Why Are Men Who Build Skyscrapers Afraid of This Woman?

Perhaps it says something about the importance the Inquirer placed on architecture criticism that its editors would award the job to a college dropout with no formal training and just as much familiarity with South Jersey’s sewer systems as with design. But what Saffron lacked in elitist architectural vocabulary, she made up for with a nose for urban-planning matters and the guts to take on even the most sacred cows. “There are 130 stories about the Mural Arts Program. Only one is negative, and it has my name on it,” says Saffron, who criticized some of the program’s art as “sentimental” and “clichéd.” As she learned through her incoming e-mail, anything short of total adulation for Jane Golden’s nonprofit is blasphemy. “I,” she says, “was the Antichrist.”

It may seem out of place for an architecture writer to take on wall murals, but while the New York Times carries a critic and a reporter to cover architecture, Saffron serves as both for the Inquirer. “What makes Inga so valuable is that she centers on not just buildings, but broader issues of zoning and land use,” says deputy managing editor Tom McNamara. “In the absence of city planning, she’s filling a void.”

Saffron’s also reaching a broader audience than Hine, who was sometimes controversial but spoke mostly to the development and design community he covered. Her voice — demanding changes to the zoning code, taking the city to task for its patchwork planning, pushing for better solutions to the casino developments — echoes further and much more loudly. Just ask Carl Dranoff.


ON A MONDAY morning in October, Saffron spent four hours interviewing Dranoff and his architect at Symphony House, the first of three major projects with Dranoff’s name on them that are intended to revitalize the Avenue of the Arts. She stood with them on the building’s roof, looked down on Broad Street, and listened to Dranoff spin a romantic tale of what his new 32-story tower aspires to be: both timeless and a throwback to flapper-era glamour, with flourishes that echo the Academy of Music while declaring its own identity. Later, Saffron toured the building’s Suzanne Roberts Theatre and lavish condos, scanning every bay window and terrace. And then, that Friday, she savaged it.

According to her criteria, Symphony House’s formal value was nil — “Dranoff’s design philosophy seemed to be ‘too much is never enough,’” Saffron wrote. She did offer faint applause for the building’s urban behavior in housing the theater and providing ground-floor retail space to promote activity. But then came the matter of its cultural importance, and that’s where Saffron took off the gloves. Symphony House, she said, was a $125 million monument to all that’s wrong with urban planning here. “Partisans” will call Symphony House a success, she wrote, but in reality, they’re just happy that something — anything — replaced a gas station and a parking lot. Dranoff’s baby wasn’t just ugly. It was a symbol of regression in a Philadelphia that’s trying to move forward. “Imagine,” she wrote, “what the rest of [Dranoff’s] flotilla will look like.”

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