A New Vine Street

With the new Mormon Temple taking shape on Vine Street and the LDS Church's apartment building proposed for the lot next door, Vine Street may soon look a little more like a street and less like a parking lot periodically interspersed with drab walkups and suburban infill. 

Mayor Nutter actually said that the Temple's addition will make the Benjamin Franklin Parkway “one of the most incredible boulevards anywhere in the world.” I appreciate his enthusiasm, but the claim is a stretch. Still, the potential is fabulous and the Mormon's are ferrying the grandeur of the Parkway onto Vine Street.

The LDS Church's 1601 Vine Street

For all that's been said of the mistake that is the Vine Street Expressway, it's more of a mental barrier than a physical one. Portland, OR is home to its own highway canyon, one barely noticeable because of the successful development flanking the east and west sides. 

Chinatown is inching closer to bookending Franklin Town's "Little Salt Lake City" with its own Eastern Tower which would contain a community center and apartments, and solidify Chinatown's presence in the emerging Callowhill neighborhood. 

The original design was fantastically wild and echoed modern architecture scraping the skies of Shanghai, albeit quite bit shorter. Nonetheless, the urban addition would be a breakaway from the sprawling parking lots, vacant lots, and dull infill that Vine Street is known for. While the urban concept remains, Eastern Tower's latest redesign has erased its edge. 

Take a look. What do you think? 

Is the new design good? Ugly? Or simply too boring to be bad?

Original design

Redesign

If Eastern Tower needed to be downsized, a few floors could have been removed without stripping it of its uniqueness. 

Widening I-95

What does a government do when presented with more than $400M in Federal and State money? Head for the trough, of course. And that is exactly what PennDOT is doing, seeking to widen the Central Delaware's I-95 corridor. 

If you can stomach it, pour through PennDOT's piss poor rationalizations here. It's a laundry list of bureaucratic horse shit, an effort to spend money while they've got it, and worry about the rest later. After all, an incomplete project is the best leverage for more state money later. And cost overruns are synonymous anything the Commonwealth attempts so no one is ever held accountable for the crap the state heaps upon us.

But my beef isn't with the physical logistics of widening I-95. It's happened before, and the state proudly plowed through hundreds of densely packed urban blocks for a highway better suited to Camden. 

Aside from the fact that I-95 could be narrowed if the same funding were applied to improving public transit, the dinosaurs planning at PennDOT probably just discovered SimCity and decided to have a little fun with a waterfront just being realized by those of us who actually live here.

Wider!

What grinds my gears (I wonder if PennDOT even knows that Tesla is making that phrase irrelevant) is that this government organization - like most - is wasting badly needed Federal and State funds in an effort to look busy, tackling the most doable, allegedly necessary project. 

Have they considered the fact that a widened I-95 will encourage more traffic, traffic funneled into the congested Vine Street Expressway and onto the even worse I-76? And why aren't these funds going towards improving I-76? Has PennDOT given up on that parking lot? How about improving South Philadelphia's link between I-95 and I-76? The last time I took I-76 South, I had to get off the interstate and drive through a few miles of Libya before connecting to I-95. Why?

This is pork. A big, raw, parasite infested pork butt. PennDOT got their hands on some money and they want to look like they're working. It happens everywhere you see a construction sign proudly exclaiming, "Your Tax Dollars at Work." But expanding interurban highways is senseless in an era when people are finally looking for an alternative to their cars.

The Other Disney Holes

The Disney Hole at 8th and Market, a surface parking lot once home to Gimbels and the proposed site of a DisneyQuest indoor amusement park, has been a black eye on Market East's already battered face for decades. But in a city that has more parking than it knows what to do with, it isn't Center City's worst example of poor planning that defaulted to the status quo of urban real estate: surface parking.

In the 1980s, when loft living was more akin to starving artistry than wealthy yuppies, the area north of Arch Street between 11th and Broad looked a lot like Old City. It was packed with underutilized warehouses, some providing cheap housing and office space, others vacant. Interspersed with worthless trinity homes, modest row houses, and ample parking, blocks and blocks were razed for the Pennsylvania Convention Center, the Vine Street Expressway's extension, and a Market East Station that allowed trains leaving Suburban Station to connect directly to the Northeast.

Unfortunately these shortsighted projects failed to recognize the potential future of Center City and the neighborhood once referred to as the Furnished Room District. At the time, Market East was lined with triple X theaters and this neighborhood was the backwater of Philadelphia's sex industry. The collateral damage was welcome, a neighborhood so disdained that little history was ever even recorded. Many buildings demolished without the posterity of a photograph.

The Pennsylvania Convention Center, despite its woes, did pull this neighborhood up. Reading Terminal Market has handsomely reaped the rewards. But its attractions and hotels cater to those who come to the city in cars, and the equal and opposite reaction to the area's success has been the Disney Holes along Vine Street that continue to chip away at what's left.

Vine Street has been a wide avenue since the 1930s, and has long since detached Callowhill from its right to truly call itself Center City. It was likely perceived that the Vine Street Expressway would be no worse. But a lack of insight and a loathing for the Furnished Room District allowed urban planners to not only introduce a freeway, but also widen Vine's existing surface streets, requiring more demolition along the east bound lanes leaving blocks too narrow to truly develop.

It was a dumb move. Interstate 676 was specifically designed to relieve crosstown traffic on Vine Street. If anything, Vine's surface components should have been narrowed. The street rarely sees the need for its six lanes and those who use it as an exit ramp to New Jersey speed. And for reasons I'll never quite understand, most Jersey bound traffic tends to use Race Street to connect to the Ben Franklin Bridge.

But as the city continues to grow, defying a post-recession logic, little has been said of Center City's final frontier. Have those in City Hall been in office so long that they still turn a blind eye to a neighborhood they fought so hard to erase? Lavish master plans have been proposed to connect Center City and the Delaware River, the Ben Franklin Parkway is still improving, and plans have been proposed as far north as Strawberry Mansion. Why has the Furnished Room District, two blocks form City Hall, been ignored?

Some have suggested capping the Vine Street Expressway, among other things. All fine ideas, but none have gotten attention from those who could make it happen. When you consider the fact that the improvements at the Pennsylvania Convention Center are already beginning to resonate, it seems even odder that this neighborhood remains forgotten. These parking lots are about as relevant to City Hall as those surrounding the Stadium District. 

And perhaps that's why. The state foolishly failed to provide any designated parking for the Convention Center and these lots wildly profit as necessary evil. The center even advertises them. All thirty six of them. Yes, thirty six. Thirty six parking lots and garages that the Pennsylvania Convention Center advertises on its website, not one owned by the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Perhaps soon the center will find enough money to cap its Race Street facade with its own garages. It has the room, and the space would generate money. Can you imagine that? A Pennsylvania Convention Center free from the confines of the Carpenters and Teamsters, with a can't-beat downtown location, and its own designated parking? Wow.

But I digress.

More hotels are coming. Once the last surface lot on Arch Street disappears, hotels will find themselves on North Broad Street, Race Street, and ultimately development will begin to replace the Disney Holes along Vine Street.

The city needs to get out in front of the progress and tackle Vine Street now. Change is happening and it's happening fast. Designating street parking on Vine Street and narrowing each side to two lanes would dramatically slow down traffic, improve pedestrianization, and expand the footprint for potential development. 

Vine Street may not even need to be capped to pull Callowhill closer to Center City. Many cities have highway trenches running through their cores, and those that succeed without a Big Dig succeed because they're surrounded by dense development. Let's start enticing that development with a better Vine Street and finish what the city started thirty years ago. 

Raelen's Vine Street Tower

Raelen

GroJLart's choice words are always welcome in Philadelphia's bizarre and frustrating world of architectural progress. I'm amazed as some of the lost proposals he manages to dig up for Philaphilia, and the most recent is one of my favorites, for two reasons:

One, because I love tall buildings. And two, because I jog past the site every day and always wondered what exactly happened to this block and why it was so awful.

Between 15th and 16th, behind Hahnemann Hospital, is a sidewalk that runs between a parking garage and the Vine Street Expressway's 15th Street (Broad Street) exit ramp. It does nothing but carry me to more scenic jogging routes, but were there more than a parking garage and a surface lot, the space could be an inviting outdoor space for an office complex.

It turns out, that's what it was supposed to be. Unfortunately the small, narrow park space horrifyingly sidles up to the parking garage and a few trees used to stash homeless bindles. If you jog through there after dark, jog fast.

But as GroJLart's crafty paleointernetology managed to unearth, a skyscraping office complex would have, like the Latter Day Saint's recent apartment building proposal, helped bridge the divide of the Vine Street Canyon.

Perhaps the Mormons will help bring the life to Vine Street it needs. Interstate caps and parks are nice thoughts, but nothing helps camouflage dramatic eyesores such as the Vine Street Expressway like equally imposing architecture right next door. The Expressway is no wider than the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Flanked with skyscrapers and high rises, the Canyon would be just another wide boulevard. Although Raelen's design is dated, plenty of skyscrapers date from the 90s and blend in just fine.

Embracing the Vine Street Expressway

Parks are wonderful urban assets. William Penn's city was built around them. They clean the air and provide recreation and leisure space. Some of the city's most desirable addresses crowd around these spaces, which is why parks are the most common go to idea for addressing our urban woes.

The towering condos around Rittenhouse and Washington Square make it easy to forget that Fairmount Park, Centennial Park, and the Philadelphia Zoo share zip codes with some of the city's worst slums. Parks are great, but they don't grow great neighborhoods. Great addresses and great parks are mutually exclusive.

Looking at that reality calls into question the recent push to convert industrial relics and transportation causeways into park space. Cap the Vine Street Expressway, and make it a park. Cap I-95, and make it a park. Open up the Reading Viaduct, and make it a park. The latter is probably the most conceivable strictly because the structure is already built and unused.

Some of the more absurd proposals have even called to convert Logan Square's unused rail tunnels into a subterranean and quasi enclosed park.

The Vine Street Expressway in particular doesn't realistically stand to benefit from this canned response, particularly the stretch east of Broad, the stretch that most adversely impacts the streetscape. West of Broad, much of it is barely noticeable from the sidewalk. Built before the eastern leg of the Vine Street Expressway, the western side has had more time to evolve and prime real estate forced the city to make it more friendly to the surrounding cultural institutions.

East of Broad, the Vine Street Expressway is a concrete river disrespectfully detaching Callowhill from Chinatown and very few strides have been made to improve the relationship between these two neighborhoods. But the truth is this relationship has always been poor. This post industrial corridor has been the city's dumping ground for necessary evils.

Viaducts, highway chasms, and rail tunnels keep the logistics of development tricky. Narrow lots along Vine Street's southern lane don't offer the land needed for high volume urban projects, and the streetscape isn't pleasant enough for row homes. Capping the expressway and converting it into a park might change this, but the cash isn't there to take that risk.

What so few consider is Vine Street is what it's always been: a major urban corridor. Instead of trying to hide centuries of use as a crosstown ferry only to take on the Sisyphean task of transforming this urban landscape into a quaint parkway, embrace what Vine Street was, is, and let's face it, always will be. Instead of covering up this engineering feat, make it a focal point of this neighborhood. Turn it into an art installation, illuminate it in blue LEDs, and treat it like you would a river.

Don't stop there. Let's have fun with this. Nearby residents avoid Vine Street because it's little more than parking lots, which means they're less likely to care what developers want to do with it. Let's make it an architectural playground. Eliminate any height restrictions. I'm obviously daydreaming here, but imagine a Vine Street Expressway lined with skyscrapers rivaling West Market Street. Instead of an eyesore we want to hide with a bunch of narrow parks, it looks a lot more like Sheikh Zayed Road.

While transforming Vine Street into a little Dubai is a conceptual daydream, Philadelphians could stand to occasionally stray from our provincial ideal that suggests addressing every problem with parks, scaled development, and taxes, particularly when those ideals come packaged in master plans eyeballing the middle of the 21st Century instead of tomorrow.

Let's look at what we can do with the Vine Street Expressway now, what developers and architects would do with it if we let them play, and how private money could tackle this obstacle.

Look Up: Chinatown

Our skyline might get a new addition, and not where most would expect. Pedestrians and commuters might be looking up in Chinatown, both vertically and northward. As Chinatown continues to expand despite the Vine Street Expressway, those managing stock footage might have to update the pictures of Philadelphia's Chinatown gate.

Chinatown CDC was granted approval by the RDA to develop a lot at 10th on the north side of Vine Street. A 23 story building with groundfloor retail has been proposed for the site complete with a community center, offices, and apartments. AK Architecture is designing the site.

10th Street Plaza

At the north end of Chinatown, perhaps the more visible end as it's seen from those exiting 95 onto Vine Street, a poorly utilized concrete park has been transformed into a proper entrance, and destination attraction, for Philadelphia's rapidly growing Chinatown.

As businesses and residents move north of the Vine Street Expressway, two foo dogs will welcome pedestrians and drivers to Chinatown at 10th and Vine.

Six years in the making, the 10th Street Plaza was started by the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation and cost $300,000.

Although mostly complete, the plaza will soon be home to a statue of Lin Zexu. From Fujian, in return for erecting the monument to Zexu, a Fujianese association will provide the plaza's required maintenance.

Moonglo Hotel and Supper Club

The former Furnished Room District - roughly defined between Broad and Chinatown, and Market and Vine - was once the site of a very unique nightlife scene. Bars, supper clubs, and small hotels dotted the streets of Center City's industrial zone. Between factories and warehouses, in the shadow of the Reading Viaduct, in older row homes were the businesses that entertained the district's employees.

Construction of the Pennsylvania Convention Center and the Vine Street Expressway was responsible for the demolition of most of the more reputable businesses. Some of the seedier theaters and bookstores remained into the 90's, the most recent being demolished for the expansion of the PCC.

The Moonglo Hotel and Supper Club is shown here in 1961. On the northwest corner of Race and Juniper, it is currently the site of a surface parking lot.

Can the Pennsylvania Convention Center get it right this time?

As ugly as the north facade of the Pennsylvania Convention Center may be, I don't think that the block of Race Street between 11th and Broad is doomed from ever finding business, especially the type of business brought by Convention Centers.

It's true that the thankless wall looms over the narrow street and casts the Scientology Center and a small group of 19th century trinities into darkness. But like the PCC itself, hotels and chain restaurants don't typically respect their local surroundings, so it's probably safe to assume that Ruby Tuesday and Applebees won't care that they might face the brick rump of this behemoth, only that their market research says there's a successful Chili's a block away.

I doubt its neighbors can expect to see luxury lofts or Garces restaurants between Race and Vine, but even more than fancy restaurants and overpriced condos, I'd like to see the surrounding area begin to pick itself back up. And the way to do that may be in catering to the conventioneers. Philadelphia loves to sell itself as one of the few nostalgic cities that hasn't sold out. We love it, but sadly, conventioneers and tourists don't. Would it really hurt to cram these suburban delights into this little island that faces an unforgiving brick wall?

This neighborhood has always struggled. Its proximity to freeways and railroad tracks have consistently isolated it from much of the city's friendly fabric and made it the go-to locale for large civic projects that required both proximity and careless demolition.

The PCC poses both threat and hope to this forgotten corner of Center City. While the parking in this area should be consolidated into several large garages, the city allows predatory landowners to bulldoze indiscriminately. The city requires all new offices and residences to provide parking, yet the state required nothing of the PCC. Sadly the unofficial assumption on the part of the city and the state was that the surrounding neighborhood could be sacrificed by private developers to supplement the parking required of the PCC's guests and employees.

The Vine Street Expressway brings people into the city, these surface lots park them, they walk to their convention, and then the VSE conveniently sends them home. And because the PCC caters to conventioneers from other cities, most people don't care. The neighbors' voices are few and mostly from renters.

The problem with this part of town is that its development is dictated by Philadelphia's late 20th Century in-and-out mentality. Back when City Hall was more concerned with retaining the little business it had than managing an urban experience for residents and tourists, the primary goal in city planning was to suburbanize the landscape for commuters and keep them happy. Because of that, 12th Street might as well be an exit ramp for the VSE, sending un-clocked traffic through the PCC tunnel at 50 MPH.

Hopefully now that the PCC is nearing the completion of its final phase and we see a grand entrance taking shape at Broad and Race, developers can begin scouting the surrounding properties, landowners can begin converting some of their surface lots into garages, and a bit of the mess left by irresponsible and careless civic planning can get cleaned up.

I'd like to see a push from City Hall to avoid the type of mass demolition that followed the construction of the initial phase of the PCC and the completion of the VSE. I'd like to see planners focus on encouraging conventioneers to stick around rather than simply getting them in and out as fast as possible. Otherwise we could end up with nothing between Race and Vine but asphalt and we're already halfway there.

The Furnished Room District and Tenderloin

For decades Philadelphia hosted two of the nation’s most notorious red light districts. Bound by North Broad Street, Market East, Chinatown, and including a wide and industrial stretch of Vine Street prior to the construction of the chasm that now segregates Center City from Callowhill, the Furnished Room District surrounding Reading Terminal and the Tenderloin to the north made up a den of iniquity so lewd that sailors docked in Philadelphia were forbidden from walking its streets.

This post-industrial fallout of large warehouses and rundown hotels used as flophouses housed the city’s homeless, drug addicts, and prostitutes. Chinatown hosted the city’s opium dens and burlesque houses, including The Trocadero, and its eccentric inhabitants called the Furnished Room District and Tenderloin their home.

View of the Furnished Room District and Reading Terminal from atop City Hall

The Furnished Room District's sex themed history spanned a century, with two adult bookstores still occupying the corner of 13^th and Arch until the last decade. While the last sordid businesses lingered into the 21^st Century, city planners began chipping away at this neighborhood’s infrastructure in the 80’s and 90’s.

12th and Arch in 1917

Following The Gallery, the relocation of Reading Terminal’s trains to a new Market East Station required the demolition of several blocks of Chinatown to accommodate underground rail tunnels. While moving the trains underground eliminated the need for the noisy elevated Reading Viaduct, it left Chinatown scarred with a number of large surface parking lots.

1311 Filbert - 1911

During this transition phase, the Furnished Room District became a refuge for Bohemia. Artists and punks occupied the apartments above the remaining storefronts. Nightlife in the district was limited to several small bars including Pentony Tavern which was a gay bar on Filbert Street, several adult themed bookstores, and rampant prostitution. David Lynch lived in the Tenderloin at 13th and Wood in the early 1970's and wrote of it, "Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me. It's the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time."

Breintnall Building's Adult Entertainment Center in the 1990s

The Vine Street Expressway drove a wedge between the district’s hotels and residences and The Tenderloin to the north. It called for the demolition of almost every building on the south side of Vine Street, leaving a street scape lined with narrow parking lots.

While transportation improvements left the Furnished Room District and Chinatown to suffer, the blocks behind Reading Terminal were chosen for the Pennsylvania Convention Center, requiring an expansive clearing of the district’s original architecture. At the same time, politicians were eying Chinatown’s northern annex as the location for a new baseball stadium and had planned to run an expressway exit right through its heart.

Chinatown's Trocadero in 1978

These two proposals were successfully blocked by neighborhood opposition but by then Chinatown had been boxed in by several large civic developments: the Convention Center, The Gallery and bus terminal, The Vine Street Expressway, and a sea of surface parking lots west of Franklin Square.

Near 12th and Race - Demolition for the first phase of the Pennsylvania Convention Center

The final phase of the Convention Center, currently under construction, cleared most of the remaining architecturally significant and historic representations of the Furnished Room District’s eclectic buildings including the Race Street Firehouse, The Lithograph Building, the Metzger Building, and a number of others.

Today, very little remains of this once infamous neighborhood. By targeting blight and ignoring architectural significance, developers have managed to completely erase an entire neighborhood and thus, its history. A small strip of industrial buildings have been restored along the 1200 block of Arch Street and a handful of industrial and small row houses are still maintained on and above Race between 11^th and Broad.

12th and Arch in the 1970s

A portion of the original Tenderloin lives on as Callowhill and Chinatown’s northern annex, sometimes called the Loft District, or Eraserhead by cinema buffs who pay homage to the inspiration of David Lynch's movie of the same name, inspiration that is now a U-Haul parking lot. Meanwhile in the former Furnished Room District, very little movement has been made to develop what remains. Aside from the Convention Center, the district now mostly consists of poorly maintained surface parking lots.

Such projects often attract chain restaurants and retail establishments that cater to tourists and conventioneers and one can hope that it will attract these businesses to the area’s arterial streets such as North Broad and Market East. Unfortunately the Convention Center’s north side pays no respect to what remains of its original architecture. With a wide overhang supporting a garage used to park utility vehicles, its narrow sidewalk devoid of trees; it doesn’t encourage the kind of growth that surrounds most American convention spaces. It remains to be seen if the Convention Center will attract the kind of business the state once promised.

The Vine Street Expressway Problem

One of our largest lesions of surface parking lots sits in a forgotten corner of Center City. Parking Lot Town is boxed in by the Convention Center, the Vine Street Expressway, and a vibrant Chinatown brimming with authenticity rare to most American Chinatowns - a Chinatown consistently targeted by city officials and predatory developers, loved by locals and long time residents, and abhorred by urban newbies and Yellow Tags. Asian owned businesses continue to thrive not just along Arch and Race, but also north of Vine along Callowhill. Philadelphia's Chinatown may be one of the few which continues to grow as a traditional immigrant neighborhood while relatively untouched by development geared toward gentrification or an attempt to attract a homogenized upper-middle class market, all in spite of the casm the Vine Street Expressway cuts through this neighborhood, and the parking holes that litter it's perimeter.

Much has been said regarding the Vine Street Expressway. As one of the nation's shortest interstate highways, many simply question the need for it at all. Prior to its construction which took the better half of a century, Vine Street was a significantly large avenue. Though it carried drivers across the city much slower than the VSE, considering the width of Center City, is it absolutely necessary to carry them across it at 55 miles per hour, particularly since most will be traveling it during rush hour traffic?

But whether you like it or not, it's here to stay. The question is how does it remain, and what responsibility do we have to the surrounding communities it divided? Boston's "Big Dig" often comes up as a solution. Boston's I-95 cut through the literal core of the city and spanned a much larger distance and was ripe with problems. Philadelphia's VSE is much shorter, straighter, and not surrounded by the kind of large scale, modern development that lines Boston's I-95 so capping it between 10th and Broad would be relatively simple. Relatively.

Unfortunately capping it might only produce more parking. Look at the area that caps the regional rail lines leading from Market East Station. One thing Philadelphia doesn't seem to undertsand is that it's pointless (unless you want more parking) to cap something if you never plan on building anything above it. If we capped the VSE it could be nothing but parking lots. Philadelphia seems obsessed with parking. Too much is never, ever enough. We're one of the densest city's in the US, and in most neighborhoods where the average home is about as wide as a midsized sedan, residents feel entitled to at least two cars. While people in Los Angeles work towards creating public trasit options and reducing the need for cars, Philadelphia wants more parking. I'll save that for another time.

As for the VSE, why not look at it this way? Why was it built as a recessed freeway in the first place? There's really no reason. Recessed it is less obtrusive and less visible. Why not cover the VSE with Vine Street, probably what should have been done in the first place. Move the south side of the actual street on top of the VSE, reunite it with it's northern brother, open up the sea of parking lots that the south side demolition created, and give developers a wider plain to work with between Vine and Summer. This increases the room for parking garages to service Conventioneers and hotel guests, making the remaining surface lots unfriendly, ugly, and unecessary. With the VSE underground you unite the Loft District with Chinatown, remove the eyesore of a freeway in your backyard and give investors incentive to create a whole new neighborhood.