Gaia’s New 13th Street Edmund Bacon Mural is All Finished

Gaia‘s new mural at 13th and Drury streets (between Sansom and Chestnut) is all finished, and it’s looking lovely!!

The mural commemorates Edmund Bacon, who, I just learned through Wikipedia, was the Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970 and is often described as “The Father of Modern Philadelphia.”

During his tenure at the Planning Commission, he and his staff conceived and implemented a bunch of design/urban planning ideas, including: Penn Center, Market East, Penn’s Landing, Society Hill, Independence Mall, the Far Northeast (I guess well just have to forgive him for that one), and the Center City Commuter Connection, which, when he proposed it in the 1950s, was a radical idea.

In 2002 at the age of 92, he skateboarded in LOVE Park, the plaza he founded and designed at Cornell in 1932, as a protest against the City’s ban on the sport. Oh, and he’s also Kevin Bacon’s dad.

To sum it all up, he was a big thinker, a big doer, and he loved this city… And I learned all that from looking at a mural. Who knew!!