Modernizing Center City: Philadelphia’s Penn Center

Two of the earliest Modernist skyscrapers in Market West, Three Penn Center (1958), left, and Two Penn Center (1955), right, retain the horizontal window bands characteristic of the International Style. They stand on the site of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station terminal yard. Photo by Kevin Patrick

Modernism came to Philadelphia in September 1947. It had been creeping up on the city for some time, but that’s when the citizenry who for decades had come to expect little from the machine that controlled city politics came to see how a modern Philadelphia could look. It was a 10-part vision of Modernism presented by the City Planning Commission’s Better Philadelphia Exhibition that was displayed on two floors of Gimbels Department Store.

The exhibition included a sprawling 30-by-14-foot model of Center City that contained 45,000 miniature handcrafted buildings, 25,000 tiny automobiles and 12,000 meticulously placed little trees. Huge sections of the model flipped to contrast the old, obsolete and haphazardly designed city of the present – the product of two centuries of unplanned aggregation – with the clean lines and rationalized efficiency of a modern Philadelphia in the not-too-distant future of 1982. The Delaware River waterfront’s decaying finger piers and marginalized warehouse lofts became a riverside esplanade with hotels and recreational facilities. Blight in the old Dock Street market district magically transformed into Society Hill, with high-rise luxury condominiums and gentrified row houses. Blocks of buildings crowded around Independence Hall were in an instant swept away to reveal the great L-shaped greensward of Independence National Historical Park with its preserved and showcased 18th-century buildings. The flagging factories clinging to the east bank of the Schuylkill River suddenly became a riverfront park. Brooding Broad Street Station and its elevated railroad viaduct that sliced through the western half of downtown, derisively known as the Chinese Wall, became Penn Center, the future city’s new commercial core bristling with modern office towers.

The Better Philadelphia Exhibition was a collaboration between the new City Planning Commission, founded in 1942 and led by modern planning visionary Edmund Bacon (1910-2005), and a partnership forged that same year between architects Oskar Stonorov (1905-70) and Louis Kahn (1901-74). In fall 1947, Philadelphia resident Kahn had just taken a position at Yale University’s School of Design. Ten years later he would be back in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania perfecting his own megalithic Modernist style emphasizing the monumentality of weighty building materials and the sweeping grandeur of space (see “Louis Kahn and Midcentury Modern Philadelphia” by Andrea W. Lowery, Winter 2015).

The popularity of the exhibition was reflected in the long lines of excited Philadelphians who came to see it, estimated to be nearly 400,000 people over the course of its two month showing. It was modern planning at its best, and the citizenry was enchanted. They had seen such a thing before at Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama exhibit built for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, only now it was their very own dirty and neglected Philadelphia that was about to be transformed. According to David Clow’s “The 1947 Better Philadelphia Exhibition: An Historic Turning Point” (Proceedings of the Second National Conference on American Planning History, Columbus, Ohio, 1987), the exacting detail of the exhibit made the vision presented almost a foregone conclusion, as if these plans were already in the works. This was surely not the case, but when wholesale demolition of dozens of Center City blocks began in the 1950s, the populace was already predisposed to support the destruction as the price worth paying for the Better Philadelphia portrayed in the commission’s model.

Philadelphia wasn’t the only Pennsylvania city influenced by the Modernist movement that swept the nation with the optimism and prosperity that came after the victory of World War II. Pittsburgh’s downtown Point at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers was also leveled for Point State Park and the Modernist cruciform office towers that now make up Gateway Center. The downtown urban renewal projects in both cities relied on the removal of oversized and outdated train stations and the elevated tracks that served them. Swept of the detritus of history, each site was redeveloped as an internally focused superblock independent of the surrounding streets, with pedestrian plazas and park spaces around a grouping of glass-and-steel skyscrapers sharing a design that eschewed historic architectural styles in favor of the unornamented, functionalist forms of modernity. Even long after the bloom finally fell from the ideological rose of Modernism, the commercial projects optimistically conceived during those early years of urban renewal continued to shape their respective cities.

In Philadelphia, Penn Center became the Modernist tip of Market West, a corridor that now includes the city’s newest and tallest skyscrapers in an area extending from City Hall to the Schuylkill River. Unlike the heterogeneous mix of buildings from different ages found in other neighborhoods, Penn Center and its westward extension are devoid of all structures predating the mid-20th century. It is a standing museum of Modernism, with office towers representing everything from the Art Deco of One Penn Center, built as Suburban Station in 1930, through the postwar International Style of Two, Three and Seven Penn Center and the Late-Modern concrete Brutalism of the Centre Square towers to the Postmodern skyscrapers represented by BNY Mellon Center (1990), Three Logan Square (built as the Bell Atlantic Tower, 1991) and Comcast Center (2008). Before all of this, before the glass-skinned skyscrapers, before the promise of modernity, before the influence of the automobile, there was the railroad.

Penn Center’s Railroad Roots

Railroad stations, yards and trackage built downtown in the 19th and early-20th centuries were land banks for future development when electrification allowed these lines to be buried underground and when railroad mergers resulting from increased competition with the automobile caused rival facilities to become redundant. Just west across the street from Philadelphia’s City Hall on the future site of Penn Center, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broad Street Station was on its way to becoming obsolete with the 1930 opening of the adjacent Art Deco skyscraper-topped Suburban Station. Electrified since 1915, commuter trains from the Philadelphia suburbs came over the Schuylkill River and into a tunnel serving the subterranean station as the SEPTA trains do today. Through trains that had to back out of Broad Street Station over the Chinese Wall were rerouted through 30th Street Station on the west bank of the Schuylkill River when it opened in 1934. Although this was all part of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s plan to vacate Broad Street Station, a plan for its demolition and redevelopment into Penn Center would not come about for nearly 20 years.

With the 1894 expansion of Broad Street Station, Wilson Brothers & Co. built the world’s largest train shed. The future site of Penn Center, Broad Street Station covered the entire area between Filbert Street, left, and Market Street, right, from Broad Street west to 18th Street, with the approach viaduct, called the Chinese Wall, extending back to the Schuylkill River bridges. Pennsylvania State Archives/MG-286

The Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) had built its Broad Street Station in 1881 just as the fulcrum of Center City was shifting west to Broad and Market streets with the construction of City Hall on Centre Square. To build its Center City station, the railroad purchased and then leveled the Eastern and Western Market sheds and a swath of row homes half a block wide along Filbert Street west from City Hall to the Schuylkill River. In this space, Wilson Brothers & Co., an engineering firm with PRR connections that specialized in railroad structures, built the Chinese Wall and the new passenger station. The simultaneous construction of City Hall (started in 1872 and not finished until 1901) represented a curious transition in early modern building technology. On its way to becoming the world’s tallest building (which it was from 1901 to 1908), City Hall was nonetheless constructed as a masonry structure, like the Pyramids, with base walls as thick as 22 feet. The six-story Broad Street Station, however, had a structural steel framework and a stone nonbearing curtain wall, which was how future skyscrapers would be built. In 1892-93 Broad Street Station was expanded by Philadelphia architect Frank Furness (1839-1912) in his signature High Gothic Revival style. Furness’ station incorporated a 10-story office block that housed the headquarters of PRR. Behind the station, Wilson Brothers erected the world’s largest single-span train shed to cover the stub-end yard that was connected by way of the elevated Chinese Wall to the Main Line in West Philadelphia.

Predating Penn Center by more than two decades, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Suburban Station was nonetheless retrofitted into the complex as One Penn Center. Although the defunct Pennsylvania Railroad is no longer a tenant, the Art Deco details of the building’s base have been preserved as one of the architectural gems of Market West. Photo by Kevin Patrick

Broad Street Station, yard and viaduct would become an impediment to the expansion of Center City west of Broad Street in the mid-20th century, but at the turn of the century Philadelphia’s first-generation Revival-style skyscrapers favored a corridor between Broad and 15th streets immediately south of City Hall. The 548-foot tower topped by Alexander Calder’s William Penn statue so perfectly fit the emerging city center that no one wanted to build any taller. Never an ordinance, this agreed-upon tradition illustrated how insular Philadelphia’s business class had become, dominated by local banking families such as the Drexels and the Biddles who were unthreatened by external influences.

Out with the Old, In with the Modern

The supremely Second Empire-style City Hall, festooned with statuary, and Furness’ grandly Gothic Broad Street Station were a perfect pair for Victorian Philadelphia and almost equally as ill-suited to the early 20th century’s fascination with Neoclassicism and its gradual transition toward Modernism. In 1909 Philadelphia thoroughly embraced the classical-inspired City Beautiful Movement by planning a neobaroque boulevard that slashed diagonally across Thomas Holme’s 1682 street grid between City Hall and the soon-to-be-built Philadelphia Museum of Art at the entrance to Fairmount Park. Construction of this cultural corridor began in 1907 and continued through 1918. Beginning with the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1919-28), the Benjamin Franklin Parkway came to be lined with Neo-classical public buildings like the Free Library of Philadelphia (1927), the Rodin Museum (1929) and the Franklin Institute (1934). Even the high-rise Insurance Company of North America Building (1925), built across Cuthbert Street from the future site of Suburban Station, was fashioned in the Neoclassical mode. Noticeably not Neoclassical were City Hall and Broad Street Station, hulking over the Center City end of the parkway as stodgy shadows from the 19th century.

The parkway plan called for a column-fronted Neoclassical remodel of Broad Street Station that never happened. The poverty of the Great Depression followed by the priority of World War II kept Broad Street Station standing until after the war, when the progressive nature of Modernism opened a whole new world for Philadelphia. Even Neoclassicism became old-fashioned when the Modernist movement that began in Europe before the war took root in America after the war and declared a moratorium on all historically inspired architectural styles, which up until then was all styles. Modernists believed the function of the space should determine the appearance of the building without the need for ornamentation or decoration of any kind, whether that space is a room, a building or an entire neighborhood.

Edmund Bacon, left, with Pennsylvania Railroad vice president James M. Symes, kneeling front, and project sponsor Robert W. Dowling, back, reviewing a new design for Penn Center in 1953. Edmund N. Bacon Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania

Like any movement that radically alters the look and function of a city, Modernism was dependent on an educated elite who understood the ideology and a sympathetic government dedicated to making things happen. Thoroughly explored in Scott Gabriel Knowles’ book Imagining Philadelphia, the city’s team of professional Modernists was the City Planning Commission led by Edmund Bacon from 1949 until his retirement in 1970. They were backed by a Democratic reform government that came with Joseph S. Clark’s mayoral election in 1951 and continued with Mayor Richardson Dilworth from 1956 to 1962. Monetary clout came from the federal government’s passing of the Housing Act of 1949, which provided funding to cities for slum clearance.

No one shed a tear when Broad Street Station and its long-maligned Chinese Wall – described as a malignant toad squatting in the middle of the city dripping dirty water onto pedestrians passing through the dank tunnels that pierced it – were pounded out of existence in 1952-53. Compared to the sleek glass-and-steel office towers and wide-open pedestrian plazas of the proposed Penn Center, Furness’ Victorian masterpiece seemed old, fussy and outmoded. The Wilson Brothers’ great train shed had already been lost to a 1923 blaze. In the end, according to Edward W. Duffy’s Philadelphia: A Railroad History, the rubble from Broad Street Station was carted off to South Philly and used as fill for Pier 122, the city’s now-demolished ore pier.

Even City Hall was looked upon as an ancient albatross around the neck of a modern Center City. The original plan called for the destruction of all but its tower. The ponderous construction technique used to build it may have saved it because of the tremendous cost of demolishing such a large masonry building. Not until the 1963 demolition of New York City’s Penn Station would people begin to question urban renewal and the Modernist movement, wondering if what was being lost wasn’t greater than what was being gained.

Penn Center Then and Now

Penn Center is not just Midcentury Modern, it is Midcentury Manhattan Modern. Its program of simplistic International Style office towers rising from a block centered on a pedestrian concourse was inspired by Rockefeller Center. Penn Center even had an outdoor sunken ice-skating rink at 17th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard before Eight Penn Center was built over the site in 1982. Penn Center’s expansion to incorporate even higher skyscrapers of glass, steel and stone is Philadelphia’s version of Midtown Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue) and Park Avenue – itself created by burying the electrified tracks of the New York Central Railroad serving Grand Central Station. The view down West Market Street from City Hall is a Manhattanlike skyscraper canyon. Penn Center’s underground labyrinth of pedestrian tunnels linking it to City Hall, Suburban Station, the Broad Street Subway and the Market-Frankford Subway is not unlike the subterranean concourse that replaced New York’s Penn Station.

Architect Vincent Kling and Edmund Bacon at Penn Center in a 1959 photograph by Lawrence Williams. Architect Vincent Kling and Edmund Bacon at Penn Center in a 1959 photograph by Lawrence Williams. Edmund N. Bacon Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania

Vincent Kling (1916-2013) was the architect most associated with Penn Center. His architectural firm, on its way to becoming the largest in the city, collaborated with Bacon’s City Planning Commission to draw up the master plan and went on to design 10 buildings and two pedestrian plazas in and adjacent to Penn Center. This one firm so dominated the postwar redevelopment of this part of the city that by the 1970s the collection of new Modernist office towers arcing around the west side of City Hall was known as the “Klingdom.” Penn Center’s overall idea was a Modernist planning favorite, the “city within a city,” where every spatial aspect of urban life was anticipated and accounted for. Commuters would take the train to subterranean Suburban Station and from there walk to their office buildings through an underground retail concourse free from the hindrance of weather. At night and on weekends, shoppers would be attracted to the stores of the concourse, the surface parks and the pedestrian plazas. Auto and bus commuters and visitors would sweep in from the Schuylkill Expressway over a new four-lane boulevard – christened John F. Kennedy (JFK) Boulevard in 1963 – to a Greyhound bus terminal and parking garage at 16th Street (demolished for the BNY Mellon Center, completed in 1990), located across the street from a Sheraton Hotel (demolished for the Comcast Center, completed in 2008). Urban dwellers would live in high-rise apartment buildings built along the boulevard (The Sterling, Penn Center Apartments and Kennedy House, built in the 1960s, and 1800 and 1880 JFK, built in the 1980s), bringing life to Penn Center outside of working hours. Penn Center seemed perfect on paper, but the Modernist planners’ inability to completely control future human behavior and economic conditions would come to dog this and similar urban renewal projects that never quite achieved the utopian environment proposed.

With its glass visual front and soaring canopy, the round Fairmount Park Welcome Center at 16th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard is Penn Center’s best example of Midcentury Modern architecture. Dedicated in 1960, it was part of the redevelopment of the Center City end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway into John F. Kennedy Plaza, more commonly known as LOVE Park. Photo by Kevin Patrick

After PRR merged with the New York Central to become the Penn Central and then promptly went bankrupt in 1968, Suburban Station became One Penn Center. The block in front of it had been cleared for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway around 1918 along with Reyburn Plaza one block east. Kling’s award-winning Municipal Services Building rose from Reyburn Plaza in 1963, and the old terminus of the parkway was redesigned into John F. Kennedy Plaza in 1965. More famously known as “LOVE Park,” after the sculpture by Robert Indiana that is installed there, the plaza is also noteworthy for the ultramodern, circular Fairmount Park Welcome Center, constructed there in 1960.

Completed in the 1950s, Two Penn Center and Three Penn Center, west across 15th Street from City Hall, best project the International Style of the postwar era. Twin rectangular blocks 20 stories tall with horizontal window bands alternating between strips of limestone, the buildings are offset from each other and oriented more to the interior pedestrian plaza at their bases than to the street in the superblock fashion favored by Modernist planners. The now-demolished Sheraton Hotel at 17th and Arch streets and Six Penn Center facing 17th Street between Market Street and JFK Boulevard followed in 1957. Six Penn Center was originally the Morgan, Lewis & Bockius Building, named after PRR’s law firm. PRR itself was also headquartered in this building, as was the successor Penn Central from 1968 to 1976 and Conrail from 1976 until the rail network was sold to Norfolk Southern and CSX Corporation in 1991. Between 16th and 17th streets, Four Penn Center was completed in 1964, Seven Penn Center (formerly IBM Building) a year later, and Five Penn Center in 1970, stamping the entire block with the modern International Style until the curve-cornered Late-Modern glass box Eight Penn Center went up in place of the original ice-skating rink at 17th Street and JFK Boulevard.

Penn Center, other nearby Modernist buildings, and Postmodern skyscrapers. Map by Kevin Patrick

Penn Center’s Modernist layout completely obliterates the old footprint of Broad Street Station, the façade of which would have been in what is now Dilworth Plaza on the west side of City Hall. Penn Center stands across 15th Street, which passed under the old train station half a block west of the front door. The footprint of the Chinese Wall is preserved in the alignment of JFK Boulevard, which was built as Pennsylvania Avenue, a wide and fast four-lane highway that also obliterated Filbert Street. Almost imperceptibly, JFK Boulevard reaches the elevation of the original wall, affording a spectacular full Corinthian-column view of 30th Street Station before soaring across the Schuylkill River to the entrance ramps of the Schuylkill Expressway. Even now, the wall’s reincarnation as JFK Boulevard causes it to still function as a critical transportation link out of town.

Progressive and widely acclaimed in the 1950s, Penn Center never achieved its potential. More than half a century later, the pedestrian plaza is an underwhelming midblock sidewalk devoid of humanity outside of the business day, when it is prone to be a haunt of the homeless. The underground concourse’s retail component never really materialized, and the dreary warren of corridors functions as little more than subway transfer tunnels with shopping opportunities limited to the level of newsstands and fast food. Inaccessible light wells to the surface barely cut the gloom and collect litter blown in from above.

The public identity of Penn Center never went much beyond the original two-block footprint between JFK Boulevard and Market Street, 15th to 17th streets, although buildings continued to be added up until 1986 when Eleven Penn Center was completed at 19th and Market. Each new building was slavishly modern with few distinguishing characteristics and topped out at such conservatively modest heights that City Hall was still the tallest building in Philadelphia into the 1980s. In no other top 20 American city was the tallest building as old as City Hall in Philadelphia, with the exception of Washington (its old Post Office tower was completed in 1899, just two years before City Hall) where building heights were limited to 130 feet by law in 1910. In Philadelphia that changed in 1987 when One Liberty Place soared nearly 400 feet higher than William Penn’s hat, ushering in a round of supertall (for Philly) and architecturally stunning Postmodern skyscrapers that all rose from a greater Penn Center neighborhood that in 1988 was redefined as Market West. Eight other Market West office towers have since been built taller than City Hall with a ninth currently under construction. This includes the 57-story Comcast Center, completed on the site of the demolished Penn Center Sheraton Hotel in 2008 and now the tallest building in the city. It also includes Vincent Kling’s 55-story, red granite-surfaced Bell Atlantic Tower (now Three Logan Square), a Postmodern setback skyscraper built in 1991 as his last contribution to the greater Klingdom before his death in 2013. Now dwarfed by these megastructures, the original buildings of Penn Center nonetheless stand out as the historical Midcentury Modern heart of Philadelphia’s expanding business district.

Penn Center’s pedestrian plaza looking west toward the BNY Mellon Center, constructed as Nine Penn Center in 1990 and now the fourth tallest building in the city. In the original Bacon plan three transverse office blocks straddled a three-block long pedestrian mall. Photo by Kevin Patrick

The Klingdom

The following buildings and pedestrian plazas in and around Penn Center were designed by architect Vincent Kling.

• Six Penn Center (formerly Morgan, Lewis & Bockius Building, Transportation Building), 17th and Market streets, northwest corner, 19 stories, Modern International style, 1957
• Greyhound Bus Terminal and Parking Garage, 18th and Market streets, northeast corner, Modern International style, 1957 (demolished 1989)
• Two Penn Center, 15th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard, southwest corner, 20 stories, Modern International style, 1958
• Municipal Services Building, 15th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard, northeast corner, 16 stories, Modern International style, 1963
• Seven Penn Center (formerly IBM Building), 17th and Market streets, northeast corner, 21 stories, Modern International style, 1965
• John F. Kennedy Plaza (LOVE Park), bound by John F. Kennedy Boulevard, 15th Street, Arch Street and 16th Street, 1965/1972
• Five Penn Center, 16th and Market streets, northwest corner, 36 stories, Modern International style, 1970
• Dilworth Plaza (City Hall West Plaza), west side of City Hall, 1972 (redesigned 2013)
• One Meridian Plaza (Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Building), 15th Street and South Penn Square, Modern International style, 1972 (damaged by fire in 1991, demolished 1999)
• Centre Square I, 15th and Market streets, southwest corner, 32 stories, Late-Modern Brutalist style, 1973
• Centre Square II, 16th and Market streets, southeast corner, 40 stories, Late-Modern Brutalist style, 1973
• Three Logan Square (formerly Bell Atlantic Tower), 18th and Arch streets, northeast corner, 55 stories, Postmodern style, 1991

Kevin Patrick is professor of geography and regional planning at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and served as a consultant for the National Park Service’s Lincoln Highway Special Resource Study and Pennsylvania’s Lincoln Highway Heritage Corridor. He is the author of Pennsylvania Caves & Other Rocky Roadside Wonders and coauthor of Diners of Pennsylvania.