Somewhere, Gloria Steinem Weeps

Whether you're conservative or liberal, religious or secular, if you've been on Facebook - or just online - in the past week, you haven't missed out on the fact that this Hobby Lobby/Conestoga Wood thing is kind of a big deal.

The ruling essentially treats for profit companies like private individuals with religious ideals (even when the company profits on cheap crap manufactured in China), allowing them to refuse to cover medical procedures they unscientifically deem synonymous with abortion.

Displaying the evangelical extreme of these corporations, and the ignorance of the men on SCOTUS, these companies may now choose to exempt certain forms of contraception in their health care plans. Plans provided by informed health insurance companies, not the medical brainiacs selling silk flowers and yarn.

The most disturbing image of the Hobby Lobby Movement may be this one, of a young woman clearly possessed by the spirit of religious indoctrination, proudly proclaiming her freedom from a lifetime of choice.

Somewhere, Gloria Steinem weeps.

While the ruling only affects certain forms of contraception provided by health care companies tied to companies who wish to file the proper paper work, the women on SCOTUS recognized the slippery slope this precedent sets. Namely Justice Ruth Bater Ginsberg who stated that the court "has ventured into a minefield."

Specific or not, no ruling can control a precedent. We've seen precedents aid progress in the gay marriage movement, beginning with Civil Unions and state recognition eventually leading to full and equal representation.

In an era of sweeping progress across America, both in LGBT rights and affordable healthcare, this could be the beginning of the extreme Right's attempt to retaliate, a step towards evangelical relevance, at least in terms of political presence. 

But it may also hurt moderate Republicans and the overall GOP. Like fringe extremes on the Left, the evangelical movement has been a black mark on the Right. Prominent Republican candidates typically dodge evangelicals despite their willingness to vote for the Right ever since Pat Robertson ran for the White House.

Even Christians have criticized Hobby Lobby for referring to itself as a "Christian business," noting its thousands of products manufactured in China where child labor and abortion abound. There is bipartisan stink around this ruling and it will undoubtedly impact voters' decisions in November, particularly women voters in both parties.

Unfortunately, the precedent has been set for corporations to deny coverage for vaccines, blood transfusions, and life saving treatments that deviate from extreme Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Mormon, even Dianetic beliefs.

Corporations are now people and the evangelicals have rolled the dice. When your boss asks that you wear a hijab because your hair offends your employer's religious beliefs, just remember, religious zealots brought this on themselves.

Philadelphia's Acropolis

By now you're likely aware that world renowned starchitect, Frank Gehry has proposed carving out about one sixth of the iconic steps leading to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a picture window. 

But media outlets around the world continue to misunderstand the significance of the wide steps, repeatedly referring to them as the "Rocky Steps" here, here, here, here and elsewhere.

While 55% of those surveyed approve of the proposal, the media is inadvertently driving art lovers to embrace the alterations by failing to point out how significant these steps were long before Rocky ever made his first run.

This isn't the first time that the art community has clashed with fans of the 1976 movie. About ten years ago, a bronze statue from Rocky III was returned to the art museum. Fans wanted it placed atop the steps while the art community wanted nothing to do with it. A compromise was reached and the statue now stands just north of the first step.

The steps have become synonymous with a movie that has nothing to do with art, and the art community has forgotten that the setting was merely chosen because of what it represents. Rocky didn't invent the "Rocky Steps," the steps inspired the character and his audience. While the statue truly is a studio prop, the steps are not a Hollywood set to be discarded or forgotten. 

The wide span of the steps are as dramatic as the building itself. A deliberate architectural element forcing visitors to overcome an obstacle before reaching our city's vast temple of art, a feat shared by those worshipping atop the Acropolis over 2000 years ago. The steps curve ever so slightly to create the same optical illusion as the steps of the Parthenon it emulates, making them look even taller than they are.

The building itself, including the steps, is one of the museum's greatest works of art.

Gehry should know this. He is, after all, an architect. His proposed window may provide grand views of a city built independently of Philadelphia's Acropolis, and those views are also available from the top of the steps. 

No one would dare allow the priceless paintings and sculptures within our temple to be altered with cluttered modernism and the same reverence needs to be applied to the work of art that holds them all. Disrupting this passage with anything would make the Philadelphia Museum of Art just another art museum, and that has nothing to do with Rocky Balboa.

Pier 68 and Beyond

Following the success of the Race Street Pier, the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation has honed in on its industrial relics much the way the Schuylkill River Waterfront Corporation did on its own banks. 

Two more piers, Pier 53 and Pier 68, have found new life as park proposals. As mentioned before, Pier 53 may house Jody Pinto's Land Buoy, an illuminated and climbable tower at the end of the dock complimenting Camden's proposed Skyview Tower.

The most recent park/pier proposal is for Pier 68 near Walmart in South Philadelphia. Don't let Walmart fool you. This pier anchors a bike and jogging trail that carries recreationalists north to Penn's Landing.

A unique feature not available at Race Street Pier will be the promotion of fishing and ecology. Despite what you may think about fishing in an urban river, it's a popular pastime along both of Philadelphia's rivers. Creating a legal venue will also provide education about fishing in the area, essentially what's safe to eat and what should be thrown back.

However, when I looked at a thumbnail of the proposed Pier 68, I confused the blue lines in the rendering with power generating windmills and for a moment, got even more excited. I immediately thought of Jennette's Pier in Nags Head, N.C. 

After Hurricane Isabel destroyed Jennette's Pier for the last time, it was replaced with a concrete pier completed in 2011, one that houses a museum, aquarium, and gift shop all powered by three windmills atop the pier.

Perhaps someday.

The unique approach the DRWC has taken in not only proactively addressing its existing assets - its abandoned piers - is proving that the Delaware Waterfront doesn't necessarily need to copy the success of the Schuylkill Banks by focusing primarily on its shores, but by reaching out atop the water. 

Detached from residents by I-95, these pier parks aren't complimenting neighborhoods as the banks of the Schuylkill does, but creating destination attractions for South Philadelphia, Pennsport, Old City, and perhaps someday, Northern Liberties and beyond.

As the trend continues - a trend not only dedicated to creating a portfolio of river top parks, but one that is truly considering the pastimes these piers have offered - we might one day see Pier 124, otherwise known as Graffiti Pier, sured up to provide a haven for aspiring street artists. 

American Heritage Trail: Spruce Street

Philadelphia is home to some of the nation's most continuous avenues of architectural heritage. Elfreth's Alley comes to mind, of course, but it's but one block in a long line extending all the way to 69th Street that provides us with examples of America's architectural history.

Philadelphia isn't the only bicentennially aged city in the country. Boston shares a similar collection of history along its curved streets that grew atop the Charles River and Boston Harbor. But William Penn's original plan for Philadelphia provides us with a linear catalog of architecture along each of its central corridors, from America's beginnings to the decades following the Great Depression. A vast amount of it remains in tact, particularly along Spruce Street.

What makes it so unique is as the city grew westward, its architecture evolved.

Developers, Edmund Macon in particular, chose to salvage what Colonial architecture could be restored throughout Society Hill. Although modern townhouses dot the street scape, nearly each block between Front Street and the Washington Square neighborhood retains examples of architecture from the era of our nation's birth. 

Westward, the buildings grow taller but with the same sensibility of its time. As you cross Broad Street and approach Rittenhouse you begin to see the city, and thusly the nation, transform. Brownstone begins to replace Colonial brick and you experience the experimental architecture afforded by the years predating the Civil War.

None of Spruce Street's blocks are more astounding than those that carry on past the Schuylkill River, where the Girards and the Drexels built towering feats of engineering, an homage to wealth of the Gilded Age.

Around 48th Street you begin to see the nation's decline. Apartment houses abound, a return to modest living following the Great Depression, but still adorned with carvings and design elements signaling the nation's reluctance to abandon the opulence of former decades. 

From the Man Full of Trouble Tavern at 2nd Street to Spruce Hill, our city's premier avenue of architectural heritage is a lesson in design any historian could only dream of. And it's right here in Philadelphia.

Block by block, one could spend a day watching the nation unfold, evolving, displaying its wealth and then crashing, only to recover and rebound. 

Almost entirely uninterrupted, you can feel the presence of each generation as the blocks climb higher. A definitive Architectural Heritage Trail, Spruce Street shows us how America transformed through its built world. 

It's nice outside. Go discover our country on Spruce Street.

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.

Hotel at Big Brothers Big Sisters Headquarters?

Once home to a film company, 238 North 13th Street is known to most Philadelphians as the former national office for Big Brothers Big Sisters, if it's known at all. 

Vacant for a few years now, the small art deco building stands less than a block from the Pennsylvania Convention Center, and as with much of the property between Vine and Race, developers are likely eyeing it for a potential hotel.

But the building is only two floors and stands on a small footprint. Yesterday, the city's Historical Commission voted to deny and unnamed developer's proposal for a tower atop the historic building. 

Howard B. Haas, a Philadelphia lawyer and prominent voice in the campaign to save the Boyd Theater's auditorium, had this to say on his Friends of the Boyd Facebook page:

Good news! Today, the Philadelphia Historical Commission's Architectural Committee unanimously recommended against allowing a hotel tower that would poorly fit in with the former Warner Brothers Film Exchange at 238 North 13th Street. It was designed in 1946 by William Howard Lee, one of our best movie theater architects and was later offices for the NFL. I wrote a letter of opposition for today's hearing. In 2007, I had assisted with the research & testified for the succesful historic designation of this lovely Art Moderne building. Thanks to the Preservation Alliance's Ben Leech & architect Rich Thom for leading the opposition.

Hopefully we won't see the Boyd's fate replay itself. Considering the building's proximity to the Convention Center and Center City itself, the property is likely too expensive to be sustained as a modest office building. 

As development tends to go when faced with the Historical Commission, the developer will probably return with a more appropriate design for its tower component. It's bound entirely by 13th Street and three smaller streets, so the only direction to add square footage is up. It's encouraging that developers are again considering the area north of the Convention Center for new hotels

Philadelphia's Growth and the Fate of Our Suburbs

Brookings Institution's William Frey recently collated census data to compare the growth of the country's 51 largest metropolitan areas, and Philadelphia is one of the 19 areas in which the city is growing faster than the suburbs.

So what, right?

Well for decades Philadelphia's population was declining. What was at one time the second largest city in the British Empire, a city that rose to more than two million residents in 1960, lost almost half a million residents in the second half of the twentieth century. That's roughly the population of Atlanta, and we've only recently begun to recover.

But what's even more astonishing than this recovery is that our urban growth is exceeding suburban growth. Cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. are experiencing the same phenomenon, but it's expected in metropolitan areas that span so far. Philadelphia is dense, even in our suburbs. 

While many in newer cities may be discovering the cities to escape a three hour commute, it seems that those in our region are returning to Philadelphia simply because they want to be here.

And why wouldn't they?

If the trend continues it might call into question the long term fate of suburbia nationwide. Most suburban areas continue to grow, some more modestly than others. But the suburban ideal is not a sustainable one. The fact that cities across the country have begun to rebound proves that even aging urban landscapes were built to last.

Densely packed neighborhoods trade publicly maintained freeways, roads, and unused green space for an infrastructure largely maintained by tenants. Walkability eases the strain on public resources. 

New Jersey, a state that has completely neglected its true urban cores, is learning this the hard way. Suburban areas benefit from an urban hub, but most efficiently when they share state taxes. Cities on the other hand are relying less and less on the suburbs. If high fuel costs drive a new flight back to the cities and the suburbs begin to struggle, poorly constructed McManions will begin to deteriorate leaving even broader gaps between residents than already exist. 

That's not pretty. Ask Phoenix.

Dead before it was finished

The lifespan of the suburban dream may have been built to fail. The first Levittowns were erected as a reactionary approach to urban ills that are vanishing, not as proactive planning. Cities have existed since the dawn of civilization and our need for dense community is a baser instinct. Compared to a trend that isn't even one century old, suburbs could easily become irrelevant.

We might not see it in this decade or even the next, but considering the effects of urban flight on our cities in the 60s and 70s, it's easy to imagine the flip side of scenarios found in dystopic thrillers like Soylent Green, Escape from New York, and Bladerunner. One where the cities aren't fortressed havens for crime, but where cities are fortressed from the crime that has retreated outside our city walls.