After college, while traveling the world on a small inheritance, Bacon found work as an architect in Shanghai, China in Henry Murphy's office.

Bacon gained close contacts with individuals who were active in establishing the Federal Housing Authority, such as Catherine Bauer and Lewis Mumford.

However, the local real-estate industry came to see this Federal funding for public housing as a threat to their business of selling converted garages to workers as homes, as was the case in several cities early in the history of the FHA, and the automobile unions helped kill the initiative.

He served in the United States Navy aboard the USS Shoshone in the Pacific in World War II.

Senator) Joseph Sill Clark was elected Mayor, Richardson Dilworth became District Attorney, and a new Home Rule Charter was instituted.

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.

[5][6] 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.

[7] 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.

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.

[8] As an unintended consequence, the Crosstown Expressway proposal depressed property values and rents in the South Street corridor, leading to a turnover of the neighborhood's character from largely Jewish-owned garment shops to the thriving commercial and nightlife center that it is today.

Other concepts conceived during Bacon's tenure, such as Schuylkill River Park, included in the 1963 Center City Plan, came into being many years later.

'I think it's very, very destructive that he and he alone has chosen to destroy a historical tradition that set a very fine and disciplined form for the city,' Mr. Bacon said at the time."

His friends included Buckminster Fuller, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, James Rouse, and Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis.