Devil's Advocate: Spruce Parker Hotel

It's got two stars on Yelp, a whopping one and a half on TripAdvisor, but what may be surprising is that the tenants of the Spruce Parker Hotel at 13th and Spruce have access to the internet, or even know what it is. However, if you take the time to read any of the reviews you may see a wide gap between the urban legends that surround the place and those told by many who've stayed there.

Not long ago our inner cities were dotted with unassuming hotels that appealed to international backpackers or fresh faced high school graduates with no credit and minimum wage jobs. Something happened between Adventures in Babysitting and Sex and the City.

Old City's eclectic grit has been replaced with luxury lofts and parking lots for their tenants and the Furnished Room District's flop houses and dive bars were eradicated for the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Meanwhile, backpackers have uncovered chains of clean hostels while kids who want an affordable piece of the city have decided to watch it from the shores of their parents' basements.

It's good and bad. The Spruce Parker's popular perception is indicative of the polarized vision behind the New City, those who don't remember sacrificing luxury amenities for a piece of downtown, those who pride themselves on tolerance but pull their child a little closer when they see a transsexual walk past Nest...those who use brunch as a verb.

While there is some truth in the Spruce Parker's reputation, it's truth that lies in any hotel that doesn't require a credit card. Does it harbor prostitutes and drug dealers? Quite possibly. But so does a Motel 6 that sidles up to a truck stop. One that also houses travelers looking for a cheap room.

Throughout the Spruce Parker's storied history it's never been a source of pride, but its stable presence proves it serves a demand. Some of the negative attitude towards the hotel may be warranted, but reserve your judgments until you've been inside. Would the corner of 13th and Spruce be better if the hotel were apartments, condos, or dorms? Perhaps.

But would the corner of 13th and Walnut be safer without Woody's? Would the small streets between 12th and 13th be safer without iCandy, Tavern on Camac, and Voyeur? Dangerous things happen when you take property owners to task for evils that the city is responsible for enforcing.

Next time you cast stones from a nearby condo, ask yourself, are you concerned with the activity you think takes place in the Spruce Parker, or are you concerned with the fact that you simply don't like someone enjoying the city from a $59 a night bed? But more importantly, as you're licking the icing off the cake of the city, ask yourself what's next? The only thing under it is bread.

Giovanni's Room Closing

On May 17, the nation's oldest gay and lesbian bookstore will close its doors for good. Its owner, Ed Hermance will be retiring and is selling Giovanni's Room and its buildings at 12th and Pine.

It's not clear yet if any potential buyer would attempt to resurrect the bookstore in some form or fashion but it's unlikely to remain as-is.

Independent bookstores have been struggling for decades, first due to competition from big box retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble, then Amazon.com.

Interestingly, eBooks hit the big box retailers hard enough to breath a little life into the forgotten independent book sellers that lingered, but many have had to retool their business model to adapt to a broader audience or offer other items has cafes, boutiques, or entertainment venues.

Some might say that progress within the gay community and broader acceptance has made gay bookstores obsolete. At one time gay bookstores served as social spots, alternatives to seedy bars and bathhouses. Times have changed and gay bookstores are now just bookstores with a limited inventory.

But niche bookstores dedicated to religions, ethnicities, and cultures still survive with good reason. There's still a market for bookstores dedicated to a community with a storied history and unique interests, but it will need to rebrand its image, expand its offerings, and appeal to a broader age range. Hopefully it sells to someone with both a vision for the future and a respect for its history.

Pearl's 19th and Chestnut

Pearl Properties has released a rendering for a new apartment building at the corner of 19th and Chestnut.

The design echoes the small retail corner space, formerly Qdoba, which appears to be incorporated into the site.

Similar in style to the apartment building on Vine Street being developed by the LDS Church, Pearl's ambitious high rise is in line with the city's recent boom in luxury apartment buildings.

Dranoff's Better One Riverside

Carl Dranoff's One Riverside has a undergone a redesign for the better, in so many ways. For one, it simply looks better. I

Its formerly bland glass infill has been redesigned as an iconic and towering showcase for the Schuylkill River's emerging skyline. But even more astounding, Dranoff managed to appease neighbors previously opposed to the project by putting its parking underground and setting the tower back from the community garden.

Read Inga Saffron's story here.

Personally, I may have been one of the few not opposed to Dranoff's previous design. I see community gardens as temporary infill, even those as pleasant as the one along 25th Street. Like even the most beautiful murals, they satisfy a vacant place until something better comes along. By better, I mean tenants. But Fitler Square's community garden may have proven itself a worthy permanence. And admittedly, it is quite beautiful and designed for such permanence.

Likewise, Carl Dranoff has proven himself a developer truly vested in not only appealing to Philadelphia, but being a Philadelphian himself. Through the architects at Cecil Baker + Partners, he willingly worked with concerned neighbors to develop his site with their concerns in mind, and in the end created a better building.

A Proactive Approach to Blight and Neglect

After the collapse of the Shirt Corner and the fire that destroyed the Suit Corner, much of Old City's blighted neglect is being called into question. Of course blight is nothing new to Philadelphia, even Center City. On April 11, a glass panel fell from City Blue's façade near 11th and Chestnut, an intersection home to more than a few nearly abandoned and possibly dangerous buildings.

Many of the problems seem to stem from interagency miscommunication. L&I, the Historical Commission, and the city's 311 response service tend to address sites after the damage is done. Property owners are saddled with the responsibility of connecting the dots between agencies that don't talk to each other, while less concerned slumlords are free to sit on their properties until L&I is forced to control the damage.

Old City has become the poster child for potentially dangerous situations, possibly because this prime and expensive address is still structurally an in-progress neighborhood.

Philadelphians tend to have blinders when it comes to architectural neglect. But if you really look at Old City, you begin to wonder why it commands rents nearly as high as Rittenhouse. You'll find several pricy loft conversions sharing a blocks with even more vacant and weathered buildings. Many of those that host galleries and boutiques in their storefronts are capped with unkempt façades of broken glass, upper floors riddled with black mold and dry rot.

Bureaucracy in any city's government is expected, although perhaps in Philadelphia it is more pronounced. But that begs the question, why are we and our city's own non-profit organizations so content with hindsight?

Perhaps it's not the job of organizations like the Preservation Alliance or the Historical Society to address blight amongst our aging buildings, but when those within the historical community vocally react to demolition permits, collapses, and fires, they open themselves up to scrutiny. I have to ask, "well ,where were you?"

Cataloging historic properties on a flashy website is a great preliminary step, especially those potentially threatened. It's a marketing move that raises awareness but it doesn't actively provide anything.

Where is the arm of these organizations with an inside track to the city's bureaucracy? Where are the local lobbyists that speak City Hall's unique language?

Waiting for the city to get its act together is a futile effort. All cities deal with poor communication, bureaucracy, and a staff of administrators who know that a job done well is a job that isn't secure. That won't change.

Whether it's a small neighborhood organization vested in safety or a larger non-profit that charges itself with saving our city's historic landmarks, no one can expect to operate successfully until they work with the city, not against it. Knowing that the city won't change, at least not anytime soon, enables these groups and organizations to take a proactive approach to addressing safety concerns and vacant or underutilized historic sites.

But across the board, they're reactionary in every effort and provide an absent alternative or solution. Where are we with the Dilworth House? Society Hill's neighborhood organization successfully blocked an effort to renovate, then demolish the arguably historic building, but that success is eradicated by its complete lack of resolve. Almost ten years after their efforts began, the building is still empty.

citypaper.net

Perhaps this isn't the mission of these groups. Perhaps neighborhood groups are only capable of addressing immediate situations. Maybe larger non-profits aren't designed to proactively address the fate of the historic sites they catalog.

But likewise, it isn't the Historical Commission's job to save them. They're in charge of reviewing construction and demolition permits. Their bottom line is how these landmarks immediately and financially benefit the city. They stamp paper. Meanwhile L&I has proven itself incapable of addressing dangerous buildings across the city at large. They can respond to one hazardous site while another collapses, surrounding them in a cloud of ineptitude while they figure out how to do their job.

We're left with no authority, public or private, truly vested in securing the safety of aging and vacant buildings or saving our blighted, historically registered landmarks. If organizations like the Preservation Alliance and the Historical Society aren't prepared to watchdog our history, something needs to emerge. Otherwise buildings will continue to fall, deliberately or not.

The region needs a proactive preservation organization, one which understands the headaches the city poses, one with an inside voice. It needs an organization connecting owners of blighted and abandoned buildings to prospective buyers interested in unique and historic properties. Until then buildings will continue to fall for parking lots, history will be lost to paperwork, and we'll all keep scratching our heads in hindsight wondering, "how did this happen?"

Penn's Landing: If We Build it Will They Come?

A new study by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation has shown that a $250M investment in an overhauled Penn's Landing could generate $1.8B in economic growth.

But hold your horses.

Executing the DRWC's latest master plan could take five to seven years. And the private development, which is entirely speculative, could take at least thirty five years.

This is why I tend to hit the snooze button when I read the words "master plan." Wake me up when I'm 72 and prove me wrong, but I'll probably be in Miami so I can't promise I'll care.

In all seriousness, and in all fairness to those at the DRWC, they've finally addressed one of the fatal flaws in their piss poor project management skills: they're thinking dynamically. They've noted that the existing framework will be a desirable asset to potential developers. They've wrangled a way to get the transportation budget to cover part of the bill.

But they aren't quite there yet.

Any master plan is a potential boondoggle. The $250M price tag could easily double in five to seven years, and five to seven years could turn into ten or fifteen. The plan, stunning as it is, is massive. The park itself covers the equivalent of two city blocks. Grass sound cheap until you consider it needs to cover an interstate and be elevated above the existing Penn's Landing to slope towards the water. That's heavy engineering. To date, the largest project that the DRWC has executed is the Race Street Pier.

That doesn't mean it's impossible, but it does mean it's risky. The problem that still remains in DRWC's master plan is a lack of contingency. It's a broad and cohesive design, which would be great if time and money meant nothing. But because the sloped park is so cohesive, there's no room for failure. If the sloped park is complete and the money dries up, the green meadow will rise above the street to stare down at the I-95 canyon.

Worse, if the city blows through it's $250M budget prepping the site, we could potentially be saddled with a construction zone for the next decade or two, erasing the progress the DRWC has made and discouraging those who call Penn's Landing home.

Don't think small, think smart. How can the master plan retain a cohesive feel while all its components work as successful, independent pieces? Cap I-95 and see if that brings more people to the Penn's Landing we have. Better yet, green Festival Pier and bring some permanent attractions to the water.

The DRWC could have been vying for the Museum of the American Revolution. How about a museum dedicated to Native American history? Seems like an appropriate location. They could work with Gerry Lenfest to bring the SS United States to Penn's Landing.

Give us an exciting, innovative reason to be there. How about a scaled down Adventure World or Splash Mountain? Put an elevator at Race Street to take foodies to the next Iron Chef's restaurant atop one of the concrete towers approaching the Ben Franklin Bridge. The ideas for destination attractions are endless, attractions that make the Delaware River a destination. Let the park follow.

Lessons Never Learned

Hidden City

Another in a long string of systematic miscommunications has preservations singing a familiar tune on East Chestnut Street. City Blue's Art Deco Vitrolite façade at 1106 Chestnut Street has been weathering for years, but on April 11th one of the glass panels finally crashed to the ground.

Max Ufberg offers an outstanding history of Markham Ashberry's iconic building on Hidden City. Much to my surprise, the building's façade is not an addition to an older structure, but the entire building itself was built as it stands in 1933. Considered Late Art Deco, Streamline Moderne came from Germany's Bauhaus school in the late 1930s. Thusly, the building was added to the Historic Register in 1986.

But things got bureaucratic this month and no one really seems to be to blame. L&I issued a violation, deeming the building unsafe. The department asked the owner hire a structural engineer to report on the safety of the façade and install a sidewalk shelter in the mean time. The owner applied for a permit to build the shelter, but also hired a contractor to remove the glass from the façade, breaking some of the panels in the process.

A mess of absent communication between L&I, the Historical Commission, and the property's owner has offered a recurring nightmare.

The owner is retroactively seeking a permit from the Historical Commission to remove the glass already gone. But whether or not that permit is granted, and if it's not, what that would actually mean for the fate of the building is irrelevant. The damage is done. Replacing the glass will be costly, and it's hard to say if the historic unique material can even be replicated.

This allows the owner to apply for the same hardship exemption we've seen at the Church of the Assumption and the Boyd Theatre, and echoes of preservationists crying, "oh no, not again."

Standing, for now.

But the woes of preservationists isn't the only misstep being repeated. Like the Church of the Assumption, the city has allowed a property owner to move forward with unpermitted demolition. But we've also watched those in the preservation community rush to the site of an historic building after its fate seems sealed.

Noteworthy, and still alive

I hope the best for Ashberry's historic façade, particularly given the breadth of history unearthed in Ufberg's piece. But given the past decisions made by the Historical Commission we all know how unrealistic that hope is.

Will this be behind the wrecking ball before the historical community takes note?

Meanwhile there are umpteen deteriorating façades along East Chestnut Street and nearby on Market, walls that haven't yet crashed to the ground. Are those in the historic community going to step up and address the unusual PFCU façade, Robinson's Department Store, or the more traditional collection of historic buildings at 11th and Chestnut before it's too late?