September 5th, 2012

If you have an hour today, take a look at this fascinating, heartbreaking 1962 presentation by architect Edmund Bacon on the ambitious master plan for the postwar redevelopment of Center City Philadelphia. (Bacon was the Robert Moses of Philadelphia, and the father of actor Kevin Bacon.)

You don’t have to have grown up in Center City, as I did, to feel the poignance here. Some of the plan’s elements (the broad-scale redevelopment of Society Hill as a residential district) were successfully put into place; others (I.M. Pei’s fourth and fifth Society Hill Towers) weren’t; some were implemented piecemeal, and some, like Penn Center, the Chestnut St. pedestrian walk and Market East, just never attained the viability the planners dreamed of. What happened? Who knows? Inertia, maybe, or maybe the money started to not get where it was supposed to go. (It’s jarring, after a parade of good-government types, to hear the voice of ’60s mayor James H.J. Tate, a party hack.) Maybe it was all just too big. One thing for sure: The brainy, resolute spirit depicted in the film feels prehistoric. It’s a heart-tugging snapshot of a time in the postwar life of American cities when resources seemed limitless, the future seemed bright, and no urban problems seemed too intractable to be solved by smart guys with good intentions. (Part 1 above; Part 2 here, at The Internet Archive.) 

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*not every day**

**I should explain. I used to write a blog called Blather, which was a name I thought was really sharp in 2001, when I started the thing. Later, of course, and by "later" I mean like a month later, when everybody and their sister started blogging about their goddamn cats or whatever, you couldn't swing a dead... well, a dead cat without hitting a blog called THOTS or YE OLD WHIMSEY or, for that matter, BLATHER. But I had the name first and thought of it when it still seemed sort of kooky and clever and cool. I maintained Blather until 2004, when it started to feel dangerously like work. Later I did other Web-based things. Anyway, Blather's slogan, which some people were generous enough to remember, was "News, pop culture and frosty chocolate milkshakes." I tell you all this now because I find that nothing enhances a joke like when you explain it for a really, really long time.

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