Early twentieth-century developers built one of the first auto-centered residential neighborhoods just inside the Philadelphia city limit.  Later designated on the National Register of Historic Places as the “Cobbs Creek Automobile Suburb District,” this community sat adjacent to the newly created automobile parkway along Cobbs Creek, which formed part of Philadelphia’s western boundary. The neighborhood’s rows of two- and three-story houses, constructed mostly in the first quarter of the twentieth century, accommodated the family automobile with rear alleys and rear basement garages. Once Henry Ford introduced assembly line production in 1914, he began selling automobiles at prices that middle-class households could afford. Car ownership increased dramatically during the 1920s, accelerating middle-class suburbanization in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Delaware River Bridge, which opened in 1926 (later known as the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), forged an easy connection between the two states.

Some of the earliest suburbs in the region became hubs of the much-larger suburban wave following World War II. An example is the community of Delaware Township in Camden County, which was subsequently renamed Cherry Hill. There, white-collar professionals sought a suburban lifestyle at mid-twentieth century. To serve this affluent population, developers started construction on the Cherry Hill Mall in 1960, opening it a year later as the first enclosed shopping mall on the East Coast.

Manufacturing Moves to the Suburbs

Not only did stores and services follow the central city populations migrating outward to the suburbs. Manufacturing firms as well left older urban industrial districts for the green fields beyond the city limits. The owners of industrial plants in Philadelphia, Camden, and Chester played an early role in shaping twentieth century suburbs. The federally funded interstate highway system launched in the 1950s made it convenient for them to move their plants out of nineteenth-century industrial districts to cheap land at the edge of the city. There they replaced their multistory operations with one-story plants that accommodated continuous-flow production processes. They favored locations near highway on-ramps, where they could dramatically reduce the time it took truck drivers to deliver raw materials and pick up finished goods. Since suburban plants were typically more automated than older urban factories, owners could also save money on labor. For example, RCA, long a mainstay of Camden’s industrial economy, moved a significant part of its offices and laboratories to Cherry Hill in 1964. Camden’s combined losses of retail and manufacturing employment to Cherry Hill were so significant that by 1965, Cherry Hill’s assessed property value surpassed that of Camden, deepening the economic challenge facing that aging city. This pattern of industrial flight to the suburbs undermined the economic stability of all the older manufacturing districts in the Greater Philadelphia region.

Lower taxes and municipal incentive packages helped lure industries to the suburbs. The historic fragmentation of the region’s land area into hundreds of separate municipalities led to competition among townships for business investment. Relying mostly on automobiles and trucks, businesses gained the freedom to distribute themselves broadly across the suburban landscape rather than clustering. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, early manufacturing suburbs had lost ground to newer locations.  or example, lower Bucks County began losing its industrial job base as companies chose locations in upper Bucks County.

Households Pursue the Suburban Dream

Federal funds for building highways in metropolitan areas constituted only part of the national government’s spur to suburban growth following World War II. In addition, the G.I. Bill of 1944 provided low-interest loans to veterans for buying single family homes, fueling the exodus from older residential neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Camden, Wilmington, and Chester City. In 1940 the city of Philadelphia contained 57 percent of the total population living in nine counties that the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission defined as the Greater Philadelphia region.  By the year 2000 that figure had plummeted to 28 percent.

The suburbs built beyond the city limits at mid-twentieth century featured one-story or split-level houses, each home surrounded on all sides by its own grassy yard. Typically, builders offered a limited number of house plans and architectural styles, most of which offered either a side garage or a carport, building the automobile into the culture of the families who bought them. That move of the automobile from back alley to the front yard of the home signified the growing importance of the car in suburban life. New suburbs typically arranged homes along slow-speed, curvilinear streets just wide enough for emergency vehicles to turn around. Surrounding these residential enclaves, shopping malls, drive-through restaurants, and drive-in movie theaters lined suburban highways to serve the car-owning population. By the late 1950s these services began to cluster in early shopping centers surrounded by massive parking lots.

Highway intersections in the suburbs often determined the locations of early shopping malls. In 1966 the Baltimore-based Rouse Company built Plymouth Meeting Mall near the interchange where the Pennsylvania Turnpike (I-276) crossed the Northeast Extension/Blue Route (I-476). Developers strategically located the King of Prussia Mall where the Schuylkill Expressway intersected with the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The 1960s also saw the building of the Moorestown Mall near the intersection of Interstate 295 and N.J. Route 73.   Satisfying so many household needs, these and numerous other shopping centers gave suburban homeowners fewer reasons to drive into Philadelphia, Camden, or Wilmington.

Civic Leaders Accommodate the Automobile

Recognizing the threat posed by this tide of suburbanization, Philadelphia leaders focused on auto-friendly projects that would maintain the centrality of downtown as the center of a region that increasingly relied on cars and trucks. To make it easy for drivers to access downtown from any point on the suburban fringe, downtown planners designed a loop of expressways around the city.  First came the Pennsylvania Turnpike, crossing the region from west to east across the northern suburbs. On the western side of the central city, the Schuylkill Expressway opened in 1958, connecting the city to King of Prussia, which became one of the largest suburban shopping and office complexes in the United States. Across the city on its eastern edge, construction crews in 1966 began building I-95 among the Delaware River to connect the city with northern suburbs in Bucks County and Mercer County.  In 1959 engineers opened a depressed expressway across the north edge of downtown with limited access between Twenty-first Street and Seventeenth Street.  Then in 1991 they extended the eastern portion of that Vine Street Expressway all the way to the Delaware River at the city’s eastern edge.

Ultimately, however, those efforts by Philadelphia planners could not stem the rise of the suburbs. Growing segments of the suburban workforce both lived and worked outside the city limits. The automobile enabled businesses to disperse along major auto routes, rather than clustering in a handful of edge cities. That dispersed pattern of employment produced increasing traffic flows from suburb-to-suburb, breaking the spoke-and-wheel pattern that had marked earlier commuting by streetcar and rail.

While the negative impacts on the city are well-known and documented, urban analysts have paid less attention to the consequences for the inner suburbs. Mass auto ownership reduced their competitive advantage, which had been based on their easy access to downtown Philadelphia via mass transportation. Even families in suburbs served by the extensive regional rail service acquired cars because the entire suburban landscape was developed to require automobiles in everyday life for travel to schools, churches, shopping and services of all kinds.

The Automobile Enables Sprawl

Rather than locating most services, entertainment, and employment in town centers where they could be reached on foot, the automobile encouraged real estate developers to spread out those everyday destinations. Admittedly, some stores, restaurants, and services were clustered in strip malls or enclosed shopping malls, but almost all accommodated the automobile. Both commercial and residential developers sought large tracts of suburban land on which to build—  a practice that worked against a consistent pattern of outward expansion. Builders constantly leapfrogged over already-developed areas in order to acquire cheaper land that was not near already-developed territory. The resulting pattern created broadly scattered subdivisions and  commercial and industrial development. That scattering reinforced the necessity of car travel as a requirement of life in the suburbs.

The one consistent element in all suburban plans was parking space for autos and trucks. Not just shopping centers, but also schools, hospitals, medical centers, and office complexes provided free parking as a matter of course. Often zoning boards required developers to assure at least one space per employee, and the easy availability of free parking led commuters to drive alone to work. The absence of sidewalks in many suburban commercial and office districts, along with the prospect of crossing massive asphalt parking lots, discouraged both walking and transit use in the suburbs.

In 2001 a civic coalition including the Pennsylvania Economy League, 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, The Reinvestment Fund, and the William Penn Foundation sounded an alarm about the impacts of sprawl in metropolitan Philadelphia. Between 1970 and 1990, population in the nine-county area served by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) had barely increased from 5.12 million to 5.18 million, slightly more than 1 percent. Yet in those same twenty years, total developed land had expanded by 30 percent, which amounted to paving over one additional acre every hour.

The Automobile Contributes to Pollution

The spread of massive suburban parking lots especially affected water quantity and quality. Paving over land that could otherwise filter rainwater reduced the amount of water recharging suburban aquifers, which often serve as primary sources of drinking water.  Stormwater draining off paved areas heightened the potential for flooding. And the proliferation of impervious parking surfaces in suburban locations increased the quantity of contaminants being washed into local streams, rivers, and lakes by stormwater runoff.

Even more threatening than the automobile’s impact on water quality was the air pollution generated by auto exhaust. Philadelphia’s embrace of the automobile in the 1950s and 1960s blinded some civic leaders to this threat. A 1969 DVRPC transportation analysis (projecting the region’s needs and conditions in 1985) drew blistering criticism from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for its heavy emphasis on accommodating automobiles at the expense of public transportation and environmental quality. Specifically, the federal agency criticized the DVRPC for planning to spend three times as much money on limited access roads as on mass transit. To dramatize their criticism, the EPA representatives staged their news conference on an incomplete section of the I-95 highway.

Subsequent trends confirmed the EPA’s fears about the impacts of auto transportation on the region’s air quality. From 1990 to 2019, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by autos and trucks in the Philadelphia metropolitan area increased faster than the population grew, according to Boston University’s Database of Road Transportation Emissions. Among the neighborhoods burdened with the most auto-related pollution were Old City, Northern Liberties, Callowhill, and Chinatown — all areas adjacent to the Vine Street Expressway, which community leaders in Chinatown had fought bitterly. Suspecting the massive expressway project would damage their district, they had demanded unsuccessfully that the submerged road be capped, at least in their vicinity.

Not only inside the city, but also in the suburbs, dependence on the automobile endangered air quality at the turn of the twenty-first century. The single largest contributor to ozone was automobiles on congested roads. Lower Bucks County consistently recorded some of the highest smog levels in Pennsylvania, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease and strokes. In some years, the two Bristol census tracts bordered by I-95, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and Route 3 recorded the highest asthma rates in the United States, exceeding 10 percent of adults. Advocates for cleaner air proposed that employers in Lower Bucks County allow employees to work from home on days with poor air quality, or organize ride-sharing, and reduce the company’s use of motor vehicles.

Automobile Culture and Social Separation

Among the most important long-term effects of the automobile culture was to enable social separation of residents by income and race in the Philadelphia suburbs. As the suburban job base ranged across long distances (instead of concentrating in industrial districts like those within the central city), commuters needed daily access to an automobile.  That requirement prevented many lower-income Philadelphians from living in the suburbs.

Since the car made it possible to live at significant distances from workplaces, the fortunate families who could afford suburban homes enjoyed the freedom to select their neighborhood based on factors other than the journey-to-work, newcomers made choices based on the price of housing, the kinds of services and amenities that different communities provided, and the kinds of people they preferred as neighbors.

In some suburbs, trends toward income, racial, and ethnic separation were reinforced by restrictive covenants, sales, rental or financing opportunities, and real estate agents who steered African American buyers away from all-white neighborhoods. Suburban residents engaged in such practices not only to live among compatible neighbors, but also to preserve the value of their houses. The resulting pattern separated the suburban population into homogeneous enclaves. By the 1970s, the social mixing of residents that had been common in earlier streetcar suburbs had become distinctly uncommon in suburbs. Inner suburbs had become home to many working-class and immigrant households. In contrast, the greatest number of middle-class suburbs were arrayed at the outer edges of the metropolitan area, where land prices were affordable. The suburban towns with the highest household incomes in the region clustered in Pennsylvania at mid-distance between downtown Philadelphia and the region’s edge, where land prices had risen historically in older suburbs served by commuter railroads.

Recovering Walkable Townscapes

At the opening of the twenty-first century, suburban planners faced changing consumer preferences that affected suburban planning. The dominance of shopping malls as retailing centers had begun to erode in competition with online shopping. Several of the region’s largest malls had suffered serious declines. At the same time, young adults appeared less committed to auto ownership than their parents’ generation and more inclined to favor walkable environments for recreation, shopping, and entertainment.  To accommodate the growing interest in walkable communities, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2014 began publishing a “National Walkability Index” because walkability had emerged as an important factor in real estate markets across the nation.

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission encouraged redevelopment of walkable suburban centers with its Classic Towns initiative carried on between 2008 and 2018. That program encouraged and publicized a group of suburbs working to encourage pedestrian traffic by investing in walkable commercial districts. Typically, their Main Street improvements included historic preservation of stores, office buildings, restaurants, bars and movie theaters, plus the addition of street trees and other greenery, historic lighting fixtures, and benches for sitting.

Some of those walkable suburbs served as county seats (for example, Doylestown and West Chester), while others developed lively town centers around regional rail stops (for example, Ambler and Collingswood).  Such town-based initiatives, while they certainly could not eliminate the place of the automobile, could at least signal the end of its overwhelming dominance in suburban life.

Carolyn T. Adams is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Information in this essay was current at time of publication.)

Created in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway connected the heart of Philadelphia’s downtown to its premier park and over time became a district of cultural institutions and a commons for civic celebrations. The broad boulevard and its monumental structures reflected the European-inspired, nationwide City Beautiful Movement embraced by the emerging city planning profession.

Before the Parkway, Philadelphia’s congested downtown lacked any convenient or ceremonial road to give urban dwellers access to Fairmount Park, its bucolic setting beside the Schuylkill River, and the inspiration of the beautiful classical architecture of the Fairmount Water Works. As the park extended to some three thousand acres along both banks of the Schuylkill shortly after the Civil War, suggestions arose for connecting the park directly to Broad Street. In 1871, an anonymously published pamphlet advocated two “grand avenues” extending from north Broad Street, one leading to the east park entrance and the other to a west entrance. Several years later, the construction of City Hall at Centre (Penn) Square made that the more obvious terminus for a single boulevard leading to Fairmount. Following a preliminary proposal in 1884, City Councils authorized the idea with an ordinance signed into law on April 12, 1892. The planned route was then inscribed on official city maps.

Although immediate execution of the plan faltered, in part due to the financial panic of 1893, it harmonized with trends evident in 1893 at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the temporary “White City” energized planners to embrace a new City Beautiful Movement. The fair’s design of clustered civic structures bound by a broad thoroughfare demonstrated an alternative to prevailing urban conditions of dark, unhealthy neighborhoods. In contrast, City Beautiful principles would open built-up portions of the city to sunlight and allow greater ease of movement.

In Philadelphia, such visions inspired the 1902 formation of the Philadelphia Parkway Association, an organization made of the city’s most prominent and wealthy residents. They released a new grand plan for a Parkway in March 1903, but debates over location and costs delayed its execution. For the next several years, planners fiddled with the route, some breaking its axis at the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul on Logan Square and continuing the road at a slightly different angle to the Green Street entrance to the park. A more costly option, ultimately adopted, cut straight from the northwest corner of City Hall across Logan Square to the foot of Fairmount. With the exact route still unresolved, work began with the demolition of a little row house on north Twenty-First Street on February 22, 1907.

Museum on a Hill

Weeks later, Republican Mayor John E. Reyburn (1845-1914) took office. Within days, he received an invitation to the mansion of one of the city’s most influential Republicans and a leader in the parkway project, the immensely rich streetcar baron and art collector, P.A.B. Widener (1834-1915). For years, Widener had been arguing for a new art museum to replace the distant and crowded facility at Memorial Hall. He informed Reyburn that he would personally pay construction costs for a new museum if the mayor agreed to build it atop Fairmount, where, both men understood, the Water Works’ reservoirs, like the rest of the facility, should soon be closed because of the Schuylkill’s pollution. Accepting Widener’s offer, Reyburn was persuaded that the new boulevard should terminate at the foot of Fairmount. The Fairmount Park Art Association commissioned a new architectural plan to represent for the first time a vision of a Parkway complete with proposed grand new civic buildings. The architects named were the French-born Paul P. Cret (1876-1945), Clarence Zantzinger (1872-1954) and partners, and Horace Trumbauer (1868-1938). By late summer 1907, Cret produced a bird’s-eye view of the plan. It showed a grand rectangular plaza at the foot of Fairmount, a classical art museum at the summit, and a smaller semicircular plaza at the northeast corner of the larger one, where a second avenue would run north parallel to the main Parkway before curving toward the river at Boathouse Row.

The project would be very expensive—some two million dollars more than if the roadway had been shifted slightly away from the foot of Fairmount. Reyburn campaigned for more than a year to win support for it. In 1908, voters approved a loan for the project, and in June 1909, the updated plan returned to official city maps. By the time Reyburn left office at the end of 1911, he was hailed for his leadership of the Parkway project and for making Fairmount the site of the new art museum. High costs and seemingly endless delays postponed completion of the art museum for nearly two decades, however, by which time Widener was long dead and his son had angrily withdrawn his earlier offer to give the family’s vast art collection to Philadelphia.

Adding to the delays were disputes between Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg (1843-1918), a reform Republican who succeeded Reyburn in 1912, and the Republican machine that controlled City Councils. After the Pennsylvania legislature in 1915 gave Pennsylvania cities the right to control construction within two hundred feet of parkland, City Councils voted to annex the Parkway to Fairmount Park, which would give control to the Fairmount Park Commission (FPC), then a bastion of Republicanism. Blankenburg vetoed the legislation, only to have the Councils override him. The commission waited to exercise its authority until 1916, when Republicans restored their rule over City Hall with the election of Mayor Thomas B. Smith (1869-1949). But then things moved quickly. By the time the nation entered World War I in April 1917, the Parkway was nearly complete. The Fairmount Parkway, as it was initially named, was declared fully open on October 25, 1918. More than 1,300 properties had been demolished at a cost of $35 million.

Parkway Plan Gets a Second Look

Seeking to put its own stamp on the Parkway, the Fairmount Park Commission in 1917 hired its own consultant to reexamine the Cret-Zantzinger-Trumbauer plan created nearly a decade earlier. The commission selected French landscape architect Jacques Gréber (1882-1962), the favorite of commission president Edward T. Stotesbury (1849-1938), and early in 1918 approved and published his revised plan. While retaining the basic design of Paul Cret’s 1907 plan, Gréber replaced the monumental plaza that Cret had drawn at the foot of Fairmount with a smaller oval and created a green wedge of largely open space extending down into the city. He also created a traffic circle within Logan Square, which was extended to Twentieth Street. He intended that enlarged space, rather than the plaza at Fairmount, to become the main locus of new public buildings, similar to the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

The 1907 plan in which Paul Cret had played such an important role reflected the influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he had trained, and the Avenue des Champs-Elysées and other great Parisian boulevards built during the reign of Napoleon III. Gréber built upon those references, particularly in shifting the allusion to the Place de la Concorde from the foot of Fairmount to Logan Square. Between 1927 and 1941, the Free Library by Julian Abele (1881-1950) and Municipal Court building by John T. Windrim (1866-1934) were completed on the square’s north side, an obvious homage to comparable buildings at Concorde. Cret, who had been away from Philadelphia serving in the French army during World War I, was at first unhappy when he heard of the changes made by his countryman. But after he returned at the close of the war, he and Gréber reconciled and went on to collaborate on the Rodin Museum in 1929.

During the decades while the Parkway was on the drawing boards and under construction, a number of buildings were proposed for it but never constructed. Of those eventually built, most were completed between 1918, when the Parkway opened, and December 1941, when the United States entered World War II. These included the Insurance Company of North America (1925) at Sixteenth Street, the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company (1928) at Twenty-Fifth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the Philadelphia Council of the Boy Scouts of America (1930) at Twenty-Second and Winter Streets, the School Administration Building (1932) at Twenty-First and Winter, and the Franklin Institute (1934) at Twentieth and the Parkway. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the vast temple crowning the acropolis of Fairmount, officially opened in 1928, although much of its interior remained unfinished.

Monuments on the Parkway

Outdoor monuments also adorned the Parkway. In 1924, the sprawling Fountain of the Three Rivers (Swann Memorial Fountain) by Alexander S. Calder (1870-1945) was unveiled in the center of Logan Circle, the approximate midpoint of the long view from City Hall to the Museum of Art. In 1928, the Washington Monument designed in 1897 by Rudolf Siemering (1835-1905) was moved from its original home at the Green Street entrance of Fairmount Park to the foot of Fairmount and the terminus of the Parkway.

The Great Depression, then World War II, brought a halt to new projects for the Parkway, which was renamed the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1937, a year of festivities marking the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. Little was added during the second half of the twentieth century apart from a juvenile incarceration facility, the Youth Study Center, at Twentieth Street in 1952. But the 1953 demolition of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station, which had long abutted City Hall at its northwestern corner, made way for the creation of John F. Kennedy Plaza in the 1960s at the Parkway’s southeastern terminus in the block bounded by Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Arch Streets, and JFK Boulevard. That plaza atop a municipal parking garage opened a broader vista from City Hall to the Art Museum than ever before. It later became known as “Love Park” following the installation of the iconic LOVE sculpture by Robert Indiana (b. 1928). In 1959, the Parkway also gained the Moore Institute of Art (later Moore College of Art) on the south side of Logan Square at Twentieth and Race Streets. Ten years later, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets, the Friends Select School replaced its buildings dating from 1848 with a new school and office building. At the other end of the Parkway, also in the 1960s, to accommodate ever-increasing automotive traffic Gréber’s small oval at the foot of Fairmount was enlarged into the egg-shaped Eakins 0val, named for artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916).

By the start of the twenty-first century, new Parkway projects came to life with prodding from a 1999 report by the private-sector Central Philadelphia Development Corporation, which laid out proposals for “completing” the Parkway in keeping with the visions of Cret and Gréber. New and renovated park space filled the once-empty corners of Logan Square; new benches, sidewalks and crossings created a better experience for pedestrians; a new Dilworth Park replaced the hard-surface Dilworth Plaza on the west side of City Hall; and new cafés opened at Sixteenth Street and on Eighteenth Street on Logan Square. Paine’s Park for skateboarders arose in the lawn between the roadway and the new Schuylkill Banks park along the riverbank, and Eakins Oval also became a temporary park in the summertime. At Twenty-Fifth Street, the Philadelphia Museum of Art annexed and enlarged the Fidelity Mutual Life building as its Perelman Building with galleries, archives, and office space for the museum. Most importantly, in 2012 the Barnes Foundation opened a new Philadelphia campus on the site of the demolished Youth Study Center on the Parkway’s north side between Twentieth and Twenty-First Streets. With the renovation of the Rodin Museum next door, this at last realized much of the century-old dream of making the Parkway an art-lover’s destination.

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway remained one of the greatest achievements of city planning in Philadelphia’s history. The long process that brought it to fruition marked the start of a century in which professionals united with civic leaders and officials to create a bold vision for the heart of the downtown. The result has been both a prime cultural destination for the region and a distinguished civic space for area residents to gather for holidays and other special occasions.

Lynn Miller is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Temple University. He is the author of, among other works, Global Order: Values and Power in International Politics, Crossing the Line (a novel), and the co-author (with James McClelland) of City in a Park: A History of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System. (Author information current at time of publication.)

By 1945, American cities suffered from neglect, aging infrastructure, and overcrowding. Yet victory in World War II fostered a sense that cities could be improved with new spaces for living, working, and recreation. Urban redevelopment programs introduced by national housing acts in 1949 and 1954 remade the landscapes of cities such as New York, Boston, and New Haven, Connecticut. In many cases, redevelopment relied on clearing slums and other blighted structures to make way for parks, commercial structures, and expressways as well as new apartment blocks. While Greater Philadelphia adhered to certain aspects of a clearance approach to renewal, the organizers of the Better Philadelphia Exhibition also incorporated historic preservation, concern for pedestrians, and the use of existing structures to complement new projects.

Along with sculpture, light shows, information about the urban planning profession, and a history of the city’s growth, an elaborate thirty-by-fourteen-foot diorama of Philadelphia served as the centerpiece of the exhibition. Spotlights focused on specific areas of the city, and portions of the diorama then mechanically flipped over to reveal their imagined future. In the years that followed, many of the diorama’s notable features became reality, including removal of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s viaduct, popularly referred to as a “Chinese Wall”; a new, three-block-long mall north of Independence Hall; a Delaware riverfront yacht basin and promenade; and new housing in the Far Northeast.

Urban planner Edmund Bacon (1910-2005) often receives credit for the exhibit’s design, but modernist architect Oskar Stonorov (1905-70) first conceived the idea and recruited Bacon’s help. Stonorov’s business partner, the famed architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-71), also contributed to the exhibition’s design as did Philadelphia City Planning Commission (PCPC) members Robert Leonard and Robert B. Mitchell (1906-93). Their model found inspiration in General Motors’ Futurama display, an attraction of New York’s 1939 World’s Fair that showed a city of modern skyscrapers, high-speed expressways, and pedestrian skyways devoid of congestion and obsolete structures. Better Philadelphia’s creators similarly hoped to stir citizens’ imaginations while overcoming public objections to urban planning.

To assure adequate funding, Stonorov enlisted prominent Philadelphians, many of whom later held posts on the exhibition committee. These included Mayor Bernard Samuel (1880-1954) as honorary president; businessman Benjamin Rush, Jr. (corporation president); Gimbels executive Arthur Kauffman (1901-86), who donated two floors of his store for the event (vice president); Allan G. Mitchell, president of the Philadelphia Electric Company (secretary); and Philadelphia Bulletin publisher George T. Eager (committee chairman). Together, they raised more than $325,000 in public and private funds for the event.

Planners wanted to enlist public support for their vision by presenting their concepts in accessible terms, as indicated by the exhibition theme, “What City Planning Means to You and Your Children.” Taking cues from architect Daniel H. Burnham (1846-1912), whose 1909 Chicago plan was distributed to schoolchildren, Bacon and Stonorov visited elementary schools prior to the opening and asked students to draw their own plans for the future city; the drawings were later displayed at the exhibition.

Following the event, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission asked the 365,000 visitors their opinion about the exhibit’s proposals; nearly sixty-five per cent responded that they would pay higher city taxes to see the envisioned features come to fruition. By the time Bacon left as Planning Commission executive director in 1970, nearly all of the features, except for a crosstown expressway at South Street and a new ring highway system circling the city, had materialized or were under construction. Despite its short run, the Better Philadelphia Exhibition allowed planners to build consensus for reenvisioning central city functions for a new era.

Stephen Nepa received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University and has appeared in the Emmy Award-winning documentary series Philadelphia: the Great Experiment. He wrote this essay while an associate historian at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers University-Camden in 2015. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The pace of bridge construction was initially slow compared to that in New England and the South.  This was partly because the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers were themselves useful as highways, and so the need to cross them remained limited throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The Lenni Lenape who first lived in the area marked good crossing locations along rivers, particularly the Delaware and Schuylkill.  These later became sites of ferry crossings, which would eventually foster bridge spans.

In 1660 King Charles II (1630-85) ordered a road, referred to as the King’s Highway, to be built stretching from Boston, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina.  By 1683, however, progress in Pennsylvania had stalled.  Consequently, and at the request of William Penn, that same year the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly passed a law requiring bridges to be built by local inhabitants across all streams and rivers that intersected the highway.  Due to technological limitations, which were just starting to be overcome in New England, these first bridges were not able to span major waterways like the Delaware River.  Instead, they typically kept to tributaries and smaller rivers.  The earliest surviving bridge built along the King’s Highway in the Delaware watershed area, the Pennypack Creek Bridge, was just such a structure.  Completed in 1697, it was stone arch in construction and spanned the Pennypack Creek, located north of Philadelphia where it empties into the Delaware River. Due to the way they facilitated travel, these bridges served as early milestones in the delineation of the region.

Bridges spanning the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers in Philadelphia were first constructed in the early nineteenth century, and, almost invariably, these river crossings originated as ferry points.  Swedish colonists operated the earliest ferries in the 1660s and by the 1730s a significant number of modern-day bridge sites had ferries in operation.  On the Schuylkill River these included Gray’s Ferry, the Middle Ferry at Market Street, and the Upper Ferry at Spring Garden Street (all in Philadelphia).  On the Delaware these included ferries at Trenton, New Jersey, and upriver at New Hope-Lambertville and Easton-Phillipsburg. 

Drawbacks of Ferries

Several factors drove the conversion of ferries to bridges.  As early as 1764 timber rafters using the Delaware for transport proved dangerous to ferry passengers.  As late as 1914 there was a collision between a raft and a ferry that caused the deaths of four passengers.  Also, ferries had to stop operation during flooding and freezing.  The greatest impetus, though, was when a ferry could no longer handle the amount of traffic queuing up to cross.  At this point a corporation, typically local residents of the towns on either side of the river, would petition the states for a charter to build a bridge.  They would then finance construction by selling stock in the company, and dividends (and repairs) would be paid from collected tolls.  Thus, privately owned ferries were converted into privately owned toll bridges.

The most heavily trafficked ferries on the Delaware were at Trenton and Easton, which consequently led to the first bridge construction over the river.  The Delaware River Bridge Company commissioned the Easton-Phillipsburg Bridge in 1795.  However, the Lower Trenton Bridge, though commissioned later, was completed nine months before the Easton bridge in January 1806.  New England had achieved greater technical feats in bridge building at the time, and as a result both of these bridges were designed by men whose earlier works were constructed in New York and Massachusetts: the Trenton bridge by Theodore Burr (1771-1822), designer of the first bridge to span the Hudson River, and the Easton bridge by Timothy Palmer (1751-1821), who designed and built the first timber-truss bridge in the United States over the Merrimack River in Massachusetts.  Trenton was an ascending manufacturing center and its bridge helped solidify its importance along the route between New York and Philadelphia.  Easton-Phillipsburg was initially a small agricultural area, but, through influences such as its bridge, it would become a transportation hub for the steel industry and funnel large quantities of anthracite coal to Philadelphia.

At the same time that these Delaware River bridges were enhancing the route between Philadelphia and New York, bridge construction across the Schuylkill was laying the potential for the expansion of Philadelphia’s suburbs, particularly West Philadelphia.  The Schuylkill bridges also generally started as ferry crossings.  Technically, the first span across the river was a floating bridge at Gray’s Ferry, built shortly after the Revolutionary War.  However, the first significant bridge (that did not need to be pulled aside for passing ships) was finished in 1805 and designed by Timothy Palmer (who would then go on to build the Trenton crossing).  It was known as Palmer’s Permanent Bridge at Market Street.  A bridge at Spring Street was completed in 1812 in anticipation of traffic from the growing neighborhood of Mantua.  At its completion, this Wernwag Bridge was the longest single-span bridge in the world at 343 feet.  The ease of access that these bridges provided to neighborhoods that were initially outside the city would be a justification for their inclusion within the city limits set with the 1854 Act of Consolidation.

Railways Played a Role

The need for railway bridges spurred further bridge construction across the Schuylkill River, both in Philadelphia and further upriver.  In 1838 Gray’s Ferry finally got a proper bridge.  Called the Newkirk Viaduct, this was a railway bridge that provided the first direct rail access from Philadelphia to Baltimore.  The Philadelphia and Reading Railway opened in 1842 and its multiple crossings as it stretched from Philadelphia to Reading and into northwest Pennsylvania’s coal region (including a major crossing at Norristown) allowed it to compete with the Schuylkill Navigation Company.  Its terminus was at Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad on the west side of the Schuylkill River from which point cargo would be transported to Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal via the Columbia Railway Bridge in Fairmount Park.

The bridges over these two major waterways would become more technologically advanced with time.  The Pennypack Bridge was a stone arch bridge suitable for modest length bridges over rivers that did not have much down-river traffic.  Bridges built in the area, starting with the Permanent and Lower Trenton Bridges, were wooden covered bridges, the Permanent Bridge being the first completely covered bridge in the United States.  For wide points in a river these bridges could require many spans (the Lower Trenton Bridge had five), which was a hazard during floods and freshets (spring ice thaws), and for timber rafts.  An 1841 flood damaged or destroyed many Delaware River bridges.  By some accounts only the Easton and Trenton bridges remained.

Beginning in the 1870s covered bridges were abandoned for steel bridges.  These were typically suspension bridges but sometimes truss or cantilever bridges.  The last wooden bridge built on the river was the Columbia-Portland bridge (upriver at Knowlton township New Jersey) completed in 1869.  After a particularly bad Delaware River flood in 1903, most of the covered bridges were damaged or destroyed and their respective companies repaired or replaced them with steel constructions.  Steel was typically required for a bridge to be able to handle railroad traffic for any length of time and was consequently used at Trenton (after an initial attempt at modifying the wooden bridge with track).  Other bridges farther upriver on the Delaware were also modified to permit rail traffic, which enhanced access to markets in the northeast, including New York City.

Camden Commuters

Just as development in West Philadelphia required bridges in order to handle the increase in traffic, higher levels of commuter traffic across the Delaware drove plans to connect the city directly to Camden.  To this end, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures created commissions that coalesced as the Delaware River Joint Commission in 1919 (later renamed the Delaware River Port Authority in 1931).  Its purpose was the building and maintaining of links between the two states.  This initially included a single bridge, which was completed in 1926 and named the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge).  This would expand to include three more bridges: the Walt Whitman Bridge in 1955, the Commodore Barry Bridge in 1974, and the Betsy Ross Bridge in 1976; the PATCO Speedline in 1969, a mass transit rail line running between Philadelphia and Camden over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge; and a ferry.  The Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman Bridges are steel suspension bridges, the Commodore Barry Bridge a steel cantilever bridge, and the Betsy Ross a steel truss bridge.

The initial reports conducted by the Delaware River Joint Commission in preparation for the Delaware River Bridge showed that most trans-Delaware traffic crossed using the ferry that ran between Market Street, Camden, and Market Street, Philadelphia.  Furthermore, they stressed that nearly two-thirds of this traffic originated locally in Camden, numbering 24.6 million passengers per year.  Also, a summary of these reports in 1920 showed that the trend was towards an increasing percentage of traffic across the river that was not local.  Therefore, a central conclusion was that, at the time of the construction of the first bridge, it was not economical for the commission to construct an elevated rapid transit system, but that it would be a plan with “attractive features” as traffic patterns shifted in the following decades to higher numbers of long-distance commuters.  The bridge itself would act as a catalyst for these trends.

After the completion of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, demand grew for a connection across the Delaware River between New Jersey and Delaware.  A ferry service started in 1926 to meet this demand almost immediately generated a traffic bottleneck with reported automobile lines of up to four miles long on both sides of the river.  Despite this, it was not until 1940 that the Delaware General Assembly studied the possibility of a bridge.  The project lagged due to World War II, but in 1947 the Delaware River Crossing Division formed and began construction of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  It was completed in 1951, making it the second bridge across the Delaware in the Philadelphia area.

Washington-New York Corridor

From the Delaware Memorial Bridge’s inception, actual usage far exceeded the estimated projections of traffic (in 1960 it was calculated that traffic was increasing at a 5.7 percent compound growth rate). This was due in part to its strategic location on the north-south route between New York and Washington, as well as its connection to major highways running west.  While the Benjamin Franklin Bridge had made it possible for automobile travelers to reach New York without having to use a ferry, now it was possible to avoid traveling through Philadelphia altogether.  In 1962 the Delaware River and Bay Authority was created to enhance the first span and build a second, making it a twin suspension bridge, which was completed in 1968.

Further development south of Philadelphia was spurred with the opening of the Walt Whitman Bridge in 1957.  It was initially conceived by the Delaware River Port Authority as a way to reduce traffic on the Ben Franklin Bridge and provide an alternative route to South Jersey shore communities.  However, at the thirtieth anniversary ceremony of the bridge’s opening commenters noted that while originally many viewed the bridge as just another route to the shore, its larger consequence was to stimulate growth in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey.  Migrant workers had easier transport between South Philadelphia and southern New Jersey farms, and many ultimately relocated outside of the Philadelphia area.  Furthermore, after its construction, the bridge was connected to the Schuylkill Expressway, opening a major route west of the Delaware.  The bridge also helped spur the establishment of the Food Distribution Center, the South Philadelphia sports complex, and the expanded use of Philadelphia International Airport.

The Delaware River Port Authority and the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) assumed responsibility for the majority of bridges crossing the Delaware between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Launched as the Commission for Elimination of Toll Bridges, the DRJTBC was created for two reasons.  It would purchase toll bridges along the Delaware River and convert them to free bridge crossings and use equal annual subsidies from both states to maintain the bridges.  From 1920 to 1934 the commission purchased, repaired, and consolidated many bridge crossings on the river.  In 1934 it was replaced with the DRJTBC, with responsibility to maintain a total of twelve toll-free bridges out of joint tax subsidies and maintain eight toll bridges including the Easton-Phillipsburg (U.S. Route 22) Bridge and Trenton-Morrisville (U.S. Route 1) Bridge (Lower Trenton Bridge).  Although many of these and the Schuylkill’s bridges were prompted by need, once completed they had a profound impact in altering patterns of travel and commerce, thus helping establish the distinct character of the region. 

Andrew Slemmon is a graduate student in the Department of History at West Chester University. (Author information current at the time of publication.)

Bridge Construction Types

Arch – A bridge whose substructure is composed of arches.
Truss – The load-bearing structure (truss) is composed of a series of connected elements, typically triangles.
Suspension – The roadway is hung below suspension cables (via vertical supporting cables), which transport tension to towers at either end of the bridge.
Cantilever – Each half of the bridge is a rigid structural element supported at one end only (a cantilever), which extends out over the river.

Bridges

Abbreviations of proprietors:
DRPA – Delaware River Port Authority.
DRJTBC – Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission.
PennDOT – Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Benjamin Franklin Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, suspension bridge, DRPA, opened 1926.
Walt Whitman Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Gloucester, suspension bridge, DRPA, opened 1957.
Commodore Barry Bridge: Delaware River between Chester and Bridgeport, cantilever bridge, DRPA, opened 1974.
Betsy Ross Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Pennsauken, truss bridge, DRPA, opened 1976.
Delaware Memorial Bridge: Delaware River between New Castle and Deepwater, twin suspension bridge, Delaware River and Bay Authority, opened 1951.
Tacony-Palmyra Bridge: Delaware River between Philadelphia and Palmyra, tied-arch bridge, Burlington County Bridge Commission, opened 1929.
Burlington-Bristol Bridge: Delaware River between Bristol Township and Burlington, truss bridge, Burlington County Bridge Commission, opened 1931.
Milford-Montague Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Milford and Montague Township, truss birdge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Delaware Watergap Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Delaware Water Gap and Hardwick Township, steel plate beam bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Portland-Columbia Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Portland and Columbia, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1953.
Easton-Phillipsburg Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Easton and Phillipsburg, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1938.
I-78 Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Williams Township and Phillipsburg, twin girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1989.
New Hope-Lambertville Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Solebury Township and Delaware Township, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1971.
Scudder Falls Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Lower Makefield Township and Ewing Township, plate girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1961.
Trenton-Morrisville Toll Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, girder bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1952.
Portland Columbia Bridge: Delaware River between Portland and Columbia, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1957.
Riverton-Belvidere Bridge: Delaware River between Riverton and Belvidere, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Northampton Street Bridge: Delaware River between Easton and Phillipsburg, cantilever bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1896.
Riegelsville Bridge: Delaware River between Riegelsville and Pohatcong Township, suspension bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Upper Black Eddy-Milford Bridge: Delaware River between Upper Black Eddy and Milford, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1933.
Uhlerstown-Frenchtown Bridge: Delaware River between Uhlerstown and Frenchtown, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1931.
Lumberville-Raven Rock Bridge: Delaware River between Lumberville and Raven Rock, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Center Bridge-Stockton Bridge: Delaware River between Center Bridge and Stockton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1927.
New Hope-Lambertville Bridge: Delaware River between New Hope and Lambertville, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Washington Crossing Bridge: Delaware River between Upper Makesfield Township and Hopewell Township, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1904.
Calhoun Street Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1884.
Lower Trenton Bridge: Delaware River between Morrisville and Trenton, truss bridge, DRJTBC, opened 1928.
Market Street Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1932.
Walnut Street Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, truss bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1893.
Spring Garden Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1965.
Gray’s Ferry Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, State Highway Agency, opened 1976.
Girard Avenue Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1972.
Strawberry Mansion Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch truss bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1897.
Vine Street Expressway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, PennDOT, opened 1959.
Schuylkill Expressway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, girder bridge, PennDOT, opened 1956.
Columbia Railway Bridge: Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, arch bridge, City of Philadelphia, opened 1920.
Schuylkill River Bridge: Schuylkill River between Swedesburg and Black Horse, girder bridge, Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, opened 1954.

Grounded in landscape and European architecture and shaped by the politics of the Progressive Era, the City Beautiful Movement emerged in reaction to the physical decay and social congestion that burdened America’s industrial centers at the turn of the twentieth century. Considered the “mother” of urban planning, its promoters and practitioners sought to reorder the built environment in the cause of “civic uplift.” While expressions of City Beautiful appeared nationwide, cities in Greater Philadelphia also were shaped by the movement. From Camden and Trenton, New Jersey, to Wilmington, Delaware, and especially Philadelphia, from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s the region’s urban areas were graced with new civic spaces and associated monumental buildings designed to improve in public consciousness the very idea of the city.

In the 1880s, rising rates of immigration and industrialization brought high levels of congestion and pollution to urban areas. While early park planners brought some physical relief to city dwellers, a new generation of reformers sought further to instill a sense of pride and belonging to residents, especially immigrants with only tenuous ties to established institutions, by creating wide boulevards, ennobling buildings, and manicured parklands to allow people of all backgrounds spaces for reflection and recreation. Such inspiring spaces, they argued, could uplift city dwellers weighed down by low pay, long hours, and inadequate housing. Influenced by projects in Europe such as Vienna’s Ringstrasse, Baron Haussmann’s (1809-91) redesign of Paris, and Ildefons Cerdá’s (1815-76) work in Barcelona as well as American figures such as landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52), Central Park creator Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), and architect Daniel Burnham (1846-1912), dozens of examples, from museums and municipal buildings to new street grids, were proposed and completed. The movement got its initial boost from Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Laid out by Olmsted, Burnham, and other leading designers, the fair’s “White City,” a model (comprised of plaster of Paris) of lagoons, fountains, promenades, statues, and neoclassical buildings showcased how comprehensive planning might relieve urban problems. Subsequent fairs at Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), San Francisco (1915), and Philadelphia (1926) similarly formed as grand civic spaces under the influence of the White City.

In the region, Philadelphia contained the most significant projects aligned with City Beautiful. After the Civil War, the city’s population neared seven hundred thousand and its industrial base of factories, refineries, and shipyards polluted the environment. In response, calls emerged for beautification plans and civic improvements. Emerging environmental groups including the City Parks Association, the Fairmount Park Art Association, and the women’s Garden Club of Philadelphia as well as reform-minded citizens such as Peter A.B. Widener (1834-1915) and financier Edward T. Stotesbury (1849-1938) pushed for grand Beaux-Arts architecture, boulevards in North Philadelphia, a citywide playground system, a park along the Schuylkill River’s western bank, and a new plan for South Philadelphia mimicking Washington, D.C’s planned system of radial boulevards. During WWI, local architects Albert Kelsey (1870-1950) and David K. Boyd (1872-1944) proposed the clearing of two square blocks from Chestnut Street north to Ludlow Street so as to increase the visibility of Independence Hall, one of Philadelphia’s most iconic and patriotic structures, though it was not until after WWII when their vision, known as Independence Mall, came to fruition.

Most prominently, a number of Philadelphia’s art and civic groups championed a grand parkway to connect Center City to Fairmount Park. Based on a plan by Jacques Gréber (1882-1962) and Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), work on the Parisian-style project commenced in 1907. Ten years later, Gréber proposed a system of diagonal parkways radiating outward from central Philadelphia’s five squares. While this plan never fully materialized, by 1930 much of the Fairmount Parkway (renamed Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1937), including the Free Library, Rodin Museum, the Municipal Court, Logan Circle, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art was completed or under construction. Across town, Washington Square, graced with new statuary, refurbished fountains (care of the Philadelphia Fountain Society), and two high-rises designed by Edgar Seeler (1867-1929) (the Penn Mutual and Curtis Buildings), reflected City Beautiful sensibilities. In 1933 architect Alfred P. Shaw’s (1895-1970) 30th Street Station, the city’s last “grand depot,” opened for service as a monumental gateway to the city. The Neoclassical/Art Deco station, commissioned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, replaced the company’s Gothic Broad Street Station, which was demolished in 1952.

In 1913, Cret received a commission to redesign Rittenhouse Square. Influenced by Paris’ Parc Monceau, his Beaux-Arts plan for Philadelphia’s wealthiest neighborhood included diagonal walkways, new sculptures and fountains, and tree plantings. Prior to the completion of Cret’s Delaware River (renamed Benjamin Franklin) Bridge, which linked Philadelphia with Camden, New Jersey, architect Charles Wellford Leavitt (1871-1928) conceived in 1925 a system of parklands and thoroughfares to remake central Camden as the gateway to South Jersey. Echoing Gréber’s Philadelphia street plan, much of Leavitt’s blueprint was never built. Yet the city’s Admiral Wilson Boulevard, running from the bridge into the suburbs to the east, opened in 1926 and became Camden’s main traffic artery, later attracting the Sears and Roebuck Company to erect a new store in the neoclassical tradition.

In 1888 the city of Trenton, New Jersey, began accumulating land for a grand park, a process aided considerably three years later through a donation of seven additional acres from lawyer John L. Cadwalader (1836-1914). With Olmsted as chief designer, Cadwalader Park (Trenton’s largest and Olmsted’s only one in New Jersey) included a restaurant, amusement midway, concert gazebo, and a zoological garden with lions, deer, monkeys, and black bears. Gracing the park were circular foot paths, picnic areas, ornate entryways, and statues of George Washington (1732-99) and John A. Roebling (1806-69). To offer a counterweight to urban congestion, the city submerged the Pennsylvania Railroad’s track along the park’s eastern edge. John H. Duncan (1855-1929) designed the Trenton Battle Monument, a towering Roman-Doric column graced with bas-reliefs and a surrounding plaza, which opened in 1893 and commemorating the Continental Army’s 1776 victory.

To the south, Wilmington, Delaware, also initiated projects shaped by the City Beautiful Movement. With the city growing into a mercantile and chemical manufacturing center, the DuPont Company in 1905 began construction of its new twelve-story downtown headquarters. To complement the building, in 1917 vice president Pierre S. DuPont (1870-1954), who had personally financed road improvements between Wilmington and Chester County, retained architect John Jacob Raskob (1879-1950) to redesign the one-and-a-half-acre green space across the street. Completed in 1921, the new Rodney Square included paved walkways, cast stone stairs and balustrades, and a gleaming bronze statue of Caesar Rodney (1728-84), the state’s signer of the Declaration of Independence. Further committed to the Progressive ethos of the City Beautiful, DuPont in the late 1920s opened to the public the gardens and grounds of his Longwood estate in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Amidst changes brought by industrialization, population growth, and environmental concerns, the City Beautiful Movement provided for greater Philadelphia’s residents and visitors new spaces for work, recreation, and reflection. From industrial riverfronts to cramped older neighborhoods, many urban areas were demolished to promote arts and culture as well as entertainment and consumption. Yet the onset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s spelled the end of the movement as the regional economy adapted to financial collapse and high rates of unemployment. And while many local cities underwent large-scale renewal programs in the decades after World War II, nearly all of the projects shaped by the City Beautiful Movement remained intact well into the twenty-first century, attesting to their enduring importance.

Stephen Nepa teaches history at Temple University, Moore College of Art and Design, and the Pennsylvania State University-Abington. A contributor to numerous books and journals, he is currently at work on a project about the history of Puerto Rico’s Levittown community. He received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Under the direction of Philadelphia planning director Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), the route of the Crosstown Expressway figured prominently in the 1947 Better Philadelphia Exhibition, where it marked the boundary of Center City redevelopment. Bacon contended that the artery would reduce traffic on city streets–a prerequisite for successful redevelopment of Center City, particularly Society Hill. A swath of land running from the Schuylkill to the Delaware Rivers along South Street was found to be “blighted” and ripe for demolition, providing space for a such a major traffic artery. In promoting the necessity of urban redevelopment, the Better Philadelphia Exhibition was closely tied to the political agenda of the emerging reform movement. When reform-mayor Joseph Clark (1901-90) came to power in 1951, the Crosstown became integral to plans to redevelop Center City.

In 1955, the city’s Urban Traffic and Transportation Board officially proposed a limited-access highway. It reasoned that the Crosstown Expressway would enhance the functioning of the regional freeway network as the southern segment of an inner loop connecting the Schuylkill Expressway and Delaware Expressway (I-95). For the same reasons the Greater Philadelphia Movement, a coalition of civic organization leaders, pressed to include the envisioned Crosstown in the Interstate system in 1957. Further planning was to be coordinated with the neighboring counties, a responsibility later assumed by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.

By 1963, the proposed Crosstown Expressway became the focus of public debate. Citizens’ groups, most notably the Queen Village Neighbors Association, complained that the prospect of a highway was thwarting efforts to revive the neighborhood. Additionally, critics objected to dividing South Philadelphia from Center City and organizations such as the Philadelphia Housing Association and United Neighbors Association raised concerns about the relocation of residents. Confronted with these objections, planning for the expressway stalled.

Appraisals Trigger Further Resistance

Consequently, it came as a surprise to many when the Pennsylvania Department of Highways began conducting appraisals to acquire property along South Street early in 1967. A public meeting organized by the Hawthorne Community Council and the Society Hill Civic Association condemned the department’s action as lacking adequate provisions for relocation. A group led by Hawthorne activist Alice Lipscomb (c.1916-2003), George Dukes (1931-2008) of the Rittenhouse Community Council, and lawyer Robert Sugarman (c.1938-2008) of Society Hill formed the Citizens’ Committee to Preserve and Develop the Crosstown Community (CCPDCC). In response to the emerging opposition, Mayor James Tate (1910-83) publicly criticized the Department of Highways for starting appraisals and warned that more time was needed to resolve the many problems related to the construction of the expressway. However, he did not question the necessity of the Crosstown.

While the unresolved problem of relocation initially sparked the conflict, the argument that the Crosstown would separate South Philadelphia from Center City increasingly gained attention for its racial implications. Opponents dubbed the Crosstown the “Mason-Dixon Line,” describing it as a mechanism to divide white Philadelphians north of the highway from African Americans to the south. In addition, the CCPDCC began to focus on the issue of deteriorating property in the proposed route and turned toward a new strategy of pushing for renewal in the area as a means to prevent construction of the expressway. In 1968, the CCPDCC formed the Crosstown Development Corporation to elaborate a counterproposal for the South Street area and promote renewal projects as the nucleus of redevelopment in place of the proposed expressway. The citizens committee contracted with architect Denise Scott Brown (b. 1931), who suggested returning South Street to its earlier functions as a commercial strip and hub of adjoining communities. This aim was bolstered by the “South Street Renaissance,” a movement of countercultural entrepreneurs to reinvigorate South Street’s commercial and cultural life.

While the resistance mounted, the expressway retained the support of the Pennsylvania Department of Highways, the Chamber of Commerce, and some members of City Council who viewed a limited-access highway on the southern edge of Center City as essential. Mayor James Tate aimed at reconciliation: He appointed a committee to publicly discuss the issue and mandated a comprehensive traffic study. While the committee attempted unsuccessfully to reach a final decision, both Tate and his successor, Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91), failed to take a clear position on the Crosstown.

Meanwhile, Bacon and the City Planning Commission changed their minds. Increasingly, the proposed expressway was seen as an obstacle to expanding the kind of redevelopment that had been successful in adjacent Society Hill. The CCPDCC’s preliminary work helped to convince the City Planning Commission to submit a proposal to the federal Neighborhood Development Program for small-scale redevelopment in the South Street area, similar to Society Hill.  Such a project also was incompatible with construction of an interstate highway, so when the federal government funded the redevelopment plan in 1971, it effectively ended prospects for an expressway. The Crosstown Expressway was formally deleted from the plans in 1974.

The Crosstown Expressway was by no means the only controversial proposal that came under attack in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, its defeat marked a turning point in the history of urban planning in Philadelphia. The successful opposition against the expressway became a precedent for the rising resistance against large-scale projects. The opposition’s alternative proposals for the South Street area highlighted the potential of the kind of small-scale neighborhood development that gained support during the 1970s.

Sebastian Haumann is Assistant Professor of History at Darmstadt University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. In his dissertation he compared protest movements against urban redevelopment in Philadelphia and Cologne. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Delaware River is a key regional water resource spanning the boundaries of four states in the northeastern United States: Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Established October 27, 1961, through concurrent legislation ratified by the four basin states and the federal government, the DRBC was formed to address the often contentious planning, development, regulatory, and allocation issues posed by the expanse of the Delaware River watershed (the area drained by the river). Among the issues prompting its founding were water supply shortages, pollution of the tidal Delaware in the urbanized stretch below Trenton, New Jersey, and flooding spawned by the hurricanes of 1955. The first such federal-state partnership in the United States, the DRBC subsequently served as a national and international model.

The DRBC oversees the longest undammed river in the United States east of the Mississippi; the Delaware flows 330 miles from Hancock, in upstate New York, to the mouth of the Delaware Bay. As of 2016, more than thirteen million people (about 4 percent of the nation’s population) relied on the waters of the Delaware River Basin for drinking, agricultural, commercial, and industrial use, although the river drains only 0.4 percent of the nation’s continental land mass. A powerhouse of the regional economy, the basin supported the largest freshwater port in the world along with six hundred thousand jobs generating $10 billion in annual wages, according to a 2011 study.

Interstate wrangling over Delaware River water rights began in earnest as early as the 1920s, driven in large part by the water needs of the region’s two largest cities, New York and Philadelphia. New York City, situated just outside the Delaware Basin, sought to tap Delaware tributaries within New York State to fill its reservoirs, while Philadelphia, within the basin, was counting on the river’s waters to meet its present and future needs. Efforts to reconcile competing demands for water resulted in multiple failed attempts at an interstate compact, as well as litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court, as the three downstream states opposed New York City’s efforts to divert water from the Delaware. Representatives of both New York City and Philadelphia took part in the negotiations that led to the creation of the DRBC.

Fear of Centralization

At the same time, efforts by the federal government to establish national or regional water planning agencies had been rebuffed by states concerned that their water rights might be abridged. During the New Deal, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) created a National Resources Planning Board, but Congress quashed it in 1943 for fear of excessive centralization of power. Legislation establishing the DRBC compact was forged during the administration of President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) after months of fine-tuning to craft an agreement that would allow coordinated federal and state action in the river basin, while addressing federal concerns about constitutionality and potential threats to jurisdiction, and protecting state prerogatives in managing water and related land resources within their borders.

The pioneering interjurisdictional compact replaced a patchwork of forty-three state agencies, fourteen interstate agencies, and nineteen federal agencies that an article in the magazine of the American Water Resources Association termed “a regional body with the force of law to oversee a unified approach to managing a river system without regard to political boundaries.” Under the water law doctrine of equitable apportionment, states have the right to a share of river water that originates within or flows through their terrain. Recognizing the need to manage resources throughout the entire Delaware watershed—the area drained by the river—the compact empowered the DRBC to allocate water supply, protect water quality, regulate water withdrawals and discharges, develop water conservation initiatives, create flow management policy, plan for water needs and recreation, and finance capital projects, programs, and operations through bond issuance and cost sharing.

Headquartered in West Trenton, New Jersey, the commission was one of the few basin management agencies to have regulatory, as well as planning and monitoring responsibilities. Key successes included improved water quality, implementation of an effective drought management policy, and comprehensive watershed planning. Much of the river was afforded special protection status, to preserve water quality, and was enrolled in the National Wild and Scenic River System, to maintain its scenic nature.

The commission’s membership, as defined by the compact, consisted of the governor of each of the basin states, plus a presidentially appointed federal representative (in 2016, the North Atlantic Division Engineer of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers). Decisions were to be made by majority vote except for drought declarations or member funding quotas, which required unanimity. The initial term of the compact was one hundred years, renewable for a second century, unless any of the partners gave advance notice of intention to leave.

Tocks Island Dam Project

Along with interstate water rights litigation, a second prime impetus for creation of the DRBC was the planned implementation of the multimillion-dollar Tocks Island Dam project. The dam would have been built on the main stem of the river six miles upstream from New Jersey’s Delaware Water Gap, on the northern tip of an island owned by the State of New Jersey, creating a lake forty miles long and up to 140 feet deep. It was ultimately rendered unbuildable by its scope and cost.

The multistate impacts of flooding spawned by two hurricanes in 1955 had cleared the way for federal involvement in Delaware River water affairs.  The Senate directed the Army Corps of Engineers to prepare a comprehensive basin-wide resource management plan, which was funded by Congress as part of a massive public works bill, the Flood Control Act of 1962 (P.L. 87-874).

The plan included the Tocks Island Dam as the centerpiece of a multipurpose reservoir project that had flood control, recreation, and hydropower generating components, initially estimated at a cost of $122.4 million. Almost 250 billion gallons of water were to be stored behind the dam. Another ten dams would have been built on Delaware River tributaries. A recreation area, later enlarged and known as the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, was proposed to develop the recreation opportunities promised by the project.

Project costs began escalating almost as soon as the dam was approved, due to inflation, land acquisition prices, and construction issues. The DRBC was intended to serve as the local sponsor of the project in behalf of the four river states and would have owned most of the water behind the dam. Construction was supposed to start in 1967, with project completion scheduled for 1975, but the schedule was delayed by litigation and design problems.

The dam drew resistance first from residents whose property was taken by eminent domain and then from an environmental movement that steadily gathered force after the first Earth Day in April 1970. The plan foundered amid concerns about stagnant reservoir water, unstable geology, cost overruns, budget cuts due to spending on the Vietnam War, and the enactment of new, more stringent environmental regulations. The DRBC, long a proponent of the dam, in July 1975 voted 3-1 against starting construction, with Pennsylvania the only vote in favor. The federal government representative abstained.

But the dam remained nominally viable as a component of the DRBC Comprehensive Plan, for complex reasons related to land earmarked for the national recreation area, as well as the water supply and flood control issues the dam was supposed to address. Federal legislation to remove the project from the books failed several times during the mid- to late 1970s.  It was not until 1992 that Congress formally deauthorized the Tocks Island project.

The Rise of Hydraulic Fracturing

The DRBC’s regulatory responsibilities again placed it in a key regional role in the early twenty-first-century controversy surrounding the practice of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, the process of drilling into rock and injecting a pressurized liquid to extract gas or oil. About one-third of the Delaware Basin, in Pennsylvania and New York, overlies the Marcellus Shale formation, which contains rich deposits of natural gas. Concentrated in southwestern and northeastern Pennsylvania, the state’s fracking industry mushroomed, bringing with it revenue and jobs, but also environmental impacts that included noise, concrete well pads, pipelines, wastewater disposal, and deforestation. Faced with the looming expansion of fracking into the Delaware River watershed, the potential construction of gas transport pipeline under the river, and opposition to fracking by compact member states Delaware and New York (the New Jersey legislature and the state’s governor were at odds on the issue), the DRBC in 2010 issued a temporary stay on fracking, pending its enactment of regulations for gas production activities. In 2016, a federal lawsuit filed against the DRBC by landowners in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, who held fracking leases, claimed the agency lacked the power to regulate gas drilling. The suit was joined by three Republican Pennsylvania state senators, who claimed the DRBC had usurped authority already addressed under state regulations.

Born in litigation and political horse-trading, the DRBC more than a half-century after its creation continued to struggle with its mandate of managing an essential natural resource transcending multiple state boundaries. Often a source of technical expertise and mediation in the ongoing process of maintaining adequate water quality and supply throughout the watershed, the DRBC’s interjurisdictional regulatory and administrative powers nevertheless thrust it into the foreground in high-profile regional controversies with multiple constituencies, such as those surrounding Tocks Island and fracking. Despite the intent of those who intended the DRBC as a strong advocate and mediator for the river and its resources, the agency found its powers checked by the complexity of the environmental regulatory system in which it operated, the often conflicting interests of the many public and private stakeholders in the Delaware Basin, and financial constraints stemming from the reluctance of its membership to fully fund its work.

Gail Friedman holds a Master’s Degree in Public History from Temple University. She worked as a community planner for Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from 1999 to 2015. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Regional leaders in the Delaware Valley began discussing the idea of building a bridge that would span the Delaware River and connect Philadelphia and Camden as far back as the early 1800s. Their vision took nearly a century to realize, but finally, in 1912 and 1917, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures created a pair of commissions for the purpose of jointly building, operating, and owning a single toll bridge. Construction on what would briefly become the world’s longest suspension bridge started in 1922, and in 1926 the Delaware River Bridge–renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in 1956–was opened to traffic.

The 1931 creation of the Delaware River Joint Commission formalized the agreement between the two states while expanding the scope of operations of their new agency.  The commission would now be responsible for planning and providing future bridges and passenger rail service across the river and for promoting passenger and freight commerce on the Delaware River, as “a highway of commerce between Philadelphia and Camden and the sea.” With this last duty, legislators intended to give their new bi-state agency the responsibility for unifying the region’s fragmented system of ports.

Five times between 1931 and 1952, legislators amended the commission’s enabling act in efforts to expand its duties to include port operations. The draft legislation for each amendment granted the commission the power to acquire, build, own, and operate maritime cargo facilities, but every time powerful private interests successfully lobbied to curtail these powers and weaken the final legislation. In 1935 the United States government, through an act of congress, recognized the agreement between the states as a federal “compact,” and the 1952 compact amendment optimistically re-christened the organization the “Delaware River Port Authority.”  As with previous amendments, however, the power to acquire port facilities was stripped from the final legislation.

Walt Whitman Bridge Opens

Following the 1952 compact amendment, planning for bridges and commuter rail continued, and in 1955 the Walt Whitman Bridge opened to the south of the Ben Franklin Bridge. The Port Authority Transit Corporation or “PATCO Speedline” trains began to operate in 1969, providing a commuter rail line running from the southern New Jersey suburbs across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and into Center City Philadelphia. The Commodore Barry Bridge opened in 1974, south of the Walt Whitman Bridge, and a final bridge, the Betsy Ross, opened in 1976, to the north of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

In 1992, the compact was amended one more time, finally making port unification a true mandate of the DRPA by granting it the power to acquire the two state-chartered port agencies on the Delaware River–the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority and the South Jersey Port Corporation. But over the next several years, entrenched interests at the two public port authorities succeeded in blocking the DRPA’s acquisition plans, and by 1998 port reunification was dead. The 1992 amendment, however, also granted the DRPA the power to engage in “economic development,” broadly defined.  After the failure of port reunification, this power–which was added as an afterthought–became central to the DRPA’s mission.

By 2013, nearly a century after its creation, the DRPA was still a port authority in name only. Maritime operations include a seasonal cruise terminal, a small multimodal cargo yard, and a ferry service, but otherwise the DRPA remained almost entirely a bridge and commuter rail operation. Together, the four toll bridges and the PATCO Speedline served as an integrated transportation system that carried workers from the New Jersey suburbs to their jobs in Philadelphia in the morning and back to their homes at night.

In 2010, the DRPA earned $275 million in operating income and incurred expenses of $202 million for a net operating income of $73 million.  More important, a full ninety percent of operating income came from bridge tolls. An additional nine percent came from PATCO fares, while maritime operations accounted for a scant one-tenth of one percent of operating income.

Tolls as Revenue Source

Like most governments, the DRPA effectively operates as a monopoly, so its bridge tolls are both a large and dependable revenue source and its bonds are a low-risk investment, together giving the agency enormous borrowing power.  In 2010 the DRPA had about $1.4 billion in outstanding debt, backed primarily by future toll revenues. More important, periodic toll increases had a big effect on the agency’s borrowing capacity and the unique institutional character of the DRPA as a bi-state public authority influenced the allocation of funds that flowed from these increases.

Unlike a municipality that provides a wide variety of tax-funded services and facilities, the DRPA has operated as a “public authority,” a specific type of government created by legislators to provide a single service or facility, such as a highway, airport, maritime cargo port, or bridge.  Authorities typically pay for these facilities with proceeds from the sale of “revenue bonds” that are backed by future rents, tolls, or other charges that will be paid by the people who use the facility.  Because authorities typically do not rely on tax revenues, they can skirt public review of their projects, unlike municipalities that must seek voter approval of bonding bills to avoid claims of taxation without representation.  Authorities are governed by appointed boards or commissions rather than by elected officials so their leadership typically is less sensitive to political pressures.  Together, appointed leadership and the lack of a need to seek voter approval for projects makes authorities more politically insulated than other units of government.

But the DRPA is not just any authority; rather, in 2013 it was one of only three in the United States that enjoyed a “bi-state” jurisdiction, with a service area of 5,840 square miles that included five counties in southeastern Pennsylvania and eight counties in southern New Jersey.  A commission of sixteen leads the DRPA, eight commissioners from each state, all but two appointed by the two governors.  This division of the commission into two equal delegations ensures an unusual level of internal stability but it also virtually guarantees ongoing stress between the two delegations that stems from their different views of the DRPA’s purpose and duties. These differences of opinion reflect the contrasting geographies and constituencies that the two delegations represent: suburban New Jersey bedroom communities filled with workers interested in a cheap commute to the city, and densely developed Philadelphia, whose politicians have long thought that low tolls and fares promote the flight of businesses and residents to the suburbs.

Prior to commission meetings, the two delegations meet separately, in closed “executive” session, where they conduct most of their business out of the public’s eye. Thus the public meetings of the full commission usually lack controversy or meaningful debate and serve instead as perfunctory events where agreements hashed out in private are merely finalized in public. The same process has typically been used to make spending decisions.

Borrowing Power Grows With Tolls

Because the governors of the two states are term-limited and gubernatorial politics are central to raising tolls and fares, the DRPA usually does so only every eight years, although the agency broke the pattern in 2011 when it increased tolls after only three years. But this puts stress on the agency’s operating budget because revenues remain flat year over year while annual operating costs continue to increase because of inflation. More important, new debt cannot be issued until there is a new source of future revenues to back it. When tolls do go up, however, the impact on borrowing can be huge.  As a rule of thumb, each of the four times between 1992 and 2012 that the DRPA raised tolls on its four bridges by one dollar, the agency’s bonding capacity–the amount it could borrow–rose by about a half billion dollars.

That meant that the commission’s next job was to decide how and where to spend about $500 million dollars on economic development projects. The method was simple. The two delegations agreed to split the funds equally, half going to either side of the river.  Then each delegation proposed a list of projects and values that added up to half the total amount of funds and the commission voted and approved all of the projects.

Between 1992 and 2001 alone the DRPA’s debt grew by five times, from $250 million to $1.4 billion.  During this period approximately $443 million in toll-backed proceeds from the sale of “Port Project Development Bonds” (PPDBs) were invested in economic development projects worth a total of $4.4 billion. Some of these funds were spent on job creation projects, including location subsidies to lure private shipbuilder Kvaerner to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard after it closed in 1995, patents for “FastShip” technology, and a charter school and expansion projects for several private manufacturing companies in Camden. Other funds were spent on waterfront redevelopment projects on both sides of the river including a ballpark, aquarium expansion, and a new DRPA headquarters building on the New Jersey riverfront; a new performing arts center, a new museum to the U.S. Constitution, improvements to a science museum, and an aborted riverfront entertainment center on the Philadelphia side; and an aerial tram connecting the two cities across the river that remained uncompleted over a decade after its foundations were poured in 2000 at a cost of $10 million.

Subsidizing a Shipbuilder

Another example is the DRPA’s $50 million contribution–and one of its largest grants–to the nearly half billion dollars in government subsidies to Kvaerner.  Despite being politically popular with democrats and labor unions in Philadelphia, Kvaerner was used as an example in a 1998 Time Magazine cover story about corporate welfare, in which the authors calculated that each new job at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard cost $323,000 in subsidies to create. In a 2000 performance audit, democratic State Auditor General Robert Casey found that the location subsidies provided to Kvaerner by the state and other agencies grossly over-subsidized Kvaerner, which made only a relatively modest investment in the facility and bore very little risk.

The DRPA’s challenges with economic development projects stem from a simple but important disconnect: Because the bridges generate substantial surpluses, the DRPA has been able to provide financial support in the form of loans, forgivable loans, and grants to projects that did not need to perform economically because their debt was backed by bridge tolls rather than by project income.  This presented a two-edge sword, because while it allowed for subsidizing worthy projects and initiatives, it also made it easier for commissioners to allocate money to questionable projects such as the tram and Kvaerner because the funds would be repaid whether or not the project was economically successful.  At the policy level, the DRPA’s spending decisions raised a recurring equity question, as the commuters who were required to pay higher and higher tolls and fares saw their money spent on facilities and programs that they might never use or benefit from and that were completely unrelated to the bridges. The lack of adequate due diligence and controls to assure sound economic performance left the door open for poorly vetted pet projects that could and sometimes did embarrass the agency, cause needless distraction, and waste money that could have been spent on more worthwhile endeavors.

Infusions of huge amounts of cash every four or eight years, the lack of a connection between project funding and economic performance, and the perception of increased political insulation on the part of commissioners have also led to instances of inside dealing, cronyism, graft, and corruption. A remarkable case was that of DRPA Commissioner and Pennsylvania State Senator Vincent Fumo, who created a $40 million economic development fund fueled by toll revenues and directed at initiatives on the Pennsylvania side of the River. The supposed purpose of the fund was to offset disparities in spending between the two states resulting from cheap fares and tolls that benefited New Jersey.  Instead, Fumo and a handful of close associates quietly spent all of the funds in 1999 with little oversight and on projects of direct personal interest to the senator.  In 2009, Fumo was convicted in federal court of 137 charges of corruption and sentenced to 55 months in prison for the illicit spending of public funds, including those of the DRPA.

By 2013, the DRPA had become a large and mature regional transportation agency successfully serving a densely populated region but the divisions between its constituencies, governance structure, and bi-state jurisdiction promoted conflicting ideas about its purposes.  With its future as a port authority out of the question, the DRPA’s dependable stream of toll revenues continued to support the new economic development powers that it was still learning to wield.  Together, these unique tensions, powers, and limits continued to influence the operations, investment decisions, and evolution of DRPA nearly one hundred years after its creation.

Peter Hendee Brown is an architect, planner, and urban development consultant based in the Twin Cities. He teaches private sector real estate development at the University of Minnesota and is the author of America’s Waterfront Revival: Port Authorities and Urban Redevelopment.  Before moving to Minneapolis in 2003, he lived for seventeen years in Philadelphia, where he practiced architecture and worked in Philadelphia city government, serving in the administration of Mayor Edward G. Rendell. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) was founded in 1965 to coordinate planning activities within a nine-county area, which included Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, and Delaware Counties in Pennsylvania and Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, and Mercer Counties in New Jersey. In the decades since its founding, DVRPC has worked to foster economic development, direct transportation projects, protect the natural environment, and study land use and housing conditions within the Greater Philadelphia metropolitan area. Throughout its history, DVRPC has tried to balance the needs of its urban centers with the growing power of its car-dependent suburbs.

In the early twentieth century, Philadelphia’s regional planners advocated a purposefully decentralized vision for metropolitan growth. Taking advantage of the expanding range and popularity of the automobile, they sought to alleviate the overcrowding of central cities by directing growth into the rural hinterland. In 1928, a coterie of Philadelphia-area power brokers—municipal reformers, corporations, planners, and real estate developers—created the region’s first formal planning organization, the Regional Planning Federation of the Philadelphia Tri-State District. The federation’s director, Russell Van Nest Black (1893-1969), drew up a utopian plan for the area. His proposal suggested the construction of newly built garden cities—planned, dense, self-contained communities—surrounded by parks and open space, to be connected to Philadelphia via rail and automobile. But these plans proved quixotic, hamstrung by a lack of funds and coordination between local, state, and federal governments.

All of that changed in the 1950s as the federal government made massive investments in the nation’s highway system. The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion towards the construction of new interstates, required the close synchronization of federal and state planners. As automobile use skyrocketed and government subsidies helped underwrite the construction of new suburbs, the need to harmonize the planning decisions of cities and surrounding counties became acute.

Planning for the Region

In 1959, the Penn Jersey Transportation Study brought together experts from nine area counties and local universities, under executive director Henry Fagin (1913-2009), to coordinate the region’s implementation of the Highway Act’s transportation initiatives. They sought answers to several key questions: Where would Pennsylvania and New Jersey build their interstate highways? How could the region optimize land use while maximizing economic development? What path might growth take, given different governmental policies, transportation decisions, corporate behavior, and market forces? The study also explored the possibility of creating a permanent organization to manage ongoing land use and transportation planning.

The direct impetus for the creation of the DVRPC was the 1962 Federal-Aid Highway Act. It mandated that all urbanized areas with populations over 50,000 establish a metropolitan planning organization to direct the local expenditure of federal transportation and housing funds by means of a “continuing, comprehensive and cooperative” planning process. In response, the counties and cities that had participated in the Penn Jersey Transportation Study formed DVRPC by means of the Delaware Valley Urban Area Compact, which Pennsylvania’s Governor Raymond Shafer (1917-2006) signed into law on June 30, 1965. New Jersey officially joined the commission by ratifying companion legislation in 1967. The new commission included appointed representatives from each of the member states and counties and the cities of Camden, Philadelphia, Trenton, and Chester, along with New Jersey’s commissioner of transportation and commissioner of community affairs, and Pennsylvania’s secretary of highways and executive director of its State Planning Board.

DVRPC began work on its first regional long-range plan with an extensive series of aerial photographs. Beginning in 1959 and repeated every five years thereafter, flyovers were conducted across the 3,833-square-mile DVRPC region. These aerial photographs were used to track the chronological progression of area land use and economic growth. Survey by survey, photographs documented the spread of suburban development into the rural areas surrounding the region’s urban centers. Aerial photography also had a powerful effect on planners’ imaginations. Traditional political maps had encouraged parochialism by reinforcing the importance of municipal boundaries. But overhead photography demonstrated the region’s interconnectedness. Roads, rail, and rivers seamlessly connected cities to suburbs, farms to factories, and ports to the sea. Viewing the Delaware Valley through these photographs, planners began to acquire a sense of the region as a coherent whole.

In the years to follow, that holistic vision fostered a newfound awareness of the environmental impact of urban development. After the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, DVRPC began research on the region’s air and water quality. It also assumed responsibility for water supply, natural resource, greenway, and solid waste planning. Later in the decade, DVRPC issued a region-wide watershed management plan to protect the area’s surface and groundwater resources in accordance with the Clean Water Act of 1972.

An Expanding Role

DVRPC’s scope extended beyond environmental, land use, and transportation planning. In the late 1960s, it turned its attention to historic preservation, which thereafter became a key factor in its comprehensive planning mission. DVRPC’s 1969 report on historic preservation compiled the first master list of sites worthy of protection in its open space plans. DVRPC promoted historic designation for numerous historic structures—ones like the birthplace of James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) in Burlington, New Jersey, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s multifamily homes in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. DVRPC also emphasized the importance of historic sites to the tourism industry, which was expected to explode as visitors flocked to the region in 1976 for Bicentennial celebrations.

In the 1980s, DVRPC issued sweeping reports that forecast future transportation needs. Using predictive modeling, these reports demonstrated the economic importance of expanded public transit and highway facilities. Long-term projections were instrumental in the construction of new roads—I-476, I-95, US Route 422, NJ Route 55—which helped to accelerate growth in the region’s suburbs. It also called for new rail lines, including the Center City Commuter Connection, which finally linked all of Philadelphia’s major railroad stations when it was completed in 1984. DVRPC also began to encourage greater public participation, soliciting input from area citizens on its long-range plans. To formalize this process, it created the Regional Citizens Committee, which became an important—if sometimes contentious—forum for residents to comment on the DVRPC planning process.

During the 1990s, DVRPC’s planning scope expanded considerably with passage of the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). It provided expanded federal funding for metropolitan planning organizations to provide more seamless connections between transportation modes—pedestrian, bicycle, transit, air, marine—not directly targeted by earlier highway-focused legislation. DVRPC incorporated these recommendations into their federally mandated Transportation Investment Program reports, which ranked hundreds of local transportation projects in order of priority. During the 1990s, DVRPC also issued reports on the region’s housing supply, recommending that municipalities promote multifamily and rental construction to increase the availability of affordable housing. And DVRPC redoubled its environmental efforts, initiating a new air quality program and providing commuters with subsidies to encourage public transit ridership.

After the appointment of executive director Barry Seymour in 2006, DVRPC tried to balance autocentric development with more progressive planning goals, including a focus on public transit and regional equity. As in previous years, suburban governments and developers resisted this shift towards urban-focused planning. Still, DVRPC’s efforts included a regional food system plan—the first by a metropolitan planning organization—that encouraged local stakeholders to improve food supply equity. It also invested in recreational facilities, including improved trail infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians. In 2011, DVRPC faced an internal controversy: It disbanded the long-standing Regional Citizens Committee (RCC) because of fierce infighting among its members. While it was replaced by the Public Participation Task Force, ex-members of the RCC lamented the commission’s alleged unwillingness to consider public input.

In 2013, DVRPC issued its latest long-range plan for the region, Connections 2040. It called for continued investment in transportation infrastructure despite funding shortfalls. As DVRPC approached its fiftieth anniversary, its long-range plan echoed the goals it had set forth at its founding: “creating livable communities, managing growth and protecting the environment, building the economy, and establishing a modern multimodal transportation system.”

Dylan Gottlieb is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, where he works on recent American urban history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Bacon called cities “one of man’s greatest achievements.” Challenging the notion that they resulted from “grand accidents,” he instead suggested that “human will,” consciously applied to elements of “mass and space” shaped ancient cities such as Rome and Athens and modern city building projects in Brasilia and Stockholm. Drawing lessons from various figures such as Pope Sixtus V (1521-1590), James Oglethorpe (1696-1785), Le Corbusier (1887-1965), and David Helldén (1905-90), he examined how over centuries, the form of various cities reflected both the aspirations of citizens and the “state of their civilizations.” Representing a new era in urban planning after World War II, Bacon then set forth his own principles, concluding that by balancing old and new structures, pedestrian and vehicle flows, and work and leisure activities, postwar Philadelphia could be made vibrant and pleasant.

Bacon served as director of the City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970 and played significant roles in designing projects such as Society Hill, Penn Center, and Market East, some of which garnered him international praise. Upon Design of Cities’ publication, many of those works were finished or nearing completion. As he showed in the book, his overarching goal was to unite them as a “total organism” in a city “laboriously built up, part by part, over time.” Further, he imagined a redesigned Philadelphia as a crucial center in the larger “megalopolitan” corridor stretching from Boston south to Washington, D.C. Ultimately, Bacon hoped through his book to maintain Philadelphia’s regional preeminence even as its industries declined, residents fled, and levels of poverty rose.

Bacon’s most celebrated work was the redevelopment of Society Hill, one given considerable attention in the book. Largely based on his Better Philadelphia Exhibition (1947) model and with assistance from architects Robert Geddes (b.1923), Roy Larson (1893-1973), Vincent Kling (1916-2013), and Oskar Stonorov (1905-70) and developer William Zeckendorf (1905-76), Society Hill was planned as a “sweeping continuous design.” Stretching from Washington Square to the Delaware River waterfront, it contained restored colonial homes, new town houses and apartment towers, garden footpaths, and “pocket parks,” all linked through a “Greenway System.” The area would then be integrated into the redeveloped Independence Mall immediately north, providing “organic capability for growth.” Bordered on three sides by the planned I-95, I-676, and Crosstown (never built) expressways, the area would upon completion have offered convenient linkages to Center City and surrounding suburbs. For pedestrians and vehicles alike, roads and paths connected the area’s eastern edge to Geddes’ redesigned Delaware River waterfront.

Regarding Philadelphia’s “civic core,” Bacon surveyed the design of Penn Center, Philadelphia’s first office building project since the 1920s. Completed in the mid-1960s and relying on the demolition of the “Chinese Wall” rail viaduct and Broad Street Station, his Penn Center diagrams, renderings, and color photographs displayed how train lines, shopping concourses, and open-air plazas (the “interweaving of public and private spaces”) coalesced above and below ground just west of City Hall. Through an “outward thrust of design” Penn Center would, along the Market Street axis of William Penn (1644-1718) and Thomas Holme’s (1624-95) original 1682 grid, blend with Society Hill to the east. Between Society Hill and Penn Center, Bacon proposed the revitalization of Market East, specifically its “rundown” retail stores. He unveiled in the book a new, light-filled Market East corridor, containing submerged walkways and rail lines to facilitate vehicular traffic on surrounding streets, and anchored by a glass-walled pedestrian mall. Eventually called “The Gallery,” the mall debuted in the mid-1970s. Other projects undertaken by Bacon, such as the suburban developments of Eastwick and the Far Northeast, did not appear in Design of Cities. While they did not readily fit with Design of Cities’ focus on downtown areas, they were key pieces in his larger organic concept of urban planning.

To close his book, Bacon argued that it would be through dialogue among leaders and citizens that sound planning and design—a “strongly articulated nuclei” surrounded by landmarks, institutions, and residential fabric—would materialize. The resulting “imagery and rhythms” would then generate “loyalty and pride” among residents and visitors. Such ideas resonated in the early twenty-first century as evidenced by the redevelopment of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River waterfront and the 2017 proposals for building new park spaces over the I-95 freeway in Queen Village and Society Hill. Yet despite Bacon’s optimistic tone, Design of Cities failed to mention the economic and racial turmoil that put such ideas to the test in the late 1960s. By the time a second edition of the book appeared in 1974, the Nixon administration had significantly cut federal aid for urban renewal in favor of revenue sharing with the states, and the era of federal largesse towards cities with the kind of ambition Bacon epitomized was over.

Stephen Nepa teaches history and American studies at Temple University, Moore College of Art and Design, and the Pennsylvania State University-Abington. A contributor to numerous books, journals, and documentary films, he received his M.A. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and his Ph.D. from Temple University. He lives in Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)