THE PHILADELPHIA STORY
When one smushes urban renewal into one large ideological mass, it is easy to lose the real-time reality that UR was an umbrella strategy, not a specific monolithic program that was pursued to “remove Negroes”. Under that umbrella strategy lurked a wide variety of actors, movements, constituencies and goals. Philadelphia is our example to demonstrate the different forms of UR that existed, not only across the Big Cities but also within a single municipality. That allows us to sketch out how, I believe, different wings/approaches within American economic development evolved during these critical Transition Years.
The first task of this case study is to trace the policy system that produced Philadelphia’s UR strategy. It is clearly not identical to that outlined in Boston where Progressive business elites doubled as Irish-hating Yankees. Moreover, one can more easily see how UR itself evolved—in ways that might not fit the smush. In this section one might see the rude beginnings of a new order, our contemporary American ED system, jell and take shape. In particular one can see a division of labor involving Transition-era chambers finding new roles and spinning off new EDOs. It is also possible to see the “governmental” wing of mainstream ED assume form within the mayoral administration—an evolution that involved a break from the community development wing of UR, from the housing authority to the redevelopment agency. This proved unfortunate for public housers and neighborhood physical redevelopers.
The Le Corbusier high-rise public housing spawned so many problems they had to be torn down, and a new federal housing role had to be devised. As bad, Transition-era, neighborhood-based housers using slum removal (to be fair, mostly highway-related slum removal) generated an intent and visceral neighbor counter-reaction that, in its good time, would itself join our contemporary community development system. In short, Philadelphia is a good place to examine the workings of our Scarlet Letter metaphor.
Philadelphia’s UR Background
Politically, with rare interruptions Philadelphia’s state Republican political machine dominated the city’s politics from the Civil War through to 1950. Philadelphia consequently enjoyed an unsavory postwar political reputation as a “corrupt and sleepy, unprogressive city” with limited home rule powers. War production strained Philadelphia’s existing housing, yet in 1944 building permits in a city approaching 3.5 million were for only 160 new units. Housing surveys revealed that one-third of housing units required demolition/substantial rehabilitation.
Why? The 1940 metro population grew by 2 percent; Philadelphia’s declined by 1 percent. The fifties’ metro increase was 14.7 percent, the city’s 7.3 percent—mostly Great Migration newcomers. From 1940 to 1950 the net increase of African-Americans approached 130,000. Over the next decade, 155,000 were added. Steered to inner-ring ghettos, black migrants found employment scarce. From 1948 to 1954, retail business fell by 10.4 percent and manufacturing employment declined by 10.9 percent during the 1950s (Beauregard, 1989, pp. 199–200).
Three-term machine mayor Bernard Samuel had in 1946 taken advantage of state enabling legislation to establish the city’s redevelopment corporation—one of the nation’s first. Samuels was listening to “Young Turk” Progressive housing reformers who sought to empower a strong Planning Commission that vigorously advocated not only for planning but also for CBD redevelopment and neighborhood housing. The first wing, Young Turks (Progressive young reformers styling themselves after La Guardia), began meeting at a restaurant in 1939. Their discussion forums evolved into “the City Policy Committee” which limited membership (yet included women and blacks). The Policy Committee’s true love was planning—next was housing improvement (Lowe, 1967, pp. 320–21). Among their members were two older reformers/politicos, Joseph Clark and his close buddy Richardson Dilworth.
In 1942 the Policy Committee convinced Mayor Samuels and the city council to significantly empower a strong, quasi-autonomous Planning Commission (PHC). The PHC will be a central actor in post-1950 housing and urban renewal. At the urging of Walter Phillips (a prominent member of the Policy Committee), the committee formed a permanent civic association to watchdog and supplement the new city agency: the Citizens’ Council on City Planning. The Citizens’ Council’s first initiative (1947) was to hold an exposition presenting its visual image of what Philadelphia could achieve through planning. The exposition amounted to a call to arms for Philadelphia’s physical redevelopment, from highways to housing—including a visual map of the city’s blight.
An estimated 400,000 walked past its elaborate visual images and maps. Proposed changes included a mall and park around downtown Independence Hall, greenways, pedestrian bridges, a waterfront walk along a marina and other recreational facilities. The CBD was the heart of the New Philadelphia. Working with other old-line Progressive groups (such as Philadelphia’s Bureau of Municipal Research), they lobbied Samuels (1949) to appoint Edmund Bacon (a protégé of a Phillips) first to the Philadelphia Housing Association (PHA), then as executive director of the PHC.
The PHC inherited and commenced planning (1949) for a major neighborhood redevelopment through slum clearance and relocation: the Eastwick Project (outlined above). Eastwick, a racially integrated, rather large neighborhood containing approximately 19,000, mostly home-owning residents, was envisioned by city planners as an area that “low-income blacks … could be relocated to a new planned community” (McKee, 2001, p. 552). Using “open land” or land acquired by eminent domain and cleared by demolition, a second phase, conducted by private real estate developers, would build new suburban-style housing.
The project generated intense backlash from residents, but planning continued and Eastwick became the city’s first post-1949 Housing Act project. Quickly labeled “the nation’s largest urban renewal project in 1958”, eminent domain and slum clearance of most of Eastwick followed. The Korman Company was awarded construction rights for replacement housing (1958), but little was actually built. Most of the cleared land remained empty for decades (McKee, 2001). Having removed most of the original population, Eastwick gained population between 1970 and 1990. Eastwick could have been the poster child for the Second Ghetto.
Business Coalition and Policy System Change
The second wing emanated from the chamber and its “old Main Line” corporate elites. Disgusted with machine scandals, horrific governance, lousy water and economic stagnation, they coalesced in 1948 into the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM).4 Initially, the GPM consisted of 31 members, who paid to play. Its initial budget was $225,000, which hired staff and consultants to formulate a CBD redevelopment plan, the centerpiece of which was moving a food distribution company (Dock Street Market) out of the downtown and opening up CBD land for redevelopment (Banfield and Wilson, 1967, p. 271). They invited Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Conference on Community Development’s executive director for advice. The GPM’s CBD revitalization approach centered on privately financed offices/headquarters and the removal of physical blight; the public sector provided only accompanying infrastructure and site control.
The GPM allied with reformist Young Turks Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth, won the 1951 election and on January 1, 1952 Clark became Philadelphia’s first “strong mayor”. Planning, led by Bacon, immediately started. Key projects included: the Triangle (blighted mixed-use Center City (CBD) neighborhood; development of Independence Mall by the federal Department of the Interior’s National Park Service; Philadelphia airport (1953) expansion; the Walt Whitman Bridge (Delaware Valley Port Authority); the Penn Town housing project (north of Center City); and the signature project, Penn Center (the city’s first major post-Depression office/retail construction).
Varieties of Urban Renewal
Penn Center, adjacent to city hall, was privately funded and constructed on privately owned land. Bacon, working with the chamber and the Citizens’ Council, devised a plan that made Penn Center “the tangible symbol of a new kind of city” (Lowe, 1967, p. 331). But before construction started a major barrier had to be removed by an “unwilling” private corporation: the Penn Railroad. Penn Railroad owned an unused station/rail yard complex square in the middle of the CBD (the “Chinese Wall”). The wall, running eight blocks separating north from south Philadelphia, was comprised of 16 tracks and a transportation viaduct. Penn Railroad sprang into action only after Mayor Clark threatened to condemn the mess. Construction started in 1954.
Development didn’t always follow Bacon’s plan faithfully. But underground shopping, public spaces at street level, links to the subway system, a pedestrian mall, parking garages and a visually inspiring esplanade from the foot of city hall to the surrounding railroad and subway stations were victories for Bacon. Underneath the mall was a pedestrian concourse offering restaurants, shopping, amusements and a sunken plaza. Office buildings “on stilts” ensured uninterrupted views and maximum sun. Nevertheless, “the city’s role [in Penn Center] was minimal” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 209); using private funds it was not associated with the city’s redevelopment authority.
Left to the city was neighborhood housing/slum clearance. The first such project (1950)—the East Poplar Penn Towne project, managed by the Redevelopment Authority—reflected Bacon’s Planning Commission’s innovative “self-help”, “shelter-oriented”, historic, preservation-friendly, humanist Le Corbusier approach. Lest we wax too nostalgically, Bacon made extensive use of the bulldozer as well. Philadelphia’s neighborhood model did not follow the “Baltimore model”. The East Poplar neighborhood approach relied on slum clearance with mixed low-rise and high-rise physical redevelopment combined with substantial rehabilitation of existing units and preservation of old Quaker residences (Lowe, 1967, pp. 333–6). Compared to Boston’s West End, Penn Towne was in another league altogether.
Penn Towne employed a number of innovative methodologies, partnerships and policies—it was integrated. The idea was that “good housing” or spores would stimulate investment in adjacent private properties. Accordingly, the RDA built units in the worst areas of the project—owned by African-Americans. Those displaced, having nowhere to go, doubled up in the closest available units, prompting further deterioration and exodus. The project attracted national attention and favorable comment. It also exceeded budgets and schedules, and produced high vacancy rates. Private investment did not follow. It didn’t stop suburbanization or surrounding neighborhood succession. Bacon and others believed they had to do it better the next time.
Highways
Between 1950 and 1973 Interstate 95 (I-95), a beltway, and several expressways cut through and around Philadelphia. Highways were a significant element in Bacon/GPM comprehensive plans; highways were not forced upon the city or its UR leadership. But I-95 exerted a “dramatic effect”, tearing up areas running through northeastern neighborhoods, connecting to the airport and into the suburbs.
It sliced through many river wards causing the taking and demolition of large numbers of buildings and dividing neighborhoods physically … [cutting] off Center City [the CBD] from the waterfront … By the end of the period, the southeastern portion of the city was a virtual tangle of interstate highways, access roads, and bridge ramps. (Beauregard, 1989, p. 215)
The CBD emerged relatively unscathed; the Schuylkill Expressway, Philadelphia’s first modern highway, bulldozed one neighborhood, linking the CBD to the beltway/I-95. From the get-go, opposition got in the way. As early as 1957 Society Hill’s resistance to highways affected their route. Opposition gathered steam with each freeway and expressway:
The final link in the inner beltway quickly [1964] became emblematic of the sharp contrast between Bacon’s showy center city projects and the deteriorating conditions in the residential neighborhoods beyond … [turning] the Crosstown Expressway proposal … into a flashpoint for Philadelphia’s urban renewal. (Klemek, 2011, p. 134)
Arising out of this opposition came a new generation of lawyer-planners, the rise of citizen activists and newly formed CDOs (Klemek, 2011, pp. 133–6). With signs reading “Fry Bacon”, they protested. Crosstown was stopped, and stopped, and stopped—before it was finally abandoned in 1974.
Society Hill
Society Hill, a rundown, historically significant, low-income neighborhood touching the CBD, captured Dilworth’s interest. Newly elected, he ordered Bacon to plan the project—and started construction on his new $150,000 house in the district. Bacon, long involved in promoting the area, lost control of the project, however, when Albert Greenfield—a politically connected banking-CBD real estate developer (and taxi cab owner)—became City Planning Commission chair. Bacon came within an inch of resigning. In any case, Greenfield truly believed Society Hill was an important cog in downtown revitalization because its high-quality, historically significant housing could attract affluent households to the CBD. Greenfield insisted the project required decisive private sector management to succeed. Dilworth agreed.
So, in 1956 Greenfield incorporated his change-agent, the nonprofit Old Philadelphia Development Corporation (OPDC), with the city’s financial and business elite on its board. OPDC, the direct descendant of today’s Center City Philadelphia and the founder of several key Philadelphia EDOs, drove the Society Hill project from beginning to end. In 1956 OPDC hired John P. Robin (redevelopment chief of Pittsburgh’s Mayor Lawrence’s Gateway Center) as executive director. Formally, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Agency subcontracted with the OPDC to develop the project, but the board dominated policy that included design competitions, demolition, restoration of historic colonial houses, luxury high-rise apartments and three office buildings built by I.M. Pei and NYC’s William Zeckendorf. Urban renewal funds were used.
The project was slow coming together, and groundbreaking for its first phase was in 1961. Like Boston, UR required housing for “a prestige, upper-income … elite taste-setters … the first part of a coordinated set of efforts to revitalize center city as a place to live and work and to provide an image for the whole city’s revitalization” (Lowe, 1967, p. 350). Society Hill, always a controversial use of public funds and a target for architectural and planner criticism, is, however, regarded as one of urban renewal’s more successful projects.
UR Splits ED at its Seams: An Outline of Contemporary Big City ED Emerges
Traditional planning’s chief tool was the comprehensive plan that allowed for coordination and integration of zoning, codes, capital budgets and infrastructure—both CBD and hinterland. It became clear in the fifties that a comprehensive plan was not up to the UR task. Comprehensive plans meant planning with many moving parts, and required lots of expertise and time, great cost and many independent actors, few of which shared common goals—and planners had little actual power to compel behavior. Left unsaid was the outcry that resulting from UR linked to housing and slum clearance. The planning critique was that not enough was being destroyed. The mayor’s critique was that the costs, political and financial, were too high relative to the impact.
As early as 1952, Mayor Clark recognized that Bacon and planning had all they could do to cope with day-to-day UR. So he stoked up the redevelopment agency; its board recruited private sector heavy-hitters and developed an internal long-range planning committee that included prominent planners (Martin Meyerson, for example). In 1956 Clark transferred William Rafsky, his housing coordinator, to be the city’s redevelopment director. Successful UR program implementation required RDA powers, access to both federal urban renewal monies and corporate elites if plans were to be actionable. To improve UR’s effectiveness, Rafsky produced studies that collectively constituted the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) Report.
That report recommended no further slum removal of “Negro housing” until alternative housing could be developed. Efforts to retain manufacturing in the city’s economic base through industrial districts were prioritized. The report reversed Bacon’s “developing spores” strategy, i.e., scattering islands of UR in the “belief” that private investment would fill in between the spores. It didn’t—in fact the reverse occurred. In response, Rafsky proposed to redirect UR to the CBD and concentrate initially on so-called “gray areas” (housing rings adjacent to the CBD). The report called for both public and private investment, and recommended programs such as adult education, enhanced city services, treating family disorganization, delinquency, crime, fair housing and human rights—and poverty. These were the essential features of LBJ’s future Model Cities program, launched a decade later. The report, well-received, went nowhere.
In 1959, however, Philadelphia participated in a federal planning/UR innovation, the 1959 Housing Act’s “community renewal program” (CRP). The CRP encouraged gathering data, observing effects and making adjustments to the project. More than a planning tool, however, the CRP acknowledged issues inherent to UR-style physical redevelopment. It opened up UR to include “social” concerns. Blight no longer meant solely physical deterioration, but was widened to include education, crime, welfare and health (congruent with the Ford Foundation Gray Areas program). By 1963 over a hundred cities participated.
[The CRP] suggested that social action should accompany the clearance or rehabilitation of buildings … yet most planners … had given all too little thought to the relation between social planning and their kind of planning, had only superficial knowledge of the welfare resources of their communities, and made no detailed study of the needs and desires of minority groups and the victims of poverty. (Scott, 1969, p. 598)
UR, under the pressures and realities of municipal level implementation, was bifurcating along Privatist/CBD/business assistance lines, while CD housing physical redevelopment mutated into a comprehensive form of CD. The housing authority managed CD/neighborhoods, and CBD/business programs moved to the RDA and a new set of EDOs and programs that worked with the jurisdictional economic base. So, Rafsky and the redevelopment agency became the lead actors in the CBD and business/eds and meds redevelopment process.
Within the none-too-gentle womb of municipal-level UR, a new corps of economic developers had made their appearance. Rafsky “shared with Logue the distinction of being the first in a new order of municipal officials conspicuously charged with producing teamwork among the agencies concerned with city-building and renewal, including special districts, quasi-public agencies, and even private corporations” (Scott, 1969, pp. 530–31). Pittsburgh was at the parade’s head, but by the mid-1950s (1956) Baltimore’s Mayor D’Alesandro Jr. reorganized planning/UR, centralizing relevant departments, offices and functions in a renewal/housing agency—with a powerful director, Richard L. Steiner. Logue sat in New Haven, and Rafsky in Philly. RDA leadership in UR was strong throughout the East.
CD and ED Work Together under the UR Umbrella
Rafsky involved the RDA with nonprofit institutional redevelopment, now eligible for federal funding. The GI Bill triggered the growth of universities and colleges across the nation, including the University of Pennsylvania. Expansion of facilities and scope of activities logically resulted. By this time such projects were popping up across the nation (NYU, the University of Chicago and later, in Philly, Temple). The question was where? A suburban location was arguably likely (the University of Buffalo, for instance, moved to the suburbs). Philadelphia UR officials were determined not to let that happen. In 1963 RDA partnered with Drexel, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia General Hospital and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to plan, assemble and establish the University City Science Center (today’s University City) on Schuylkill’s riverbanks.
The RDA partnership included eminent domain of adjoining neighborhoods, use of federal UR monies and state funds to construct key facilities (the research building). Involved in this UR project were three neighborhoods, populated mostly by workingclass African-Americans and Italians. Up to 10,000 residents were eventually displaced. The idea was to create a beautiful “manicured” campus, architecturally au courant, that from a cynic’s viewpoint built an isolated cordon sanitaire from less desirable visual and social influences (Puckett and Lloyd, 2015). The buildings were “pointed” inward, away from the surrounding city. Today, the project is an outstanding success (Penn is the city’s largest single employer), but it took a while—for decades after considerable cleared acreage was used only for parking lots.
Moreover, Philly recognized the existence of the problem with “no name” (deindustrialization). Philadelphia was losing its manufacturing. Between 1951 and 1956 the city lost 74 major companies, nearly 10,000 jobs, with payroll cutbacks affecting nearly 40,000 more (Lowe, 1967, p. 360). One asset the city had plenty of was vacant/unused land. So the city’s Department of Commerce established a nonprofit toacquire and assemble land, install streets and infrastructure, to be marketed and sold to business. Also established was the nation’s first industrial land bank. The corporation that inherited these functions, programs and tools, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), was a partnership with the chamber, which paid half its costs and was governed by a 30-member public/private board, including the mayor. The PIDC still operates, having expanded into tax-exempt financing, lending and a wide variety of business assistance programs. Its loan program commenced in 1961 after voters approved a $10 million general obligation bond to finance a revolving loan fund and add more land to the industrial land bank. After 1965, the Philadelphia UR program included industrial parks (Callowhill Industrial Historical District).
Bacon and the Housing Authority meanwhile turned their attention to the North Philadelphia district adjacent to Center City (called the “Jungle”, mostly occupied by African-Americans and location of later 1964 riots): “The strategy employed was to remove dilapidated buildings in order to create land for new private development and public housing and also to stifle the blighting effect many existing dwellings were having on adjacent properties” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 211). By 1962, 10,126 dwelling units were demolished. North Philadelphia demolition continued until 1980 (totaling 35,196 dwelling units demolished, burned down or abandoned—32 percent of the area). The population fell by 54 percent, becoming exclusively black: “With clearance came numerous high-density public housing projects, but almost no new private construction” (Beauregard, 1989, p. 211).
Many of those displaced in this project were intended to go to the pioneering “new town in town” UR project, Eastwick. No one, however, asked North Philadelphia African-Americans if they wanted to move to Eastwick in south Philadelphia—for the most part they didn’t. Eastwick became a middle-class, predominantly white neighborhood.
Buried beneath the fold were torn-up neighborhoods, demolished by highways and UR that created a new generation of leaders, new organizations and new priorities.
The fight against [slum clearance] drew the neighborhood together and gave residents pride in a distinct community identity. Theirs proved a fierce battle for survival, confronting the urban renewal order directly with a multilevel strategy … These citizens succeeded in driving a wedge, from the bottoms up, into the alliance between planning experts, politicians, and private developers. (Klemek, 2011, pp. 133–6)
Klemek is describing NYC, but the story is typical of our Big Cities. The legacy of UR is that in its ashes rose the phoenix of a new policy system, and a rejuvenated community development approach to our profession—all of which will be duly considered in future chapters.
Ron W. Coan 