Becoming Philadelphia: How an Old American City Made Itself New Again

By Inga Saffron

Once dismissed as a rusting industrial has-been—the “Next Detroit”—Philadelphia has enjoyed an astonishing comeback in the 21st century. Over the past two decades, Inga Saffron has served as the premier chronicler of the city’s physical transformation as it emerged from a half century of decline. Through her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns on architecture and urbanism in the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has tracked the city’s revival on a weekly basis.

Becoming Philadelphia collects the best of Saffron’s work, plus a new introduction reflecting on the stunning changes the city has undergone. A fearless crusader who is also a seasoned reporter, Saffron ranges beyond the usual boundaries of architectural criticism to explore how big money and politics intersect with design, profoundly shaping our everyday experience of city life. Even as she celebrates Philadelphia’s resurgence, she considers how it finds itself grappling with the problems of success: gentrification, poverty, privatization, and the unequal distribution of public services.

What emerges in these 80 pieces is a remarkable narrative of a remarkable time. The proverbial first draft of history, these columns tell the story of how a great city shape-shifted before our very eyes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978800656

Book preview

PHILADELPHIA

INTRODUCTION

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I set down the road that would lead to this book. After spending a good part of the ’90s working as a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer in Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, I came back to the city in 1998 to start a new career as the paper’s architecture critic. I knew I was making an abrupt transition, and not just in location and subject matter. As I wandered around Philadelphia during my first few weeks on the job, I was often overcome with a sense of disorientation. Places that had once been familiar seemed oddly off. I felt as if I were seeing the city through an old-fashioned stereograph, with two slightly different images arranged side by side: the city as I remembered it and the city as it was. Everything looked shabbier and more fragile. I was particularly dismayed to see that the charred wreckage of One Meridian Plaza still formed a sullen backdrop to City Hall, John McArthur’s great Second Empire palace. The thirty-eight-story skyscraper had been destroyed in a massive fire only a few months before I left for Yugoslavia in 1991, and yet somehow the owners had been allowed to leave it standing. Over those seven years, the ruined tower had become a black hole in the heart of the city, sucking life from the surrounding blocks. Many of the nearby shops on Chestnut Street had closed, and several handsome, early twentieth-century office towers on Broad Street stood empty. Compared to the place I had known before going overseas, the downtown felt noticeably underpopulated. Four percent of the city’s residents had moved out of town while I had been away. As the sun went down in the evening, streetwalkers gathered under the yellowish haze of the highway-style street lamps at Broad and Lombard, just a few blocks south of City Hall.

The statue of William Penn on top of City Hall presides over Philadelphia. (Credit: © Jin)

Despite the evident problems the city faced, my husband and I were committed to buying a house in Center City and sending our five-year-old daughter to the local public school. We had spent the late ’80s downtown and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in Philadelphia. Besides, I felt I should be in the thick of things if I were going to be writing about the city’s architectural future. But as we made the house-hunting rounds, we began to feel increasingly anxious. We found a house we liked near Fitler Square and offered the seller $20,000 less than she had originally paid for it—back in 1989. Much to our surprise, she accepted our price. Yet it hardly felt like we were getting a deal. If she were taking that much of a hit, what would we end up losing when it came time for us to sell? At the Inquirer, one of my colleagues jokingly referred to Philadelphia as Brigadoon, because the city seemed stuck in time.

Of course, the change has been nonstop since then.

My tenure as the Inquirer’s architecture critic has coincided with one of the most remarkable, invigorating, exciting, and—there is no denying this—disruptive periods in the city’s history. Philadelphia has gone from a city struggling for its very survival, to one that is struggling to manage the gentrification and inequities brought on by a long-running construction boom. When I began writing about architecture for the Inquirer, there were only a handful of new buildings under construction, the city was still losing population, and policy makers were frantically trying to figure out how to stanch the city’s decline.

I started my new job just as Mayor John Street was launching his Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, which was supposed to rid the city of abandoned buildings in depopulated neighborhoods such as Strawberry Mansion and Mantua. The plan had a whiff of the old urban renewal about it, especially when it became clear that the city also intended to evict some longtime residents and demolish their homes, thereby creating tracts of cleared land that could be marketed to developers. Around the same time that Mayor Street was pushing his demolition plan, the renowned planner, and founder of the New Urbanist movement, Andres Duany, gave a lecture in which he proposed a triage strategy for dealing with Center City’s decline. Depending on the amount of vacancy, he suggested, the streets should be assigned A and B designations—A for those that could be saved, and B for those that were a lost cause and used to house parking garages. Those B streets included the likes of Sansom and Race. When I complained later to a well-regarded urban planner about Duany’s proposal, he crisply responded, Beggars can’t be choosers.

As bad as things were, I couldn’t accept that Philadelphia had no other choices. After a year of turning out feature stories on architecture, I offered to write a weekly column on the subject for the Inquirer’s arts section. I felt that having a regular slot in the paper would provide a venue where I could riff on new buildings, make my arguments for preservation, and spout off about the city’s defeatist urban design policies. The column, now called Changing Skyline, has turned out to be far more than a soapbox for my views on architecture. It has given me a privileged front-row seat on Philadelphia’s historic transformation.

I’ve always thought of these Friday columns as installments in a long-running serial, a chronicle of the city’s changes on a week-by-week basis. But it wasn’t until I reread my 1,600-plus columns in preparation for this collection that the story of Philadelphia’s astounding comeback really came into focus. We are so caught up in the problems of the moment that it is easy to forget just how far Philadelphia has progressed in this strikingly short span of time. No one, other than a few outliers, talks anymore about reconfiguring the city to mimic the low-density suburbs or turning vacant lots into urban farms. We’re too worried about gentrification and ensuring there is enough affordable housing for everyone. My hope is that this collection will give readers a small window into this remarkable period in Philadelphia history.

Obviously, only a fraction of those 1,600 columns could be included here, so I need to fill in some of the gaps in the story. I don’t want to suggest that Philadelphia’s turnaround began precisely in 1998, the year I wrote my first architecture story. History doesn’t move in a straight line; it lurches. Opposite trends occur simultaneously. It seems safe to say that Philadelphia hit bottom during the 1970s, the decade in which the city lost 140,000 factory jobs and 13 percent of its population. Industrial mainstays such as Philco Ford, the Budd Company, and Midvale Steel vanished overnight. Yet by the late ’80s, Helmut Jahn’s Neo Deco Liberty Place was busting through the city’s traditional height limit, and an entirely new district of gleaming skyscrapers was emerging west of City Hall. It is worth noting, especially in light of today’s opioid crisis, that the construction of those corporate office towers occurred concurrently with the city’s devastating crack epidemic. Yet even as West Market Street was being remade into a mini-Manhattan, the city’s population slide continued. Only Baltimore and Detroit lost more people during the ’90s.

The giddy skyscraper boom didn’t last long, nor did it do much to help the areas beyond Center City. The triple scourge of drugs, crime, and incarceration decimated working-class neighborhoods that had already been weakened by industrial collapse and job loss. By the early ’90s, the city’s finances were a mess, and Mayor Ed Rendell struggled through the decade to keep Philadelphia from falling into bankruptcy. More houses were abandoned as more residents left neighborhoods such as North Philadelphia. It wasn’t uncommon to hear people refer to Philadelphia as the next Detroit back in the days when Detroit served as the all-purpose shorthand for America’s urban apocalypse. The more charitable ones called the city Bostroit, a conflation of Boston and Detroit that was intended to convey Philadelphia’s disconcerting juxtaposition of downtown wealth and neighborhood poverty.

Not that architecture critics in the ’90s were paying much attention to struggling urban neighborhoods. If they thought about cities at all, they generally focused their gaze downtown, where stylish skyscrapers and museums by name-brand architects were going up. Frank Gehry’s sensational Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997, transforming that down-at-the-heels industrial city into one of the world’s top tourist destinations. The notion that a single museum or concert hall could turn around the fortunes of an entire city became known as the Bilbao effect, and it gripped the imaginations of both critics and aspirational cities around the world, Philadelphia among them, in a way that seems utterly irrational today. Thanks to those glamour buildings, architecture entered the public consciousness in a big way in the early 2000s. As one of a handful of American newspapers to employ a full-time architecture critic during the ’70s and ’80s, the Inquirer had participated in nurturing that interest. Even so, after the paper’s long-serving critic, Thomas Hine, left in the late ’90s to pursue a book-writing career, the position was left unfilled for long stretches. Another writer, Tom Ferrick, took over for a short while. But like the stately limestone office towers arrayed along Broad Street, the critic’s chair was empty when I returned to Philadelphia. I let it be known that I wanted the job.

In those days, returning foreign reporters at the Inquirer typically angled for a prestige job in the news sections. They became Washington correspondents, city editors, and metro columnists, or they went overseas again. The Inquirer’s editor seemed baffled by my interest in an obscure culture beat for the features department, whose status could be gauged by its location in a small alcove in the far end of the newsroom, then located in the shining white tower on North Broad Street.. On the other hand, he realized that letting me write about architecture would solve the problem of what to do with me. He never asked me about my qualifications, or how I planned to cover the topic. But a few weeks into my tenure, he pulled me aside. You know you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, he whispered. I assured him that covering architecture was exactly what I wanted to do.

It’s still humbling to think about how much I didn’t know about architecture when I began this job. I had taken some college courses in architectural history and had gotten my feet wet during a year spent writing for the Inquirer’s home and design section. But that was the extent of my experience. To be honest, it was really the fate of cities that obsessed me. Part of this had to do with coming of age during the years when American cities were imploding. Although I grew up in the suburban cocoon of the original Levittown, outside New York City, the issues of urban decline and suburban sprawl were never far away. My father’s family had lost their home, along with their live chicken business, when their building was taken by the government to make way for public housing on Manhattan’s Avenue D. Later, my father’s clothing store in the tiny downtown of Kings Park, New York, succumbed to the call of the mall. I was a freshman at New York University the year the Daily News ran its famous headline about the federal response to New York’s efforts to avoid bankruptcy: Ford to City: Drop Dead. Arriving at my first newspaper job in Plainfield, New Jersey, I was shocked to find that fully half the downtown of the Queen City had been razed and left as a multiblock parking lot. Urban renewal, someone explained to me with a defeated shrug. The demolitions had been carried out in the ’60s, when people were convinced that a major corporation could be enticed to locate its headquarters in downtown Plainfield. By the time I arrived, it was deep into the ’80s.

My experiences covering conflicts in Bosnia and Chechnya further stoked my desire to write about cities. The war in Yugoslavia can be seen as a clash between rural and urban cultures, between those who wanted to create an ethnically homogeneous state and those who accepted blended populations as a characteristic of modern life. The relentless destruction of gracious, centuries-old neighborhoods in Sarajevo, Mostar, and Banja Luka was part of a war against this kind of ethnic mixing, just as race had been the subtext in the demolition of so many American downtowns during the urban renewal period. When I saw the husk of One Meridian hovering over City Hall after I returned to Philadelphia, I couldn’t help thinking how much the scene resembled downtown Grozny after the Chechen capital was bombed by Russia fighter planes. Even though I knew Philadelphia’s Meridian tower had merely suffered a devastating fire (one that claimed the lives of three firefighters), it was hard not to describe Center City as looking bombed out.

If anyone had asked me back then how I planned to go about covering architecture in Philadelphia, I probably would have given some undercooked answer about promoting urbanist values. I was obsessed with calling out the policies that caused cities to tear themselves apart with highways, parking garages, and wanton demolitions of fine old buildings. It wasn’t that I had no interest in the more artistic side of architecture. I am perfectly capable of geeking out over a daring cantilever or diving into the comparative merits of various architects. I refuse to accept that a well-made, aesthetically pleasing design is an optional frill that can be dispensed with, like an extra closet in a fancy apartment building. You can’t create successful, livable cities without thoughtful, well-made architecture. But my first love was never solitary buildings. I am drawn to ensembles and public spaces for the way they reveal the values and forces that shape culture and civilization. My guides to understanding cities and buildings are writers such as Jane Jacobs, William Holly Whyte, Ada Louise Huxtable, and Elijah Anderson.

What unites those writers is their conviction that urban form is crucial to the salvation of cities. It is a miracle that Philadelphia never completely destroyed the essence of what made it a city, in the way that Plainfield and so many other places battered by deindustrialization, profound population loss, and crime did. Sure, interstates ripped through the body of Philadelphia, separating the city’s historic center from the river of its birth. Yet by some miracle, Center City and its neighborhoods managed to retain their amiable rowhouse atmosphere and walkable streets. Threadbare as it was, the existence of this basic urban fabric meant the downtown didn’t have to be reconstructed from scratch when people began trickling back. It’s one reason I consider historic preservation fundamental to solving the city’s problems. Our existing buildings—both the extraordinary and the ordinary—are our most undervalued asset. I also believe that retaining these older buildings offers our best hope for preserving affordable housing and stabilizing neighborhoods.

Still, I recognize that great architecture and smart urbanism by themselves can’t save a dying city. Philadelphia was on the verge of bankruptcy when Mayor Rendell took office in 1992. How did the next Detroit become what it is today—a city that, in many neighborhoods, feels like a permanent construction zone?

The answer is partly related to local policy decisions and partly a result of the sea change in how American cities are perceived. The millennials who began moving into the city and snapping up bargain-priced rowhomes in the early 2000s belonged to a generation that had been largely reared in the suburbs, at a remove from the problems of urban life. They were the first post–World War II generation that had no memories of Philadelphia’s long, painful slide from greatness. For them, the city’s authenticity and grit were simply part of its appeal. They marveled that Philadelphia still had neighborhoods populated by people and businesses with multigenerational social ties. You could say a lot of bad things about living in Philadelphia during the doldrums of the ’80s and ’90s, but it was never boring. I’ve noted in a couple of columns in this collection that 1998 happened to be the year that the TV show Sex and the City debuted. That series, along with the earlier Friends and Seinfield, was a big departure from the drumbeat of dark crime dramas made during the ’70s and ’80s, when the dysfunction of cities was the dominant theme. While the shows from the ’90s were all set in New York, they portrayed urban life in a more upbeat way, particularly for the young and white. Cities were depicted as fun places, where you spent your time hanging out with friends and falling in love. The city was a place where you could be as weird as you wanted to be. And because cities were cheaper than suburbs, they offered young people an opportunity to pursue a creative life. At the same time these millennials were rediscovering the city, a surge in foreign immigration was repopulating distressed neighborhoods. Even if Philadelphia wasn’t New York, it benefited from these same demographic trends.

Still, Philadelphia would not be the resurgent urban center it is today without the major investments and policies that elected officials pursued over the past two decades. Because Philadelphia tends to be slow to embrace new ideas, its approach to revitalization generally involved copying the urban strategies pioneered by other cities. After New York police dramatically reduced crime by using data to map and fight nuisance activity, Philadelphia introduced a similar approach that helped make the city safer. After Baltimore became the Bilbao of America by building an aquarium and the old-timey Camden Yards ballpark near its downtown waterfront, Philadelphia became determined to position itself as a major tourist destination. Of course, in trying to mimic other cities, Philadelphia often overlooked its own strengths, particularly its tight-knit neighborhoods and architectural patrimony. With all the focus on blockbuster projects, you rarely heard anyone in the early 2000s mention the role that meds and eds would come to play in the city’s economic revival, despite the presence of so many medical schools and great universities in the city.

In those years, the Rendell administration was convinced that hospitality was the key to replacing Philadelphia’s lost manufacturing jobs. The mayor soon began pursuing a suite of publicly subsidized megaprojects to attract tourists—a downtown convention center, new hotels, and several entertainment venues. The city’s big weakness, Rendell concluded, was that tourists thought of Philadelphia as an afternoon stopover on the drive between New York and Washington. Getting them to spend the night became his administration’s rallying cry. The Pew Charitable Trusts felt the same way and pushed the city to focus on a few key projects. With Pew’s encouragement and money, Independence Mall was completely rebuilt with an honor guard of history-themed museums whose main purpose was to give tourists a reason to stick around once they had taken a quick look at the Liberty Bell. The obsession with creating attractions for out-of-towners didn’t end there. South Broad Street was rebranded the Avenue of the Arts and lined with new theaters, including the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, in an effort to get suburbanites to come downtown in the evening. Two modern stadiums were built in the South Philadelphia sports complex, both at considerable taxpayer expense. At one point, Rendell went on a major charm offensive to convince the Walt Disney Company to build an interactive urban theme park called Disneyquest in the heart of Center City, at Eighth and Market. But for Rendell, the big prize was legalized gambling along the waterfront. He was convinced that lining the Delaware with casinos and related attractions would create a major tourist destination and finally awaken the waterfront to development.

Because Philadelphia politicians were so focused on the immediate gratification of snagging these marquee projects, they tended to see long-term urban planning as an impediment to realizing their grand visions. They didn’t want to hear city planners tell them that the presence of I-95 and the lack of pedestrian crossings made the Delaware waterfront a hard sell to developers. Planners were often sidelined during the late ’90s, and many of the investments made during the Rendell-Street era had an improvisational quality. Nearly $20 million in public funds were sunk into a failed Delaware waterfront project that was supposed to feature an indoor shopping mall and aerial tram to Camden. As of this writing, an enormous landing pier for that tram, a concrete monolith that looks like a modern Stonehenge, still endures on Penn’s Landing, a monument to that staggering government failure. The city also had to bail out Disneyquest’s developer after that project was abandoned in mid-excavation. For years, the giant pit at Eighth and Market was known as the Disney hole. Both sites—the waterfront mall and the Disney project—remain unproductive surface lots to this day, even as development has boomed elsewhere in the city.

To be fair, the megaprojects era wasn’t a complete bust. Rendell was able to get the new concert hall built, a worthy goal that had eluded several of his predecessors. While the Kimmel Center is no Guggenheim Bilbao architecturally, it did provide the city and its great orchestra with a modern music hall. The cultural building boom of the mid-2000s also yielded several significant new museums: the Constitution Center, the National Museum of American Jewish History, and the new Barnes Foundation. The new Independence Mall museums did, in fact, play a role in convincing tourists to spend more time in the city. Of course, so did the booming restaurant row on Passyunk Avenue, which evolved out of the existing South Philadelphia neighborhood. After many twists and turns, Rendell finally realized his long-cherished dream of getting a casino on the Delaware. But the one-story building looks more like a Walmart than a Vegas-style resort. None of the nongambling attractions that Philadelphia was promised in the promotional renderings were ever built—apart from a large parking garage. Nor has it been much of a catalyst for development on the Delaware waterfront. The casinoless Schuylkill waterfront is where all the construction action is today.

What is notable about these public investments is how much emphasis was put on luring outsiders into the city rather than improving the quality of life for people who were already there. Because many suburbanites were nervous about taking a train downtown after dark to attend a show or visit a restaurant, city officials insisted on building new parking decks to accompany all the city’s cultural projects. Never mind that this often meant dismantling the interesting buildings that made Philadelphia an attraction in the first place. At one point, Rendell even enlisted the Philadelphia Parking Authority to erect a garage on Rittenhouse Square, perhaps America’s loveliest downtown park. That effort failed, fortunately, but a politically connected developer did succeed in leveling an entire block of nineteenth-century buildings on Sansom Street, with the intention of putting up a twelve-story garage. In the end, the developer couldn’t get the banks to lend him money for the structure, and the site spent a decade as a surface parking lot. In my early years as architecture critic, I wrote so many columns railing against parking projects that I often felt like the Inquirer’s garage critic. Amazingly, I was often told (usually by developers and their minions) that parking garages were not a fit subject for architectural discussion.

Philadelphia was hardly the only recovering city obsessed with parking. Many policy makers in the 1990s and the 2000s were convinced that cities needed to become more like the suburbs if they hoped to survive. As late as 2009, New York City was still boasting about replacing burned-out apartment buildings in the South Bronx with single-family ranchers. Philadelphia embraced the suburbanizing fad with a vengeance: We tore down handsome, functioning buildings in Center City to insert large parking garages. We dismantled the Chestnut Street Transitway—a bus-only corridor with wide sidewalks for pedestrians—so cars could have free rein on that crucial crosstown street. We replaced high-rise public housing towers with low-density rowhouse developments that included acres of asphalt parking. Philadelphia never built Bronx-style ranchers, but you can find stand-alone suburban houses just south of Girard Avenue, four subway stops north of City Hall. If the city couldn’t beat the suburbs, the thinking went at the time, then it should just copy them. Of course, what really brought Philadelphia back from the brink was the opposite of suburbanization: density.

When Philadelphia finally turned its attention to housing for its existing residents, the results were far more enduring than megaprojects or mimicking suburbia. In the late ’90s, Philadelphia undertook two very different strategies that would ultimately lay the foundation for the current building boom. The first involved the demolition of nearly every low-income public housing tower in the city—nearly two dozen in all. The second created a city tax incentive to encourage developers to build middle-class housing—now known as the ten-year property tax abatement. Thanks to the incredibly generous tax break, anyone who bought a new or substantially renovated house was excused from paying the bulk of their property taxes for a decade.

It’s unlikely than anyone back then realized how inextricably linked those two policies would become. American cities had been turning against high-rise public housing for decades, because they were seen as islands of poverty and crime. In Philadelphia, those widely spaced towers-in-a-park were architectural interlopers amid the diminutive rowhouses. As the towers increasingly deteriorated from poor maintenance and vandalism, you could actually see the blight bleeding outward, bringing down adjacent neighborhoods. In the late ’90s, the Clinton administration began encouraging cities to replace the failed projects with lower-density public housing. The program, called HOPE VI, had been influenced by the ideas of Duany’s New Urbanist movement, which advocated a return to traditional housing forms and street layouts. In the late ’90s, the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA), which received more HOPE VI money than any housing agency in America, embarked on a series of federally funded demolitions: The four notorious Martin Luther King housing towers at Thirteenth and Bainbridge came down in 1999 in a mushroom cloud of dust, creating a huge, tabula rasa site for development. A few months later, the city council passed a bill authorizing an early version of the tax abatement. In hindsight, it’s hard not to see the switch in support, from public housing for the poor to private housing for the middle class, as a major turning point in Philadelphia’s