Remembering Ed Bacon

"In the 1950s Bacon began transforming a seedy historic area between Independence Hall and the Delaware River, removing the meat market plus blocks of deteriorating rowhouses to create Society Hill. Here historic 18th- and 19th- century townhouses were renovated, infill construction added, and a pedestrian path and park system inserted; all signaled by I.M. Pei’s high-rise apartment towers. West of City Hall, Bacon replaced the Broad Street Station of the Pennsylvania Railroad and its “Chinese Wall,” an eight-block-long viaduct, with Penn Center, a Rockefeller Center-style complex of office buildings linked to mass transit, plazas, sunken courts, and pedestrian concourses.

...As Alex Garvin, former vice president for planning design and development at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation pointed out in 2003, “By 1970, owners had rehabilitated more than 600 of Society Hill’s historic structures, property values had more than doubled, and the population had increased by a third.” Businesses filled the office buildings of center city and there began a renaissance that, although sometimes rocky, was revolutionary for its time."