Senior Advisor Gregory Heller cited by Nathaniel Popkin of Hidden City Daily on his new biography about Ed Bacon entitled Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadlephia.
>FULL ARTICLE
>WATCH THE INTERVIEW (YouTube)
>BUY THE BOOK
Heller had previously written on Bacon’s influences in the 2009 Imagining Philadelphia: Ed Bacon and the Future of the City, edited by Drexel’s Knowles and also published by Penn Press, but here Heller is able to place Bacon in his widest and most fully conceived contexts as an operator in the Philadelphia political system whose ideas were always evolving (and sometimes–as in his shifting feelings about cars and highways–locked in two places at once).
Bacon, Heller tells us, spent
twenty-one years, from 1949 to 1970, as part of a complex bureaucracy that shaped Philadelphia’s planning and rebuilding program through four mayors, during an era of population decline, racial tension, civic unrest, and changing federal directives on how best to invest in the future of changing urban America.