy-handed clearance programs tended to be insensitive to preservation concerns.” 1
Across the United States, cities bear the physical legacy of past planning efforts, including urban renewal projects. While some have proved successful in the long-term, many failed housing projects and vacant downtown parcels are a visible, tangible, and negative reminder of midcentury planning. What is less striking, though, are those parts of the urban landscape that were saved—conserved, rehabilitated, restored—as part of planners’ overall efforts to transition cities into the modern era. Small blocks of houses, stable neighborhoods targeted for rehabilitation or no intervention at all, downtown landmarks, and countless other aspects of the urban built environment were often not touched by the federal bulldozer. In many cases, it was not the active, well-formed historic preservation advocates who exist today who fought for such urban conservation. Rather, it was the product of intentional city planning efforts that faced many of the same challenges planners face today: limited funds, the need to strategically focus investments in targeted areas, and an overall desire to make cities as livable and functional as possible given the contemporary context.
This article debunks the dominant narrative that midcentury city planning practices incited the preservation profession, which then embraced the conservation and rehabilitation of everyday urban landscapes. The research, focusing on urban renewal planning in Philadelphia, shows how preservationists in that city held a limited view of what counted as “historic,” leaving planners with the power to decide the fate of the vast majority of the city’s built environment. The evidence from the Philadelphia case, which includes approximately forty small area plans, the 1960 Comprehensive Plan, and contemporary reports, complicates the “urban renewal equals demolition” story. It illustrates that the dominant narratives about Society Hill and Center City represent two extremes within Philadelphia’s midcentury planning landscape. The former embraced historic preservation as a central strategy, while the latter emphasized demolition and redevelopment strategies. Overall, midcentury planners, facing market constraints, combined demolition and redevelopment, conservation and stabilization, and pristine historic restorations. Their retention of older buildings was not based on a sense of historic value, but rather a pragmatic desire to ease plan implementation and use limited funds to make the greatest impact in a struggling city. In the end, it was planners—not preservationists—who saved vast swaths of the city’s landscape.
During the midcentury period, Philadelphia was viewed as an innovator in its urban renewal practices, earning national and international notoriety. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, major publications published at least twenty articles about the “Philadelphia approach.” 2 Architecture, planning, and preservation journals published articles about the city’s planning efforts, while popular publications, such as the 1964 issue of Time magazine placed the work of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission on a national stage. Contemporary writings characterized Philadelphia’s planners as taking an innovative approach to urban redevelopment. For instance, a 1952 article identified six ways in which renewal in Philadelphia was unique, including its small scale, minimal displacement, citizen engagement, preservation of neighborhood institutions, focus on urban design, and historic preservation. 3 Headlines such as “The Philadelphia Cure: Clearing Slums with Penicillin, Not Surgery” and “More Integration of Past and Present in Philadelphia” stood in stark contrast to the massive urban clearance programs of many U.S. cities. The articles often contrasted the “Philadelphia Way” to that of Robert Moses’s “neighborhood-leveling techniques” in New York City and argued that Philadelphia’s conservative approach was respectful of and influenced by the city’s history.
While some of the writings focus on the design of entirely new projects in Center City (Philadelphia’s central business district) and the charismatic leadership of Edmund Bacon, the head of the city’s planning department, others emphasize the role of Philadelphia’s planning in fostering the growing historic preservation movement, particularly via the innovative Society Hill renewal project. The preservation of Society Hill, which used federal urban renewal funds to restore a neighborhood of Colonial-era row houses, was hailed as “the most significant example of preservation of the period” and was the most exceptional piece of Philadelphia’s urban renewal program. 4 At the time, characterizations of Philadelphia’s influence on historic preservation focused on a single neighborhood in the city and ignored the city’s other planning efforts. 5 It is within this broader spectrum of projects and plans that Philadelphia’s conservative approach to renewal is revealed via the neighborhood-to-neighborhood variations in recommendations for rehabilitation or clearance. This story—the one of Philadelphia’s citywide urban renewal efforts—is less exceptional; thus, it offers more nuanced insight into the history of renewal-era planning and sets the stage for future comparisons with citywide renewal efforts across the country.
While the history of urban renewal generally is a popular subject for historians, only a few contemporary scholars have recognized historic preservation as an urban renewal strategy.
6
Within the far-ranging literature on urban renewal, research emphasizes the politics of renewal, race, displacement, demolition, downtown versus neighborhood interests, and programmatic changes.
7
These narratives correctly argue that renewal-era planning emphasized physical solutions to urban problems such as highway construction, housing, airports, and other development projects. As prominent urban renewal scholar John Teaford writes,
To most urban leaders a better city was a physically rejuvenated city. Rather than sponsor programs that tampered with the metropolitan social structure or that redistributed wealth and power, planners, politicians, and the business community believed physical changes were the appropriate weapons against blight. Thus brick, mortar and asphalt constituted the artillery in this initial offensive against the decline of the central cities.
8
Within the historical analyses of urban renewal’s “brick-and-mortar” projects, stories of demolition and wholesale clearance dominate. For instance, McKee argues, “As implemented in the United States, urban renewal usually demolished dense, mixed-use urban neighborhoods.” 9
Few existing studies analyze the relationship between city planning and historic preservation during the post-WWII era, with the majority of this work focusing on general accounts of changing policy and increased interest in rehabilitation. 10 In his seminal work on urban renewal, Teaford notes, “[A] number of cities during this period [the 1950s] experimented with rehabilitation of existing structures and preservation of established neighborhoods.” 11 Spiers analyzes the renewal of Boston’s Washington Park neighborhood, which emphasized rehabilitation. While he notes that “historic preservation played a minor role,” he gives no further explanation distinguishing between the two practices. 12 Thus, scholars addressing renewal-era rehabilitation generally do not directly discuss the impact (if any) of local historic preservationists or untangle the differences between rehabilitation and preservation.
Philadelphia’s midcentury renewal efforts have also garnered attention from historians.
13
These works provide important context for understanding the overall redevelopment strategies of the city, but only anecdotally (if at all) discuss the role of historic preservation. Teaford, in his seminal work on urban renewal, gives only brief mention to Philadelphia’s Society Hill project, stating simply,
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the rehabilitation crusade was very much alive in the older central cities. . . . In fact, during this period, federal renewal funds were pouring into what would become one of the nation’s most famous restored districts, Philadelphia’s Society Hill.
14
Bauman focuses on the distinction between housing renewal and Center City redevelopment, only briefly mentioning Society Hill as a Title I urban renewal project that mixed historic preservation with redevelopment. 15 He goes into more depth about renewal in the city’s East Poplar neighborhood. Here, he does not directly discuss historic preservation, although he argues that this effort “transform[ed] a group of aged, but structurally sound, Civil War vintage row houses into decent, low- to moderate-income housing units.” 16 Other scholars have analyzed Center City renewal efforts, including the development of Penn Center and the demolition of the “Chinese Wall,” the 1976 bicentennial celebration, redevelopment in Eastwick, and Philadelphia’s clearance and public housing projects. 17
Viewed comprehensively, though, the city’s plans reveal a gradient of preservation support, mixing old and new, with recommendations ranging from pristine restorations to complete demolition. Even the plans for Society Hill and Center City are more complex than the overly simple (but still overused) dichotomy of preservation versus demolition. The influence of official historic preservation, though, was minor and concentrated in the Society Hill and, to a lesser extent, Germantown neighborhoods. The narrow focus of the Philadelphia Historical Commission (PHC) on the city’s Colonial-era heritage prevented the recognition of later periods, building styles, and neighborhoods as having historic value, and there was minimal interaction between the Planning Commission and the PHC beyond the Society Hill project. The bulk of conservation that occurred in Philadelphia, rather, was the result of the Planning Commission’s moderate approach to urban renewal, which emanated from a desire to reduce implementation costs and modernize the city without destroying its underlying character. Using a combination of statistical data from the U.S. Census of Housing and firsthand observations, the city’s planners recommended a mix of conservation and rehabilitation, clearance, and new development. This conservative approach to renewal-era planning resulted in the integration of older fabric with modern infill and the physical preservation of much of the city’s residential built environment, well beyond the scope of what the Historic Commission valued as historic and worthy of preservation at the time.
After briefly setting the context for midcentury renewal and preservation, the article details the history of renewal and preservation in Philadelphia from the 1940s through the late 1960s. It weaves together the story of changing local and national policy with the city’s planning efforts, beginning with a description of Philadelphia’s post-WWII urban condition, the initial formation of key policies and institutions, and the earliest renewal efforts. It then documents the city’s evolving renewal policy and plans, focusing on the various ways that preservation and conservation were (or were not) included. In doing so, the research demonstrates that the preservation of large swaths of Philadelphia resulted not from preservationists’ activism but from planners who, in the face of severe market constraints, were forced to find alternative solutions to widespread clearance and rebuilding schemes.
Midcentury Urban Renewal and Preservation
The post-WWII era was a significant for both the historic preservation and city planning professions. Beginning in the mid-1940s, city planners throughout the United States collaborated with policy makers, developers, real estate interests, local governments, and powerful growth coalitions to rebuild central business districts, alleviate housing shortages, and upgrade substandard living conditions. During this period, the federal government took an active role in confronting the challenges facing the nation’s cities by providing funding and support for local efforts. Via the Housing Act of 1949 and amendments passed in 1954, the federal government support urban renewal projects that transformed downtown districts and facilitated the construction of urban housing. Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 provided local governments with matching funds for land acquisition, demolition, and resale, with the federal government paying two-thirds of the cost and localities contributing the remaining one-third. The act also stipulated that projects be primarily residential in nature and allowed only for clearance and redevelopment. The 1954 amendments to the act introduced rehabilitation as a viable renewal strategy and allowed local governments to use a portion of their renewal funds for nonresidential projects. 18 By the late 1960s, the era of urban renewal was winding down as the federal government began devolving its responsibility to rejuvenate the nation’s cities. First replaced by President Johnson’s Model Cities program (1966) and then by the Nixon-era Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, federal funding and support for large-scale urban renewal efforts continued to decline throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.
During the midcentury period, the preservation field was beginning to gel into the modern profession that exists today. Preservationists were increasingly trying to protect entire historic neighborhoods and districts. These efforts were highly local, with the earliest district protections emerging in Charleston, South Carolina (1931), New Orleans, Louisiana (1936), Alexandria, Virginia (1946), Winston-Salem, North Carolina (1948), Santa Barbara, California (1949), and Washington, D.C. (1950). While expanding the profession’s purview beyond isolated historical and architectural monuments, these early neighborhood-scale efforts were based on a limited view of historical value. Preservationists at the time tended to herald cities’ oldest neighborhoods, pre–Civil War and Revolutionary War–era districts, and/or concentrations of architecturally stunning (and typically wealthy) residential areas. The federal government chartered the (then quasi-governmental, now fully independent) National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1949—the same year it passed the clearance-based Housing Act of 1949. In 1966, as concerns over urban demolition resulting from urban renewal projects and interstate highway construction escalated, the federal government passed the National Historic Preservation Act. In doing so, it proffered heightened protection to historically significant properties from detrimental federal action and validated local efforts to protect historic districts. By the end of the twentieth century, the protection and conservation of older urban neighborhoods had become increasingly embedded in planning practice—a stark contrast to the often tenuous relationship between the two professions in the midcentury era.
Setting the Stage: Philadelphia and Urban Policy in the Late-1940s
In the period following World War II, older cities throughout the United States confronted a number of issues that created new challenges for urban leaders and city planners across the nation. Older cities’ physical fabric was severely blighted and deteriorated—the result of years of neglect and an overall lack of investment during the Great Depression and WWII. At the same time, a number of forces coalesced to increase suburbanization and decentralization—GIs returning from WWII took advantage of favorable loans to buy suburban houses, federal highway construction opened formerly inaccessible areas for development, and increasing household wealth in the middle class made purchasing a home and automobile possible. The result was that residents and jobs relocated away from dense urban neighborhoods to newer developments on the fringes. Eventually, deindustrialization escalated as cities’ economic bases shifted away from traditional manufacturing to business and consumer services and employment shifted away from the older “Rustbelt” cities of the Northeast and Midwest to the newer “Sunbelt” cities of the South, Southwest, and West. Combined, these forces led to a sharp decline in urban property values, overall economic decline, and an associated fiscal crisis. 19
Philadelphia’s postwar urban condition mimicked the widespread national trends. The city, originally laid out according to William Penn’s 1683 system of gridded streets and five public squares, grew throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century as a prosperous industrial and port city. In 1854, the city and county consolidated, forming the boundary of contemporary Philadelphia. Although Penn’s idea for Philadelphia was to design a city primarily composed of single-family, detached houses with a plethora of open space, early economic conditions and building speculation made the row house Philadelphia’s signature housing style. Typically built to the front lot line with a width of twelve to twenty-two feet, the row house allowed speculators to maximize density. 20 By the 1930s, nearly 75 percent of all new residential construction in the city used the row house typology. 21 The row house pattern of development made Philadelphia significantly different from cities where tenement housing predominated. In those cities, such as New York, overcrowded housing and unsanitary living conditions resulted in housing reform movements in the early decades of the 1900s. By the onset of the Great Depression, the high density of row house development and the lack of coordinated planning for much of the city’s development resulted in often overcrowded and substandard building conditions in the city’s residential neighborhoods.
In the immediate postwar years, Philadelphia had no guiding plan for development, and the bulk of the city was unplanned, chaotic, overcrowded, and unorganized. 22 The city had a substandard and increasingly obsolete physical infrastructure. The urban, multistory factories that dotted much of the city’s physical landscape were being replaced with single-story plants on large tracts of outlying land and the city’s planners logically concluded that demolishing old factories, assembling large parcels and allowing for (and subsidizing) the construction of suburban-style facilities might save the industrial economy of the city. 23 In addition, Philadelphia’s planners faced the challenge of upgrading blighted and deteriorating housing. The 1950 U.S. Census of Housing classified over 25,000 units as “dilapidated,” a condition based on a building’s state of disrepair and substandard weatherproofing, safety, and construction quality, while an additional 46,000 units had no private toilet or bathroom. 24
As the city began to confront its postwar condition and transition into a modern city, a number of institutional and political reforms took hold. In the 1940s, a group of civic and business leaders from “new industries” (i.e., banking, finance) formed the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM) to reform city government and eliminate the Republican-controlled machine political system, which had dominated Philadelphia government in recent decades. 25 The GPM exerted tremendous political influence and espoused a philosophy of modernization, growth, and economic development. In addition, it supported and promoted a number of reforms, including passing a new Home Rule Charter, revamping City Council, improving the civil service system, and establishing a city planning commission.
A key outgrowth of the GPM’s efforts and local reform was the establishment of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (PCPC) in 1942. The mayor had the power to appoint all nine members of the PCPC, which had an initial budget of $40,000 per year and served as an advisory commission to the mayor and City Council. 26 City leaders viewed a revived planning regime as a necessity in modernizing the city and retaining its competitiveness and in the postwar era, the PCPC had an unprecedented amount of power. The PCPC’s initial focus was on engaging the citizens of Philadelphia, advocating for state redevelopment policy, and developing area redevelopment plans. Eventually, its work was structured in four areas: a citywide comprehensive plan, a capital program, long-term district plans, and short-term area or renewal plans. 27
In 1945, the city’s desire to have centralized control over urban improvement came to fruition when the state passed the Pennsylvania Redevelopment Law. This was the nation’s first urban redevelopment legislation and was heavily advocated for by the newly formed PCPC. The law allowed local redevelopment agencies the power to float bond issues to raise money for renewal, including using the power of eminent domain for the acquisition and clearance of slums and blighted areas. 28 The following year, the city created the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA), the first such local authority in the United States, to implement urban redevelopment plans and oversee eminent domain actions. The PRA’s initial charge was to issue bonds to fund renewal activities, although it eventually controlled the city’s allocation of federal renewal funds. The Planning Commission and the PRA worked closely together, with the former developing plans and the latter carrying out implementation. 29
With legislation in place and institutions to oversee planning and redevelopment, the city of Philadelphia embarked on a quest to modernize the city and fix its “functional obsolescence.”
30
Overall, the city’s earliest redevelopment efforts used large-scale clearance and rebuilding with no inclusion of rehabilitation, much less formal historic preservation.
31
By the end of the 1940s, the PCPC had
certified ten sections of the city as blighted areas, permitting the Redevelopment Authority to exercise its power of eminent domain and to clear sites for private redevelopment projects in accordance with Planning Commission plans for the overall development of the area.
32
In projects such as Eastwick and East Poplar and around the Temple University campus, the crux of redevelopment rested on demolishing substandard, blighted housing (Figure 1).
33
Commentators on Philadelphia’s early planning program reflected,
[W]ith few exceptions, the Authority’s first program was oriented toward slum clearance in the Negro-occupied section of north-central Philadelphia. . . . The concept was to develop “spores” of good new housing which would act as a stimulus to the revitalization and rehabilitation of private property around them.”
34
Map of Philadelphia, highlighting select urban renewal sites.
In 1947, the year after the PRA and PCPC began implementing clearance and redevelopment plans, historic preservation made its first entrance into Philadelphia’s renewal scene. That year, the National Park Service, working collaboratively with the state of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia’s planners and local officials, and nonprofit Independence Hall Association, created a landmark district centered on the historic Independence Hall and honoring the city’s Colonial heritage. The development of the Independence National Historic Park required major alterations to the surrounding urban landscape, including the clearance of many nineteenth-century buildings that were not affiliated with the nation’s founding or the city’s early settlement. In total, the idealized restoration of Independence Hall included demolishing over one hundred buildings to make way for a large grassy mall on the building’s north side (Figure 2). 35 Other “important” structures were clustered to the east of Independence Hall, including Carpenter’s Hall, Benjamin Franklin’s homestead, the Second National Bank, Library Company of Philadelphia, and Banker’s Row. The demolition associated with Independence Hall’s preservation provided the earliest evidence of that Philadelphia’s preservation community at the time held a narrow view of historic significance that valorized only Colonial-era heritage. The preservationists involved heralded Colonial-era landmarks at the expense of the neighborhood’s everyday landscape. At the same time, planners were supportive of the project in the hopes that tourism-driven preservation, combined with selective clearance and redevelopment opportunities (which created new building sites around the perimeter of the mall), would improve this blighted neighborhood. As Edmund Bacon, writing in 1950, explained, “[I]f the adjacent development is properly planned, this should have the effect of halting decline in this older area.” 36
An aerial view, looking north, of Independence Mall (ca. 1951), created via the demolition of non-Colonial historic buildings.
Two key events occurred in 1949 to further propel Philadelphia’s midcentury planning efforts. First, as discussed previously, the federal government passed the Housing Act of 1949. With its requirement that projects involve only the clearance and redevelopment of blighted housing, the federal act institutionalized the type of activities already under way by Philadelphia’s planners and Redevelopment Authority. Second, Edmund Bacon took over as the director of the PCPC. The PCPC’s most well-known and influential leader, Bacon provided the vision for the city’s planning, renewal, and redevelopment from 1949 through 1970. He viewed planning as an urban design endeavor and worked to create a modern, functional, and livable city. 37 While most historical accounts have focused on Bacon’s well-known Center City projects, including the Modernist Penn Center and Market East redevelopments, his approach was actually “half modern, half historicist, at once looking forward and backward.” 38
Building a Multifaceted Renewal Agenda
By the early 1950s, urban renewal based solely on the process of demolition and redevelopment was losing popularity in Philadelphia. The largely unsuccessful clearance projects of the 1940s incited the Planning Commission to reduce the emphasis on demolition and maximize private-sector conservation and rehabilitation. In other words, “city officials decided that the residential program was a failure because demolition proved more costly than anticipated and because developers were not interested in buying the cleared land.” 39 Philadelphia’s planners’ discontent with clearance strategies and the desire to increase rehabilitation were not unique, and in 1954, the federal government revised the urban renewal program. One of the key changes, among many, was that rehabilitation projects were now permissible. 40 This ethic of conservation permeated Philadelphia’s ongoing planning and renewal efforts in a variety of ways—from the classification of residential neighborhoods in the city’s comprehensive plan, to scattered-site demolitions, to pristine neighborhood restorations and the designation of historic districts.
A key development move of the 1950s was the adoption of Philadelphia’s first comprehensive plan. In 1952, the city’s new political leadership, still represented by the GPM, successfully passed a new Home Rule Charter, which mandated the Planning Commission to prepare a comprehensive development plan for the city. Under this new framework, the PCPC had four programs. First, the comprehensive plan laid out the physical development of the city over a twenty to forty-year time frame. Second, district plans also had a twenty- to forty-year time frame, focused on smaller geographic areas of the city, such as West Philadelphia, and outlined objectives for social and physical development. Third, area/renewal plans recommended improvements for individual neighborhoods and subneighborhoods within five to twelve years. Finally, the capital program outlined capital improvements and operating programs necessary within one to six years to meet the goals and recommendations of the various plans.
In 1955 a distinct comprehensive planning division was added to the PCPC and the Comprehensive Plan: The Physical Development Plan for the City of Philadelphia was completed in 1960. In prior years, the PCPC prepared area plans on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, but after 1960 all area plans were required to fit within the guidelines and provisions of the comprehensive plan. A key driver behind the comprehensive plan was the PRA’s 1956 Central Urban Renewal Area report, which found that continuing with a clearance and redevelopment approach would cost nearly $1 billion. Deeming this amount cost prohibitive, the report recommended that “rather than attacking the worst areas with aggressive clearance programs, the city would focus on the conservation of declining residential areas.” 41
Ultimately, the city’s new comprehensive plan recommended a mix of conservation, rehabilitation, and clearance and redevelopment for Philadelphia’s housing stock. The plan classified all residential neighborhoods in one of four categories. Approximately 100,000 dwelling units were in areas of major reconstruction (5.5 square miles), in which planners called for clearance of one-third or more of the total units. An additional 200,000 units were in limited reconstruction districts (15 square miles), where the recommendation was demolition of one-tenth to one-third of the existing units. The third category, conservation areas, included about 150,000 units (11 square miles) and had good housing conditions but needed more open space and community facilities. The rest of the city’s dwelling units were in areas deemed stable and in need of no intervention. These neighborhoods consisted mostly of recently constructed buildings. In total, the plan called for demolition of 158,000 units, or about 26 percent of the city’s entire stock, most of which constituted the city’s older row houses in areas of major reconstruction. Of these, 116,000 were to make way for new uses, while 42,000 (7 percent) were solely the result of substandard conditions. 42 Conversely, the plan called for the retention of over 70 percent of the city’s residential buildings.
While the plan recommended conserving about three-fourths of all residential properties in the city, the highest priority for city planners and local leaders was clearly modernization, retaining the city’s industrial base, and developing commercial facilities to compete with new suburban retail centers. 43 Philadelphia’s planners estimated continued population growth. And as they confronted increased suburban economic and housing competition, they were also attempting to solve an inner-city housing shortage. Planners thought that providing a favorable environment for industry and modern housing would halt decline and upgrade the overcrowded, unsanitary, insufficient, and unsafe conditions within the city. The areas targeted for demolition and the rationale for doing so made this agenda vividly apparent. For instance, to reach the goal of dedicating 25 percent of the city’s land area to industrial uses, the plan recommended complete clearance of 1,234 acres of residential and commercial buildings. Additional residential demolition was planned to increase parking for existing commercial uses, so that these urban facilities could compete with the easy accessibility and parking of newer suburban shopping centers. Finally, the plan called for clearance of older residential buildings to facilitate transportation improvements and to create space for parks and recreational space within existing neighborhoods. 44
In 1955, at the same time that the Planning Commission was creating the comprehensive plan and considering the role of rehabilitation as a means of renewal, the city of Philadelphia established the PHC. The PHC was the first local historical commission with jurisdiction over an entire metropolitan area. 45 It was a seven-member advisory body charged with regulating the demolition of historic structures, designating and reviewing alterations to individual buildings, and generally “preserving all that was of historical value to the city.” 46 By the time it was established, the preservation of Philadelphia’s Colonial-era heritage, centered on Independence Hall, was well under way. The Historical Commission institutionalized this preexisting value of Colonial-era buildings, choosing to narrowly define what counted as “historic.”
Because of the PHC’s limited view of historic significance, its influence on midcentury planning and renewal was extremely limited and concentrated in Society Hill, a neighborhood adjacent to Independence National Historic Park and the target of an innovative urban renewal scheme—for Philadelphia and the nation—that relied on historic restorations. Overall, the renewal of Society Hill marked an important milestone in the broad history of urban preservation. Reflecting on the planning of Society Hill, Hassebroek highlights the unique mix of approaches and the lasting influence of the project:
the transformation of Philadelphia’s impoverished Washington Square East neighborhood into tony, upper middle class Society Hill was considered innovative for its day. Called “slum clearance with penicillin, not surgery,” Society Hill sponsored a mix of new residential towers and townhouses by I. M. Pei, modern infill projects, pocket parks, and extensive restoration of the majority of existing rowhouses which formed the historic fabric of the neighborhood. Society Hill thus became a model for a still-fledgling preservation movement.
47
The PCPC created an original plan for the area in 1947, calling for massive clearance and redevelopment of the low-income and deteriorated housing stock. 48 The rethinking of Society Hill’s renewal came on the heels of Edmund Bacon’s arrival at the PCPC, the 1954 amendments to the federal urban renewal program, and the creation of the city’s Historical Commission. Between 1957 and 1966 the Planning Commission prepared and/or amended seven plans for the neighborhood, with Edmund Bacon, Oscar Stonorov, Vincent Kling, and Roy Larson participating in the design.
The project mixed historic restorations with demolition of a wholesale food distribution market, new construction of high-rise apartment towers and infill townhomes, and the insertion of a pedestrian greenway system designed by Bacon to connect “the principle historic structures scattered throughout the venerable but blighted Society Hill area” (Figure 3). 49 With $11.1 million in federal funding, the Planning Commission partnered with the Redevelopment Authority, the Historical Commission, and the Old Philadelphia Development Corporation (OPDC)—a resident-organized group created in 1956 to gain a participatory voice in Society Hill’s renewal and ensure that revitalization involved minimal demolition. 50
Preliminary site plan from the Washington Square Redevelopment Area Plan (ca. 1961). The plan references a number of key historical sites, illustrates the preserved housing stock, and includes redeveloped sites, including the new I. M. Pei–designed high-rises.
The most unique aspect of the Society Hill effort was the reliance on official historic preservation as an urban renewal strategy. In 1958, the Philadelphia City Council approved a partnership between the Redevelopment Authority and OPDC, following plans developed by the City Planning Commission. The contractual agreement allowed the PRA to take properties within the designated Society Hill renewal area via eminent domain and transfer the development rights to OPDC, which marketed the homes to middle- and upper-income homebuyers. While not initially involved, the PHC lobbied the PRA for inclusion, and in 1959 the Redevelopment Authority agreed to stipulations that buyers had to adhere to PHC-established standards when restoring properties. 51
The Society Hill project was not without controversy. The PCPC’s overall vision was, at times, in conflict with the Historical Commission’s desire for pristine restorations and minimal demolition. Even among preservationists, controversies arose about what to preserve and how to preserve it. The PHC, obsessed with the city’s Colonial past, required property owners to restore their buildings to a specific era and erase any physical reminders of more recent periods. The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Institute of Architects Committee on Preservation, and the American Architectural Archive all criticized this narrow interpretation of history. 52 The PHC set high standards for restoration, and the OPDC marketed Society Hill to middle- and higher-income buyers. While the built environment was preserved, the approach cleared the area of existing, low-income residents and allowed “only rich architectural history buffs [to] afford to rehabilitate the Georgian houses in Society Hill according to the standards of historic correctness required by the city.” 53
While the Society Hill project demonstrates that Philadelphia’s planners were open to preservation, they were simultaneously undertaking more traditional renewal plans involving clearance and modernization. The bulk of these plans focused on downtown Philadelphia, with the PCPC completing at least nine plans for the Center City Redevelopment Area and additional plans for smaller subdistricts between 1958 and 1967. 54 In contrast to Society Hill, the Center City plans only modestly and indirectly addressed historic preservation. Aside from the renewal efforts of the 1940s and early 1950s, the plans for Center City had the least amount of reference to conservation, rehabilitation, or historic preservation. 55 Rather, the plans called for massive redevelopment as the basis for economic revival. A key example was the demolition of the “Chinese Wall,” an eight-block-long, sixteen-track-wide railroad viaduct that covered thirty acres of downtown land designed by noted architect Frank Furness, to make way for the modern Penn Center office complex as part of the Market West renewal strategy. 56
Even amid these clearance schemes, though, evidence of the PCPC’s support for some level of preservation and rehabilitation was evident. For instance, while early plans called for the demolition of Philadelphia’s City Hall, later illustrative plans show the building intact and unchanged. There was no explicit recommendation to preserve City Hall, but its inclusion, rendered in great detail in the Market East renewal plans, demonstrates recognition of its landmark value and a desire to preserve it while undertaking adjacent redevelopment (Figure 4). 57 Other features of the Center City landscape that midcentury plans implicitly preserved were the diagonal axis of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Philadelphia Art Museum, Reading Terminal Market (although originally slated for demolition), and much of William Penn’s original street layout, including the public squares. 58 The only explicit recommendations for rehabilitation or conservation are contained with the South Triangle and Schuylkill River Park subarea plans. 59 For the former, planners recommended mixing new construction with the rehabilitation of “sound, older houses.” 60 The Schuylkill River Park area included a cluster of houses undergoing private rehabilitation, and the plan recommended supporting this effort by demolishing intrusive and blighting nonconforming uses, particularly industrial buildings. 61
Rendering of the proposed Market East Plaza (ca. 1958). Notice the detailed inclusion of a preserved City Hall in the background.
In terms of historic preservation, the Society Hill and Center City plans represent two ends of the spectrum with restorations playing a central role in the former and rehabilitation playing a minimal, supportive role in the latter. In between these two poles, though, lies the remainder of the PCPC’s plans—nearly thirty area, district, or neighborhood plans prepared from the 1950s through the 1970s. Predominantly focused on the city’s residential neighborhoods, these plans emphasize rehabilitation but rarely call for explicit or official historic preservation. 62 Each plan typically included a preliminary site plan and addressed land use, zoning, street changes, development standards, relocation of displaced families, and acquisition costs. To evaluate the possibility of conserving existing dwellings, the PCPC used the U.S. Census of Housing reports on residential conditions, followed-up with firsthand field observations. For instance, the Census of Housing reported that 62 percent of the dwelling units in the Northwest Temple area were dilapidated and/or had no private baths, and the PCPC recommended that the Redevelopment Authority conduct a field survey of the area to determine the extent to which rehabilitation was possible. 63
The area plans illustrate the PCPC’s rehabilitation ethic and reflect their desire to find a cost-effective way to renew the city. In a prime example, the primary goal of the Haddington Redevelopment Area Plan was “conservation of the residential environment.” 64 In Nicetown, the PCPC wanted to “preserve all areas that are stable and not seriously deteriorated” (Figure 5). 65 Furthermore, in Mantua, planners recommended minimal residential demolition and encouraged residential rehabilitation. 66 Oftentimes, the level of rehabilitation recommended for an area was only implicitly stated, with explicit numbers provided only for demolition. For instance, the plan for College Avenue called for clearance of 1,177 out of 2,188 dwelling units (54 percent), while the Haddington Redevelopment Area Plan called for clearance of 670 of 10,028 (7 percent). 67 Furthermore, the PCPC only rarely identified specific buildings targeted for conservation or rehabilitation.
Preliminary Site Plan from the Nicetown Redevelopment Area Plan (ca. 1965). Notice the detailed rendering of the existing stock of row houses.
One of the PCPC’s unique area plans was for Germantown, a neighborhood located approximately eight miles northwest of downtown Philadelphia and originally settled during the Colonial era. In anticipation of the 1960 comprehensive plan, the commission conducted a planning study for the area and recommended regulatory protection for historic resources. Over 70 percent of Germantown’s housing dated to before 1919 and included a range of styles including row houses, single-family Victorians, and large mansions. The PCPC determined that one of Germantown’s key assets was its architectural quality and recommended mixing overall conservation of the existing built environment with explicit preservation of identified historic buildings. The plan is one of the only times that the PCPC listed specific sites to preserve, including the Wyck Estate, Concord School House, Germantown Women’s Club, Mennonite Church, Vernon Park, Trinity Lutheran Church, Germantown Historical Society, and St. Stephen’s Church, among others. 68
Overall, Philadelphia’s comprehensive plan as well as the Society Hill, Center City, and other area plans illustrate the PCPC’s desire to modernize the city while retaining the city’s character and conserving existing resources when possible. The retention of older buildings was, at the time, based not on a sense of historic value but rather a pragmatic desire to ease plan implementation and use limited funds to make the greatest impact throughout the entire city. The Planning Commission’s conservation strategy minimized demolition and preserved large swaths of the city’s neighborhoods despite a lack of advocacy on behalf of the city’s Historical Commission. In effect, the PCPC preserved a more diverse range of buildings, neighborhoods, and architecture than was of concern to the PHC. In only rare cases, though, did the Planning Commission call for regulatory protection for conserved areas, thus retaining flexibility over renewal. This was a position fostered by the city’s Historical Commission, whose value of only Colonial-era buildings set an unofficial policy that resources from later periods were unworthy of historic designations.
Conclusion
The PCPC exerted a strong influence in shaping the physical form of Philadelphia during the mid-twentieth century. Contemporary writings from the period credited the PCPC as a visionary and conservative planning body—in that it did not follow the traditional “slash and burn” policies typical of urban renewal. The dominant narratives about Philadelphia’s midcentury planning focus on the preservation of Society Hill and the modernization of downtown Philadelphia. In total, though, the PCPC prepared nearly fifty plans during this era, which laid out development and redevelopment schemes for much of the city. During the same period that Philadelphia was strategizing about urban renewal, the city established the PHC. Despite the potential for renewal to demolish large swaths of older buildings, the PHC had a minor impact on midcentury planning. This resulted from the PHC’s narrow view of Colonial-era heritage as the city’s only historic assets, while ignoring any historic value in later periods, building styles, and neighborhoods.
Philadelphia’s planners tried to mix old with new, making recommendations ranging from pristine restorations to moderate rehabilitation to complete demolition and new construction. In an effort to reduce implementation costs and modernize the city without destroying its underlying character, the Philadelphia Planning Commission adopted a moderate approach to renewal, which resulted in the retention of a wide range of older buildings, well beyond the scope of what the PHC valued as historic and worthy of preservation at the time. When the PCPC recommended conservation and rehabilitation, though, it did not call for regulatory historic designation or give these areas protection under the auspices of the Historical Commission. For Philadelphia’s planners, conservation and rehabilitation reflected an inherent value placed on the existing built environment and functioned as unofficial, implicit historic preservation. This study focuses on Philadelphia’s midcentury plans and, in so doing, demonstrates the complexity of the PCPC’s approach. While the Philadelphia experience cannot be generalized to all cities, it does inform us about the limitations of framing cities’ urban renewal efforts in black-and-white, preservation-versus-demolition terms. In the 1950s and 1960s Philadelphia was characterized as unique and “conservative,” but in all likelihood it was exceptional only in the extreme case of restoring Society Hill. As historians continue to investigate the complexity of midcentury planning efforts, it is thus crucial to delve deeper than high-profile projects and understand the complexity of midcentury planners’ approach and values in a range of neighborhoods, contexts, and situations. In so doing, we will gain an ever more nuanced picture of urban renewal processes.
By the late 1960s, the national sentiment about urban policy began to rapidly shift toward increased neighborhood conservation and decreased federal involvement in local planning efforts. Critiques, such as Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, Martin Anderson’s The Federal Bulldozer, and Herbert Gans’s The Urban Villagers, fueled a popular and professional backlash toward large-scale clearance schemes. 69 In the realm of federal policy, President Johnson created the Model Cities program in 1966, which marked a definitive shift away from the clearance strategy with “provisions to assist preservation activities through urban renewal, comprehensive planning and other programs.” 70 That same year, the federal government passed the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), which required review of all federal projects—including those using federal monies—to minimize their negative impact on historic resources. The NHPA closely followed the recommendations of the 1965 U.S. Conference of Mayors publication With Heritage so Rich, which outlined the threats to urban historic resources and the benefits of a new, preservation-minded urban strategy. 71
In 1966, the same year as the passage of the NHPA, the National Trust for Historic Preservation held its annual conference in Philadelphia. In the proceedings, preservation leaders noted that “not many cities or states have concerned themselves too deeply” with the idea of historic preservation, but Philadelphia was an exception.
72
At the conference, Edmund Bacon, the head of the Planning Commission, spoke about the city’s preservation efforts, reflecting on his desire to modernize the city with the context of the existing built environment:
The Commission’s approach is to remove only the worst parts of the community; to interweave the new construction with the older houses; to use rehabilitation wherever appropriate; to preserve existing community institutions and to use them as focal points.
73
By the 1970s the PHC began expanding its definition of historic value and designating a wider range of resources, but its earlier, narrow view of history had preempted involvement in most of the city’s midcentury planning. 74 Rather, the city’s planners had free reign to recommend clearance policies without organized protest from local preservationists. In other words, large swaths of older and historic urban fabric might have been lost without a second thought from midcentury preservationists. In the end, it was the PCPC’s choice of a moderate, conservation-based urban renewal strategy that resulted in the retention and preservation of Philadelphia’s various building types and neighborhoods. The PCPC’s approach was driven not by historical values but by market constraints (severely limited funds for implementation) and urban design concerns (a desire to modernize the city without destroying its underlying character). This conservative approach to renewal resulted in a mix of pristine restorations, rehabilitated older buildings, modern infill, and isolated clearance and redevelopment projects. Thus, the evidence from the Philadelphia case complicates the “urban renewal equals clearance” story by demonstrating that the city’s planners preserved much of Philadelphia’s residential built environment, well beyond what the local Historic Commission viewed as worthy of protection at the time.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.