Maybe you’ve seen that rather heroic image of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the great concrete symmetrical massing opening out toward the Pacific Ocean. One of Kahn’s students at Penn, John Dorio Nicolais, a Californian whose father, uncle, and brother were all architects, took the legendary photograph.

John Nicolais died of Hodgkins disease October 29, 1979, at age 39, three years after opening his own firm and already responsible for photographic monographs of I.M. Pei, Charles W. Moore, and Kahn.

Nicolais arrived in Philadelphia around 1965. Between then and 1969, when Penn awarded him a fellowship to travel to India to study water infrastructure, he wandered the streets of Philadelphia with camera in hand, sometimes on class assignment, with an inquisitive mind and an outsider’s fresh eye. Nicolais’s photographs, along with those of notable Penn Design colleagues like Denise Scott Brown and Laurie Olin, are in part why Philadelphia in Color 1950-1990 is the deepest investigation of the physical and material experience of Philadelphia ever produced.

At Hidden City, we are hard into the process of making this tantalizing mosaic happen. For a year, we’ve been searching high and low for photographs from dozens of organizations, archives, and working photographers. More than 130 readers have contributed family slides and snapshots. On March 26, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $30,000 to underwrite production of Philadelphia in Color. Yesterday, we passed that goal, securing $15,000 in matching donations. Now, there are 72 hours until the Kickstarter deadline (11:30AM Saturday April 26), and a chance to invest more in key elements of the project, resulting in a larger and thicker book, with more photographs and higher quality design and printing. We’re aiming for the very best—and your support now can be the difference.

Each week, our team meets in the conference room at CultureWorks to assess the hundreds of images that have come in. We try to determine the date each one was taken, and the location, sorting it by decade. Then we project each photograph on a large screen and decide if it might make the cut. We ask if the photo is visually arresting. Can you stop looking at it? (We take Alexey Brodovitch’s maxim “astonish me” seriously.) If so, maybe it isn’t right. Can you feel the sun or the humidity, the mood of the street, time frozen and also passing? We’ve noticed that the most compelling photographs are reference points and mirrors, documentary in their function yet also triggering of mind and memory. They are how we know what this city, undergoing such enormous upheaval in the four decades after 1950, was really like.

All the more so, through the perceptive eyes of a man whose own time was cut so short, whose vision was so concentrated. In John Nicolais’s images of storefronts and doorways, peddlers and roller skaters, we see the city’s streets as he did in that instant in the mid-1960s, saturated with color, vibrating with messages.

Only a couple years before Nicolais started shooting on the streets of this city, the Princeton professor Nathaniel Burt, in his book The Perennial Philadelphians (1963), had described Philadelphia as “big and flat and drab…massive, craggy, gray.” This was a particular take on Philadelphia, one in fact widely held in the early-1960s, and Burt invests in it. In Center City, he writes, there are “blocks of miscellaneous drabness and dreary nondescript streets of nondescript shops, broken here and there by the raw emptiness of asphalt parking lots.”

Burt suggests there is another much more colorful city besides the dingy, suffocating one he describes (the name he gives it is, in fact, the name-origin of this organization—”sooner or later one is bound to find the Hidden City”). But he fails to take his readers there. Perhaps Burt was blinded by his subject, the city’s hereditary upper class, but he didn’t perceive that all around him were the seeds of the city that would come to be. That was, despite steep population decline, becoming more democratic, more creative, more open than perhaps ever before.

John Nicolais did, with vigor, and so did the dozens of photographers whose work we’ve uncovered, of men racing around a Kensington soccer field in the 1950s, of West Philly juice man’s pyramid of fresh oranges in the same era, of boys posing on a West Philly basketball court in 1963, of children romping around Chinatown in the 1970s, of late-80s protests against the censorship of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography.

Yet imagine if we stopped with Burt, as so many observers of this city have done over the years. We would have it wrong, plain and simple. And in getting the past so wrong how could we understand the present? How could we know what to look for or how to assess or compare?

This, fundamentally, is why we’re pushing so hard to bring this project to life. The story is just that rich, varied, dynamic, democratic, propulsive, and yes, melancholic, and yes, painful. This is the sumptuous reality brought to life.

When you have this book in hand you’re never going to want to put it down. Make it yours today.

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