Driving force behind Philadelphia's 1950s comeback

This is the third of three excerpts from Dan Rottenberg's "The Outsider: Albert M. Greenfield and the Fall of the Protestant Establishment," released this month by Temple University Press. Greenfield (1887-1967), a Russian immigrant, built a Philadelphia empire that encompassed banks, real estate, department stores, newspapers, and transportation companies. That background was critical when, as chairman of the city Planning Commission, he took on the challenge of transforming Society Hill.

By Dan Rottenberg

Nineteen fifty-six would be recalled in Philadelphia as the year Center City finally began to reverse its long decline. Upon assuming office [as chairman of the city Planning Commission], Greenfield focused . . . on the area he knew best: the historic district east of Broad Street. Here he approached the challenge like a developer rather than a bureaucrat.

The city's future, he theorized, depended on building up its tax base, which in turn depended on attracting affluent people to live nearby and spend their money in its department stores, hotels, and restaurants. Like [renowned city planner] Ed Bacon, Greenfield recognized that the Georgian homes in the historic district, now largely abandoned or converted to dingy rooming houses, offered the potential cachet that could entice affluent homeowners back to the neighborhood - if the general area improved. But to Greenfield, a piecemeal, house-by-house approach to reviving downtown living was doomed to failure. "The reason nothing is moving and nobody has bought down there," he argued, "is because nobody has been given a guarantee that his investment will be protected and the climate of the whole area improved."

Greenfield's solution was to draw up a detailed revitalization plan that would qualify the entire thousand-acre tract southeast of Independence Hall - an area that comprised one-quarter of downtown Philadelphia - for urban renewal under the Federal Housing Act of 1954. In effect, the city would condemn all properties within the project's boundaries; but instead of leveling everything and rebuilding from scratch, as other cities were doing, Philadelphia would offer every existing homeowner the opportunity to keep his or her property by restoring its exterior to its original period - and the city would provide low-cost loans to do the job, as well. At the same time, vacant houses and lots would be offered to newcomers at bargain prices, again with the stipulation that façades be restored according to the plan's rigid specifications.

To create confidence among home buyers, the plan called for realizing some of Bacon's visions, like installing new brick sidewalks and imitation gas lanterns, [and] creating green walkways that connected Society Hill to Independence National Historical Park. . . .

This was a unique surgical approach to urban renewal - what one observer called "an attempt to salvage what is good of the old, add what is needed of the new, and in general transform that part of the city into a sort of urban residential paradise without making a museum-fossil out of it." . . .

In a city previously accustomed to old money and slow movement, here was the most complex and demanding urban project ever attempted - in Philadelphia or anywhere else. In effect, Bacon's vision and Greenfield's plan both sought to reverse the process that the Pennsylvania Railroad had begun 80 years earlier - that is, it would draw Philadelphia's upper and upper-middle classes back into the heart of the city, much as the railroad had lured them to the Main Line in the 19th century.

That the plan would benefit Greenfield's own nearby hotels, department stores, and office buildings was obvious but also beside the point. In this case Greenfield's great strength lay in his lack of objectivity: Precisely because he had huge investments in the historic district, he enjoyed widespread credibility. . . .

The first enthusiastic convert to his plan was perhaps also the most important: [Richardson] Dilworth's first public act as mayor was a directive to proceed with Greenfield's proposed plan. Shortly after, Dilworth announced that he would personally build himself an 18th-century-style townhouse on Washington Square, at Society Hill's western edge. No such townhouse had been built anywhere in Philadelphia since the turn of the 20th century. . . .

But new residents could not be induced to invest in Society Hill unless government and private developers invested millions as well. Fitting together all the public and private elements of the Society Hill project, it soon became apparent, exceeded the scope of any public agency. Greenfield's solution was to create a nonprofit public-private partnership between the city and business leaders who had a stake in the downtown.

Forming this new civic body - possibly the first of its kind anywhere - became Greenfield's primary mission. That spring he spoke at length to virtually every leading industrialist, banker, and merchant to drum up financial support. The business leaders he buttonholed soon discovered what home buyers and shopkeepers had learned 50 years earlier: Greenfield had an answer for every objection. He could wax lyrical about Society Hill - "this plot of 1,000 acres that combines all that civilization has to offer." But he could also get down to hard economic facts and figures, pointing out that retail sales on Market Street had declined by 15 percent in the last eight years, even while sales in the greater Philadelphia region had grown. He reminded the banks and insurance companies holding mortgages on stores and buildings in the area that they would be the long-run losers if the downtown withered.. . . "He understood the history, he understood the economics, he understood the politics, and then he understood how to sell it to a broad citizenry of the city that would have to support it on a continuing basis," Philadelphia's redevelopment director Walter D'Alessio later recalled. . . .

To lead this new partnership, Greenfield courted John P. Robin, who had overseen downtown Pittsburgh's pioneering Gateway Center development. . . . Over lunch on Robin's first visit to Philadelphia, Greenfield painted a rapturous picture of Philadelphia's future and of Robin's "unique opportunity" to make a contribution to his time in a much larger city. But Robin remained skeptical.

"Are you all together?" Robin asked, referring to Philadelphia's business leaders. "Because the reason I was able to work it out in Pittsburgh was because the Mellons were behind me, and once the Mellons said yes to anything in Pittsburgh, that meant that everybody was for it. . . . Do you have anything like that in this community?"

"Well, that's exactly what we're putting together in [the Old Philadelphia Development Corp.]," Greenfield eagerly replied. "We're putting together a vehicle where the total community can get behind a project that's worthwhile."

To the planning commission's meetings, as in all his other dealings, Greenfield brought his exquisite sense of timing and human relations. As one observer recalled, he would let a discussion flow freely until he sensed that people were repeating themselves. Then he would bring things together quickly. "Now, gentlemen," he would typically say, "I'd like to express myself. I do not have a monopoly on wisdom. However . . ."

If Greenfield wanted something badly enough, Philadelphia's development coordinator, William Rafsky, noted admiringly, he could usually get it done. In one instance, Philadelphia's city planners objected to an architectural design that the General Services Administration (GSA) had devised for a federal courthouse on the proposed Independence Mall, but the GSA refused to budge from its original plans. When the Philadelphians gathered to plot their next step, Greenfield astonished the roomful of professional planners and commission members by reaching for the phone and placing a call to the White House.

"Inside of 20 minutes," one board member later recalled, "he had on the telephone, personally, the White House, the governor, the mayor, and the two United States senators. . . . It left the leading businessmen and citizens present with mouths open in awe and wonderment and respect." The result was a conference to discuss the issue, after which the federal agency modified the design to suit the Philadelphians' objections. . . .

Bacon ultimately perceived that Greenfield's operating style was critical to translating Bacon's plans from paper into reality.. . . "Albert Greenfield was a very difficult chairman," Bacon later recalled, "and I found it quite painful to serve under him but nonetheless managed to do it. He was very bullheaded, and of course he was very much tied up with vested interests. However, it is true that he did back the idea . . . of our doing the comprehensive plan, and he had that much influence with Council that he was able to get funds necessary for it. In fact, I have a strong suspicion he was the only person who would have been able to do that."

Within a year of Greenfield's arrival at the planning commission, a private developer (with public funding) demolished the decrepit Dock Street Market to make way for what became the neighborhood's primary anchor: Society Hill Towers, a residential complex of three 31-story apartment buildings as well as low-rise houses, all designed by the noted architect I.M. Pei. Society Hill was subsequently reborn as an upper-middle-class enclave of more than 6,000 residents, many of them living in restored colonial homes, just as Greenfield and Bacon had envisioned. It was the envy of cities everywhere.

Society Hill's renewal triggered the subsequent reinvention of downtown Philadelphia as a center of arts and culture, gourmet restaurants, upscale hotels, and gleaming high-rise office buildings that towered well above William Penn's statue on City Hall. In 1980 a U.S. census study concluded that no downtown neighborhood in America could match Philadelphia's Center City for its combination of population, household income level, education level, and number of people who both lived and worked in the same neighborhood.

While the population of Philadelphia declined by nearly one-quarter between 1960 and 2000, the downtown population grew by more than half. By the end of the 20th century, nearly 80,000 people were living within the boundaries of William Penn's original town - far more than resided in any downtown outside New York or Chicago.

"Of all the big cities," the urban affairs journalist Jeanne R. Lowe wrote in Cities in a Race With Time, a book on urban renewal published in 1967, "Philadelphia has come closest to a comprehensive approach to the complex challenges confronting our urban centers."