(more…)

By the 1880s Philadelphia was maturing into its industrial self, its new mills and factories sprouting like sooty mushrooms amid its rows of traditional redbrick rowhomes. It was a city whose workplaces sat cheek by jowl next to the places where Philadelphians called home. For some, the industrial growth of the city signaled the arrival of Philadelphia as the nation’s premier workshop. Still others appreciated the short distance to work. Yet for others with a regressive gaze, the obliteration of the city of Penn, Franklin, Rush, and Rittenhouse was cause for alarm. The new and seemingly inexorable economic momentum of the city was destroying the sacred places, the streets, and places once inhabited by Philadelphia’s legendary First Men. In this time of uncertainty, Philadelphia’s elites’ rebelled against an increasingly incomprehensible present by connecting to a mythologized past.

(more…)

This past weekend I went to see the City Museum of New York’s revisionist exhibit on the role of Robert Moses in “remaking” that five-boroughed “metropolis.” As a statement of fact, he did “remake” New York in the image and likeness of the automobile and the exhibit takes pains to incorporate the well-entrenched anti-Mosaic criticism of Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro. I would argue that the exhibit was so extraordinarily fair that it was befuddling to have such a polarizing figure like Moses situated in an accurate and correct context of his physical legacy.

(more…)

The City Planning Commission’s 1960 Comprehensive Plan is a borderline schizophrenic document: one that casts the suburbs as siphoning population from the city while the city grows. The report estimates the 1980 population of Philadelphia to be somewhere between 2.4-3 million people. Thus the two structural features affecting how Philadelphians would live in 1980: the threat of the suburbs and an ever-increasing population.

(more…)