Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  2.

  PENN CENTER’S FIRST BUILDING GOES UP

  This is Philadelphia’s first new office building in more than twenty years. Long after the ephemeral advantage of being the most-up-to-date is gone, this building and its future twin will have something that sets them apart: their wonderful seats on the Penn Center promenade.*5

  Arrangements are now being worked out with Philadelphia’s museums for sculpture pieces on loan, and everyone concerned seems agreed not to do the thing timidly.The missing ingredient is something out of the ordinary happening, if only the splash of water.

  Uris Brothers, owners of the building, have an unusual deal with Pennsylvania Railroad, owners of the land, who have agreed not to permit a competing structure until whatever Uris has is 85 percent rented. But no matter how fast the first building rents, Uris has until next summer to get first crack at the second office site. Uris leases back to the railroad the underground portions of its structure.

  What the general Penn Center plans still lack, and badly need, is some sort of enterprise not strictly workaday. The promenade is a help, but once the office workers are gone, it will sleep. The missing ingredient is something out of the ordinary happening, if only the splash of water, but better yet some focus of entertainment or sport.

  3.

  HISTORY WITH A FUTURE

  The new Independence malls (being done with state and federal participation) are disengaging Independence Hall and a group of other fine historic buildings from the clutter that has congealed around them over the years. Among the side effects of this improvement: it is already stimulating private rehabilitation of the rundown but fundamentally lovely old areas nearby; it is building back into the district its prestige as an office center; it ties the district visually to the Delaware River bridge, a main entrance to the city; it is a counterweight to Penn Center, which by itself would likely accelerate the movement of business westward, leaving a trail of more blight. These side effects were no accident; the malls were conceived and placed to propel this whole seedy district out of the gloom.

  The state mall has been criticized as out of scale, embalming Independence Hall in its grand distances like a fly in amber. However, mall or no mall, the Hall is a fly in amber—whole, stimulating to the sense of wonder, but infinitely, infinitely remote. The quaintsy lamps, urns and pedestals that irritate the mall’s edges are a pathetic try at concealing the joints between then-and-now, but the design that counts is the long tree-lined bits which acknowledge the Hall is an exhibit that most people first view at 35 mph. Happily for those who stop, the existing park behind and the building-dotted federal mall lend a congenial urban scale.

  The problem of harmonizing then-and-now without going phony is also posed by the new office buildings that will focus on the malls. The first has already created quite a hassle. A statement adopted by the Philadelphia AIA sensibly recommends candid contemporary design, tallness with rigid adherence to setback on the mall side, sensitive study of the neighbors and plentiful planting.*6

  4.

  “FINEST FOOD DISTRIBUTION CENTER IN THE WORLD”

  That is what Department of Agriculture’s marketing experts call this 400-acre, $35 million project which is to start building within six months and will serve not only the city and a 90-mile radius but will likely make Philadelphia the major food distribution point on the middle Atlantic Coast.

  It will unify and vastly enlarge wholesale facilities now scattered in half a dozen places—most of them crowded, dirty, festering sources of blight and bottlenecking, put them at a transportation hub, provide enough parking and loading so the city’s 5,000 independent retailers can shop speedily, competitively and oftener, so suppliers can function in an eight-hour day and so working conditions will attract high-grade labor. Motel, hostel, eating places, 23 acres of planted area, go with it.

  Because of what it will do for the old market districts, what it will do for its site (burning dumps and squatters’ shacks) and what it will do for the city’s economy, this is Philadelphia’s most important single improvement.

  Why should a step like this be so rare? For one thing, slum markets are like slum housing; there are big profits in them for some people, at the expense of all people.*7 It takes ability to overcome a kicking, scratching opposition, ability to line up wholesalers’ support, ability to think big and to finance big.

  How Philadelphia got this project is as remarkable as the project itself. It is the baby of the Greater Philadelphia Movement, a small, very high-powered group of nongovernmental Philadelphia leaders, mostly businessmen and bankers. These men applied themselves to study and action on food wholesaling with the fervor their business ancestors applied to building the railroads or cornering wheat. But observe a startling difference in motives: these new tycoons expect their nonprofit corporation, the Greater Philadelphia Food Distribution Center, to lower distributing costs for the consumer and at the same time pay for itself. And when capital costs are paid off, the whole development will be converted to the ownership of the city of Philadelphia which will then pocket the profits. In the meantime, the city should receive about $1 million a year in property tax and the school district $800,000. The sponsor’s share seems to be the bang they get out of doing something big, and satisfaction in helping the city.

  5.

  HOW TO PUT THE NEIGHBORHOOD BACK INTO THE CITY

  Mill Creek redevelopment area is a chunk of typical city desert. Building coverage runs as high as 74 percent, dwelling density as high as 50 units per acre. Nothing gives the whole amorphous mass backbone; block after block is more of the dreary same.

  The city planning commission’s Mill Creek redevelopment plan, with Louis I. Kahn as consulting architect, contains some wonderfully clever and practical devices for jacking up the district, almost by its own bootstraps.*8

  As Kahn studied the area, he noticed that a good proportion of its few institutions—churches, school, a playground—occurred along one street, although the fact was hardly noticeable, they were so underplayed.

  The plan reinforces these institutions with a few additional, and gives them a new kind of Main St., primarily for pedestrians, closed off to vehicles where it runs through new housing, widened and side-planted in other places, joining subsidiary spurs. “It brings out, instead of burying, the things built by unselfish effort,” says Kahn.

  Looking at the old housing, he concluded the worst thing about it was the gridiron streets “which were not nearly so bad in the more peaceful days of the horse when these houses were built.” Where cross-streets were sufficiently wide, he has turned the gridiron into loops by inserting a trail of little connected parks and decorative pavings. Within the street loops, he has added parking across from the parks. Both this device and the new greenway or pedestrian main street have been approved, are to be tried.

  New housing, mostly in the southeast corner, combines public low-cost and private middle-income projects. Tall buildings are ingeniously sited so they do not confront each other. Circles, some containing sand, some grass, some paving, are the basic landscaping unit and path-determiners. “It puts shortcuts into the paths in the first place.”

  Mill Creek’s new housing, particularly its mixture of high, low and differing-income projects and its tall-building siting, have already influenced planning in other cities, notably in Detroit.

  * * *

  *1 Urban renewal in Philadelphia, pioneered by City Planning Commission director Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), sought to avoid the excesses of the “bulldozer approach” to slum clearance and rebuilding by designating smaller renewal areas, trying to minimize evictions, holding community meetings early in the process, preserving local institutions, employing innovative architects, and incorporating local history into plans. Jacobs found herself both inspired and provoked by Bacon, but if nothing else, she approved of his attempt to use renewal as a catalyst for rejuvenation. At the 1958 conference where Jacobs made her public debut as a critic of urban renewal, Bacon descri
bed city neighborhoods as “dynamic organisms which have within themselves the seeds of self-regeneration.” Jacobs would echo this idea in the closing moments of Death and Life: “Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves” (p. 448).

  *2 “Pennsy” was contemporary vernacular for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Founded in 1846, it went on to become the biggest railroad in the United States and one of the largest corporations in the world. Its passenger lines were folded into the new Amtrak system in the 1970s.

  *3 See part 4 of this article, “Finest Food Distribution Center in the World.”

  *4 Rittenhouse Square, originally called Southwest Square, was one of the five original parks that William Penn designed for the central district of Philadelphia in the seventeenth century. It was renamed after the clockmaker David Rittenhouse in 1825. In Death and Life, Jacobs would say that the Square and its siblings provided “almost a controlled experiment” on the successful ingredients of a city park. While others, more isolated from their surroundings, had grown stagnant, she praises Rittenhouse Square for its success as a much-beloved and -used park, which benefited from the diverse and intricate uses of the neighborhood around it and enriched that diversity in turn.

  *5 Jacobs would later turn on Penn Center and particularly the “promenade” she praises here. Ed Bacon designed it as a superblock featuring office towers and a pedestrian walk, but he placed all the shops and commerce in the development underground. In “Downtown Is for People,” Jacobs criticizes it and other big office redevelopments for shoving “its liveliest activities and brightest lights underground.”

  *6 A reference to the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the major professional organization for architects in the United States.

  *7 Jacobs is using the conventional mid-twentieth-century term for the mixed residential, commercial, and industrial districts surrounding the downtowns of big cities. Despite its wide use as shorthand for “bad neighborhood,” the term slum was, like the closely related term blight, far from an objective description. Although the two terms were often used interchangeably in everyday usage, they had slightly different connotations. In the early twentieth century slum initially meant that a city district suffered from a range of physical and social problems—from high incidences of crime, disease, and fires to overcrowding and physical dilapidation of older housing stock—while blight tended to refer to districts that were economically fallow, largely because they were not returning their highest values in terms of tax dollars to city coffers. Thus the major difference: overcrowded neighborhoods tended to be seen as “slums,” areas with vacancies and abandoned buildings as “blight.” In popular usage the two terms tended to merge as conjoined judgments about the social, physical, and economic viability of whole swaths of the city. They were used, despite their vague and capacious natures, as official justifications in policy for slum clearance plans.

  *8 The architect Louis Kahn (1901– 74) not only designed Mill Creek, he also served as the “chief planner-architect” for Philadelphia’s entire redevelopment program. He would become one of the most celebrated modern architects of his generation. As with Ed Bacon, Jacobs found herself inspired by Kahn’s respect for the city fabric, although in the long run she became dismayed by the impact of his plans on the city. Mill Creek was demolished in 2002 and replaced by a low-rise, single-family development called the Lucien E. Blackwell Homes.

  Pavement Pounders and Olympians

  * * *

  ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, MAY 1956

  Edgardo Contini, one of the authors of the splendid Gruen plan for Fort Worth, had it in mind one Saturday morning a few weeks ago in Fort Worth to buy himself a new pair of walking shoes.*1 When a visitor from Forum turned up, however, he agreed to postpone his shopping and talk about the city instead.

  Talking about the city, it quickly developed over a cup of coffee, also meant walking about the city, and over the next few hours the visitor began to understand why Contini’s walking shoes needed replacing. He knew that square mile of downtown, on foot, the way most people know their own block. Between side excursions into backyards, prowls into alleys, sallies into the middle of the street (future domain of the pedestrian) and plunges up stairs (for a different angle of vision), he enthusiastically detailed the history of this store, the activities on that block, the qualities of the restaurant yonder, the potentialities of around-the-corner.

  Contini belongs to a breed which seems to be on the increase—the pavement-pounding city planner. Edmund Bacon, Philadelphia’s executive director of planning, is another representative. Bacon delights in having figured out, by trial and error, a zigzag route across Philadelphia, from river to river, that never subjects the walker to a dull vista or uninteresting street. The same passion for intimate examination of the city extends right through his staff. A visitor gets the impression that any one of them chooses his lunchtime restaurant more for the quality of the walk to it (generally long) than the food at the goal. Out in Cleveland, a supposed tour by car with Planning Officials Ernest Bohn and James Lister actually amounts to a series of short automobile hops and long exploratory stops. San Francisco has the tirelessly ambulant and observant Paul Oppermann as director of planning; Carl Feiss will walk anyone’s legs off at home in Washington or wherever he happens to be, and there are happily others like them.

  We had reason to be especially appreciative of the pavement pounders after a recent talk with a representative of another type of planner—the Olympian. In a city which shall be nameless, this planning official and his colleagues had conscientiously studied, from Olympian heights, their maps, their density patterns, their social statistics, their traffic patterns—then waved their clearance wands. And they were in process of committing economic, aesthetic and social outrages on the adjoining neighborhoods because they lacked awareness of such simple things as the distinction between convenience “neighborhood” shops and widely patronized “district” shopping. And on being told there were some good and well-kept streets embedded in a statistical slump area under discussion, the Olympian exclaimed in genuine surprise, “Where?” Bacon and Lister would not only know where, they would know why.The pavement pounders are a new breed: they are the men who want to change and rebuild the city not out of fundamental disgust with it, but out of fascination with it and love for it.

  The pavement pounders are coming up with by far the best planning these days, but we doubt the relationship is simple cause-and-effect, salutary as first-hand knowledge is. More likely, the walking and the good planning are two sides of the same attitude, two sides of the pavement pounder’s fascination, on an intimate level, with all details of city life and city relationships, of his consuming curiosity about the way the city develops and changes, of his endless preoccupation with the living city, and—at the bottom of it all—of his affection for the city.

  Affection for the city, curiously enough, has not always been an attribute of city planners in the past. The City Beautiful men valued a minute part of the city as a grand showplace, but pretty well ignored and despised “the antheap.”*2 Twenty years ago, the most stimulating planners were putting their most stimulating thinking into schemes for decentralizing the city, not rebuilding it. Implicit was a rather hopeless feeling about the city itself. The pavement pounders are a new breed: they are the men who want to change and rebuild the city not out of fundamental disgust with it, but out of fascination with it and love for it. Equally hopeful for the city’s future: their ranks are being joined, gradually, by real estate men and financiers and promoters—who are also capable of feeling, influencing and acting either as pavement pounders or Olympians.

  We wish Contini and all his kind a long succession of the most comfortable shoes, well worn.

  * * *

  *1 Jacobs wrote frequently about the work of architect Victor Gruen (1903–80), particularly his plan for Fort Worth, Texas. An é
migré from Vienna, Gruen gained fame as the architect of the first enclosed, climate-controlled, regional shopping mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota (1956), and many subsequent malls. Jacobs admired his love for city life and his attempts to concentrate city-like uses in his designs. His Fort Worth plan turned what he’d learned designing malls back on the downtown, combining genuine urban liveliness with the theatricality and traffic engineering of a suburban shopping mall. For other examples of Jacobs’s analysis of Gruen’s work, see “Downtown Is for People” and “Do Not Segregate Pedestrians and Automobiles” in this volume and chapter 18 of Death and Life, “Erosion of Cities or Attrition of Automobiles.”

  *2 One of Jacobs’s many derisive references to the City Beautiful movement, an influential city planning movement from the turn of the twentieth century that hoped to rescue the city from the effects of rampant industrialization by laying out great boulevards, ceremonial squares, civic centers, greenbelts, and parks, and then studding these new open spaces with statuary and monumental buildings. The movement is most often associated with planner Daniel Burnham (1846–1912), he of the famous maxim “Make no little plans.” It was responsible for a host of city plans in the early years of the century that drew inspiration from Burnham’s 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and the cityscape of imperial Paris. Most were only implemented piecemeal—remnants can be seen in Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and in lone monuments like Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, New York.