Historic Philadelphia

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In November 1953, a four-year-old
descendant of William Penn ceremonially
touched off a blast to begin demolition of the
Chinese Wall and signal the coming of Penn
Center. The railroad’s clearance of six blocks
in the heart of the city presented an
unprecedented opportunity to create a
magnificent new central area, but despite
the abilities of premier city planner Edmund
Bacon and the input of architect Vincent
Kling, economics and political pressures
resulted in Penn Center becoming a clump
of undistinguished office buildings. The best
new designs were on the fringes of the
center, Kling’s Municipal Services Building
and Girard Plaza. (The Girard skyscraper
would ultimately become the Meridian
Tower, to be destroyed by a spectacular fire
on February 23, 1991; high floors burned
for nineteen hours on the thirty-eight story
structure, and three firemen died.)
COURTESY OF THE URBAN ARCHIVES, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
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wealthy, including relatives of the power
brokers who had smugly let his Banker’s Trust
collapse less than thirty years before.
A police captain began to get some
publicity. He was Francis Lazarro Rizzo from
South Philly, son of an Italian immigrant
police officer. Rizzo was good at busting vice,
and also heads, in Center City drinking
establishments. His raids on beatnik era coffee
houses, where the major vices seemed to be
chess playing, folk singing and poetry reading,
amused some citizens and outraged others.
RESTLESS
DECADE
Philadelphia-based corporations were on
the move: Sun Oil just to the suburbs, but
pioneer refinery Atlantic Richfield and
pioneer ad agency N. W. Ayer to New York.
The Pennsylvania Railroad merged with New
York Central and soon went bankrupt. Philco
was bought by Ford Motor Company. Horn &
Hardart began slipping in 1964; the
restaurants would decline from forty-four to
one by 1984, with America’s original Automat
closing in 1968.
Mayor Dilworth resigned in 1962, halfway
through his second term, for an unsuccessful
shot at the governor’s office. He was succeeded
by the president of City Council, James H.
J. Tate. The WASP-led reform Democrats had
been succeeded by a grass roots Irish-
American politician who lived in a row house
and, in his first months as mayor, commuted
to City Hall by subway. The party boss was
Congressman William J. Green, an old school
campaigner. Tate was elected in 1963 and
again in 1967.
The state established the Southeast
Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) in
1964, and in 1968 SEPTA bought the PTC
city transit system. It would absorb suburban
transit services and the Reading and
Pennsylvania railroad commuter lines.
Roosevelt Boulevard was extended from
Broad Street to the Schuylkill Expressway in
1961, after four years of construction that
included the engineering legerdemain of
tunneling under the Broad Street subway.
The 12.3-mile boulevard, which had been
rebuilt, relandscaped, and tinkered with for
decades, was widened from six lanes to twelve
between 1962 and 1965. Underpasses
replaced nightmare intersections at Fifth
Street, Oxford Circle, Cottman Avenue and
Pennypack Circle.
A plan for something called the Nautical
Mile along the waterfront came to light in
1961. Between the Delaware River and the
new Delaware Expressway would be an $85-
million development including a twenty-fivestory
port office tower at Market Street, a
pedestrian walkway, museums, restaurants,
office space, a boat basin with historic ships
on display, and perhaps a motel. The tower
and walkway would be in place by 1963.
Mayor Dilworth presided at the start of
demolition of three piers in January 1962.
The project was named Penn’s Landing. Work
dragged on, piers were demolished, and plans
kept changing. The tower didn’t happen; the
waterside walkway materialized in 1969,
although nobody but workmen could get near
it. The site was an expanse of tan mud.
On May 14, 1963, a turbulent decade
began, as sixteen members of the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) staged a sit-in at the
mayor’s reception room in City Hall, seeking
equal opportunities for work on the Municipal
Services Building, then under construction,
and other city projects. After twenty-one