Pod Hotel

The hospitality industry is no joke. But it's also one that, at least for the last fifty or so years, has been steeped in the expected. That works for me. I'm more interested in the destination than the stay, so any clean bed will do.

Yet with the upcoming W Hotel and several Kimptons, it's clear that those visiting Philadelphia, or perhaps just spending a night in town, are looking for something more dynamic than the flagship name of a major national chain. 

So bring on the Pod Hotel. Occupying a vacant parcel on 19th Street and a parking lot along Ludlow, the Pod by Modus Hotels and Parkway Corporation won't win any awards for its exterior design, but it will be welcome infill for this long gaping property smack in the middle of the business district. 

While there's no shortage of entertainment in the area, one curious venue stands a few doors down from the proposed hotel's Ludlow entrance. If you think the XXX Forum Theater was gone you'd be wrong. It simply moved a few blocks to this tony address. It will be interesting to see how the hip and trendy guests of the Pod Hotel decide to interact with the sex club next door. 

East Market

With the first phase of East Market nearing completion, it's about time we starting hearing about the tenants who stand to redefine this long neglected thoroughfare. The massive project is no doubt exciting, and Iron Hill Brewery is slated to anchor part of the ground floor. 

But signage has already appeared on the prime corner location at 11th Street, and it's a SMDH moment that should make everyone scream "this is why we can't have nice things!"

Yes, that's an AT&T store. Bring on the glamour!

Bait and Switch at Jewelers Row?

Philadelphia's architecture czar, Inga Saffron, is nothing if not critical and she hasn't held back when it comes to Toll Brothers' proposed tower for historic Jewelers Row. When she referred to SLCE's rendering as a "zombie" back in February she may have been speaking about more than just the vacant aesthetic of the building, but the likelihood that the proposal is already dead. Among all parties involved - the Design Advocacy Group, the Preservation Alliance, the Historical Commission, L&I, and City Hall; not to mention numerous online journals like PhillyMag and Curbed Philly - Saffron seems to be the only one willing to sift through the mounting meta data that suggests exactly that.

Toll Brothers has already received approval from the city and returned to the drawing board more than the two required of the Design Advocacy Group, yet the site remains motionless and no timelines have been offered. Aside from readying the proper paperwork, Toll Brothers is likely assessing the profitability of the endeavor, if they ever planned to embark upon construction themselves at all. 

As Saffron pointed out, Toll Brothers has done this before. Abandoning a project that ultimately meant the demolition of the historic Society Hill Playhouse and the redevelopment of a vacant lot on Rittenhouse Square, Toll Brothers simply readied the sites for development then flipped the land for a profit. 

Until the latest rendering, Toll's tower on Jewelers Row didn't have any private balconies, one of its largest criticisms considering it is intended to be a luxury residential property. It looked more like an office building. They've since added balconies, but only nine and all pointed north, none facing Washington Square Park. 

It's becoming clear that this is less of a realistic proposal and more a marketing brochure for speculators. Of course, if Toll flips it to a developer more attune to urban architecture, and certainly more daring, this may be good for Jewelers Row. When it comes to urban development, nothing is worse for an eclectic location than a publicly traded company that traffics in the status quo. Toll Brothers isn't necessarily bad at what they do: clear-cutting farmland for bloated mini-mansions. But high-rises and skyscrapers aren't disposable and they alter our skylines ideally forever. SLCE's best rendering to date is blandly corporate, but this is characteristic for Toll Brothers. 

The firm doesn't aim at wealthy eccentrics who want to live in a work of art. They aim squarely at the upper tier of the middle class, a wide range of consumers with disposable income who like trendy sameness. They aim at consumers who shop at Whole Foods and lease BMWs. They aim for the most people with the most money. And sadly, most people don't like bold architecture or care enough about history to sacrifice amenities and luxuries. 

But flipping it to another developer is also an architectural gamble. Any firm that could afford Toll's ready-to-build site will be looking for the same exponential profit. SLCE's most recent rendering may simply be a best case scenario, one that could result in demolition for far blander, low-rise infill. A similar bait-and-switch played out on the 1100 block of Chestnut where CREI commissioned a rendering of Winka Dubbeldam's wild Unknot Tower only to flip the land for Blackney Hayes' Collins apartments, the exact kind of dull-your-senses infill we could get out of Jewelers Row.

Unfortunately, given that this probable outcome isn't a bigger source of contention suggests that all those involved in historic preservation aren't intuitively prepared for this scenario. Looking back on this and similar situations, the Preservation Alliance, Design Advocacy Group, and neighborhood organizations look foolish questioning the aesthetics of buildings developers never intended to build. Buildings are astronomical efforts, and much of that comes from just the initial bureaucracy of getting them approved. I'd be curious to hear Toll's response if someone at the Design Advocacy Group had asked if they actually intended on building this tower. 

Savvy developers have gotten good at using bureaucracy to their advantage. With far more resources at their disposal than advocacy groups, lengthy meetings and flashy renderings distract preservationists from inferring what may be happening behind the scenes. Preservationists too often wind up looking like children fussing over a drawing, while developers and their lawyers laugh their way through red tape.

Philadelphia's Preservation Crisis

Like many publicly operated organizations, the city's preservation task force has already proven itself useless. That's a chore in itself given it isn't even a year old. From HUD to the EPA, sometimes I wonder why we invest so much in publicly operated groups. Given their political nature, they shift in purpose through administrations and are often defunct byproducts of campaign promises that never fully emerge. 

There's simply no money in altruism, and like for-profit corporations that serve only Wall Street, publicly funded advocacy only subsists as political stock. 

Simply put, the investment in public preservation advocacy would be better spent on the organizations that have no vested interest in demolition and redevelopment. The very fact that private developers, publicly traded firms, and a City Council that banks political capital from redevelopment is in any way involved with the city's Historical Commission, Licenses and Inspections office, or Design Advocacy Group is a huge conflict of interest. Preservation and its impact on our urban fabric should be left exclusively to the experts trained in historic preservation with no interest in anything else, and its autonomy should be heeded. 

In nearly all realms of public life, officials defer to privately funded experts. Allowing the Historical Commission, a tag tag gang of bureaucratic flunkies, to decide what goes, often at the behest of millionaire property developers claiming economic hardship, is no different than Betsy DeVos running slipshod through our public education system. Why are we outraged by one and not the other? Both are charged with one responsibility, enacting the opposite. 

Of course granting private groups like the Preservation Alliance absolute power over historic preservation is a tough sell. There's the knee-jerk assumption that private advocacy with too much authority can run rampant over the financial realities of any municipality. But time and again, advocates - from preservationists to gun reformists - have proven themselves nothing if not compromising. Barring the most storied of historical sites, only facades command preservation in Philadelphia (though the loss of the Boyd Theater's auditorium may, hopefully, challenge this caveat). 

The preservation crisis in Philadelphia can't be understated. Arguably as historic as Boston but considerably poorer, a recent influx of residents, mostly young or empty nested, has overtaken the priorities of our schools and our beleaguered history. In the decades since the New Deal era, Philadelphia's history survived in a preserved decay, uncataloged and untouched by the happenstance of neglect and a lack of development. Enticed by unfamiliar growth for the first time in nearly a century, City Hall and the campaigns of all those within have been fixated on the city's transformation, more often than not to the detriment of our history.

Charged with the task of organizing that history, private groups are so bogged down with the need for proposed landmarks threatened by development that only the most notable find a home on their lists. And even then, it's meaningless when the Historical Commission is so liberal with granting hardships to developers who simply don't want to salvage a portion of a facade. Meanwhile, incidental row homes built to last forever are routinely swapped out, blocks clear-cut, for new construction chock full of amenities, aimed at transplants with no concern for history, constructed to last maybe a few decades. 

When America's economy finally began to rebound from the Great Depression in the 1980s, it was through a culture of disposability. Everything from phones to cars to homes are designed to be temporary, and it's become our biggest enemy. Preservationists haven't been able to recon with the profitable nature of development itself, acting on the blind assumption that most people would like to save old buildings, and sacrifice luxury and convenience to do so. The only way they can move past this, and possibly be expected to professionally interact with and influence the very nature of our disposable culture is by granting them the autonomy and authority to do what they are academically prepared for: protecting our history in spite of developers equally vested in profitably maximizing every square inch.

City Hall can't be expected to do this, and maybe we shouldn't want it to. American culture, as much as our fickle desire for fast fashion housing, is driven by individualistic civic engagement. Maybe it's time we hand the reigns of preservation power over to those who actually care about it. 

Amazon's HQ2 Pageant

When Amazon released the "short list" for its second headquarters, I was expecting a list that was, well, short. Instead, Amazon released something that looks more like a BuzzFeed listicle of America's twenty most popular cities. And that's probably exactly what it was.

Whether Amazon knew it going into this campaign, it's clearly become a lucrative contest, one that has every major newspaper in North America singing praise of the trillion dollar beast. Of course it's not a decision to be made lightly, but considering Amazon's reputable speed of service, it's one that certainly could have been made by now, and maybe already has. Yet by drawing it out for another year, memberships will continue to surge out of cities that hope to be chosen, the press will continue to freely advertise Amazon with puff pieces careful not to damage their cities' odds, and maybe Bezos can squeeze a few more incentives out of the few cities unaware that they're already top contenders. 

Whatever is going on in downtown Seattle's hive mind, I think that Philadelphia is a top choice for Amazon's HQ2. I say that with no bias, because personally I don't want them here. Philadelphia's place in the race is evident to anyone who lives here, but not so much beyond the northeast corridor. Our public transportation is as expansive as any city between D.C., New York, and Chicago, in many cases more so. 30th Street Station's access to other cities is second only to Manhattan. Our universities are keeping more and more graduates in town, which will only grow with Amazon's career opportunities and internships. And above all, our housing stock is considerably cheap.

Sure, statisticians loves to run means and averages that show property values are on the rise, and that's great, But with Detroit out of the race, few cities of our size, if any, can offer a habitable home for $50,000 or a decent one for $150,000. Normally slums aren't an upside, and that was the fallible conclusion for much of the 20th Century. But when adventurous Gen Xers began working their way back into our cities, paving the way for Millennials to return in hoards, slums have merely become opportunity. To developers, neighborhoods like Kensington and Harrowgate are only as bad as the people who live there. To 50,000 new Amazon employees who know nothing of the city's baggage, or simply don't care, these places are real estate goldmines along the trendy Market-Frankford line. 

Many have speculated that the D.C. suburbs, namely Northern Virginia, will likely emerge as the ultimate winner of Miss Amazon's crown. The Dulles Corridor has been tech heavy since the early days of AOL and MCI, and Metro's new Silver Line connects it to downtown D.C. through the semi-urban enclaves of Arlington and Tysons Corner's growing skyline. While that might sell a location to a tech company like Oracle, Amazon isn't one of many. When AOL moved into an old Boeing office at the end of the Dulles toll road, it was surrounded by farmland. At the time, it ruled the tech sector like Google and Amazon do today, and it defined the region the way Microsoft defined Redmond, WA.

Amazon undoubtedly wants a location with talent, but short of technology vacuums like West Virginia or Northern Alaska, today's tech talent isn't hard to find. What Northern Virginia provides are established applicants with lengthy resumes, and if I know one thing as a fifteen year veteran of the industry, it's that tech companies are willing to pay threefold for inexperienced college graduates that can be groomed into a company's unique corporate culture. 

Considering we're talking about an industry that boomed a short twenty years ago, what's an established technology region even mean to a company like Amazon anyway? They could plop HQ2 down in the worst part of Camden, NJ or the middle of the Ozarks, and they're going to define that place exactly how they want.

In that regard, Philadelphia has what all cities have...plus easy access to an ocean that's warm enough to swim in. Compared to other areas on the list - costly Northern Virginia, New York, and Boston, isolated southern cities, and Denver's redundancy - Philadelphia has more pros than cons. Our only real cons are our unions and historic reputation for fucking things up. If Amazon is willing to weather our notoriously frustrating unions throughout construction, the only thing it has to look past is what few ever do: recognizing that "Philadelphia isn't as bad as Philadelphians say it is." Considering Amazon decided to set up shop in an iffy part of downtown Seattle instead of taking the traditional route out to Redmond, I think they're savvy, and unique, enough to see Philadelphia for what it actually has to offer.

All that said, I'd rather Amazon go anywhere but Philadelphia. Sure, it would be exciting to see what they build and how the city evolves. But the incentives Amazon receives will set a precedent for kickbacks that is already painfully apparent to corporations dancing around Philadelphia. I wonder how many developers have shelved plans for Philadelphia, waiting to see how Amazon's decision plays out, waiting to see how many more handouts they'll be able to demand in its wake. 

This city has been a whore in Colonial drag for the last forty years, and by handing out a few million here and there to developers who do nothing but demolish landmarks under the pretense that they might someday build something better than a parking lot, the pimps in City Hall aren't even trying to be discreet. What's the next developer or corporation going to want knowing Amazon got, say, $1B or more? 50,000 new jobs sounds great, and maybe the investment seems sound, but not if we're paying for those jobs and one company's tax breaks for the next ten or twenty years. Hell, by the time the first ordinary Philadelphian reaps the benefits of Amazon's theoretical HQ2, the Technological Revolution may have collapsed and it could be 1929 all over again.

But that's where things get really icky, not just in Philadelphia, but in all cities competing for a prize that could be as laboriously fruitless as winning the Olympics. Philadelphia hasn't even disclosed its offer to Amazon, and though it will likely come out at some point, it's being kept under wraps for one or two reasons: It's unrealistically expensive, and in the likely event that we aren't chosen, residents will begin questioning why even a fraction of such a bloated amount can't be put towards our existing infrastructure. How greedy we are to expect our elected officials take care of their own citizens' needs with found money apparently available to a trillion dollar conglomerate three thousand miles away? Speaking even more broadly, Amazon's corporate pageant has driven a rift in a once united country, pitting American cities against one another as if we are embroiled in an economic war. 

Historically, we're bribing a 19th Century robber baron to build a train station or a port, something that will never be appreciated by the masses until it's an architectural relic seventy years later, and a civics lesson in economic ethics. But that's exactly what this contest signals, and why it should be more disconcerting than it is. Whether Amazon winds up here or Northern Virginia, history is repeating itself. And between Amazon, Google, Tesla, Comcast, etc., etc., etc., we are all doomed to repeat it. But we're so caught up in the pageantry of it all, we can't see what awaits us.

Graffiti Pier Can't Last, and That's Exactly Why We Love It

Allie Volpe at Curbed wrote a wonderful piece about Graffiti Pier and the allure that may soon escape us. Of course, the fact that Graffiti Pier is being written about in the mainstream media is perhaps proof that its allure will not endure. The fate of the space, properly named Pier 18, has been mentioned in more than passing by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation. It's included in the master plan for the riverfront and the Director of Communications, Emma Fried-Cassorla, has mentioned that the DRWC plans to incorporate the pier's popular namesake into that plan, in some way.

Creating a legal space for ongoing graffiti wouldn't be unheard of. The Writerz Blok in San Diego was the first park of its kind and there are other similar spaces throughout the country. Considering Philadelphia's proliferation of street art, it makes sense. In North Philadelphia, at 5th and Cecil B. Moore stands an ever changing wall of some of the city's most astounding graffiti. Passing by one afternoon to shoot photos, I ran into the wall's owner who was lamenting over the "shit job" an artist had done overnight. In the background, in broad daylight, a man kneeled down surrounded by paint cans, toiling away on something fresh. "I hope it's better than this shit," the owner said, pointing to a hackneyed series of silver smiley faces on a shiny, solid black background.

He was busy so he didn't linger long. His attitude towards the graffiti seemed more resignation than pride. If artists are going to continue to tag his wall day after day, it might as well look cool. After all, it's just a concrete wall. The owner is clearly more interested in the its physical purpose than what it looks like.

5th and Cecil B. Moore falls somewhere between what Graffiti Pier is and what it could become: a safe, publicly maintained, organized art space. But the graffiti at Pier 18 is only part of its allure, and what attracts photographers, explorers, and outsider tourism is what attracts graffiti artists. It is a brutal, crumbling hulk of an industrial past few can even remember. We're drawn to Graffiti Pier for the same reason we're attracted to the Reading Viaduct, the CSS tracks under Pennsylvania Avenue, and traipse through the woods to find the charred remains of The Cliffs Mansion in Fairmount Park.

Sure, there's something exciting about exploring what's off limits, telling weary friends and Instagram followers we climbed something we shouldn't. But there's more than that. Like wilderness voyagers who find solace in the forest, urban explorers find something the same in nature's reclamation of our greatest feats of engineering.

After Eastern State Penitentiary closed, numerous ideas were floated for its redevelopment, from parking to total restoration. What preservationists settled on was something unique, to preserve much of it in its decayed state and safely allow tourists to explore on their own. But Eastern State Penitentiary is as much a product of its era of preservation as it is its storied history. When it opened its doors to hard hatted visitors in the 1990s, urban decay was as much a part of the urban experience as taxes and traffic. Places like the Reading Viaduct and Eastern State weren't white elephants to be endured, they were simply expected. 

It's from this era where much of our fascination stems. From the New Deal to the Oil Crisis, American cities are a mystery to anyone under 40. You can scour the internet and find countless photographs of Philadelphia in its heyday of the Industrial Revolution, but you'll find few of interest between the late '40s and early '80s. Philadelphia was filthy, blighted, and covered with the dust of constant construction and demolition. Places like Graffiti Pier are more than evolving art galleries, they're places where we can experience an era that many didn't bother to photograph.

Sanitizing all of that has been happening since the 1980s, but those more interested in the allure of our forgotten past flock to these places because they allow us to imagine a built environment few ever documented. Change is inevitable, and preservation of that ideal impossible. Several piers have been transformed into parks, the Reading Viaduct is undergoing the same fate, and if the economy continues to bring more residents to the city, Graffiti Pier will lose its allure, either as a museum to graffiti or in total demolition. You can't fight it anymore than you can bring back the past. Even in the midcentury, these spaces were fleeting, constantly under the threat of demolition and transformation. 

I wish Philadelphia still looked like it did when I moved here in 2004, that the Reading Viaduct still ran trains through Callowhill as it did in the 1970s, and that Graffiti Pier would never change. But what makes these places so alluring, more than anything, is their complete lack of permanence. The only way to make time stand still is to take plenty of pictures. I wish I'd taken more photos in the 1980s and '90s, even when I finally moved to Philadelphia. They'll be another Graffiti Pier, and the beasts we build today will someday crumble and crack, attracting another generation to the history we're creating right now. Nothing lasts forever, and that's exactly what makes Graffiti Pier, and cities, so special.

Boredom and the Two Towers

When Sandy Smith at PhillyMag.com dubbed Cecil Baker a "starchitect," I was taken a bit back. Not necessarily because it was printed, Philadelphia Magazine loves touting our own. Rather because Sandy Smith is so well versed in Philadelphia's history, particularly our architectural heritage, that it seemed odd to pair Baker next to our revered starchitects of yesteryear: Frank Furness, Willis G. Hale, William Decker, Wilson Eyre, Samuel Sloan...you get the idea. 

More so, Cecil Baker was the expert consulting on the article's primary point: "How Philly Can Avoid a Skyline of Bland Boxy High-Rises." Yet Cecil Baker's most recent, notable contributions to Center City's skyline aren't exactly avant garde works of art. Comparable cities like Chicago and Miami have erected Zaha Hadid's skysrcapers, Milwaukee has a Santiago Calatrava, and Seattle's main library was designed by Rem Koolhaas. Sure, we've got Lord Norman Foster's CITC rising, a couple Cesar Pellis, and Frank Gehry futzing around the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But when it comes to in-house architects and local firms, Cecil Baker's reputation as a near-starchitect has more to do with his proliferation than it does any sort of signature style.

To his credit, Baker does give our daring architects their own due, noting Interface Studio, Erdy-McHenry, DIGSAU, Tim McDonald, MGA Partners, and Qb3, any of which might be better equipped to comment on the threat of potentially boring, mid-rise infill. Cecil Baker's latest standouts are fine buildings, and it might be unfair to call them "bland" or "boxy." One Riverside, despite the unfinished appearance of its roofline (I don't know why he didn't finish the top floor with glass), complements its surroundings much better than neighborhood groups had warned. Likewise, 500 Walnut, nearing completion, doesn't distract from its historic surroundings. In fact, the east wall angles away from Walnut Street deliberately to keep its presence in photos of Independence Hall to a minimum. 

Both towers try to blend seamlessly into their backgrounds and surroundings. But that is exactly what keeps Cecil Baker from being a starchitect. 500 Walnut's neighboring buildings are far from unobtrusive. Next-door, a Brutalist tower flanks an Egyptian Revival facade. At the west end of the block, a classical office building flexes its marble muscle. None of these buildings, nor Independence Hall itself, are exercises in understatement. They're products of their eras designed to send a specific message, each a piece of the architectural anthropology of our city and nation. 

What does Cecil Baker have to say?

Such diluted lack of panache is more excusable at One Riverside, along the Schuylkill Banks where neighbors demanded the built environment not encroach into recreational park space. But across from Independence Hall, long the site of commerce and construction, 500 Walnut's lack of prowess is distracting where it's designed to disappear into the sky. 500 Walnut makes its block look incomplete, unfinished, like the roofline of One Riverside. 

This deliberate lack of presence is far from exclusive to Cecil Baker. In fact, it's become incredibly common. BLT's East Market is designed to pay homage to the famed PSFS Building across the street. While BLT breaks up the monotony of East Market's super-block by varying the designs of both towers and the renovated Family Court building, the southwest tower is set back atop a curved podium that reflects the PSFS Building itself. This respects and retains the views of the PSFS Building, and the curved wall's homage is commendable, but when concessions trend into how a design will be indefinitely perceived, we lose the sense of confidence that once dominated the field of architecture.

A stone's throw from Baker's 500 Walnut are I. M. Pei's Society Hill Towers. Now a star amongst meager planets, Pei boldly redefined Society Hill by starkly breaking from the neighborhood's recreated Colonial norm. To this day, Society Hill Towers are both adored and abhorred, but they generate conversation, even from passersby who don't care to know anything about architecture. That's why I. M. Pei is featured prominently in architectural textbooks. It's hard to imagine anything designed by Cecil Baker finding its way into the classroom, but it's not hard to imagine how unsatisfying Society Hill Towers would be had an architect like Baker been commissioned for I. M. Pei's project. 

When Philadelphia Magazine set out to uncover how to avoid becoming a city of "Bland, Boxy High-Rises," Smith went to a firm building just that. That's not to say Baker has designed anything bad. He didn't design Symphony House. But at least at Symphony House, BLT made a statement with a classical design, unfortunately undermined with cheap materials and construction. At Symphony House, Carl Dranoff wasn't just building a tower to sell units, he and BLT were attempting to build a legacy. And that's the exact problem with market rate architects like Cecil Baker, at least where design is concerned. Like most projects today, their buildings are designed solely with profit in mind, and that means skirting the negative press of rogue artistry. They design buildings cram packed with amenities without risking too much visibility. 

The most sellable design lands firmly in the status quo. If we want to avoid a skyline of "Bland, Boxy High-Rises," our most prolific architects need to dare to define something new, not just build what moves the most units. More importantly, we need developers willing to hire firms that do just that - firms like Erdy-McHenry and Qb3 - and not just firms that seem safe. The "Bland, Boxy" skyline will become the urban answer to cul de sacs full of McMansions if developers, and their consumers, aren't willing to embrace the truly avant garde, even the wacky. 

Artistic innovation happens and new styles are being developed - in Manhattan, Dubai, Beijing, and London - but as Philadelphia becomes more of a bedroom community for out-priced New Yorkers and Washingtonians, our residents are looking at our skyline with less of a sense of pride and more pragmatism. That's boring. We gave architecture history Louis Kahn and Edmund Bacon. Are we winding down to a point of complacency, or are we waiting for the next homegrown starchitect to force us to demand more.