Thanks for Four Years of Awesome
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Blogged Around Philly: Farewell Edition
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As in years past, Phillyist will be counting down to 2010 every workday of December, presenting you with our highlights from the past year and our predictions for the next. If you have a list you'd like to submit, let us know!
Any lifelong Philadelphian will tell you straight up that when it comes to physical improvements and developments proposed to the city landscape, they'll believe it when they see it. The following top ten list represents actual additions to the city fabric that began in 2009. Some are big projects, and others just involve a few cans of paint, but all will have a significant impact on the city in years to come. We take a few moments to reflect on these here. Yes, most are specific to Center City and its surrounds, but let's be honest here: when you have the most compact and lived-in downtown in the entire country, this bias is inevitable. So now that that's out of the way, let the backwards counting begin:
10. The new sculpture garden at the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
One of Philadelphia's most picturesque scenes just got even prettier with PMA's graceful approach to covering a parking garage. Designed by the internationally renowned landscape architecture firm Olin Studio, the garden eloquently camouflages the Museum's new 400-car garage (something that Philadelphia typically doesn't do well) and adds to the great scene that is the Waterworks building, the Schuylkill River Trail, and the beginning of Kelly Drive and Fairmount Park. There are only a couple of sculptures in the garden at the moment, both by sculptor Isamu Noguchi (whose work you know if you've ever entered Philly from the Ben Franklin Bridge), so it looks a little bare at the moment. But just a couple more signature pieces will make this an instant tourist attraction and one of the great jewels of the Philadelphia public art landscape.
9. The groundbreaking of the Barnes Museum:
If you're a purist, check out the estate in Merion while you can because one of the most prestigious private art collections in the country is moving to the Ben Franklin Parkway. We could take this opportunity to open a dialogue about legal interpretations of wills and the importance of art and education, but we won't: the decision has been made, the Barnes Foundation has the financing and construction is in progress. End of story. The relocation process has been painstaking and the final building design lacks that important element of creating a more engaging pedestrian experience along the gaping auto-dominated roadway, but the addition of this Barnes collection makes the Parkway one of the top cultural boulevards in the world and will be a treasure for residents for generations to come.
8. The Piazza at Schmidt's in Northern Liberties:
As much as I hate including anything done by Bart Blatstein in a positive post, I have to give the tyrant his due. What, you think I am being too hard on him? The man used to think THIS was good design. Yes, that's the UA Riverview movie theater, one of Blatstein's first entrees into the Philadelphia development world. Vomit in my mouth. Either Blatstein's design aesthetic changed or he realized that good physical planning actually earns you more money in the long run. Either way, the Piazza is the most popular new destination in the city. With a Roman-style hardscaped plaza lined with restaurants and shops, the Piazza buzzes with activity thanks to the help of a Jumbotron on the old Schmidt's Brewery factory and a stage that always has some sort of musical act performing on it. Since the Piazza's opening, Blatstein has been profiled in such publications as The New York Times. Blatstein gets it right: give people something to do, and they'll flock from Center City to brown-bag it all day long.
7. The opening of the Delaware River Trail:
You probably had no idea this existed until miss bee wrote about it last week. That's because the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC) built an interim trail that provides South Philadelphia with much needed riverfront access, and then decided not to tell anyone about it. You'd think after decades of corruption surrounding Penn's Landing and numerous board members imprisoned for fraud, DRWC would be the first to point out that good things are actually happening on the Delaware these days. Apparently not. Anyway, there is now a bike and jogging trail along the river from Washington Avenue to Tasker Street, a short stretch with big implications. It shows that public space is now a priority on the Delaware, and with numerous park projects in the pike for DRWC, we can only expect more from Philadelphia's original riverfront.
6. The reconstruction of the South Street Bridge:
Okay, it's nowhere near done yet, but the clusterfuck of controversy is finally over and construction is underway. The old bridge has been torn down and from what we last heard, the new one's still on schedule to be complete by the end of 2010, although the Philadelphia cynicism I have developed since I moved here encourages me to think otherwise. The new South Street Bridge will still be a glorified highway onramp (though the Inquirer's Inga Saffron gives it a little more credit than I do), but hey, at least pieces of it won't be falling into the Schuylkill.
5. The release of Greenworks Philadelphia and subsequent sustainability initiatives:
It turns out that one of Michael Nutter's deputy mayors actually achieved something in his first two years. Earlier this year, Deputy Mayor for Sustainability Mark Alan Hughes unveiled Greenworks Philadelphia, the city's first sustainability framework that includes steps to make Philadelphia's future more competitive, prosperous and vibrant. The plan proposes initiatives that create jobs, improve the quality of our physical landscape and generally bring communities closer together. And smart move by Hughes: he resigned before he was tasked with trying to implement and enforce the damn thing. But he did make some big first moves. On the morning he unveiled the plan (which he did in front of the Ben Franklin statue at the Franklin Institute. Epic.), he also announced the installation of hundreds of Big Belly solar-powered trash and recycling containers (now a ubiquitous image on any Center City street). The Mayor's Office of Sustainability has also installed 28,000 LED signals in traffic lights. And there's talk that tens of millions of dollars in federal funding is on its way soon to City Hall to finance weatherization initiatives. The goals in Greenworks are lofty, but it gives us a long-term road map for how to live better as a city, so let's hope it is a gift that keeps on giving.
4. The $100K House:
This is one of the many cool things going on in the amorphous neighborhood of Port Fishington, so we wanted to make sure we acknowledged it here. The 100K House was an experiment in sustainable, affordable urban housing, challenging the assumption that environmentally friendly houses are necessarily more expensive than standard homes. Located at 2100 East Susquehanna Avenue, it respects the rowhouse context of the East Kensington riverward neighborhood but it definitely sticks out from the pack. By providing a prototype of residential development that is both affordable and environmentally sound, these developers have done Philadelphia a favor, so we thank them.
3. The sprouting (sorry, we couldn't help it) of urban agriculture throughout Philadelphia:
As we nerds call it, "urban agg" is all the rage these days. Now we all love our famers markets, our CSAs like Greensgrow Farm, and how very proud we are of all of them. But there is more to urban agriculture than swiss chard for hipsters, and that's what the Philadelphia Orchard Project has been working hard to demonstrate. POP works with community groups to plant orchards that are edible for residents and have an educational element as well. Many of these orchards are planted in vacant lots in some of Philadelphia's most distressed areas, including parts of West, Southwest and North Philly that most of us who read this blog don't dare explore. And as a city that has lost 500,000 people in the last fifty years, Philadelphia has a lot of vacant land to reuse. So if even one-tenth of this land is used to produce food for its neighbors, just think of the impact that has on the look and the health of the entire city.
2. The bike lane "pilot project" on Spruce and Pine Streets:
Deputy Mayor for Transportation Rina Cutler has come a long way since being Secretary of Shoving Highways Down Your Throat at PennDOT. This project is meaningful on a number of levels. It is an example of the city's bureaucracy actually following up on an idea they had without getting sidetracked by insular interests or embroiled in silly political controversy. Cutler accomplished this by labeling the bike lanes a "pilot project," thus enabling her to bypass many of the typical permitting processes required whenever permanent changes are made to public rights of way. By making it temporary, she allowed the bike lanes to be designated quicker, which is an important lesson when trying to implement something as against-the-grain as removing a downtown auto lane for the sake of bicycle safety. And of course, this provides bicyclists with the Center City east-west access they have so desperately needed. The Bicycle Coalition is already reporting that bicycle use of Spruce and Pine Streets have almost doubled since the buffered lanes opened, showing initial success in attracting more bicyclists. Keeping cars out of the lane will continue to be difficult until the city culture changes, but if this pilot project succeeds, it could literally be the catalyst for changing street layout across the city.
1. The completion of the West Philadelphia El reconstruction:
This is kind of an anticlimactic #1 choice, but the impact this will have cannot be ignored. A decade and millions of dollars over budget later, West Philadelphia finally has an updated rail line. The project was botched on a number of levels, but the studies nationwide showing the positive impact of reliable transit on neighborhoods are innumerable. SEPTA certainly has its share of questionable decisions, but for the good of West Philly, we're glad this project is finally complete and residents and businesses can finally enjoy having the quality access and facilities they deserve. Now it's on City Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell and her two-faced band of state congressman to uphold their part of the bargain and help businesses return to the corridor after years of displacement and neglect.
Honorable Mentions: The Water Department's "Green City, Clean Waters" initiative; Mural Arts Program's LOVE Letter project, SEPTA re-commissioning trackless trolleys in Northeast Philadelphia; and the private development projects that actually finished (The Residences at the Ritz-Carlton, 10 Rittenhouse Square, Hotel Palomar Philadelphia, 1706 Rittenhouse, 3711 Market Street, and Millennium Hall at Drexel University).
Not so Honorable Mention: Local historic preservation advocates (you "saved" the Boyd Theatre but you let government break previous agreements to preserve historic landmarks and you didn't even put up a fight); Andy Altman, Mayor Nutter's sexiest out-of-town acquisition as Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (you did nothing); SugarHouse Casino; and Waterfront Square Condominiums and Spa (you added another tower to your site on the Delaware River, and you remain the largest gated community in Philadelphia. We're coming for you.)
An uber not-so-honorable mention goes out to the parking garage on the proposed "Cira Centre South" parcel: You are pointless and shouldn't exist. You are the reason thousands of people will drive to work at Cira even though you sit one block away from the second-busiest train station in the country. Nobody likes you. Go away.
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