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Urban Politics and the Vision of a Modern City: Philadelphia and Lancaster after World War II
Urban renewal transformed America's older cities in the aftermath of World War II, and perhaps nowhere was the impress of federal dollars better demonstrated than in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia demolished the infamous "Chinese Wall," an elevated structure that supported the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks entering downtown from the west, which divided the city on north-south lines and, at a time when trains were powered by diesel, resulted in enormous amounts of pollution that affected the quality of life in adjacent blocks. The city and its redevelopment authority also undertook other projects that attempted to modernize downtown and eliminate blight in residential areas. Collectively, these projects received national acclaim, and planner Edmund Bacon was featured on the cover of Time. Lancaster, sixty-six miles to the west, commenced its ambitious urban renewal program in 1957, a decade after Philadelphia had done so, and turned to Philadelphia for lessons on how best to revitalize its downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. As was true of the Quaker City, Lancaster attempted to solidify its downtown commercial center and also to eliminate blight in residential neighborhoods. A comparative analysis of urban redevelopment in these two cities reveals the conflation of a modernist political sensibility—a revulsion against boss-dominated Republican rule and an emphasis on professionalism and expertise—as well as a modernist philosophy of design that attempted to replace aging downtown and residential structures with new buildings that reflected a postwar aesthetic. Modernism in architectural design was itself a political statement, a sweeping away of the old in favor of the new. As Swiss architect Le Corbusier was wont to state, modernism was predicated upon tearing down the old and avoiding any local traditions in new construction. This essay attempts to explain both the achievements and the limitations of renewal in the two cities. It also uses a comparative perspective to assess how effectively leaders in a large and a small city were able to bring a vision of both a modern political culture and a modern urban landscape to fruition.1
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The victory banners that waved from second-story windows across Philadelphia's narrow row-home streets in 1945 and 1946 barely disguised the city's postwar shabbiness. A 1939 Works Progress Administration Real Property Inventory had branded 35 percent of the city's housing substandard, and the war only exacerbated these grim conditions. One typical aging neighborhood, the Poplar area, a maze of dark alleys and dank, pestilent courtyards bounded by moldering tenements, sat just north of City Hall. Fires, deadly tenement house collapses, and code enforcement actions left ugly gaps in the area's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tapestry of courts, shanties, row houses, factories, and junkyards. Recent immigrants—Italian, Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian—still lived in these graying neighborhoods along with a rising tide of black migrants from Virginia and North Carolina who were drawn during the war to the city's booming shipyard and war materials industries. Newly arrived blacks swelled the population not only of the city's historic seventh ward, described by W. E. B. Du Bois in his Philadelphia Negro (1899), but also of neighborhoods in West and North Philadelphia like the East and West Poplar areas adjacent to Center City.2 |
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