Flint in 1939. Career From Flint, Bacon returned to Philadelphia to serve as managing director of the Philadelphia Housing Association. He served in the United States Navy aboard the USS Shoshone in the Pacific in World War II. In 1947, he joined the staff of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission under then-Executive Director Robert Mitchell (not the Canadian politician), and served as co-designer to the 1947 Better Philadelphia Exhibition in collaboration with Oscar Stonorov and Louis Kahn. Bacon was also an early member of the City Policy Committee, a grassroots movement of young Philadelphians, established by future civic leader Walter M. Phillips, that was instrumental in Philadelphia's political reform movement. Members of the Committee went on to become leaders in Philadelphia government after 1952, when the reform Democrat (and later U.S. Senator) Joseph Sill Clark was elected Mayor, Richardson Dilworth became District Attorney, and a new Home Rule Charter was instituted. In 1949, Bacon succeeded Mitchell as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Serving under Mayors Samuel, Clark, Dilworth, and Tate, his work brought him national repute along with his counterparts Edward J. Logue in Boston and Robert Moses in New York City during the mid-century era of urban renewal. His face appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1964, and in 1965, Life magazine devoted its cover story to his work. That same year, Bacon was appointed by President Johnson to serve as a member of the White House's Conference on Recreation and Natural Beauty. In 1967, he wrote Design of Cities, still considered an important architectural text. It is a seminal work on urban design that illustrates the relationship between historical and modern principles, as well as practices of urban planning, applied particularly to Philadelphia. It was during his tenure at the City Planning Commission that Bacon and his staff conceived and implemented numerous large- and small-scale design ideas that shaped today's Philadelphia. These design concepts became Penn Center, Market East, Penn's Landing, Society Hill, Independence Mall, and the Far Northeast. The Center City Commuter Connection, a seemingly radical idea at the time, was conceived during the 1950s by Planning Commission staff member, R. Damon Childs, who succeeded Bacon as executive director. Not all of the concepts that Bacon supported materialized. One proposal that he inherited from Robert Mitchell was to encircle Center City with a series of expressways, including the so-called "Crosstown Expressway" (I-695)