University City's Academic Turf War

As University City continues to redefine the city's skyline, one of its most lackluster additions might also be one of its most divisive. Bohlin Cywinski Jackson's New College House spans the 3300 block of Chestnut Street. Instead of building up, the space-saving alternative that Drexel has recently embraced, New College House drones dully through a former lawn as if to deliberately divide the Ivy League university from Drexel to the north.

Whether that was the building's intent, Dr. Amy Gutman, Penn President, might be the only one who knows for sure. It's a fair assumption considering the former lawn's central position between both campuses. Once enjoyed by both Penn and Drexel students, New College House could have been doubled in height to save half of the lawn. Instead it builds a wall against Drexel's massive expansion pushing into Chestnut.  

It looks as though a high-priced academic turf war is taking place on what now houses Philadelphia's most expensive real estate, with Penn's conservatively low-rise, brick-and-mortar bumping up against Drexel's sky scraping, modern delights.   

Whether an architectural rivalry truly exists in University City is anyone's guess, but Drexel is gearing up to change the way we think of the American campus. Drexel's departure from their aging brutalism with a modern, and ironically soothing interpretation of the same style, has been a welcome change for a campus consistently ranked amongst the nation's ugliest. Drexel may not be competing with Penn, but with its own past. For decades its orange brick and harsh lines sidled up to the classical curves and lush lawns of Penn's campus, traditional tokens synonymous with the Ivy League. 

We've gotten a sneak-peak of what's to come from Drexel in the last few years, but the transformation officially began today with Drexel President John Fry's announcement that Brandywine Realty Trust will be heading up an ambitious project to house a growing student population in an integrated and urban fashion. 

Dubbed Schuylkill Yards, Drexel's expansion will tap into the underutilized space surrounding 30th Street Station, blending updated incarnations of existing infrastructure with modern infill. Taking a page from the city's most innovative endeavor, the Navy Yard, a development that borrows heavily from the workplace philosophies throughout the Silicon Valley, Drexel isn't just expanding their university up and out, they're fostering an environment for innovation. 

The term "mixed-use" is thrown around so often it's almost meaningless, and often leaves us with parking podiums and empty storefronts. Where it's worked most in Philadelphia has been in University City, specifically amongst Drexel's recent developments. Walking along Chestnut Street, it's very apparent that there's a college somewhere in the mix, but at its heart, it's the city. Walnut Street, on the other hand, clearly belongs to Penn. To walk Walnut is to walk through the heart of a campus. 

Drexel's plan is smart. Its absence of collegiate isolation doesn't just attract retail to its mixed use element, but it's inviting technology firms, medical labs, and a student experience integrated with neighboring colleges, even the city's school district. 

Penn will always have a place alongside the historic greats - Harvard, Princeton, and Yale - but the relevance of that position is changing. As tuition costs soar, prospective students are taking a closer look at their postgraduate opportunities and what employers are looking for. Law firms and traditional employers still eye the Ivy League for buttoned up recruits, but for more innovative corporations like Google, Apple, even our own Comcast, it's quickly becoming less about where you went and more about what you did there. Playing a role in that place has become a huge component of a successful education, an integrated component that Penn hasn't grasped or is too arrogant to admit. 

In the 1990s, graduates who didn't land their ideal career simply went back to school and Van Wildered it through degree after degree, and twenty years later, many of them are finally paying off their loans. With today's cost of education, that luxury is gone, but universities like Drexel are replacing it with another. Students are now analyzing what it takes to land their backup jobs, and looking for educations that either place them in positions before they graduate or teach them how to create their own. 

As Penn continues to dominate as the region's premier, traditional education, Drexel is charging into the future of academia, a future where students are not merely offered an education, but also trained on the realities of a postgraduate world and what it takes to own it. Drexel is giving their students a place to grow after they graduate right here in Philadelphia. 

Penn's turning out doctors and lawyers, but Drexel is graduating students who will invent the next Google or Tesla. If a turf war is unfolding in University City, Drexel is winning by not merely carbon copying what worked for Penn once upon a time, but by building better to create what works for the future. 

Is Aramark Trying to Kill University City's Food Trucks?

Don't you just love this food truck trend? Finally, we're as hip as Chicago. Good food for your lunch break that doesn't enlist a $10 bowl of kale. Seriously, when did kale become the food du jour? Didn't it used to waste away in the meat aisle separating the pork from the chicken?

If you're a cash-strapped college student, food trucks are an affordable opportunity to opt out of the monotony of the dining hall. It's a boon for local businesses too, because students still clinging to their Massachusetts and New York licenses are sopping up some local eats. Who knows, maybe they'll like those Cap'n Crunch infused tacos so much they'll stick around for another four years.

Well, Jannie Blackwell wants to make some changes. Blackwell, the Councilwoman presiding over University City wants to regulate the hell out of the foot trucks near Drexel University, and Bill 150600 would do it.

Why? Well the answer isn't clear from Blackwell's office, but according to armchair activists, the food trucks are cutting into Drexel's on-campus dining options. This may sound like conspiracy theorist lunacy. How could Steak Me Home Tonight compete with the Big Boys operating Drexel's dining halls?

So why would a local politician want to stifle local businesses? Why would Jannie Blackwell - a Council Member who's consistently fought for locals and on behalf of her community - decide to propose a bill that sides with Big Business? 

Well, who operates Drexel's dining services? Aramark. It sounds like the Big Boys of Market East might be giving Blackwell a little push to free up a little business for them. If that's the case - and let's face it, it probably is - it's pretty damn irresponsible. Not only would a local Big Boy be enlisting politics to grab a few bucks, Blackwell created a bill to help the Big Boy crush a few local businesses. 

Aramark might be local, but in the food truck world, they're Wal-Mart. They don't need the business food trucks are taking, they'd just maneuvering their political position to expand beyond their dining halls onto the streets of West Philadelphia. And Jannie Blackwell would helping them.

Farewell, Old Friend

As Philadelphians, we've all enjoyed watching University City transform into Center City's towering sister. Ugly midcentury disasters have made way for their modern equivalent, architecture that will likely be just as abhorred by future generations. Some may even remember a time when West Philadelphia's universities proposed building a wall to separate students from once-dangerous neighborhoods now adorned by preserved mansions, renovated condos, and Victorian twins. 

Architecturally, it's been great. And University City and its West Philadelphia neighbors have managed to evolve without accommodating the suburban ills that tend to play out in isolated college towns. The University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, even Temple don't just cater to their students, they embrace the city of Philadelphia by indulging our rigid adherence to urbanism and sustained walkability. 

Universities are no stranger to change. They exert enormous political influence and have the cash to build what they want, where they want. Historic preservationists have abandoned all but the most historically significant of colleges. And even in those instances - William and Mary, Harvard, Penn - those charged with protecting urban heritage largely assign the task to the universities themselves. 

We've see buildings fall in University City - the good, the bad, and the meh. But there's more to a building's legacy than bricks and mortar, be it Colonial or academia's wild fascination with Brutalism. These places also hold a significance for a vast portion of the public who experienced the most poignant piece of personal history within these buildings. 

Just today, an old college friend of mine posted a link on my Facebook page. The link? An offer to buy a piece of my college dorm, recently demolished to make way for a new Student Union. Now, I know this is a blog about Philadelphia, but it's also about architecture and history. Plus, it's my blog, so I'm going to stray from my adoptive city for a moment or two.

Everyone has their college stories, or stories from a pivotal point in their life when they start their next act. I might think mine are unique, but no matter how hard I try, I know they're not. But sometimes good stories are those most relatable. And that's exactly what I experienced living on the third floor of South Cunningham for the bulk of my college career.

The building was dated. The architecture has been replicated across Longwood College's (now University's) campus. There was nothing significant about the Cunninghams other than our own personal experiences, and that's why it was so sad to see it go.

This is the building where I (sorry, Mom) lost my virginity. This is where I spent countless nights crying with friends in the laundry room, coming to terms with my sexual orientation. It's where I spent even more nights crying in that same laundry room with friends - still some of my best to this day - struggling with the same.

It's where we somehow managed to cram forty students and a DJ booth into a dorm room for an epic Christmas party, one graced with performances by my then-drag persona, Empress Savannah of the Fourteenth Shue. 

It's where we would strut down to the hall perfecting our "Model Walk" to the Sugar Cubes. It's where we watched the O.J. verdict. It's where we sang Seasons of Love at the top of our lungs. It's where we watched Kimberly Shaw blow up Melrose Place. It's where we realized that Murder She Wrote's Cabot Cove had a murder rate higher than Honduras.

It was more than a dorm or a building...it was a friend. 

Anyone who's been to college knows what it's like to sit outside their dorm until 3am deconstructing the nature of existence, solve all of the world's problems, and declare that we'll own this world by the time we're thirty. This is where we did that.

But most of all, this was the place where we laughed, cried, smoked, drank, and looked to the new millennium, clad in flannel, with relentless optimism. It's where we fostered friendships that have endured marriage and pregnancy, distance and divorce, and substance abuse and recovery. 

The Cunninghams created the people we are today. And while I think it's fantastic that the campus of my alma mater finally resembles, well, a campus, I am sad to see the Cunninghams go. But their legacy will live on through the people its inhabitants have become, the stories we tell, the stories I continue to tell throughout my thirties and will continue to tell well into my forties and beyond. 

Farewell, old friend. 

With that said, enjoy a little 90s awesomeness...

Innovating in the Other Philadelphia

With several skyscraping proposals nearing approval along the Schuylkill Banks, University of the Sciences making itself seen along West Market Street near 36th, and CHoP reaching across the river to develop Schuylkill Avenue, the neighborhood doesn't appear to have much room to expand.

Drexel University and Brandwine Realty Trust want to tackle that by resurrecting a long proposed cap atop the tracks servicing 30th Street Station.

Capping the railroad tracks would add 7 million square feet of developable space to Drexel's existing plans to develop 6.5 million square feet at 33rd and Market.

PlanPhilly.com

At the other end of University City, Penn isn't slacking off. Penn has proposed "South Bank" just on the other side of the southern bend in Schuylkill River at DuPont's former paint factory. With what Penn calls its "Pennovation Center," the details sound like Penn is asking Comcast to bring their A-game with the Comcast Innovation and Technology Center.

It seems like city that once helped innovate America, served as the Workshop of the World for the best part of the Industrial Revolution, might be returning to the forefront of the world's most profitable industries.

Innovation Drexel

While Drexel's Innovation Neighborhood plans are largely conceptual, the renderings are nevertheless mind blowing. The ambitious collection of designs and strategies remind me a lot of Portland's South Waterfront neighborhood, not just architecturally, but in the fact that the ideas don't stop at isolated towers and infill, but attempt to terraform an entirely new neighborhood.

Unlike Portland's South Waterfront, however, the neighborhood Drexel is conceptually terraforming isn't vacant land, and any attempt to move forward with a number of these projects is likely to come at the resistance of a West Philadelphia neighborhood that includes more than those affiliated with the university and new Philadelphians.

Take a look at just one of the many renderings Drexel has been floating around. So redesigned is the neighborhood, it's one of the few renderings I could even place on a map, mainly because a lone Furness building is the only existing structure that seems to remain.

In a city with less red tape and history, this might be seen as an imminent plan. But such drastic change in Philadelphia might take a little longer. Still, it's fascinating to imagine a "downtown University City" that rivals our own Center City, and looks an awful lot like Vancouver, BC.

Ping Pong Centre

Cesar Pelli's Cira Centre will soon host the world's largest gaming screen when Drexel University professor Dr. Frank Lee uses the building's customized LED lights to play one of the world's first video games, Atari's Pong.

Tetris simulated on the south wall of Cira Centre

 

If you notice something funky in the lighting scheme lately, Lee has been testing out a number of video games including Space Invaders on the building's façade.

The Pong challenge will take place on April 18th and 24th.

University City Skyline

Drexel to receive $45 million gift for new center for business school

Drexel alumni Bennett LeBow, after whom Drexel's Business School was named, has donated $45M for the school's new Academic Center. The twelve story limestone building will be completed in 2014 at a cost of $92M. The building will be named after late Drexel President Constantine Papadakis and located at 32nd and Market. The selected location is intended to serve as an entrance to Drexel University and the materials used are meant to compliment 30th Street Station and the former postal headquarters nearby.

On the site, Matheson Hall, built in 1965, will be demolished next summer.

Lebow graduated in 1960. The school was named after him when he donated $10M in 1999. As the current economy has frozen most Center City development, University City continues to redefine its skyline.