Work–Life Balance

There was nothing inevitable about Garfield’s success. His work—which anticipated key features of algorithmic life as we know it today—was consistently at odds with his commitments as a single father.

Garfield and his first wife divorced young. She, an aspiring student of nuclear medicine, did not have time to parent their infant son, Stefan. Rather than consign the boy to his former mother-in-law’s care, Garfield took sole custody in the late 1940s. He and Stefan moved to New York, where he had relatives and the opportunity to finish his undergraduate degree after serving in World War II. But no childcare facility in the city would accept them.

“The rules and regulations were quite sexist,” Garfield later recounted. “If you had any female in your family, able or willing to take care of your child, the city wasn’t going to allow you to bring him to a childcare center.”

Driving a cab at night, he scrambled to pay for private facilities and informal nanny shares. When these didn’t work out, he reluctantly sent Stefan to live with his sister and her husband. All the while, Garfield was commuting back and forth to Philadelphia, where he found consulting work at the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French. But this arrangement, too, proved unsustainable. If a colleague hadn’t stepped in with a cheap rental on a South Jersey asparagus farm where the Garfields could live as a family, impact factors and journal rankings would not exist today.

Things improved once Stefan was old enough to start school. Garfield remarried, moved into a nearby log cabin, and set up his first company, DocuMation, in a chicken coop behind their new home. Initially, the company focused on selling researchers and companies up-to-date summaries of the literature in their areas of specialization. Meanwhile Garfield’s “thought indexes” languished, his 1955 paper uncited. He correctly judged the idea—which was decades ahead of hyperlinks and Google Search—“too advanced” for the times.

Fortune intervened again. Joshua Lederberg, who had just won a Nobel Prize for his work on bacterial genetics, contacted Garfield in the spring of 1959. He had found the 1955 essay tantalizing—but where was the fruit of this idea? Lederberg nudged Garfield to return to the project, this time with backing from the academic research community and federal agencies.

Westward Expansion

The partnership between Lederberg and Garfield got the first iteration of the SCI published in 1961, ushering in an ambitious—and initially destabilizing—chapter in the life of Garfield’s company. But after a few difficult years, it had become a centerpiece of the ISI success story. By 1977, Garfield had paid back his debts, and the growing ISI family was overflowing rented offices in a prestigious address near Independence Hall. Projecting further growth, he convened a Space Committee to explore real estate options around the city.

Philadelphia at this time was in the throes of urban renewal. The city was an early leader in the nationwide initiative, having taken in more than $200 million in federal grants by 1965. Planners used these funds to clear or revitalize blighted property throughout the city. As part of this process, a large swath of land along the Market Street corridor between the University of Pennsylvania and the Drexel Institute of Technology was bulldozed to make way for the new University City Science Center, gutting an African American neighborhood known as the Black Bottom. The first urban research park in the United States rose haltingly in the decades thereafter from the rubble of Black working-class homes.

But the University of Pennsylvania, which had majority representation in the Science Center project, failed to attract the national technology firms that planners initially predicted would come. The entire venture was losing tens of thousands each month, and it faced intense student and community protests. The Science Center only achieved financial stability in 1973 after new management promoted a focus on smaller, homegrown businesses.

Across town, Garfield decided his company would be best served by a purpose-built HQ—one that could accommodate the ISI’s growing staff, its library, heavy-duty computers, and most importantly, its constant need for reorganization. The company broke ground for its new home at 3501 Market St., in the heart of the University City Science Center, in 1978.

The Efficient and the Humane

It is tempting to daydream about how, given the resources and opportunity, one might run institutions differently, better. With a profitable company and an empty piece of land, Garfield had found himself in that remarkable position. He could afford to contemplate what an ideal company might look like. The plans he and his lieutenant Peter Aborn developed for the new building centered on the people who worked there and the conditions of their labor. Aborn, vice president of facilities and Garfield’s stepson, summarized the new plan in just two words: “Efficient, Humane.”

This vision dovetailed with the philosophy of Robert Venturi and John Rauch, the architects chosen to translate the plan into brick and mortar. Venturi, in particular, was known for his outspoken critique of modern design. He condemned minimalism’s erasure of ornament as a denial of human experience. His words take on layered meaning when set against the displacement of Black families from the area.

“I speak of a complex and contradictory architecture,” Venturi wrote, “based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience.”

This credo, full of life and disjunction, supported Garfield’s own ideas. “I wanted a building that everyone would recognize as a lively and distinctive contribution to the community and to the information industry,” he said. What community did Garfield have in mind?

For his part, Aborn insisted the building be designed “from the inside out”: he sought to care for the physical and emotional well-being of ISI employees in significant and sometimes surprising ways. He endorsed features, for example, to promote physical activity among the staff. Not only did plans include showers and locker rooms for “joggers, bicyclists, and other athletic employees,” he also championed colorful murals that encouraged use of the stairs.

Garfield signed the checks for these artworks without hesitation. Though the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority required the ISI to install one work of public art as a condition of sale, Garfield far exceeded that minimum, putting artists on retainer and turning the ISI’s corporate headquarters into a veritable museum.

American conceptual artist Jennifer Bartlett, Polish sculptor Józef Sławiński, and Welsh painter Handel Evans were among those who teased out themes of communication across epochs and cultures. Their only directive was to say something about the theme of “information,” highlighting the “human element behind” it. Mexican artist Emeteria Ríos Martínez’s yarn paintings, modern riffs on older techniques used by Indigenous Huichol people to depict ancestral knowledge, stood alongside the colorful Lucite panels Gabriel Liebermann used in his mural, Microcircuit. Garfield’s commissions gave form to his optimistic vision that it was possible to bring “accumulated knowledge to bear on social, economic, and political affairs” while fostering the creativity and well-being of his employees.

Vision also mattered in a more quotidian sense. In the early days of office computing, workers often complained of headaches and eye strain. In response, ISI designers created custom lighting fixtures for the new building that directed light toward the ceiling, eliminating shadows and creating a softer environment overall. Similar care went into the building’s acoustic design, which featured noise-absorbing insulation, carpeting, and “an unobtrusive, electronic conversation-masking system on each floor.”

Who was on the receiving end of these designs? A large percentage of the indexers and transcriptionists seated at ISI terminals were women. By 1978, 45% of U.S. mothers with children under age 6 held jobs outside the home, and those numbers only continued to climb. Garfield kept a watchful eye on these demographic trends, which informed his efforts to manage the ISI scientifically. Company-sponsored childcare became a key part of the plan to achieve humane efficiency. It made both economic and moral sense to Garfield, whose personal experiences as a young father amplified the data.

When the ISI Caring Center for Children and Parents opened its doors in September 1982, it was one of the first in-house, employer-run childcare facilities in the United States. Although the new facility cost so much—both to displaced former residents and the company’s bottom line—Garfield justified the expense as “a contribution to future generations.” And, he hastened to note, “our employees, parents and non-parents alike, can’t help but profit from the enthusiasm and joy of these young children.”

 The Caring Center for Parents and Children

Everything in the Caring Center’s 14,000-square-foot facility was shiny, custom-built, and new. Even the furniture was custom-made and “scaled for comfortable use by small bodies.”

Aborn, according to Garfield, “spent nearly three years reviewing the childcare literature, visiting centers throughout the country, and consulting experts in the field.” He recruited Susan Milner from an elite circle of childcare center directors well before the first Caring Center families had even contemplated enrollment. Together with Marlene Weinstein, who would later design programs for industry heavyweight Bright Horizons, Aborn and Milner created environments for children to learn through play and exploration. In the months before families arrived, Milner gave prospective staff blocks to play with as a test of their creative abilities, an interview technique that became a standard industry practice. Garfield also leveraged his client list to provide material support. Pediatric researchers in the ISI Rolodex, for example, developed pioneering tests to ensure kids did not get sick from contaminants near the diapering station.

As with all ISI operations, research guided the center’s programming for children, who ranged from 6 weeks to 6 years in age. Milner and her staff customized activities to different age groups, following an emergent philosophy that positioned early education at the heart of human intellectual and social development. Children were understood to be scientists themselves, observers who took information from the world and synthesized it in novel ways. Afternoon lessons, such as “Rocket to Adventure,” reinforced this developmental approach by blending music, movement, arts, science, and drama.

To further feed children’s inquisitiveness, Aborn filled the Caring Center’s open spaces with large-scale artworks, echoing the design philosophy in the ISI’s main building. “Everything was art,” Milner recently mused in an interview, describing what it felt like to walk through the property.

One of Ríos Martínez’s largest yarn paintings hung within the children’s reach. It was likely Garfield who suggested the yarn painting’s orange motif. Orange was his favorite color; one he associated with royalty and power. The painting encouraged children and their families to explore and ask questions—about other cultures, nature, and their place in the world. Milner described it as an important part of the delicate multicultural balance the center was trying to achieve in this contested slice of West Philadelphia.

Such goals, taken together with the grandeur of the artworks Garfield commissioned, belie the idea that the center grew out of a strict cost-benefit analysis: it was a passion project, to be sure. That said, Garfield often touted efficiency, competitiveness, and employee retention in his writings about childcare. Such claims can be read as a strategic performance of fiscal responsibility during the Reagan years and the rise of neoliberalism.

Thanks in part to Garfield’s rhetoric, the new center attracted a great deal of public attention. Republican Lieutenant Governor William Scranton III visited the facility in 1986 as part of a statewide campaign to promote corporate-led childcare. A candidate for governor at the time, Scranton held up the Caring Center as a “pioneer in workplace innovation.” High-quality childcare was an important tool, he argued, for boosting productivity, morale, and economic development. Standing before Lilli Ann Killen Rosenberg’s psychedelic mural on the Caring Center’s western façade, Scranton touted the benefits of childcare for Pennsylvania’s working families. To opponents who might have caught sight of the scene, it surely fueled rumors that Scranton was a “long-haired dope-smoking hippie,” fears that ultimately cost him and his platform the race.

Community Benefits

Garfield and Aborn built a deeply humane facility, but it wasn’t efficient. A combination of economic and practical barriers discouraged most ISI parents from enrolling in care. Leadership had banked on low-level employees receiving state subsidies that never materialized. Many of those who could swing the cost of care lived in the suburbs and could not overcome the challenge of commuting with young children. Milner, for one, potty trained her daughter on the shoulders of Interstate 95 while driving an hour to and from work.

Given robust federal investment in the Science Center project, it seemed only natural to Garfield that politicians would see that childcare was necessary economic infrastructure. But, as with the SCI, he was out of step with his time. He later looked back on the Caring Center experiment as a miscalculation of where politics was headed. The company simply couldn’t afford to provide high enough subsidies to encourage employee participation and pay the Caring Center staff a livable wage.

By the late 1980s, only about 25 of the Center’s 150 kids came from ISI families. To meet income targets, the center opened its doors to neighbors in West Philadelphia. Those who took advantage tended to be wealthier residents, mainly researchers at the local “eds and meds.” For lower-income families in the area, Garfield established a $10,000 annual scholarship fund “scaled to family income.” It was not the restitution activists had called for in the 1960s, but it did acknowledge inequalities in the neighborhood. How might community relations have evolved differently if the Science Center had landed an idealistic tenant like Garfield during the fight for civil rights rather than at the dawning of the Reagan era?

The ISI Caring Center never managed to break even; it lost $250,000 each year from the start. Garfield hoped its enrollment and commuter challenges would turn out to be temporary “growing pains”—that ISI families would eventually take advantage of the center’s exceptional programming with the state’s help. If not, he was comfortable offering it up as a subsidized benefit to the larger community. “The company could afford it,” he later said. “If the company is making good money, we should donate generously.”

But in the long run the Caring Center and other workplace-sponsored childcare facilities didn’t stand a chance without significant public support. When Garfield retired from active leadership of the ISI in the early 1990s, the center was one of the first initiatives to go.

The ISI Caring Center closed in 1992, a casualty of trickle-down economics. Garfield managed to provide for its successor—a nonprofit that carries the same name—by securing a loan from the University of Pennsylvania. In this circuitous way, the university committed to some long-sought community benefits. Ensuring continuity of care and employment became a top priority for Garfield and for the Caring Center staff on the eve of this transition. So too was the goal of finding new homes for the center’s artworks.

“The orange yarn painting in the ISI Caring Center was created in honor of the children,” Garfield wrote in a memo to his staff in January 1992. “It is now time to transfer that piece to the new Caring Center at 31st and Spring Garden streets.”

Ríos Martínez’s testament to Huichol history and mythology can still be found at that address. It hangs over an atrium, framed by a group of opalescent clouds made for the original Caring Center by artist-inventor Remo Saraceni (of Big piano fame). The nonprofit that inherited the ISI experiment is a vibrant and necessary place. Garfield would be pleased to know it survived the COVID-19 lockdowns.

But the artworks are beginning to show their age. The clouds are dusty and no longer emit light. The yarn painting, with stories that children once touched directly, is now literally out of reach. Once justified as an “investment in the future,” these creations are becoming historical. Garfield’s model of corporate stewardship, too, is growing illegible in a world where headlines tack between proposals to achieve universal childcare in his hometown, New York, and drastic cuts to scientific capacity.

Buildings are still being pulled down and redeveloped in the Science Center corridor. Now branded an “innovation district,” projects are pushing further west. In March 2025, on the heels of a bitter dispute over plans to tear down University City Townhomes, one of the few affordable developments left in the area, local officials announced that the Philadelphia Police Department would bring a new state-of-the-art forensics lab to a location down the street from the old ISI headquarters—a location with “unique benefits . . . being a stone’s throw from our city’s world-class life sciences industry and universities.”

Four free-standing murals, made for the Caring Center’s playground by partners Guillermo Wagner Granizo and Lark Lucas, have so far survived the wrecking ball. They stand on a wedge-shaped sliver of land at 3401 Filbert Street now owned by Drexel University. Garfield introduced them to his readers in 1986 as “a bright and colorful addition to the surrounding community.”

I often walk past the murals after dropping my son off at school across the street. They are easy to miss in the architectural hodgepodge left by the flux of demolition and redevelopment in the neighborhood over the past half century. Vines harass them. Time and the elements have chipped away at the tiles. But they endure—traces of a plan to care for the children of working parents, members of a scientific labor force with diverse roles and accountabilities.