City Planning

Ross Brightwell - hiddencityphila.org

I recently received a comment from Ross Brightwell on a previous post about Stu Bykovsky's Philly.com article, A King in the wings.

Instead of being elated that someone so notable actually read my swill, I felt like a kid with my hand caught in the cookie jar.

Perhaps that's the only thing I was right about.

City planning may be the dream job for SIM City nerds, but it's a harsh position facing harsher scrutiny. If you're successful enough to be as revered as Ed Bacon or Ross Brightwell, you become an inadvertent politician, hated for your failures and forgotten for your success. For every Gallery at Market East and Vine Street Expressway, planners are responsible for dozens of public spaces like LOVE Park and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Ross Brightwell was visionary as a city planner and remains a visionary. Saddled with the reality of grim funding, boring sidewalk improvements, and hipsters demanding more trees, it's rare to find city employees so dedicated to their position that they still find time to dream.

Philadelphia's current city planner isn't a household name. In general, our planner is a commission. With so many undereducated activists ranting from their keyboard - myself included - planners wrestle with NIMBYs and approve buildings designed by others. If Brightwell's tenure is unappreciated, that lack of appreciation comes from looking at history through the glasses of 2014.

It's unfortunate that the city's most influential city planners - love them or hate them - were employed in an era when so few, save the planners, actually cared about Philadelphia.

They gave the 1970s I-95, the 90s a complete Vine Street Expressway, and replaced a catastrophic Market East with the Gallery, and we curse them for it. Why? Because we don't remember what happened to Philadelphia when we lost the population of Miami. It's easy to hate so many mid-century developments until you consider the fact that Society Hill was an iffy neighborhood when the Gallery was built.

While we enjoy a Philadelphia so refined we can demand more bike lanes, city planners in the 70s and 80s were faced with competition from King of Prussia and Cherry Hill and a population that was having a love affair with driving. Developers like Ed Bacon and Ross Brightwell saved Philadelphia from a city that could have easily become Cleveland or Detroit, and we have their visions, dreams, and passionate dedication to one city to thank.

It's that optimism that's absent in the bureaucratic nightmare of today's urban planning process. Whether or not planning czars have a place in a 21st Century city that plans itself is a valid question. Comcast, CHoP, and the Mormons are transforming our city on their own dime, relinquishing the need for government dreamers. But it's important to remember - important for me to remember - that the planners that gave us a handful of white elephants also saved one of America's most astounding cities from demise.

Kenney's LOVE Park

Between bringing drag queens to the Mummers Parade, massive legislation that could make Philadelphia the nation's most LGBT friendly city, and his attempt to minimize the penalty for marijuana possession, it might seem that Councilman Jim Kenney couldn't get any cooler.

You'd be wrong.

This deserves recognition.

With Councilman Clarke's wild pitch for seven restaurants within a newly landscaped LOVE park, and every rational Philadelphian's anxiety over a Sbarro on the park, or worse, seven For Rent signs, Councilman Kenney has recognized the park's historic place in the annals of skater lore.

I'll admit, I was never a skater despite growing up in the 80s and 90s. With my flannels and Nash board, I was a poser at best. But I'm very familiar with the history behind Paine's Park, and the long road and blind optimism that led to its reality. Despite LOVE Park's reputation amongst skaters, Paine's Park deserves every ounce of that reputation and then some.

Still, just a few short years after Ed Bacon skated across LOVE Park it deserves its recognition. Kenney's pitch to reserve a portion of the park for skate boards might be far fetched, but considering the reverence for the space amongst skaters it's a unique proposal, much more innovative that an inward facing food court.

From Chestnut Street to the Water: Poor Planning

Philly.com recently posted Stu Bykofsky's article gushing about a city planner who's assisted in some of Center City's most irreparable damage. And unlike Ed Bacon - who once proposed tearing down City Hall to make way for a giant traffic circle - Ross Brightwell's bright ideas came to fruition in an era when we all should have known better.

Ross Brightwell was a management consultant for the Chestnut Street Association in the late 1980's, planning the redevelopment of the Chestnut Street Business District. Assisting Ron Rubin (who's disregard for the "bricks" inadvertently created Philly Bricks, and gave us The Gallery at Market East and the Disney Hole), this "fountain of creativity" upped the district's taxes and created the thriving business, retail, and residential corridor that is our now successful Chestnut Street.

According to Stu Bykofsky's article, he helped save Center City.

Well let's back up. Where does Center City succeed? It succeeds on Walnut Street, Society Hill, Rittenhouse Square, University City.

Wherever Brightwell employed his "fountain of creativity" is an utter disaster. Where Chestnut Street succeeds is where, in very recent years, the success of Walnut Street has spilled over to Chestnut's deplorable infrastructure and bargain basement rent.

Brightwell is creative. Ed Bacon was a creative visionary as well. But the visions they shared gave us blocks of cold Soviet era concrete, inflated taxes to improve the sidewalks no one used, and at one point, blocked Chestnut to traffic and saw a street of Jetsonian pods carrying shoppers that didn't exist down a corridor with no business.

This didn't happen.

Basically, Brightwell is a utopian visionary. He comes from an era when Philadelphia, and most major cities, were struggling. Rather than wait out the slump, they poured huge sums of money into infrastructure improvements, and the assumption that the reason businesses were avoiding Center City had something to do with our sidewalks and traffic and nothing to do with the fact that the city had just lost the population of Atlanta.

Instead of adhering to the principle that has revived every successful post-industrial city in America, that new residents bring business, and new business affords us the luxury to plant trees, build plazas, and lay down brick sidewalks, the mid-century visionaries practiced the idea that "if you build it they will come."

We've learned from our mistakes, and by the time Brightwell was managing Chestnut Street in 1987, he could have looked at Market East and seen the scars of poor urban planning. Instead he charged full speed into the brick wall of reason insisting the mistakes of Ed Bacon could work.

The fallacy in this vision is evident in the success of Walnut Street. Our most diverse business corridor was a largely organic. The city fussed with Market and Chestnut because they were closest to our core. Walnut was ignored, and while it suffered the same lack of business throughout the 70's and 80's, it came around in the 90's because it hadn't been touched.

Now it's so successful that the boutiques that helped put it on the map are moving to Chestnut Street because they're being out priced by high volume retailers that have recognized how successful it is.

If Brightwell had done his job and his model worked, his domain wouldn't be the refuge for businesses struggling to make rent, it would be on national retailers' radars.

Lately he's been focusing his vision on the alleged I-95 debacle, a red herring for the Penn's Landing quagmire.

I-95 is an easy target. Sure, it was poor planning. The budget should have accounted for it to be capped. Hell, it should probably be in New Jersey.

But it is what it is, and the reason for that is that no one really cared about the waterfront or the industrial district it replaced at the time. It was the result of a lack of foresight from planners like Bacon, a lack of foresight Brightwell shares.

A good planner is more than an idealist and should have recognized a need for the built environment that I-95 replaced. Le Corbusier was a visionary and proposed leveling Paris for his Radiant City. They laughed, but Philadelphia did it.

City planners walk a fine line between architectural artistry and realistic business people with a respect for an organic infrastructure. Bacon and Brightwell lean towards the former.

As Brightwell envisions acres of real estate atop a buried interstate, capped with everything from an amphitheater to an aviary ferrying us to the water, he's ignoring what most of us ignore: Penn's Landing isn't a failure because we don't want to walk across eight lanes of elevated park space. It fails because it's a failure in and of itself.

On any given day hundreds of residents and tourists find their way to Penn's Landing. Locals ignore the poor museums and concrete, while tourists scratch their head and ask "why?"

Baltimore's waterfront doesn't succeed because it's not separated from the city by a highway. Inner Habor is disconnected from the city by a canyon, it's called Baltimore. It still succeeds because it's destination attractions are destinations.

If the National Aquarium was on Penn's Landing it would be surrounded by the same high rises, tourist malls, and street vendors that make Inner Harbor a lovely place to spend a day. Dumping millions of dollars into a concrete park over an interstate won't make Penn's Landing better, it will just get the same people to crap faster.

Brightwell envisions a cap over I-95 as a blank canvas for the city to work with while the city's had over 40 years to play with the canvas that is Penn's Landing, and it's still a disastrous money pit.

He sees I-95 as the space for the world's biggest merry-go-round and a roller coaster - which would be amazing - but why doesn't he see that on Penn's Landing?

I'd love to see high rise condos lining Delaware Avenue and sitting atop a capped I-95, but until developers are fighting over property that faces the river on solid ground, they aren't going to embark on the engineering feat of building anything on top of an interstate.

It's easy for us to see the river as an inaccessible pain and blame it on I-95. I do it all the time. But we aren't urban planners. An urban planner's job is to realistically assess the situation and recognize the fact that despite the interstate, we get to the river every day.

Give us something to do when we get there and maybe we'll have the means to cap the eyesore many of us have already come to terms with.

Philadelphia Legends

This is the Saffroness that I love to read! In a recent Changing Skyline column, Inga Saffron challenged convention and colleagues without an ounce of self deprecating Negadelphianess, and proved just how much she loves this city given she could easily snag a job droning on and on about how great "better" cities are that everyone already knows are great.

While his products were products of their time, Bacon was inarguably a visionary. Even Penn Plaza and its underground concourse, as sterile as they are, were novel in their prime. He experimented, but just as importantly he built.

I'd take her comments further and say that there is no question that we're better off having had him, in spite of The Gallery and I-95.

Had he developed our city beyond the 70s we might actually have a Penn's Landing worth walking to. It's no coincidence that his retirement coincided with the beginning of four decades of design studies and architectural competitions that, to this day, have gone nowhere.

Without him Society Hill would be a blighted extension of South Philadelphia, a midcentury perception responsible for his interpretation of an expendable South Street. Because of him we have Queen Village and Hawthorn sidling up to some of the city's most expensive real estate that he created.

Philadelphians have a nagging reputation for bragging about our faults, a reputation that a century later, keeps Frank Furness and Willis Hale only locally appreciated. Bacon and Saffron are no exceptions to the rule, and the fact that they maintained or maintain a local loyalty only make them more exceptional at their jobs.

Chestnut Street Transway

Following the second World War, urban planners like Philadelphia's Edmund Bacon were attempting to change the way Americans interacted with their city landscapes.

Being responsible for The Gallery at Market East, Penn Center and the removal of the Chinese Wall, Society Hill, and the Vine Street Expressway, his projects were hit or miss.

He proposed a number of other controversial endeavors which, as his career progressed, seemed to become more destructive, including an additional expressway on South Street creating a downtown loop. Even though the man once suggested demolishing all but City Hall's clock tower to ease traffic around Penn Square, not all of his projects were aimed at turning Center City into an asphalt labyrinth of freeways and interchanges.

The Chestnut Street Transway was intended to reconfigure Center City's Chestnut Street into a trolley bound, pedestrian promenade. In 1959 Ed Bacon published "Philadelphia in the Year 2009," an essay proposing a number of his ideas, including many that have already been executed.

While his quasi futuristic ideas were aimed at preparing Philadelphia for a 1976 World's Fair that never arrived, his Transway did...sort of. In 1976, Chestnut Street was closed to traffic between 8th Street and 18th Street to develop what was being called The Chestnut Street Transitway.

Immediately after construction began Chestnut Street began to decline. A bustling retail corridor well into the 1970s, upscale shops began closing, moving to Walnut Street, or leaving the city all together.

Like a mall, the Transitway took life from the street. Councilman DiCiccio pointed out the importance of window shopping and the similarity between the Transitway and The Gallery, "we killed a major artery...window shopping is always important and we took that away."

The irony of course is that Chestnut Street was negatively impacted by a pedestrianization scheme intended to increase foot traffic. Whether Chestnut Street's decline was an inevitable sign of the times, or whether the discount stores we see today were ushered in by a failed concept, we will never really know.

The concept of eliminating streets has seen success in smaller towns across the United States. In the 1980's, the college towns of Charlottesville, VA and Burlington, VT transformed major downtown thoroughfares into pedestrian malls bringing life back to stagnant retail corridors.

But it's clear that in order for large, dynamic cities to succeed, idealistically accommodating one type of traffic doesn't work. Wide roads and lots of cars scare away pedestrians, but most of those pedestrians get here in a car. Urban planning is a compromise of ideals which needs to accommodate a broad range of wants and needs. This complexity needs to be understood as the city progresses and we continue to entertain new ideas.

While we dream about pedestrianizing the waterfront and making our small streets bike-friendly, implementation will be key in these concepts succeeding. It's obvious that Interstate 95 and the Vine Street Expressway scarred the urban landscape, but no one would have guessed that a massive pedestrian oriented project would have been just as detrimental.

Society Hill - Revolution, Commercialism, Blight, and Rebirth

Many planners and architects consider Society Hill one of the most successful urban renewal projects in the country. Decades after its transformation, Philadelphians often don't realize that Society Hill was once the most blighted neighborhood in Center City, and many more are not aware of the severe architectural transformation that took place between the 1940s and 1970s. It's easy to stroll through the green-ways of Independence National Historic Park and assume that these are the meticulously preserved trails traveled by William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, and not the mid-century recreations of Ed Bacon and Mayor Richardson Dilworth.

Carpenter's Hall in 1958 during the reconstruction of adjacent buildings.

While many of the private residences of Society Hill are preserved examples of colonial architecture, only a handful of the iconic landmarks are actually original. Carpenter's Hall, the First and Second Banks of the United States, and of course Independence Hall are all original - although significant alterations were performed to return the structures to their 18th century appearance. It's difficult to imagine that the stone, Victorian era Drexel Building once occupied the SE corner of 5th and Chestnut or the equally imposing Irvin Building at the NW corner of 4th and Walnut. Here are just a few of the architectural losses that make up the ghost of Society Hill's once empowering skyline.

The Irvin Building on the NW corner of 4th and Walnut was designed in 1911 by Seeler, Edgar Viguers, and enlarged in 1928 by Ernest James Matthewson, and again in 1955 by Clarence Woolmington. It was demolished in 1974.

The Irvin Building

Diagonally across the street, The American Life Insurance Company Building at the SE Corner of 4th and Walnut was designed by Thomas Preston Lonsdale in 1888 with alterations designed by William Decker, an architect with a distinct style rarely preserved at the time it was demolished in 1961.

The American Life Insurance Company Building

The Brown Brothers Company Building at 330 Chestnut Street is now part of the site of Independence National Historic Park.

The Brown Brothers Company Building

The Drexel Building on the SE corner of 5th and Chestnut sat directly across the street from Independence Hall until it was demolished in 1955. It was designed by Wilson Brothers & Company in 1885 who made various alterations through the late 1800's and early 1900's. Later Harris & Richards would also make alterations in 1914. It is now part of the site of Independence National Historic Park.

The Drexel Building

Surviving Sex and the City

It's a relatively new philosophy, the idea that a successful urban core must be a meticulously maintained playground for the rich and trendy. I blame Sex and the City. I don't think most people who live in big cities necessarily share this attitude, but many of the vocal ones blogging from their Macs at Starbucks sure do. The condo craze transplanted so many urban newbies from homogenized suburbs, as well as the most recent generation just now entering the work force who are cultural products of the Roaring 90's, it makes complete sense that these two archetypes cringe at the thought of returning to the days of Woolworth and a society at harmony with economic diversity.

The Sex and the City phenomena isn't necessarily good or bad. It renewed an interest in our cities and brought life to the streets, restaurants, and boutiques. It saved priceless architecture, expanded neighborhoods, and renewed downtown living as a valid option. This was particularly beneficial to the larger cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, who although they lost considerable population during this nation's urban dark ages they were able to maintain a viable population at the urban heart unlike places like Baltimore or Pittsburgh.

What hurt Baltimore and Pittsburgh's downtowns is the disconnect between residential areas and their downtowns. Ed Bacon, at the opposite end of the Sex and the City philosophy, is often credited with saving Philadelphia's urban population. While he may have dictated all of Philadelphia's mid-century development, he viewed the city as a massive office park. Bacon was a product of his time. Like the vision employed in every other mid-century city, Bacon wanted to chop up Center City into urban islands, focusing on office development and freeways to get commuters in and out. Philadelphia maintained a residential core for the same reason New York and Chicago did. Bacon's vision didn't save Philadelphia's downtown population, but like New York and Chicago we had enough people to survive his vision.

Unfortunately his philosophy left us with suburban amenities far outweighing those of the city. Urban retail in Philadelphia is impractical. It is all or nothing. You can have your dog dyed pink or find a dollar store, but you can't walk to a decent grocery store. While many urban newbies want to make Center City the Delaware Valley's go-to shopping destination, maintaining it as Philadelphia's primary shopping destination is far more important. The suburbs are more than welcome to service the suburbs, but they should not be serving as Philadelphia's primary shopping resource.

While Philadelphia may be responsible as our region's cultural center, accepting this responsibility comes with more than 50 years of economic decline, corruption, and poverty. A city can't just accommodate the wealthy or you wind up with the fallout San Francisco, DC, and Boston are currently experiencing from attempting to maintain the illusion of extremely high standards. We do have a responsibility as the region's cultural representative to set extremely high cultural standards but that is not synonymous with high end shopping. To truly embrace these high cultural standards, a culture must acknowledge and accommodate all of its demographics. Sadly cultures that preach tolerance from a soap box are often the same cultures that sweep their economic diversity under the rug...or ship it to Oakland.

Realistically, retail on Chestnut Street and Market East mirror a large part of Philadelphia's population and thus generate a large chunk of tax revenue. Walnut Street represents the idealistic philosophy that has left other major cities in the red as it is afforded by a much smaller part of Philadelphia's population. Both have their place and balance is vital.

The idea that a city should be on the high end of everything is completely at odds with what the American city is and has always been. The worn storefronts on Chestnut Street and Market East serve as Philadelphia's downtown staples because the Sex and the City set has convinced us that they should be Starr restaurants or nothing, leaving us in the middle to drive to the suburbs for paper towels because this small population of vocal snobs thinks Center City is too good for a Target. A city can't sustain itself on luxuries and the upper-middle class. To succeed we need to accommodate, and tolerate, everyone.