The New LOVE Park

With Dilworth Park, Sister Cities Park, and the Parkway transforming the way we look at Center City's public spaces, and the city finally coming to terms with the fact that grass is easier to mow than concrete is to clean, our most iconic park (and probably our most photographed location) is looking a bit like a stale turn in the middle of a lush lawn.

That's going to change soon, and based on the renderings just released by Hargreaves Associates and KieranTimberlake, it's pretty much as good as it gets.

For starters, an equally dramatic fountain has become interactive. Okay, not quite as dramatic. Don't worry, it won't be launching your children 100 feet in the air. But looking at the throngs of kids (and I'll admit it, sometimes myself) who take a dip in Swann Fountain on oppressively hot summer days, when the public pools are just tepid ponds of ball soup, the designers saw a need and addressed it. 

Borrowing from the less traditional Dilworth Park and Sister Cities Park fountains, you'll be free to frolic in LOVE Park. But there's more to the park than its fountain and famous Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture, and since the plaza's existence its potential has been withheld by its overwhelming boundaries. 

Concrete barriers separate flower beds and trees from more concrete. What seemed to be an attempt to create an engaging experience became an awkward space to maneuver. People came to take pictures, then quickly left. The unused spaces, though cumbersome for pedestrians proved majestic for skateboarders and trick bikers. But now that they have a proper forum, the spectacle is over, and we're left with black scars and cracked tiles. 

The proposed renovations prove that less is more and makes an incidental tourist attraction and local destination for leisure. The concrete boundaries are removed, plants and trees become accessible, and the labyrinth of walkways have made way for open space. It's inviting.

Of course what's really unique about this proposal, especially considering our city's knee jerk inclination to start over, is that some of its best attributes remain. Obviously, we're not moving Indiana's sculpture. But the fountain also remains centered with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Parkway, and City hall, keeping the astounding vistas from the Northwest and Southeast in tact. 

And while some may wonder why, the UFO isn't going anywhere. Now before you clutch your pearls and gasp "Heavens to Mergatroyd," the pavilion will be getting a much needed facelift and a green roof. With new glass and a colorful lighting motif, the Southwest corner of LOVE Park might look like the landing pad from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it's going to be awesome.

Hargreaves Penn's Landing

Philly.com and PlanPhilly are calling it a first look. Philly Magazine calls it the future.

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation's Thomas Corcoran stated, “We don’t want this to be another plan sitting on a shelf," and boy has Penn's Landing seen it's share of those.

Hargreaves and Associates' redesigned Penn's Landing extends the existing I-95 cap to Walnut Street, completing the block, carrying the park over Columbus Boulevard, Penn's Landing's large parking lot, and to the water. It replaces the concrete Great Plaza and finally removes the useless west end of the nonexistent aerial tram to Camden.



From 1997 to 2004, the Delaware River Port Authority wasted over $13M on preliminary construction of an aerial tram called the Skylink, with more than $1M spent on additional "studies."



Additionally, Hargreaves employs a Calatrava like pedestrian bridge at South Street completing the street's connection to Penn's Landing.

The design is highly conceptual and open to speculation. Parking at the landing appears to be replaced by an elevated park, although it's not clear if parking will remain under the green plaza. The renderings also make some assumptions, for example the Chart House is gone.

As one of the few businesses catering to Penn's Landing, the Chart House will likely remain or will in someway be incorporated into Hargreaves new architecture.



In 2003, City Hall held a costly design competition. The Atlantis was one of the more outrageous proposals. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the competition was all part of a corrupt scandal that ended with an FBI investigation.



As it is, Festival Pier is huge. But as a concrete venue it's largely unused unless it's reserved for an event. Hargreaves proposal triples the amount of contiguous space, but transforming the entirety into a green space makes it an inviting public resource.

Add the Lombard Street pier to the mix, where the South Street pedestrian bridge ends, and the DRWC has itself a nice collection of inner city landscaping.



At one point Cesar Clarke Cesar of Cira Centre threw their name in the game, incorporating Penn's Landing's Skylink into what it referred to as Founders Square.



Perhaps one of the best elements in Hargreaves Penn's Landing is its openness to private development. The nonsensical flyovers between Market and Chestnut have been camouflaged by mid-rise apartment buildings, three setting right on the river.

So far no private developers have signed on, but if the city and the DRWC are willing to relinquish this property to make way for apartments and businesses, Penn's Landing's biggest obstacle - a lack of any reason to be there - is finally addressed.

The layout of Hargreaves and Associates Penn's Landing, and the DRWC's most recent pitch for a new waterfront.

More apartments on the water may not be enough to entice Society Hill's pedestrians and tourists to Penn's Landing, but it certainly helps offset such a costly endeavor, one the Seaport Museum and a few old ships can't carry themselves.

Penn's Landing as envisioned by Hargreaves and Associates, perhaps Penn's Landing's most hopeful proposal to date.

Hargreaves likely wants to stamp its brand on the design, evident in the fact that the firm has erased the existing park atop I-95, simply called I-95 Park. As it is it's a nice space, with it's truncated oval cut in half it was clearly designed to extend onto a nonexistent cap that was never completed.

Hargreaves completes the transition, but with their own design.

All of this may be moot when you consider the numerous empty promises and costly design studies performed by PennPraxis, the DRWC, the Delware River Port Authority, or whatever organization happened to be managing Penn's Landing at any point in the past forty years.



One of Penn's Landing's more...interpretive renderings. Personally, I love art that looks like the dreamscape of a junkie's K-hole, but I'm not sure where an engineer would find the fourth dimension required to actually build this.



The Race Street Pier was the DRWC's first major project since they were created in 2009. Prior to that nothing had been done with Penn's Landing since the Seaport Museum and the Great Plaza were built in the 1990s.

Although the Race Street Pier has been wildly popular, it's still new and the longevity of its success remains to be proven. Unlike Sister City's Park and a redesigned Dilworth Plaza, both of which are a response to Center City's residential growth that provide park space for people already on the ground, the Race Street Pier is an attempt to lure people to the water. We've seen how the "build it and they'll come" approach has worked in the past with the Festival Pier we have today. People love new parks, but quickly tire of them when they realize there's not much else around.

If the DRWC can muster the funds to bring even part of this project to fruition, particularly greening Festival Pier, it will be a vast improvement of what's there. Unfortunately, there will still be little reason to be there once the newness wears off.

The fatal flaw in Hargreaves plan echoes a mistake that the DRWC and Penn's Landing's managers before them can't seem to grasp. Without a wild destination attraction at river - think the St. Louis Arch or the London Eye - Penn's Landing will always be a detached lawn with a view of Camden far from anything interesting.

With Philadelphia's tradition of obscene cost overruns in everything it builds, a new Penn's Landing could easily exceed the cost of the Pennsylvania Convention Center but doesn't guarantee any return. It's understandable that those in charge are reluctant to pull the trigger on a design that isn't perfect. Still, when you consider the amount of money wasted on the Skylink, costly design competitions, and studies that found nothing but their own irrelevance, we could already have a pretty damn fine Penn's Landing.

Hopefully the DRWC can prove that they aren't just another organization in a long line of inept paper pushers, but rather the management that Penn's Landing has needed for the past four decades.



Celebrating Thirty Years of Hype

Let's cut through the bull shit. With the amount of money Philadelphia has spent throwing design contests and hiring firms like Hargreaves Associates to paint us the same pretty renderings Temple architecture students have been churning out for the past three decades, we could not only afford to cap I-95, we could throw the biggest party the world has ever seen at a top notch waterfront concert hall...with enough left over to buy every Philadelphian a used Jetta.

There are no excuses left for this sorry ass piece of prime property or those slum lording over it since the 70s with costly, empty promises.

To every ass hole at the DRWC pocketing the city funds and grant dollars you funnel into these annual empty promises: nut up and build something already or shut the fuck up about it and sell it to someone who will.

Cities smaller and poorer than Philadelphia are doing amazing things on the oil soaked shores of their swamps. Everyone who thinks it should take 30 years to build a fucking park is the reason it takes 30 fucking years to build a park in Philadelphia.