{"id":5315,"date":"2013-06-25T09:15:12","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T13:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=5315"},"modified":"2023-02-08T18:12:03","modified_gmt":"2023-02-08T23:12:03","slug":"how-high-was-up-a-history-of-philadelphias-gentlemans-agreement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2013\/06\/how-high-was-up-a-history-of-philadelphias-gentlemans-agreement\/","title":{"rendered":"How High Was Up? A History of Philadelphia\u2019s \u201cGentleman\u2019s Agreement\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Contemplating \u201cthat vast gray labyrinth\u201d of Philadelphia, with \u201cgreat Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world,\u201d G. K. Chesterton imagined<\/a> Philadelphians could \u201cfeel the presence of Penn and Franklin\u201d just as his English brethren could \u201csee the ghosts of Alfred or Becket.\u201d But Philadelphians didn\u2019t need to use their imaginations. They could literally see<\/em> Penn from every quarter of the city, miles from the center, where a giant statue of the founder had been installed 500 feet up, on top of City Hall tower.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Center City Philadelphia from Belmont, ca. 1900 (The Library Company of Philadelphia)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Philadelphia\u2019s love affair with the Founding Fathers would persist, but they\u2019d soon turn on their late-19th<\/sup> century City Hall. By the 1950s, when Lewis Mumford lectured at Penn, City Hall was seen as \u201can architectural nightmare, a mishmash of uglified Renaissance styles welded into a structure rugged enough to resist and atomic bomb\u2026\u201d It is \u201cwoefully obsolete,\u201d wrote Mumford, but \u201cthe problem of whether to do away with it\u2026is not an easy one to solve\u2026because wrecking it would wreck the wrecker.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for the cost of demolition, City Hall survived. And as long as it had to remain in the center of the plan, city planner Edmund N. Bacon was going to make the most of it. In a new biography<\/a>, Gregory Heller tells us Bacon \u201csaw the dominance of City Hall tower in the skyline as a critical element to the city\u2019s historical continuity.\u201d Bacon \u201ccreated an unwritten \u2018gentleman\u2019s agreement\u2019 that no building would rise above the statue of William Penn atop City Hall.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDevelopers would periodically meet with Bacon and propose a building taller than City Hall tower,\u201d Heller learned in his interviews. \u201cThey would query whether the height limit was legally mandated, to which Bacon would respond: \u2018It\u2019s only a gentleman\u2019s agreement. The question is, are you a gentleman?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the 20th<\/sup> century, gentleman\u2019s agreements<\/a> were mostly associated with spurious and immoral practices: limiting Japanese immigration, preventing the employment of African Americans or denying real estate to Jews. Legal scholars begin discussions of the practice with this somewhat amusing (or chilling) definition: “A gentlemen’s agreement is an agreement which is not an agreement, made between two persons, neither of whom is a gentleman, whereby each expects the other to be strictly bound without himself being bound at all.”<\/p>\n

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Penn Center from City Hall Tower, ca. 1972. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bacon used the idea of a gentleman\u2019s agreement to challenge the civility of (and presumably quickly end meetings with) developers audacious enough to bring him proposals for skyscrapers. But was there an actual gentleman\u2019s agreement, or was it just a useful ploy to bury projects that would alter the city\u2019s skyline? Over the years, the origins of the gentleman’s agreement have remained a mystery.<\/p>\n

On April 28 1956, seven years into Bacon\u2019s tenure as Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, The New Yorker <\/em>published the first of Lewis Mumford\u2019s two articles<\/a> that, interestingly, do not mention Bacon, but do<\/em> introduce Philadelphia\u2019s \u201cgentleman\u2019s agreement.\u201d \u00a0With the \u201cChinese Wall\u201d coming down, Mumford concludes the city was looking up, although how far up wasn\u2019t open to discussion. \u201cWithout legislation and with nothing more solid than a gentleman\u2019s agreement, the tallest of the city office buildings have been piously kept lower than the bronze figure atop\u201d City Hall. \u201cSentiment and symbolism have made unnecessary\u2014temporarily at any rate\u2014any legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1963, when a developer proposed a sixty-story building, Bacon responded that \u201cfor the first time in the history of Philadelphia\u201d a project \u201cwould violate the gentleman\u2019s agreement that William Penn will not be topped by private construction.\u201d The Planning Commission responded by approving a \u201cheight limit ordinance\u201d of 450 feet that made its way through the Mayor\u2019s office and to City Council, where it eventually died. The gentleman\u2019s agreement remained, though worse for wear, its authority unclear.<\/p>\n

The following year, another developer proposed a tower taller than City Hall for 15th<\/sup> and Market Streets and Bacon found himself at odds with his own Planning Commission. As built, the project came in shorter than proposed, but the challenge now seemed possible. \u201cNot all Philadelphians favor squat skyscrapers,\u201d wrote Glynn D. Mapes in The Wall Street Journal<\/em> of November 29, 1967.\u00a0 Philip Klein, vice chairman of the Commission, hankered for a proposal \u201cthat would top William Penn.\u201d Said Klein: \u201cIt\u2019s time Philadelphia did something like this. I\u2019d fight for it all the way. No city can be a big city without tall buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Philadelphians loved tradition, something like what Chesterton appreciated and Bacon perpetuated. \u201cIt still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did one hundred years ago,\u201d Chesterton had written in 1922, \u201cI never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

OK, Philadelphia was<\/em> different from other American cities. But a real challenge to the city\u2019s traditional skyline, gentleman\u2019s agreement or not, was mounting. And in 1984, the question would again be posed: Could Philadelphians maintain an honest love affair with the past if the past didn’t also dominate their city’s skyline?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contemplating \u201cthat vast gray labyrinth\u201d of Philadelphia, with \u201cgreat Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world,\u201d G. K. Chesterton imagined Philadelphians could \u201cfeel the presence of Penn and Franklin\u201d just as his English brethren could \u201csee the ghosts of Alfred or Becket.\u201d But Philadelphians didn\u2019t need to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}