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Ever since Dilworth Plaza was reborn as the wet and wild Dilworth Park, the north side of City Hall has looked worse than ever. Walking towards North Broad Street through or around City Hall, you might be wondering where the Walmart is. That's because every day of the week there are anywhere from a few to a lot of personal vehicles treating the north apron like a suburban parking prairie.
It's ugly. PhillyMag.com called it crap.
Ramping up for a visit from the Pope and the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the city is finally recognizing the lingering blight throughout Center City that might be caught in the backdrop of an international news broadcast. But we're not just hosting the Vatican and a bunch of politicians, we're also prepping for millions of visitors who will be taking billions of pictures and posting them to Instagram.
Well, the north apron of City Hall is about to get a makeover that will help it blend into Dilworth Park a little bit better. While permanent bollards will put the kibosh on the abundance of civilian parking, eradicating parking in and of itself isn't that exciting. What's more noteworthy, particular for our upcoming tourists will be more greenery and the fact that City Hall will be keeping its mature trees. Finally, someone in Philadelphia recognize the value of a living tree!
The changes obviously won't be as dramatically transformative as Dilworth Park, but not everything needs to be in order to be just as significant.
However there are some questions that remain to be answered.
For one, what will happen to the parking that has been allowed to run rampant over the last few years? Will it be condensed to the Northeast corner of City Hall or will City Hall simply tell its employees to walk from the dozens of parking lots and garages a few short blocks away? And two, will City Hall use this redesign as a misguided opportunity to formally accommodate permanent parking spaces on the apron?
The west portal to City Hall, Dilworth Plaza, has been reinvented as Dilworth Park. Despite critical opinion, the public has spoken: new is better, especially when there's something to do. Now that the fountain has been transformed into an ice skating rink, one flanked by architecture as diverse as this city (take that, Rockefeller Center), it's found itself full of hundreds of tourists and locals enjoying the outdoors, even when it's brutally cold.
But prior to Dilworth's rebirth, you probably avoided its cracked sidewalks and impractical sunken plaza, the one with that piss smell. So you probably also didn't notice all the city employees who've been treating City Hall's north plaza like a suburban Walmart parking lot.
Well, someone took note. And then someone else. And then someone even started a Tumblr page about it.
Of all the quips about the absurdity of draping the city's most monumental feat of engineering with a make-shift parking lot, the best came in the comments section of PhillyMag.com of all places: "We have the walkability of Paris and the car-centric mentality of Dallas." We sure do, IR, we sure do.
It may seem petty. The city is growing as we speak. We're better accommodating bicyclists, we're keeping subway lines open later, we're even offering the unheard of notion of credit cards at transit stations. Market East is finally recognizing its potential, and will soon be rising. The same can be said for East Chestnut.
So yeah, crying about a few (twenty) cars dwarfed by City Hall seems a bit silly. But while many Center City residents have long understood that parking is a privilege, not a right, the city that North Broad faces is largely another story.
You don't even have to go to Vine to find ample parking on North Broad, and its side streets are flanked with additional parking. And when you finally do reach Vine, still a short walk from City Hall, you'll find Center City's dirty little secret (well, not so little, it's derelict parking lots cover acres of developable land.)
Meanwhile the cretins parking on the sidewalk around City Hall as if it's the Oregon Avenue median are pointing their middle finger at anyone who thinks they should be paying for the privilege of walking two blocks.
Why, why, oh why, does City Hall require the overwhelming majority of new development offer parking spaces for the supposed sake of traffic and parking if City Hall doesn't require their employees to use them?
By the logic that parks City Hall employees on its sidewalks, we should have torn down the Logan Square neighborhood to accommodate employees in the upcoming CITC.
Again, it may seem petty, but it's representative of a bureaucracy that governs some of the greatest walkability in the nation but refuses to encourage it, or even accept it themselves.
As architects continued with the massive City Hall restoration project last year, they found that several pieces were missing from a pair of matching seven foot doors. While one door was adorned with the the Civic Seal of Philadelphia, the other was bare.
Thanks to Jorge Danta, a planner with the Historic Commission, the pair are reunited. Danta, having interned at Eastern State Penitentiary eight years ago, recalled seeing the seal on a dusty shelf at the Fairmount attraction.
More on this oddly serendipitous story can be found in the Inquirer:
Case of the missing crest
In its third year, Dilworth Plaza's German style Christmas Village is gracing the west side of City Hall. After receiving several complaints from workers and residents about the word "Christmas," Managing Director Richard Negrin asked that the word "Christmas" be replaced with "Holiday."
It's not surprising. In fact, had the sign originally said "Holiday Village" I doubt many would have noticed. While seasonally adorned retail ads aim at shoppers intending to stuff their Christmas stockings, those same retail stores treat the word "Christmas" like a four letter word. Often the most you can expect is the all encompassing "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings."
In a culture of increasing politically correct absurdities, I choose to indulge in "a Festivus for the Rest of Us."
Today's Philly.com poll shows that while 7% were offended by the word, 93% of readers don't give a Christmas about it.
