Historic Philadelphia

✧
Right: Through the years, Philadelphians
had a near-religious belief in a “gentleman's
agreement” that no building would ever be
taller than William Penn’s bronze hat atop
City Hall, 548 feet up. Architecturally
sacrilegious discussions on the subject began
early in the Goode administration. Willard
Rouse III, a developer noted for getting
difficult projects done, proposed twin
skybuster towers at Seventeenth and Market
Streets. After inevitable controversy, Rouse
broke ground in May 1985, completing One
Liberty Place, 61 stories and 945 feet high,
in 1987. Two Liberty Place, 848 feet and 58
stories, followed in 1990. Once the sky, not
the hat, was the limit, five more structures
impiously poked higher than the Penn
statue by 1992: Mellon Bank Center (792
feet), Bell Atlantic Tower (739), Blue Cross
Tower (700) and twin Commerce Square
buildings (572).
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Below: Frank L. Rizzo was striding toward
another term in the mayor’s office when a
heart attack felled him in his campaign
headquarters in 1991.
COURTESY OF URBAN ARCHIVES, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC PHILADELPHIA
126
Yet the Eighties were curiously upbeat. The
Phillies won the World Series in 1980, the 76ers
won the National Basketball Association
championship in 1983, and in 1985 the city
became host to the nation’s first professional
bicycle racing championship. Part of the six
hour, 156-mile race struggles annually up the
steep hills of Manayunk, that former gritty mill
neighborhood. Manayunk’s Main Street
coincidentally transformed into a toney area of
shops and restaurants, part of an ongoing
restaurant renaissance that turned Philadelphia
into a city where a major chef’s resignation
makes front page news.
And during the bicentennial year of the
framing of the Constitution, 1987, Congress and
the Supreme Court came from Washington for
ceremonial sessions at Independence Hall, there
was a twentieth century version of the Grand
Federal Procession of 1788, and commemorative
events materialized all over town.
THE CENTURY ENDS
Philadelphians in the 1990s blandly accepted
the idea that their city is the fifth largest, behind
New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.
It ranked third until the 1960 census, when Los
Angeles overtook it, and was narrowly nudged
out by Houston in 1970. The judgment is based
on population. But Philadelphia comprises only
135 square miles, while New York covers 309
square miles, Los Angeles 469, Chicago 227,
and Houston 539. If Montgomery County were
part of Philadelphia (as it was from 1682 to
1784), the city’s population would beat
Houston’s. In 1950, the city’s population was
just over two million and the immediate
suburbs’ was about 1.6 million. At century’s end,
the city had about 1.4 million residents, and the
suburbs 3.4 million.
In January 1991 Frank Rizzo, age seventy,
announced a third comeback try for mayor. To a
cheering crowd of supporters assembled in a
Northeast Philadelphia skating rink, he
bellowed: “From this moment on, tell your
neighborhoods, tell your friends, tell your
children, Frank Rizzo is back!” He won the
primary election against GOP endorsed
candidate Ron Castille and finance expert Sam
Katz by 1,429 votes out of 130,000 cast, and
prepared to take on Democrat Edward G.
Rendell, a former district attorney. But a massive
heart attack killed Rizzo in his campaign
headquarters on July 16, at 2:12 P. M. For days,
212 was the most played bet with numbers
writers in Rizzo’s native South Philly.
The Republicans picked Joseph Egan to
replace Rizzo as candidate. Ebullient, effusive
Democrat Ed Rendell won in a landslide,
unraveled many of the city’s tangled fiscal
problems, and was reelected four years later
to serve until the end of the century.