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.
The Eagles might not be the most popular team in the NFL, but its 11,000 solar panels and 14 wind turbines have made it the greenest. I'm actually surprised this hasn't garnered more press. This is a huge deal, one that cities known for their green ideals have only dreamed of.
Eagles President Don Smolenski calls the turbines the "eye candy," while the solar panels are the real power. But that isn't the only way Lincoln Financial Field is the future stadium that we should be bragging about.
Here are some of the stats listed by Sandy Bauers on Philly.com:
30% of the stadium's power is generated by the turbines
99.8% of the stadium's waste is recycled
Fryer oil is converted into biodiesel and reused in house
Food waste is composted
Since February 8th, 720,000 kilowatts of power has been generated
They aren't done yet. They are looking into innovations designed to capture rainwater to flush toilets and water the fields.
Whenever someone lists The Great Gatsby as their one and only favorite book on Facebook you know they haven't read a book since middle school. It's no wonder. Between The Thorn Birds and Jane Eyre, it's the most entertaining book most of us have ever been forced to read.
I've been obsessed with The Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties since I was a kid. My grandparents' home is a living gallery of portraits and photographs of another time and place, an era when the children of the Industrial Revolution danced and drank with unfettered regard, erecting shrines to their own narcissism, and ushering in a new era of art and architecture that remains to be rivaled.
A temporary experiment in excess, the Roaring Twenties had a threshold. No capitalistic walkabout can continue without end, a reality we are once again faced with today. Any man can fly without wings, but the higher you fly, the farther you fall. Our American culture will never experience the decadence of the Roaring Twenties because we will forever know that it culminates in a Great Depression.
That knowledge will never change our fascination with the blind ambition of an era responsible for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, jazz, modern architecture, and fostered an enlightened culture that questioned the convention of their ancestors, fueling the fire of a blazing trail towards true freedom for all Americans.
The Roaring Twenties were nothing if not reckless, but that carefree abandonment of our antiquated social structure questioned more than Prohibition. The children of the era trotted the globe in search of stimulation, experimenting with everything from religion to sexuality, bringing home not just art but cultural ideals and a renewed sense of tolerance.
Blaming the era's carelessness on the Great Depression is too easy and two dimensional. Very few cultures can survive on static values, and a capitalistic democracy needs to evolve to thrive. The fire started when America was founded, and these eras of extreme wealth fan the flames of great change.
Politics muck up the importance of these eras. Conservatives laud the laissez faire capitalistic approach that creates these wealthy bubbles, while liberals criticize these brief periods of excess that ironically fuel many of their own causes.
Without a bunch of bored rich kids burning through their trust funds, would our nation's decision makers be asking "why not?" on topics like marriage equality and universal healthcare? Probably not, at least not so soon.
Like the flappers of the Roaring Twenties, our own hipsters and scenesters are quickly deconstructing the social structure of our ancestors, one which was firmly established after the Great Depression. And in a clear case of history repeating itself we spent the better part of our early 21st Century making a mess of things, and in the aftermath, like the 1950's and 1960's, are streamlining the mess, mainstreaming our new ideals, and creating a freer more accessible America.
And with that, Baz Luhrmann's, The Great Gatsby...
When I first visited Eastern State Penitentiary the summer after I graduated from high school I thought, "what a great place for a party." Almost twenty years later, it has happened...again. Back by popular demand, Eastern State is hosting Dance Party at the Pen: A Masquerade with an early bird flashlight tour.
Find yourself amid dancing and drinking in the dark and dusty corridors of this decrepit landmark amid ghoulish Venetian party masked revelers. Get your tickets early, and only online. I've got mine.
Ever doodle your dream city on a cocktail napkin? Maybe it'll win you a prize. Check out the AIA Philadelphia Associate Committee's 2013 Sketch Showdown.
