Vern Anastasio is sponsoring another in a series of meetings on zoning and land use planning issues tonight at the Fleischer Art Memorial at 719 Catherine Street. I am still out of town so I won’t be able to make it.
I had a family emergency in the middle of the first one and had to leave early. But it was interesting and useful.
And, at one moment, it turned scary.
The whole issue of zoning is quite complicated and I want to write about it at length. I very much think we need to reform the way we make land use decisions in the city. But I don’t want to see us go from a system that is already problematic to one that is disastrous. And this exactly what will happen if, as some folks suggested at the previous meeting, we return to the days when Philadelphia had an all powerful planning commission guided by a planning czar, Ed Bacon, who dominated land use decisions in the city.
I once quipped that Ed Bacon was the worst city planner since Nero. Bacon did some good things in the city. But he is also responsible for some serious failures and one or two disasters. His role in restoring Society Hill was visionary and that was an extraordinary achievement. His failures, however, were not the product of a visionary but of a representative man of the mid-twentieth century planning movement. That movement was responsible for many awful developments, not just here in Philadelphia, but throughout the world.
Here is a list of some of the disasters in Philadelphia when Bacon ruled our planning process:
• Among the worst is the mostly empty plaza between the mostly undistinguished modernist buildings that comprise Penn Center. In keeping with twentieth century planning practice, the broad plazas of Penn Center made little room for few commercial enterprises such as shops or restaurants. And, as a result, they are mostly empty and have none of the vibrant street life that makes urban life exciting. (To some extent, they have been retrofitted with shops. But they are still not what they should be.) The Penn Center development made a major contribution to the city in that the prospect of new development helped convince people to finally remove the Chinese Wall that divided the western part of Center city. But the Penn Center development came at the cost of the destruction of the wonderful Broad Street train station that could and should have been preserved as other old train stations have been preserved around the country.
• The empty, unpleasant mall in front of Independence Hall which was created at the cost of the destruction of a lively neighborhood which would be even livelier today. This area is slowly being transformed by the new building that are filling in the mall and that were, by the way, opposed by Bacon.
• The ramming of I-95 through riverfront neighborhoods, cutting them off from the river and creating problems for riverfront development from which we still suffer.
• Penn’s Landing. Enough said.
• The Schuylkill Expressway which, in addition to compromising another riverfront, plagues anyone who travels on it with a few guaranteed slowdowns. The Conshohocken Curve itself belongs in the Planner’s Hall of Shame.
• And, just to mention one project that thankfully was not built, the proposed expressway that Bacon wanted to ram thorough the city at South Street. Unfortunately the project was not stopped soon enough and many people were forced out of the neighborhood at a great loss, including my wife’s grandfather who had to sell his store across from Famous Deli for a pittance. Had that expressway been built, the vital Queen Village, Bella Vista and South of South neighborhoods would never be developing as they are today.
There is more. But this is enough for now.
There is no question we need a strong, vital planning department in the city. We need it to give our political and community leaders the advice of experts. We don’t need it to make decisions for us let alone to force those decisions through neighborhood opposition as was the practice in the fifties and sixties.
A few years ago I bought a 1960 textbook on urban planning. I bought it entirely for its historical interest because it is, in fact, a textbook on how to destroy a city. Of course planning has come a long way since the 1960s. Indeed, one of the good things about contemporary planners is that they have learned a great deal from Jane Jacobs about what makes cities work. My fear, however, is contemporary planners have learned everything Jacobs had to teach except for her distrust of urban planning itself.
The last thing this city needs is a progressive movement that too closely resembles the upper middle class dominated good government movements of the twentieth century. Too often these movements created top-down, elitist forms of government. And that was especially true when it came to land use and planning decisions. Our goal should be to create a democratic, bottom-up process in which people in our neighborhoods, perhaps guided by expert advice, make the decisions.