WE feel rather close to the subject of urban renewal, taking considerable pride in the fact that Time Inc. has played a key role in major rehabilitation of an area in the world's greatest city. In 1957, when work started on the new TIME & LIFE Building on Manhattan's Avenue of the Americas between 50th and 51st Streets, this new extension of Rockefeller Center was in a neighborhood scarred by shabby old buildings dating back to the era of the Sixth Avenue Elevated. During the seven years since then, 16 other major buildings have been completed or started at nearby locations which, before TIME ventured across the avenue, were considered the other side of the tracks. Among the new neighbors: the Equitable Life Assurance, Sperry Rand and Columbia Broadcasting System buildings, and the New York Hilton and Americana hotels.

With such a big urban renewal story going on right outside the window, it did not necessarily take any long-distance perspective on the part of the editors to decide that there was a subject for a cover story. Choosing the city and the individual and the right time was not quite so easy, but the happy choice came to Philadelphia. Edmund Bacon and this week. The major reporting for the cover story was done by a bona fide expert in the field: Gurney Breckenfeld, former managing editor of HOUSE & HOME and co-author of The Human Side of Urban Renewal (Ives Washburn: 1960.), who recently joined the TIME staff. While Breckenfeld spent eight days casting a critical eye on old and new Philadelphia, Senior Editor A. T. Baker, Writer Douglas Auchincloss and Researcher Nancy Gay Faber made a one-day foray into the city, and TIME correspondents reported on the renewal progress in a dozen other U.S. cities.

As the MODERN LIVING cover story and eight pages of color photographs show, the story of urban renewal is one that develops over a period of years and spreads all across the country. With a sidelong glance at his front-of-the-book colleagues who were preparing to get out our Election Extra edition this week within hours after the polls close,* Editor Baker said: "Urban renewal is slow news but it is big news, and it might just have more to do with the way we live than the election.

* It will go to press some 80 hours after this issue, will be sold on newsstands, distributed as quickly as possible to subscribers in the U.S. and Canada, and will be bound into next week's regular overseas editions.

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