Why Are Men Who Build Skyscrapers Afraid of This Woman?

That might sound like architecture-snob shop talk, but Saffron’s criteria reveal an attempt to balance artistic concerns with practical ones, without getting swept away in highfalutin design-speak. That’s partly out of necessity, since Saffron herself isn’t fluent in the sort of language you’d hear at an American Institute of Architects lecture. She doesn’t have a college degree in architecture or urban planning, or anything else, actually — after high school in Long Island led her to New York University, she studied in France for a year, then left for Dublin without graduating. In Ireland, Saffron found her calling in journalism, writing about the arts for local papers and stringing for Newsweek for two years before returning to the States to find work at a major newspaper.

After a few years at a small New Jersey daily, she joined the Inquirer’s Burlington County bureau in 1985 as a reporter. Saffron fit in well with the swaggering big-league reporting team. “The first time I met her, we were both covering a Christian reverend who was campaigning against smut,” recalls Penn Law Journal editor Larry Teitelbaum, who worked for a smaller rival paper in the ’80s. “Inga showed up and was peppering this person with questions, rapid-fire. On the one hand, I was really impressed. But I was a little taken aback by her style. She came in and took over.”

After years of courts, crime and other stripes-earning work, Saffron became the Inquirer’s New Jersey arts reporter under Bill Marimow; with Tom Kean’s administration shoveling money into cultural projects, she had plenty to write about. Saffron wasn’t exactly a diva in the newsroom, either, as evidenced by her other beat at that time — Camden County’s sewer authority. She spent most of the ’90s in Europe, as a freelance correspondent covering the conflicts in Croatia that boiled over into the Bosnian war, and in 1994 became the Inquirer’s Moscow bureau chief. Saffron used her spare time in Russia to research Caviar — a history of the fish-egg delicacy, published in 2002 by Broadway Books, that the Washington Post called “delicious,” if “occasionally tediously detailed.” 

She also filled in at times for the Inquirer’s architecture critic, Tom Hine, and soon made a discovery about her passions as a reporter. “I was always circling around architecture,” Saffron says, “and I realized it united all of these interests of mine: cities, art, social issues, public policy issues.” Even her coverage of warring Yugoslavia — “so much about 20th-century history, grappling with its identity” — was as much about place-making as politics. Two years after Hine left the paper in 1996, Saffron lobbied for the job and won it.

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