The City Hall Parking Lot

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.  

The Other Divine Lorraine

At one point Shift Capital had hoped to renovate the beleaguered Beury Building on North Broad Street. If you don't know it, it's the other Divine Lorraine. 

At the corner of Broad and Erie, the Beury Building wasn't just abandoned glory, it is significant architecture at a key intersection of two major arteries desperate for life.

Unfortunately, as Philadelphia Magazine pointed out, it is up for sheriff's sale, meaning it will go to anyone with the funds to buy a derelict building in one of the worst parts of town. 

Meaning strip mall at best, surface lot at worst.

Abandoned buildings do very little for their neighbors. But the ones that scrape the sky are more than empty buildings. They're beacons of hope. They signal what their neighborhood once was and could be again.

Like the Divine Lorraine, the Beury Building is an important cog in North Broad's renaissance. The best hope for North Broad isn't blind profit, it's smart planning. Like Tower Place at Spring Garden, the Divine Lorraine may soon invigorate life at Girard, and the Beury Building could do the same.

These projects have and will show that success is not merely present in development but also preservation. Even in their current states, the Beury Building and the Divine Lorraine are sources of pride in struggling neighborhoods. Losing them to suburban grocery stores or worse will only make the rebirth of North Broad Street that much more difficult, solidifying their neighbors' dignity as being worth no more than a strip mall.

Temple 20/20

Temple 20/20 is a reconfiguration of Temple University's Main Campus, centering the university around Broad Street and including the development of several new projects including a new student and community library, lawn, science building, and residence hall.

Temple's proposed Signature Building on North Broad Street

Temple's attempt to improve its relationship with Broad Street is a hopeful attempt to improve its relationship with North Philadelphia, and help improve North Philadelphia itself.

New Mixed Use Residence Hall Complex

A library available to the public, shopping and restaurant spaces for private retail, and parking are some of the additions to Broad Street aimed at both campus life and the North Philadelphia community.

Expansion and renovation of Pearson and McGonigle Halls

Temple will not be expanding into the neighborhood, but rather remaining the same size and growing in height, adding excitement to the North Philadelphia skyline.

Broadwood Hotel

At one time, and now again, South Broad Street is spotted with the grand homes to Philadelphia's performing arts community. However North Broad Street was at once the post industrial home to the new, 20th century art world and briefly experienced the decadence afforded by the Industrial Revolution with massive entertainment venues never attempted in the historically stuffy and bourgeois theaters on and surrounding South Broad Street.

One of the most monolithic - and recent - architectural losses of North Broad Street's Golden Age was the Broadwood Hotel which also served as the Elk's Lodge and Philadelphia Athletic Club. Completed in 1924 by Ballinger Company and Andrew J. Samuel, it housed a ballroom that hosted the Eugene Ormandy Orchestra and saw many outstanding and historically relevant performances through its life. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 yet like many other gems of North Broad Street met the wrecking ball a short time later. Like many victims of Philadelphia's "renaissance", it is now the site of an uninspired parking garage - next and adjacent to three other large surface parking lots - operated by the parasitic Parkway Corporation. It's history is hazy, it's loss all but forgotten, along with countless other North Broad Street masterpieces.