(TNS) — It’s officially 2025, and the future is now — at least if you ask the Daily News back in 1975.
That year, the People Paper celebrated its 50th anniversary, marking the occasion with a look at what Philadelphia — and the world — might look like 50 years in the future.
To accomplish the task, the Daily News tapped more than 30 prominent Philadelphians — including philosophers, academics, and executives — to give their interpretations of what the city might look like in what is now our present.
They weren’t exactly dead-on. Here is how the Daily News thought we’d be living in 2025:
Lofty goals for humanity
The most ambitious predictions for 2025 came from renowned architect, philosopher, inventor, and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, who saw humanity becoming an extremely technologically advanced, collectivist, space-faring society in the new millennium.
And, boy, did we not live up to his vision.
Even being alive on Earth by 2025, Fuller predicted, would require us to provide “abundant life support and accommodation for all humans.” Doing so would mean humanity making decisions “both tiny and great” in service of the species overall, not just the individual.
If we could do that, he wrote in the Daily News, advances in technology would be so great, we would evolve beyond concepts like “politics, war, weapons, [and] debt,” and pursue life with “no thoughts whatsoever of earning a living.”
By 2025, we’d instead focus our “work” on communal wealth production, research and development, and archaeology to understand our past. We would communicate via thought alone, and it would be more effective than sound and words.
That last part would be useful, considering that in Fuller’s future, humans would be “transceiver-transmitted” by radio from Earth to other cosmic locations in our “local universe.” We’d make our new homes among the moon and stars, and live out our days as our solar system’s preeminent problem solvers.
“We are in for the greatest revolution in history,” Fuller wrote. “If it’s to pull the top down and it’s bloody, all lose. If it is a design, science revolution to elevate the bottom and all others as well to unprecedented new heights, all will live to dare spontaneously to speak and live and love the truth.”
If that revolution ever came, it isn’t much of a mystery as to which way the wind blew. But if not, hey, at least 2075 is right around the corner.
A better Philadelphia
For many big-name Philadelphians of 1975, the city’s 2025 incarnation stood to be almost unrecognizable by contemporary standards. Famed city planner Ed Bacon, known as the “Father of Modern Philadelphia” (and of actor Kevin), for example, predicted an idyllic cityscape would emerge in the new millennium.
“The air clean and sweet, no exhaust fumes,” Bacon wrote for the Daily News. “Everything spotlessly clean, fresh. No more vacant lots nor hulking shells of empty houses. All are filled in or restored for homes for families.”
Private automobiles, Bacon added, would have long since been “given up” in the city, and Philadelphia’s “old gangs have become youth corps to keep things in shape.” Garbage would be collected up to four times a week, and side streets would be gated off to allow neighborhood children to play hockey and basketball without concern of vehicles endangering their safety. That last part never happened (kind of the opposite, actually), but at least we have twice-weekly trash pickup in some parts of the city. Baby steps.
Leisure, others predicted, would become a larger focus in life for the city’s residents, leading to an expansion in Philadelphia’s arts and entertainment industries. In fact, wrote Philly Pops founder Moe Septee, leisure time would be “the single most important problem facing us in 2025.”
Philadelphians would fill their free time with, among other things, plenty of music, which would be delivered to them via a “mind sensor” that queues up exactly what they’re looking for, wrote concert promoter Herb Spivak. Many would even enjoy a fully immersive experience, courtesy of their own personal “home entertainment room,” former 76ers and Spectrum president Lou Scheinfeld predicted.
“Press a switch; the walls will dissolve, and — Zap — there you are watching Alice Cooper’s grandson singing, ‘God Bless America,'” Scheinfeld wrote.
Others, meanwhile, predicted an increase in in-person entertainment and shopping. Then-Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce president (and former City Council member) Thacher Longstreth, for example, predicted that cars would be banned in Center City by 2025, leading to an increase in foot traffic for shops and restaurants. Office workers, meanwhile, would hardly need to come into the city, Longstreth (correctly) predicted.
As Philadelphia’s culture progressed, at least one well-known aspect of the city would vanish.
“The Philadelphia accent finally will be a thing of the past” by 2025, wrote former Metropolitan Magazine editor Lillian Bergman.
It for sure isn’t, so let this be the last time we have to say it: Hoagiemouth is forever.
No more football
With the Eagles heading into 2025 as the NFC East champions, perhaps no one would be more surprised that football is even still a thing than former Eagles linebacker and center Chuck Bednarik.
Concrete Charlie predicted that by this year, professional football would cease to exist due to “lack of desire and economics.”
“Especially in professional football, greed is very prevalent,” Bednarik, who retired in 1962, wrote. “The lack of desire is overpowered by monetary concern.”
“God save the world and football,” he added, in what is perhaps the most accurate prediction of the issue.
Less accurate was then-Flyers coach Fred Shero, who predicted that hockey would become the most popular sport by 2025, surpassing even soccer in worldwide public interest. For context, Shero’s prediction came just one month before the Flyers’ second consecutive Stanley Cup win, in 1975, so his enthusiasm is understandable.
Equally hopeful was former Phillies pitcher Robin Roberts, who predicted the Phils would be on their fifth straight Eastern Division title by 2025. In reality, the Phillies took home their first National League East title since 2011 in 2024.
RIP Inquirer?
You might be reading this in The Inquirer, but in (at least) one late prominent Philadelphian’s estimation, the Inky ought to have been dead and gone by now.
Former Philadelphia Magazine publisher D. Herbert Lipson predicted that The Inquirer would close up shop by 1978. That year, Lipson wrote, The Inquirer would raise its single-copy price to $2.50, leading to its extinction, and leaving only the Daily News as Philadelphia’s paper of record. The Philadelphia Bulletin, meanwhile, would have moved its operations to King of Prussia by 2025, with the area surpassing Philadelphia’s population in 1990, Lipson wrote (it did not).
Today, The Inquirer’s single-issue price is $2.95 on weekdays, and $4.95 on Sunday. Philadelphia Magazine, which is also still alive, today charges about $25 a year for a print subscription.
The Philadelphia Bulletin ceased publication in 1982. Lipson died in 2017 at age 88.
University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Shayon, who died in 2008, covered how the Daily News would potentially continue publishing in 2025 — which, he predicted, would be on television. And he wasn’t that far off, only lacking the vocabulary to describe digital subscriptions and the internet.
“You won’t buy the paper at the newsstand. You will ‘retrieve’ it at home by pressing a button on a small keyboard near a transistorized flat wallscreen,” Shayon wrote.
But, he added, it would by no means be free. Nothing would, whether it’s newspapers, entertainment, or education.
“You’ll pay for all of it,” Shayon wrote. “All these services will be billed monthly.”
