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It looks like the powers that be in Fairmount Park have been cruising the internet for market research, finally addressing some of the obstacles that keep the Schuylkill River's wild success from spilling over into Fairmount Park's Lemon Hill and Strawberry Mansion.
However they've consulted PennPraxis, Philadelphia's captain of the Master Plan Pipe Dream. PennPraxis does what it does well. But they're visionary designers sought for ideas, not business minded developers. When ideas are sourced from PennPraxis they prepare a vision as if they control the available (and sometimes unavailable) land with unlimited funds, ignoring financial realities.
Were money no object, some good ideas have been addressed. The primary focus seems to be connecting the river to the park space east of Kelly Drive. The plan proposes a crosswalk at Strawberry Mansion, enhancing pedestrian quality and slowing Kelly Drive's notoriously fast traffic. But Strawberry Mansion doesn't host Kelly Drive's heaviest swell of pedestrians, many of whom walk the Schuylkill from Boathouse Row to Girard Avenue and turn around.
Girard Avenue's missing piece seems insignificant given PennPraxis's grand proposal of a new, public boathouse, small boat rentals, and new gardens. Girard Avenue may have been ignored because the east side of Kelly Drive at Girard tends to get very urban very quickly. But a Girard Avenue crosswalk would do more than just control traffic and provide a safe passage for residents and recreationalists. It would provide visitors with a sidewalk to the Philadelphia Zoo and Centennial Park, and offer those who turnaround at the rock a loop back to Boathouse Row over Lemon Hill.
PennPraxis's sprawling ambition in Fairmount Park is indicative of many oversized attempts to produce a cohesive master plan. Echoing numerous attempts to redesign Penn's Landing, these ideas ignore space that currently succeeds. Neglecting the space's current assets such as Lloyd Hall and the Philadelphia Police Department's boathouse upstream, PennPraxis suggests building an additional public boathouse rather than improving or expanding those that already exist.
Perhaps the most shortsighted element in the design is its overall approach, which spreads down from Strawberry Mansion from areas less traveled, rather than branching out from trails that already succeed. Essentially the plan gambles on its own success. Field of Dreams was more than just Kevin Costner's last great movie. It was a lesson. In the end, he lost his farm. If new crosswalks further north see limited use, it risks our chances of ever seeing new crosswalks at more practical locations.
A map of the master plan remains to be seen, but if it is as integrated as the latest proposal for Penn's Landing it could stall in a stream of blind ambition. Cohesive plans look great on paper but can rarely be executed without bottomless funding, not solely because they're so large, but because the integrated pieces can't work alone.
You don't have to think small to think smart. But you do have to think outward, consider financial realities, and with the agility for a master plan's individual components to evolve in the process. Link the park space where it's most used. Connect recreationalists to profit points like the Philadelphia Zoo and Memorial Hall. Consider variables that will prove the master plan is a viable one so that future funding presents itself when necessary.
This year, the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts will be helping the city celebrate the 30th anniversary of its Mural Arts Program. The success of the MAP isn't just noted for its lavish, colorful murals adorning Philadelphia's less desirable neighborhoods or vacant walls, but it's been echoed in cities around the world, a solution to profane graffiti and blight.
But in recent years the MAP's relevance has been called into question. As Philadelphia gets cleaner, as vacant lots are filled in with new construction, the MAP has found itself a divisive organization, even contentious. Once was a time when residents of our struggling neighborhoods longed for the MAP to come to their vacant corner, the MAP could propose anything, professional or amateur, and the city would oblige.
Now that the city's poorer neighborhoods are covered in murals, the MAP's mission has changed, with grand murals gracing the sides of buildings in our city's most successful neighborhoods. But while the MAP's mission has evolved, its self assigned image as necessary and welcome hasn't. There are places that don't need murals, even places where the murals themselves serve as the visual blight the program once attempted to eradicate.
The MAP has become too much of a good thing.
That fact has made itself evident in the program's most recent proposal, a pair of 100 foot wide paintings along the Schuylkill River at the base of the Girard Avenue Bridge.
The base of the bridge is nothing significant and the paintings, a tribute to the Schuylkill's rowing history, would be tasteful. But the Department of Parks and Recreation didn't simply offer MAP blind approval. Although the Art Commission was consulted in the murals' approval, Parks and Rec's deputy Mark Focht took the murals under thoughtful consideration, recognizing that Fairmount Park, even along the heavily trafficked Kelly Drive, may not need the MAP.
Although Focht noted that Fairmount Park is not devoid of art, sculptures cast in bronze or carved from native stone surrounded by boxwoods and ivy don't interfere with the natural experience our parks offer. Brightly colored paintings on the other hand, can be more distraction than complement.
The MAP had no intention to segue into Fairmount Park until veteran rower Tony Schneider offered the program $85,000 towards the paintings, so it's not clear if the precedent will encourage the MAP to creep further into the woods or if this is a one time deal.
Time will tell.
For this location, a mural may be an improvement. While the success of the Schuylkill River Trail speaks for itself, murals on the underside of this unimpressive bridge will probably do nothing to improve or hinder the trail's experience. They will simply exist.
As for the program itself, finding itself in front of the desk of resistance should signal to those in charge that their goal was never to cover Philadelphia in a coat of Duron. Philadelphia is exciting and dynamic on its own, especially in the vast panoramic views from Fairmount Park and Kelly Drive.
