With new proposals north, south, east, and west, Philadelphia is experience a new building boom. And given the economy of 2014, the exciting renderings being passed around the blogosphere seem far more realistic than they did a decade ago.
Today, Mayor Nutter announced two new projects for the 1600 block of Vine Street including a 32 story apartment tower designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and a Mormon Family History and Community Center. Next to the upcoming Mormon Temple at 17th and Vine, this stretch could easily find itself dubbed Mormon Row. Mormontown? Call it what you want, Property Reserve Inc.'s development stands (tall) to anchor a renewed grand boulevard on Vine Street which, despite the Vine Street Expressway, remains relatively underutilized.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has no shortage of funds and have proven to work extremely well with the city's notoriously difficult unions, so assuming the market for 258 luxury rental units with unparalleled views of the city's skyline remains in tact, this could easily happen. With Tower Place, a potential hotel or residential project at the Inquirer Building, Chinatown's Eastern Tower, and Callowhill's burgeoning Loft District, the urban space north of Vine is going to look dramatically different in the next ten years.
Caryn Kunkle took to Change.org with a dramatic proposal to reclaim the forlorn Divine Lorraine Hotel and transform it into a Contemporary Art Museum. While she makes a valid case for the need to save the landmark historic site, Change.org allows armchair activists to blow off steam without an ounce of fact checking. I strongly doubt her claim that Philadelphia makes "more money from the arts than sports, medicine or retail." I'm not sure how she qualifies "the arts," but considering the four professional sports teams within the city limits, plus university athletics, or GSK alone, banking on the arts as Philadelphia's winning income is a stretch.
Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with a lack of investment in the arts, and I have since watching my high school water color paints take a backseat to Turner Ashby football.
The problem with these online petitions, particularly when applied to something local, asking for something niche, is they offer false hope to a few motivated individuals instead of practical solutions to real problems. They're a distraction, and developers sitting on property love it.
What has happened to the Divine Miss L. is a tragedy, one that should be illegal. But it's not. Even if Change.org succeeded in driving the city to execute imminent domain over the Divine Lorraine, as Kunkle suggests, it would find itself in a costly lawsuit with a very wealthy developer, one who likely has more disposable income than the city itself. Using online petitions to gather signatures only gathers signatures from the laziest of the lazy.
That's not to say grassroots campaigns can't be used to crowd source efforts to save sites like the Divine Lorraine, but grassroots campaigns don't end at the laptop. If you want to use the internet to do something realistic on behalf of this decomposing relic, gather volunteers and cash to board up the building and save it from the elements before L&I orders Blumenfeld to demolish it.
thisoldcity.com has some European-esque ideas for transforming some of Philadelphia's narrow Center City streets (many cities would call them alleys) into designated bike-mostly streets. It's an interesting proposal. After all, Philadelphia is fast becoming America's most bike-accommodating town. I refuse to say "bike-friendly." If you're in your invincible twenties or simply a hipster without a care, you probably ride your bike around Center City. Someone is using the hundreds of miles of new bike lanes.
However it's anything but friendly. Every time I ponder taking my bike to the street I hear some Yellow Tag honking his horn from five blocks away. It's like they smell me. Drivers barrel through bike lanes, perturbed that someone dare bike to the 7-11. Cyclists can be just as ruthless. I have a car and when I drive (rarely), I carefully traverse these slow moving obstacles, only to be met with a glare or a choice finger for daring to shift into second. Some places can't be reached by bike, and sometimes I like going there.
It's understandable. The relationship between cyclists and motorists in Philadelphia is old and dysfunctional. Despite efforts to make the city a destination for cyclists, the shared hatred is already established. I bike, and in the summer I bike a lot...for recreation. Therefore I walk by bike to the Art Museum and bike the Schuylkill River Trail. I wouldn't dare take on a surface street in South Philadelphia where cars seem to outnumber houses three to one and "land yacht" isn't an antiquated term, or worse, to West Philadelphia where the tolerated speed limit in a 25MPH zone is about 60.
So what if Center City had cross streets designated for biking? Could Juniper be closed to traffic, perhaps excusing delivery trucks and parking garage access? It probably could. As thisoldcity points out, these streets are devoid of street parking. They're too narrow and burdened with stop signs to use to quickly motor uptown. Restricting these streets to limited traffic in lieu of cyclists would have a minimal impact on drivers.
But then why aren't they already bastions of bikers? Instead of choosing the bike lanes on the 12th and 13th speedways where harried commuters treat bikers like points in a video game, why don't cyclists use easy, breezy Juniper? It's certainly safer to traverse Center City through our enumerable, tiny side streets, conveniently available to bike throughout Center City. If Juniper and other small streets were closed to motor vehicles, would cyclists choose to use them if they don't already?
Of course this isn't the first proposed closure of Center City's quaint side streets. Drury Street is already lined with narrow sidewalk tables, and Camac Street is lined with taverns. Closing these streets to traffic and improving the lighting would allow for expanded outdoor seating that could be integrated in tandem with slow moving bike lanes. With cafes, restaurants, and bars already cornered up to Juniper Street at numerous intersections, and the potential redevelopment of the Hale Building at Chestnut, businesses could be encouraged to open facing a pedestrian and bike promenade on a newly lit and lushly landscaped Juniper.
Check out Eric Blumenfeld's plan for a new riverfront development he calls "an entire city" on the Delaware. With an agreement to develop twenty acres of the Delaware River around Washington Avenue, Blumenfeld regailed the visions of his father, the late developer Jack Blumenfeld, of changing times and urban needs, putting residents where they work and play, essentially eliminating a lengthy commute to King of Prussia and Cherry Hill.
It's a lofty goal but one he's capable of. With Center City's real estate spilling over onto the Schuylkill Banks, even to the west banks of the Schuylkill, Society Hill's finely scaled, historic, and desirable real estate has little room to grow. With other cities bridging the highway gaps between their urban core and their rivers (think Seattle), the Delaware River remains detached. Although we've routinely seen pipe dreams pitched at waterfront parks and grassy attractions, we've seen little proposals that put people on the river, and more importantly, get people spending money on the river.
While the current zoning only allows 200 feet, it's not hard to imagine change coming with a promising proposal, if more than 200 feet would even be necessary. Twenty acres is a lot of land when it comes to urban space. While no renderings have been released, it's amazing to imagine Blumenfeld's "new city" on the Delaware redefining the waterfront and our city's skyline.
Three state officials have endorsed Market8 as the city's next casino. Michael O'Brien, John Taylor, and Mark Squilla considered several presentations and decided that Market8's Market East location presented the best economic possibilities.
Indeed Market8's Center City address could impact the surrounding area, and if it's done well, could impact it positively. Certainly compared to isolated proposals similar to SugarHouse and Harrah's, Market8 has the opportunity to integrate into the fabric of the city. Even with SugarHouse's forgotten hotel tower promises, it was always an island venue with poor walkability. It benefits the city in the tax it generates for the state, and nothing more.
Unfortunately this is what the casino opposition wanted when they finally ceded its inevitability, a flashy suburban center as easily ignored as a thoughtless strip mall. But we shouldn't discount the opposition camp completely. Though they seem to have lost some steam in the last few years, what SugarHouse has become and how it continues to evolve, proves some of the opposition's arguments against casinos and shows us where the potential ills in the Market8 proposal lie.
It's easy to look at bland proposals for "another SugarHouse," even Xfinity's Sports Complex proposed casino, then turn to Market8 and see something flashy in a worn part of town, a neighborhood that needs this shot of adrenaline. But things too good to be true are too easy to see.
Remove Market8's exciting hotel tower and it's SugarHouse without a parking lot. If we've learned anything in Philadelphia, not just from casinos, it's that phased development is a developer's route to a permit. Once Market8 gets the green light, there is little stopping its team from offering us the lowest common denominator.
What's worse than an empty Gallery at Market East? A windowless gaming parlor across the street? It could be. Parx, SugarHouse, and Harrah's, their crowds caravan to the regions of nothingness to gamble and nothing more. If Market8 finagles its way out of the hotel component, isolated gaming will be squatting on valuable real estate. Of course it's hard to view the Disney Hole as a valuable chunk of land, but in five years we could be cursing ourselves for allowing it to happen, complaining that Market8's unsightly slot barn is just another Gallery.
It may be an obstacle difficult to overcome. The state's relationship with casinos is anything but dynamic, which is how they land in barren wastelands and suburbia. Oddly this is one thing Detroit has managed to do right, at least relatively. MGM Grand and Greektown Casino both house large hotel towers, and Greektown Casino stands integrated in one of the struggling city's most thriving neighborhoods.
Unless our state gaming commission has an epiphany and considers a casino license a means to offer more than gambling, much more, any casino in the state stands to be exactly the same no matter where it's dropped.
Hidden City's Sam Robertson posted a very detailed article on Philadelphia's 160 years of consolidation. I'll let you read it yourself as his research delves into all of the problems within Philadelphia County leading up to the Philadelphia Consolidation Act of 1854. What struck me most about the article and Philadelphia's history of consolidation, extends well beyond Philadelphia, in particular, how much consolidation has benefited Philadelphia over similarly sized, newer cities.
Last week an inch of snow brought Atlanta to a standstill. Despite jokes surrounding Southerner's inability to drive in snow, including a graphic depicting the Walking Dead's poster of the Atlanta skyline renamed "One Inch of Snow," Politico's Rebecca Burns told a more realistic story in her article, "The Day We Lost Atlanta."
Consolidation wasn't unique to Philadelphia. By the mid 19th Century, America's corporate powerhouses had become squallor of disease and crime. Consolidation was the only means to get services, fire, police, and heath care to the father reaches of the metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. This helped our nation's oldest cities cohesively expand public transportation routes, and successfully implement the railroads we still use today.
Meanwhile in the South, prior to the Civil War, the rural culture reigned supreme. While the South's most powerful lived far from their region's poorest, the North's wealthiest lived in the congested urban cores and were forced to face its poverty on its sidewalks.
Without consolidation, Philadelphia's wealthiest captains of industry had no way to conveniently flee to West Philadelphia and the Main Line, and certainly, consolidation helped develop the palatial estates outside our urban cores.
Not only was consolidation never embraced by the South, but the South's most influential cities were obliterated by the Civil War. And since reconstruction largely ignored consolidation, by the time cities like Atlanta and Birmingham began to recover, consolidation was an antiquated ideal synonymous with railroads.
As those regions continued to grow into competitive cities, some as large as Philadelphia's metropolitan area, millions of residents found themselves residing side by side, with hundreds of mayors, even more city council members, all fighting over how best to develop a cohesive city.
We know this ill well enough when Philadelphia tries to pen a deal with Montgomery County or New Jersey, but in cities like Atlanta or Miami, with populations a third the size of Philadelphia, they're faced with opposing suburban municipalities that view themselves equal or more influential than the area's urban core. That's how you wind up with light rails meant to span the metropolitan areas ending at the county line, and highways frozen in an inch of snow.
Given partisan politics and Red States' attitude towards consolidating any government entities, it's a problem that won't likely end soon. Thankfully for them, it doesn't snow often.
Back in October, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture announced the winners of the Steel Design Student Competition and not surprisingly, in the Building to Bridge category, local Philadelphia University students took to the Reading Viaduct with Stream_Line.
Stream_Line gracefully extends the Vine Street stump of the Reading Viaduct across the Vine Street Expressway to the sidewalk on the southern side of the street.
Not content with simply curving its way across the canyon with a pedestrian bridge, students Garrow, Martin, and Shenk housed exhibition space and other resources inside the structure itself.
With the neighborhood's investment in local artists, it's easy to imagine gallery space illuminated high above the expressway. Perhaps more importantly, Stream_Line shows us how to architecturally interact with our highways without hiding them under concrete and parks.
