Born and raised in 1917 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, William H. “Holly” Whyte went on to become an acclaimed authority in three seemingly diverse fields:
1. Organizational management (he wrote The Organization Man and coined the term “groupthink”);
2. Open space preservation (he advocated for conservation easements and cluster zoning to keep development in check); and
3. Urban design (Whyte’s book and movie, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, is still a Bible for designers of public spaces), the field in which he is most remembered today, a quarter century after his death in 1999.
This discussion will show how many of the roots of Whyte’s professional accomplishments can be traced back to his childhood in Chester County on the edge of the Brandywine Valley and to his high school education at St. Andrew’s School in rural Middletown, Delaware.
When asked late in his life to name his three favorite cities, Whyte responded, “New York, New York, and New York.” At his funeral on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a family friend sang “Sure on this Shining Night,” a poem set to music by Samuel Barber, also a West Chester native. Both Barber and Whyte are buried in Oaklands Cemetery on the edge of the town in which they were both raised.
About the Speaker: Richard K. Rein was raised in upstate New York and majored in English at Princeton University. As a journalist he has written for Time magazine, People, and many state and regional publications. He was the founding editor and publisher of the nationally acclaimed U.S. 1 newspaper, serving the Princeton-Route 1 business corridor and described by William H. Whyte in his 1988 book, City, as the corridor’s “sprightly” newspaper. Rein now serves on the board of Princeton Future, a nonprofit that encourages sustainable urbanism in his hometown. He also edits an online hyperlocal news site, TAPinto Princeton Community News. Rein’s first book, American Urbanist, was praised by the New York Times as “a marvelous new biography” that serves as an “elegant counterweight” to other books in the urbanism field.
Register here for this pay-as-you-wish event
Admission is Pay as You Wish! Your donation is greatly appreciated. All proceeds benefit the development of future programming and the preservation of the History Center and its collections. The History Center is home to over 750,000 manuscripts, 100,000 photographs, and 70,000 artifacts. Your donation helps us to preserve and share those resources.
Presentation is via Zoom, and will be recorded and available for 7 days for all registered participants. We will email out a Zoom link the day of the presentation, and email a link to the recording within 24 hours. Note: the Zoom link emailed out the day of the presentation only takes you to the live presentation; the link emailed out the day after will contain the recorded version.
This presentation is made possible by the generous support of the CCHC Special Fund in honor of botanist and amateur astronomer Humphry Marshall.
225 N. High Street, West Chester, PA 19380 | 610-692-4800
Sign up for our Newsletter
