Skyline Online

Moving over to Philly.com

2009-07-17T12:53:00.003-04:00

Starting today, my blog moves to Philly.com's main blog site, which should make it easier to find. Wish me luck with the new posting format - It's the blog of 10,000 steps.

You should be able to find it here:

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/changing-skyline/51027252.html

You can also read my regular Friday newspaper column on-line here:

Please write me at isaffron@phillynews.com if you run into problems.

Out of the Pool: It's not just about race

2009-07-10T12:49:00.006-04:00

If there was ever a story to push Code Red on our cultural buttons, it's the news that a private swim club in posh, suburban Huntington Valley (photo) decided to boot out a group of Northeast Philadelphia summer campers because of their race. This troubling story plays into several other narratives, and race is only the beginning of it.

It's worth remembering why the summer camp, Creative Steps, Inc., contracted with the Huntington Valley Swim Club in the first place. The answer, of course, is that Philadelphia was only able to open a token number of its public pools this summer because of the nation's devastating financial crisis, which has hit cities especially hard. The reduction in pool operations is just one more example of how America's fifth biggest metropolis is unable to provide its citizens with the sort of quality-of-life amenities that suburban dwellers take for granted. Not that anyone would have ever confused Philadelphia's no-frill public pools with those lush suburban oases like Huntington Valley, where the Olympic-size basins are surrounded by lawns and shade trees.

Inferior as they were, Philadelphia pools at least gave urban kids a small sense of what a normal, lazy summer is supposed to be like - the flapping around in the water, the pool fights, the shivering, the rush for the towel after your lips turn blue, the warmth of the sun. Now, without a neighborhood pool to cool off in, city kids have one more way to feel cut off from the mainstream of American life. I can't help wondering why the Nutter Administration didn't lease the city pools to private operators this summer People would have had to pay to use them, but the price could have been subsidized for the poorest of the poor, and the pools would have stayed open. Lots of suburban residents pay a fee to use their town pools.

But the fact is, it's gotten to the point where if you're an urban resident - black, brown or white, it really doesn't matter - you just accept it as your fate that your services won't be as good as your suburban neighbors. In the last few months, we've seen our firehouses closed, our park programs suspended, our branch libraries threatened and their hours reduced. The city has slashed funding for our great cultural institutions and for our beloved parades, which are so much at the core of our Philadelphia identity. It' not that suburban towns haven't suffered, too. It's just that most have a lot more resilience than the city, not to mention private resources. In places like Philadelphia, public amenities are often the only amenities.

Perhaps because this crisis has been so fast and deep, the long-standing inequities between city and suburban life stand out more sharply than before. Cities like Philadelphia bear huge cost burdens than the suburbs don't have to worry about. They spent a significant proportion of their revenue trying to deal with collateral costs of poverty, which leaves them with less and less for general municipal services. Meanwhile, suburbanites get to play for free in Fairmount Park which the city bankrolls. They file civil cases in Philadelphia law courts, which the city funds. They ride SEPTA, which receives its largest contribution from the city (And, remember, suburban risders pay the same fare for a long bus ride as city riders do for a short one).

So no wonder we're outraged when Philly kids pay their own hard-earned money to use suburban pools and then get thrown out. Even if the pool club's actions weren't racist, we know something is very wrong when there are some towns with big beautiful pools and others with none at all.

Rage Against the Dying of the Street Lights

2009-07-10T10:32:00.005-04:00

This week, Changing Skyline goes into that good night and finds some nice lights. For an alternative point of view, take a look at this blog post. Only in University city!

By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic

The right lighting does wonders for an old city like Philadelphia. Just look at Baltimore Avenue, where a column of new street lamps is positioned among the fledgling sidewalk restaurants and secondhand shops. Come nightfall, the aspiring hipster hangout is dusted with a fairy glow that makes even the vacant storefronts look good.

Baltimore Avenue is the latest of Philadelphia's traditional shopping streets to win the battle with the automobile by ripping out the harsh highway cobra lights and replacing them with the cozy luster of pedestrian-scaled sidewalk lamps. The University City District, which raised $1.1 million to relight two blocks of the avenue between 48th and 50th Streets, staged a party last month to celebrate. Mayor Nutter even came to cut the ribbon.

Neighborhoods all over Philadelphia would love to get some of that Baltimore Avenue glow. And why not? Sidewalk lights have been shown to reduce crime, raise property values, and make an evening stroll more romantic. There's a reason Gene Kelly didn't sing in the rain under the yellow glare of a sodium-vapor cobra light.

But in these hard times, it's not getting any easier for neighborhoods to rage against the darkness. The city has always been ambivalent about giving up its cobra lights, which came into wide use with the automobile, and cast their functional blaze primarily on the street, rather than the sidewalk.

When the city's commercial districts first began to demand better light in the mid-1990s, City Hall struck a compromise. If the neighborhood raised the money to buy pedestrian fixtures, it would pick up the tab for electricity and maintenance. Now, it appears the Streets Department is reconsidering the bargain because of the current city budget crisis.

Mt. Airy USA, the nonprofit that is helping to revive the retail core of Germantown Avenue, was all set to start work on a $3.5 million lighting and streetscaping project when its director, Farah Jimenez, said she was told the city might not pay the future electric bills. Those installation funds were hard-earned and include, ironically, $500,000 from the city. Jimenez said it was one thing for a group like Mt. Airy USA to tap into government and foundation funding programs to purchase lights - and quite another to take on a long-term financial obligation. "We're a small, business-improvement district, with a tiny budget," she explained. "We feel like these lights are for the public good." And besides, she added, the city is already paying to keep the cobra lights on.

Her argument may be popular in the neighborhoods, but not necessarily in City Hall, where pedestrian lights are still often referred to dismissively as "decorative lights." Mt. Airy USA intends to go ahead with the work anyway. To be fair, the city's costs go up when pedestrian standards are installed, because they are spaced more closely than cobras, so there are more poles per block. Joseph M. Doyle, the city's top lighting engineer, estimates that a block of pedestrian lights costs two to three times more to maintain than cobra lights.
But in a citywide street-lighting budget of $14 million, how much extra can a few selected commercial corridors add to the electric bill?

Doyle said there has been no formal decision to cut off groups like Mt. Airy USA. The city has also vowed to support neighborhoods where pedestrian lights are in place, like Baltimore Avenue. But, Doyle added, "the costs are rising, and this is a time in which we're having difficulties with rising costs." Like the proposed library closures, which were later rescinded, it could be another instance where the city administration sacrifices the long-term health of its neighborhoods for meager short-term savings.

The Center City District's Paul R. Levy, whose group was the first to install pedestrian fixtures on a wide scale, believes in the power of light, and says the changeover from cobras did more to improve the fortunes of downtown than almost any of the organization's other initiatives. Since the CCD installed the first batch of acorn-shaped pedestrian globes - called brown rounds - in 1996, it has lined Center City's sidewalks with 2,100 fixtures. "This, to me, was about reclaiming the evening and the nighttime economy," Levy explained. "In the mid-'90s, Center City was a 9-to-5 place." Without a doubt, taxes from new businesses and restaurants have more than paid for the extra costs of maintaining the pedestrian standards.

You can argue about the design chosen by the CCD, which has since become the default style for neighborhood commercial districts. But those oval globes are inoffensive and blend well with the city's red-brick neighborhoods. The occasional trailblazer, like Manayunk, has opted for a modern design. South Street ordered the CCD lights, but had them painted red, presumably to evoke a festive boardwalk feeling.

More of a concern is when neighborhoods blind pedestrians with too many lights. Sometimes, the city insists on retaining its cobras even after the pedestrian standards go in. Finding the right light levels is an art as much as a science. Another problem is the gloom that shrouds some key blocks. You would think that Walnut Street from Front to Sixth Streets would be a prime candidate for pedestrian standards, but it's a black hole of darkness because the stretch isn't under the CCD's jurisdiction. Old City, too, has never pursued pedestrian lights. City Hall hasn't picked up the slack.

Too bad. The proper amount of light has always helped us find our way through the dark night. But increasingly, those pedestrian standards also sustain us through dark times.

One Small Step for the Delaware Waterfront

2009-06-26T17:00:00.003-04:00

Today's column takes us down to the river.

By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic

Anyone who still believes that nothing changes in Philadelphia should have attended last week's Battle of the Architects at Festival Pier on the Delaware waterfront. The public event pitted four top landscape-design firms against one another for a chance to build a city park on a wildly overgrown finger pier at the foot of Race Street.

Two things about the evening are worth noting: It was clear that any of the shortlisted firms would do a first-rate job at Pier 11. And not one had gotten this far in the running by making a campaign contribution.

Serious juried design competitions are held in cities all the time, but it's been too long since Philadelphia sponsored one of this caliber. Think back to the last time the city held a contest for one of its Delaware waterfront properties.

The year was 2002. The site, the ill-starred Penn's Landing. Creating a good public space was apparently the last thing on then-Mayor John F. Street's mind.

The nine finalists were all developers - not designers - and included a felon who did time for drug trafficking. The so-called competition dragged on for 22 months, long enough to extract campaign donations from the applicants. Ultimately, the competition was canceled after one of the jurors was indicted in the shakedown.

No wonder we're still marveling that the city's Delaware River Waterfront Corp. - successor to the Penn's Landing Corp. - is putting design first.

The Pier 11 competition is different in other respects. After three decades of trying to force Penn's Landing to lead Philadelphia's waterfront revival, the city has broadened its horizons. As the agency looks beyond Penn's Landing, its goal is simply to turn a one-acre finger pier in the crook of the Ben Franklin Bridge into an attractive park.

If the city's ambitions are now smaller, they are also more attainable. Pier 11 is all of one acre. No one expects the $3.5 million pier park to carry the whole waterfront. The city intends to select a winner this summer and open the park in 2010.

It is reasonable, however, to expect the project to demonstrate that Philadelphia is not a place where design goes to die. This park - funded with a grant from the William Penn Foundation - needs to look great and feel great. Given the city's parlous finances, the park may provide the only ribbon for Mayor Nutter to cut before the next election.

The pier should be a hipster magnet, not unlike New York's new High Line - designed, incidentally, by one of the finalists, James Corner's Field Operations. At the same time, the park needs to be a comfortable respite for walkers, bikers, and families. Right now, not a single blade of grass or soft surface can be found along Center City's stretch of Delaware riverfront.

The four finalists all seem to appreciate the pier's place in the waterfront cosmos. While they weren't asked for fully developed designs, a couple ventured in that direction. Admittedly, all that blue-skying is irresistible. Yet some may be disappointed to learn that $3.5 million doesn't go far.

The most full-blown scheme came from Philadelphia's José Almiñana of Andropogon. The firm sees the pier as a demonstration project for the latest green gadgetry, such as wind turbines and solar panels. Although you have to admire the spirit, one result is that the public spaces seem to take a backseat to the educational aspects.

Field Operation's approach sounds a lot more fun. Corner, a Penn professor who likes to incorporate the gritty detritus of the Industrial Age, emphasized that the park should be "a great place to hang out." All he had to do was show slides of crowds at the High Line to make his case. But he acknowledges its gorgeous finishes are beyond Philadelphia's means, and he's more likely to use earth formations to sculpt the park.

W Architecture of New York sounded themes similar to Corner's, but with more emphasis on exploring the pier's physical properties and history. The group floated the intriguing idea of cutting off parts of the sturdy structure, to reshape the rectangular surface and let people engage with the water. That's another great idea that sounds expensive.

Perhaps that's why Brooklyn's Michael Van Valkenburgh dispensed entirely with clever ideas and instead touted his ability to work with a small budget. Unfortunately, such a hard-nosed attitude isn't very inspiring, and that's what this pier has to do for Philadelphia's neglected waterfront.

While this project may be modest, it must set the tone for the future. The city is about to embark on a detailed master plan for the central Delaware, based on PennPraxis' Civic Vision. Parks will be a tool to populate the waterfront with people and new development.

Pier 11 is a great place to try out new ideas. Unlike Penn's Landing, Race Street is fully tied into Center City's street grid. It's an effortless walk from the Mr. Barstool showroom at Second and Race Streets in Old City. You dip under I-95 and cross Columbus Boulevard at grade, with a traffic light.

What's good about the link may be hard to see right now, with cars racing to the I-95ramps and PATCO trains clattering overhead. The problem is that the city stopped thinking of this stretch as a pedestrian realm and let it decline. Sidewalks were cut off unexpectedly. The Delaware River Port Authority was allowed to colonize the
Columbus Boulevard corner to park its machinery.

As every finalist noted, the level of pedestrian comfort in this "upland" connection needs to be restored if Pier 11 is to succeed. It won't take much - new sidewalks, some landscape buffers.

The city might even treat the area as an extension of the pier park by opening up the fenced-off space under the bridge, where an old port building sits mothballed. The photographer Zoe Strauss, who organizes an annual photo show underneath I-95 in South Philly, has opened our eyes to the beauty of the highway's arcaded columns.

These are exactly the sort of improvements for which federal stimulus money is intended.

They're also improvements that will make this discarded zone an urban place again. Until that happens, no amount of good design will rescue the Delaware waterfront.

Does Dilworth Plaza Design Have Too Much Transit?

2009-06-19T10:57:00.004-04:00

Here's today's column: Dilworth Plaza, Take Two. This is a followup to an earlier assessment I wrote in February about the Center City District's effort to remake the Rizzo-era public space in front of City Hall. You can also read it on Philly.com.

By Inga SaffronInquirer Architecture Critic

Most public space projects in Philadelphia tend to stew for years, so let's give the Center City District credit for placing its redesign of City Hall's plaza on a fast track. The drawings started making the rounds of Philadelphia's various design commissions earlier this year. Now, the CCD has released its "final" design for Dilworth Plaza.

Let's hope they're using that term loosely.

There's certainly much to admire in the plaza's renderings, which show a simple lawn, a flat multipurpose area, a cafe, and two curvy transit headhouses, wrapped in a cottony pouf of trees. But peek below the surface, specifically to the underground transit area, and this $45 million design by KieranTimberlake and Olin still has some miles to go.

The CCD's vision for Dilworth Plaza, completed only in 1977, is really two projects in one. It's an effort to create a worthy public space in Philadelphia's civic heart, one that is more park and less plaza. Yet, it's also a major transit project intended to provide a gleaming gateway station for the city's underappreciated underground rail network. The problem is that the transit portion is dictating the design of the public space in ways that are good for neither.

That's not to diminish the need for better transit stations. Both the plaza and SEPTA's City Hall station are in a disgraceful state. What should concern city and SEPTA officials is the grandiosity of the CCD's proposed transit room, which would span nearly two blocks below the plaza.

Let's remember that there is already a warren of underground transit facilities in the two blocks west of City Hall, ranging from the Broad Street subway station to the Penn Center concourses to Suburban Station's regional rail platforms. Is another big transit space below Dilworth Plaza really going to make this mess cohere?

Admittedly, a dank, winding corridor already exists under Dilworth Plaza, linking the city's Municipal Services Building to South Broad Street. It was created by Philadelphia's late master builder and planner Edmund Bacon as part of a then-innovative scheme to integrate transit, government services and the workplace.

Bacon imagined Philadelphians streaming into Center City by rail to pay taxes and obtain permits at the MSB's underground counters. Without stepping above ground or crossing a city street, people could follow the concourse to shops or a job in one of the interconnected Market Street office towers.

If the scheme was a bit utopian then, it's definitely outmoded today, since people increasingly pay bills and access city services online. We also understand now that people prefer to go about their business up on the sidewalks, in the light of day.

The CCD's Paul Levy recognizes that the concourse needs help. His organization, which is funded by downtown businesses, recently took over maintenance and has greatly improved its cleanliness. That experience is partly what got his private group interested in redesigning Dilworth Plaza.

The area, both above and below, is unnecessarily complex, with cumbersome changes in levels and inexplicable twists and turns.

Levy's initial concept was to simplify: Smooth things out on the plaza. Create a straight corridor below from north to south. Olin's simple, almost minimalist, plaza design acts as a welcome low-fat side dish to City Hall's ultra-rich facade. So far, so good.

But the transit portion has taken on a life of its own. Instead of just straightening out the underground passage, Levy and the designers now propose a large "transit room" - a full-size train station, really - that would provide a centralized entry for underground rail. For the first time, entrances to the city's two subway lines would face each other in one space.

But the proposed room is so vast that Levy is already talking about installing graphic panels to liven things up, perhaps with historical details about the construction of City Hall. "We think of them as one more reason to come down and take transit," explained Levy, the CCD's president.

Hmmm. Anytime history panels are needed to make an architectural space interesting, alarm bells ought to ring.

They're a sign that the transit room is overscaled. Subway riders don't linger in a station in the same way as suburban commuters, whose trains may depart only once an hour. It's also worth noting that more than 75 percent of riders now access underground rail from the area west of 15th Street. That's where the Market Street office towers are.

This is important because the centerpiece of the redesigned plaza would be two swooping glass headhouses leading to the proposed transit room. Designed by architect Richard Maimon of KieranTimberlake, they are very elegant structures, suggesting in their curves a giant circular frame for City Hall. But does Philadelphia need them?

I suspect that transit dominates the two-prong design because that's where the money is. Since the plan would provide SEPTA's subways with much-needed elevator access, Levy hopes to tap into federal transportation funds for at least a third of the $45 million cost, with the state and the CCD picking up the rest.

There may well be a case for making Dilworth Plaza the city's central train station. You can argue, as Levy has, that the city's subways should be more welcoming to tourists, who will be spending more time on Broad Street once the Convention Center shifts its main entrance there.

But to be convincing, you can't look at the plaza in isolation. The city needs to understand the role played by each of the three squares in this municipal plaza-land, as well as the plaza space in front of the Penn Center and Centre Square towers.

Every one of these spaces has a transit entrance. Perhaps Dilworth Plaza would be better off with different structures. A real restaurant pavilion would be nice, not just a cafe.

The city is belatedly forming a committee to look at the bigger picture. Meanwhile, the Dilworth Plaza redesign keeps chugging along, collecting city permits. Next up, the Art Commission on July 1.

More Paving on the Delaware

2009-06-16T10:10:00.007-04:00

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation replaced the do-nothing Penns Landing Corp. only a few months ago, but already it seems to be succumbing to the same temptations. Chief among them: Paving over the Delaware.

As Jennifer Lin reports in today's Inquirer, the board of the new corporation is busy negotiating a lease with the yet-unbuilt Sugarhouse Casino that would give them the right to use the former incinerator site at the foot of Spring Garden Street for "overflow parking." That 11-acre site, which includes the adjacent Festival Pier, is one of the most marketable properties in the corporation's portfolio. Just a block from the Spring Garden stop on the Market-Frankford El, the waterfront site has the most potential to be integrated into Center City's fabric. So what gives with the casino lease?

Andy Altman, the departing Commerce Director and City Hall's champion of waterfront development, told me in an interview yesterday that the lease will only go into effect if SugarHouse decides to build a garage on its waterfront property, located a few blocks north near Girard Avenue. It will need to shift parking during the garage construction.

Right now, however, the casino operator isn't aiming that big. It plans only to build a slots barn and a very large surface parking lot on its 20 acres. But assuming business takes off, the operators say they will eventually build a 5,000-car garage. If that does happen, Altman insists that the incinerator site will be used for SugarHouse's overflow parking for, at most, 14 to 16 months. Meanwhile, the waterfront corporation earns a few bucks (a number to be determined, Altman says) from the lease.

There are a few problems with all of this. Most obviously is the symbolism of using the Delaware waterfront's prime development site to park cars. Haven't we had enough of this already? Especially when Mayor Nutter's Greenworks plan calls for 3,200 paved acres to be made porous to solve a different kind of "overflow problem" - water runoff. (See column immediately below) Then, as one corporation board member remarked to me, "I've never seen a surface lot disappear." That may be a slight exaggeration, but once a public agency discovers it can make money off parking, it's hard to let go. How hard will the DRWC try to market this parcel when it expects revenue from SugarHouse? The market may be in coma now, but it's bound to revive in a year or two. Will DRWC be stuck with SugarHouse's cars?

I did a little time-line calculation based on current expectations for SugarHouse and the implementation of the city's waterfront goals. In the best case, SugarHouse would open its slots barn in April 2010. Let 's say it takes another year to decide that the business warrants building a garage. If it starts construction in April 2011, the garage won't be finished until August 2012. That's being optimistic.

Compare that with DWRC's schedule: It hires a waterfront master planner this summer. The planning work wraps up around December 2010. Based on the recommendations in that plan, the city begins to solicit developers for the incinerator site shortly after the plan comes out. Say that takes a year. That brings us to December 2011.

What happens if the SugarHouse cars are still parked there? More likely, SugarHouse won't have started its garage by December 2011. The city says that if it has a developer for the incinerator site, it will find another site for SugarHouse's overflow parking.

The point is, all that is pretty far down the road and there are many unknowns. So why the rush to negotiate a lease now with a casino operator who hasn't even installed a single slot machine?

(Painting "SugarHouse and the Divide" by Noel Hefele )

Philly's Need for Green Acres

2009-06-12T10:54:00.004-04:00

Here's today's Changing Skyline column:

Changing Skyline: Attacking asphalt
By greening its playground, Greenfield School is fighting back against the damage that gunk-laden storm water does in a paved city.

By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic
No matter how many times we've heard Philadelphia described as William Penn's "greene countrie towne," we know the reality is rather different. Cities are cities because once-verdant land is relentlessly paved and covered over time. That's how we civilize our world.

It's also how we mess it up. Every time the skies let forth a deluge, as they did with particular intensity this week, the city's asphalt-sealed streets and parking lots become churning torrents. The rain cascades to the nearest sewer outlet, picking up salts and oils along the way and overwhelming the underground system. As in many of America's older cities, Philadelphia's treatment facilities are incapable of handling the watery rush hour, so the overflow is released into the Delaware River, sewage and all.

The Philadelphia Water Department has been struggling for years to solve what it delicately calls "the overflow problem." One approach is to get people to consume less water, so less goes down the drain. No wonder the agency cheered a few years ago when Comcast announced it was bucking the powerful plumbers union and installing waterless urinals in its new skyscraper.

But reducing runoff from storms may be even trickier than negotiating with the well-connected plumbers. You can't simply unpave a city.

You can only try.

On June 26, the appropriately named Greenfield School will take a leap into a green new world when it begins ripping out its asphalt schoolyard as part of a Water Department pilot project. The hot, noisy, hard-surfaced schoolyard has been a staple of urban childhood, the scene of countless rounds of Double Dutch and tag. Now, the Water Department believes, it's time for the asphalt to go.

In its place, Greenfield, a public elementary school at 22d and Chestnut Streets, will plant a wide border around the perimeter of its schoolyard, nearly equal to half the playground's total surface. The green areas are designed to let rain percolate gently into the ground, cutting the schoolyard's contribution to the city's overflow problem by more than 80 percent.

Don't worry. Greenfield won't have to ban recess to help save the environment. The new schoolyard design - a joint effort by SMP Architects, Viridian Landscape Studio, and Meliora Environmental Design - reserves an island of asphalt in the center so kids can play basketball and other games. The remaining play areas will be resurfaced with a rubbery, porous material that absorbs runoff.

The unpaving effort, which is called "Greening Greenfield," was launched by a group of parents led, not surprisingly, by two local architects, Lisa Armstrong and Brett Webber. Initially, they just wanted to soften the school's harsh schoolyard, typical of so many Philadelphia schools.

But as they explored the options, they realized that the asphalt playground wasn't just a problem for Greenfield; it was bad for the whole city.

Others in Philadelphia were coming to the same conclusion. During his campaign, Mayor Nutter vowed to make the city a greener, more energy-efficient place. With the release of the administration's Greenworks plan in April, his ideas were translated into a real strategy.

Among its goals, the plan calls for the city to convert 3,200 acres of asphalt into fully pervious (that's the favored term) land by 2015. It may sound like a big number, but not when you consider that 67 percent of pre-World War II Philadelphia is covered with buildings and pavement. Rain simply rolls across all that surface to the nearest drain.

There are other ways to prevent a storm-water rush from overwhelming the sewers and polluting the Delaware River. The Water Department could construct huge underground cisterns, or catch basins, that would temporarily hold the water generated by a big storm.

But not only are such underground cisterns expensive, they need to be "the size of ball fields" to make a difference, says Howard Neukrug at the department's Office of Watersheds. Tearing up asphalt lots can be done cheaper and faster, and the new green acres have the side benefit of helping to cool the city's air temperature.

So why doesn't the Water Department start with a really big expanse of asphalt, such as the city-owned South Philly sports complex, where fields of parking spread out virtually to the horizon? A half-acre schoolyard hardly seems like an obvious choice for such a groundbreaking effort.

"We're looking at every square foot of surface area in Philadelphia and asking, 'What if?'," explains Neukrug.
That includes streets and sidewalks, too. But he argues that schoolyards are a good place to start because the greening does double duty, providing kids with shadier, healthier play areas while capturing runoff.

Actually, the Water Department is about to add another big incentive: a storm-water tax. In 2010, the agency will charge its nonresidential customers for the runoff their sites generate. The tax will be based on the amount of impervious surface, using GIS satellite technology to determine what's paved and what's green.

So, for instance, the owner of a fully paved, one-acre parking lot could see monthly storm-water charges rise from almost nothing today to as much as $400. Schools will be taxed like everyone else.

Although the Water Department gives schools a discount, the tax will be another burden, especially for public schools such as Greenfield. The new tax provided Armstrong and Webber with an argument to persuade the school that it was worth reducing its asphalt footprint.

It helped that their group was able to raise money for the project entirely from private sources. Greening Greenfield has collected $300,000 so far, enough to complete the west side of the schoolyard. Next year, the group expects to finish the east side.

SMP's design incorporates materials salvaged from recent construction projects at the Philadelphia Zoo and the Art Museum. They're also sculpting the new landscape with mounds that can be used as an outdoor classroom.

Both Armstrong and Webber believe it's not enough just to transform the schoolyard environment. They also want to change school culture by incorporating ideas about sustainability into the curriculum. Students will help plant trees in the new borders when they return in the fall. Ultimately, Armstrong and Webber hope to tap into federal stimulus money to install a green roof on the school, complete with a greenhouse.

Neukrug believes the project will inspire other schools, not to mention private landowners, to turn paved surfaces green. But until then, it remains an asphalt jungle out there.

Fantasy Towers Make the Biggest Noise

2009-06-08T10:48:00.005-04:00

Put away the violins. Reading today's story in the Inquirer about how the would-be developers of the World Trade Center on Delaware Avenue were supposedly thwarted by the city's big bad bureaucracy and recalcitrant neighborhood groups, the inclination might be to mutter about Philly's never-ending cluelessness.

Actually, it's the developers who seem pretty clueless, if not outright disingenuous. After 17 years of pursuing this mega office project on the far side of Center City, I wonder if it's occurred to them that the real problem with their project is that Center City still has plenty of good office sites that go begging - and those are located just a few steps from the transit nodes at Suburban Station and 30th Street Station. Yes, this site sits at the foot of Callowhill Street, close to the Spring Garden stop of the Market-Frankford El, but getting there would still require an extra transfer for people coming in by regional rail. The fantasy workforce of 13,000 can't all arrive there by car.

Before the WTC-Philly becomes more than a gleam in the developers' eyes, it's likely we'll first see the construction of 1) a second Comcast building at 18th and JFK 2) some version of the wildly overscaled American Commerce Center at 18th and Arch 3) Brandywine Realty's mixed use office tower at 31st and Walnut. 4) a companion for Blue Cross at 20th and Market. 5) Some clever office tower to replace the one-story retail space-holders at 17th and Chestnut. 6) modest office development at the Navy Yard.

That is - if America's cities weren't already stuck with an oversupply of office space.

Lower Merion has waterfront troubles too.

2009-06-05T10:48:00.005-04:00

June 5, 2009 - Philadelphia's struggle to coax walkable, urban neighborhoods from the fallow land near its two rivers is a much-told tale, filled more with disappointment than triumph. But it's a mistake to think this is a uniquely Philadelphia story. Lower Merion's got waterfront troubles, too.

If you're having difficulty picturing a Lower Merion coastline - other than the Gold Coasts of suburban Gladwyne and Penn Valley - it's probably because you've never had reason to venture down to those bottomlands on the Schuylkill. Downstream from the Flat Rock Dam, the banks were dominated for more than a century by the smoking furnaces of steel fabricators. Later, I-76's rumbling viaduct cordoned off the area from Lower Merion's manicured residential enclaves.

But just like Philadelphia, Lower Merion is now beginning to see its 20th-century industrial zones give way to new 21st-century neighborhoods. O'Neill Properties, the developer of the Riverwalk complex on Conshohocken's Schuylkill waterfront, is seeking township permission to build a 580-unit apartment complex at the end of Righters Ferry Road, on a 13-acre site that sits eyeball-to-eyeball with Philadelphia's Manayunk neighborhood.

This project could be transformative, not just for Lower Merion, but for that ambiguous bit of geography we call the Schuylkill Valley. There probably isn't another spot on the lower Schuylkill where two such urbane neighborhoods have a chance to bracket the narrow river channel so tightly, effectively completing it. There are two existing footbridges just waiting to take residents over to Manayunk's towpath and its Main Street restaurants.

Altogether, Lower Merion has almost a mile of undeveloped coast, including a 10-acre site owned by the Penn Real Estate Group. As the first development on Lower Merion's side of the river, the O'Neill site cries out for a plan that goes beyond the standard box-in-a-parking-lot model. Its architecture and open spaces need to forge a single urban space with Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, developer Brian O'Neill's proposed scheme is Riverwalk-redux, a barely improved variation on the atomized boxes that litter his section of Conshohocken's riverfront. The collection of apartments and offices, which are being rebuilt after a devastating fire last summer, are barely conscious of the Schuylkill's existence or, for that matter, the existence of the hilly streets of the old town.

Given the large site that O'Neill had available in Conshohocken, it's also bizarre that such a high proportion of his units have no water views. That's not just poor planning; it's poor business.
At least, the Lower Merion structures would all face the water. The plan calls for five U-shaped buildings, each one five stories tall and set on stilts over an open parking level. Roof height is 70 feet.

Orienting the buildings to the river isn't enough, however. Not only do those U-shaped apartments look like something O'Neill picked out of a pattern book, but they would actually be stranded in a lake of asphalt, containing 807 surface-parking spaces.

Why is that so many riverfront developers insist on paving over their verdant wetlands? As O'Neill's plan is now configured, there's barely enough space on the site for the township-required walking trail and "public gathering space." Believe it or not, O'Neill is trying pass off a small parking area at the trailhead as the public space.

The developer refused to be interviewed for this column. Both the Lower Merion and Montgomery County planning commissions already have sent up red flags, questioning O'Neill's approach. But the final decision will be made by Lower Merion's building and planning committee, which resumes hearings June 23.

One might expect that the suburban planners rejected O'Neill's project because of its high density. In fact, they applaud his effort to bring people to the river. What they don't like is the height of the five buildings: They wish they were taller.

With good reason. If O'Neill piled on more height, he could build fewer structures. Township zoning allows him to go to 120 feet, about 12 stories, in part because the waterfront site sits below a high ridge. Nobody's views would be blocked. Even better, the towers could be designed with structured parking on the lower levels, eliminating the need to pave over precious waterfront.

Taller buildings also would leave room for a more gracious walking path, which will be linked into the growing regional trail network on both sides of the Schuylkill. O'Neill's previous effort at waterfront green space in Conshohocken makes no connection to anything.

Looking at the site plan, it would appear that O'Neill's rationale for a low-rise, asphalt-heavy development is driven by short-term interests. The state building code allows structures under five stories to be framed in wood, rather than more expensive fireproof steel. Surface-parking lots also are cheaper than a parking deck.

But I'd wager that better design and landscaping would command higher rents in the long run, especially in a desirable location like Lower Merion, the most affluent town in Montgomery County and home to the some of the highest real estate prices in the state.

In an ideal world, the township would insist that O'Neill follow the same standards outlined for Philadelphia by PennPraxis' Delaware Waterfront study. Lower Merion would demand that Righters Ferry have a real street grid, with blocks and sidewalks. And instead of just requiring riverfront developers to include a walking trail,
Lower Merion would hand the builder a list of design guidelines.

But the part of the world that is Pennsylvania is far from ideal. The state does not allow its townships the same latitude as its cities in dealing with developers, complains township commissioner Elizabeth Rogan. So, while Lower Merion may weigh in on matters of use, density and safety, it is not permitted under state law to demand good urban design.

What Pennsylvania's government hasn't learned is that the boundaries between suburbs and cities are fast losing their meaning. Places like Lower Merion and Philadelphia are bound together by a common geography, the Schuylkill.

The river has shaped the region's political organization since colonial times, linking the settlements of Pottstown, Norristown, Conshohocken, Manayunk, and East Falls into the heart of Center City. The industry that formed them may be gone, but their close relationship remains just as important in the 21st century.

Where to find me....

2009-05-18T12:46:00.002-04:00

Devoted readers of Skyline Online:

I'm hoping to resume this blog again in the near future. But in the meantime, you can find me and all Changing Skyline columns and news stories on Facebook. Please be my friend!

Inga Saffron

Venturi's Lieb House Begins its Journey

2009-02-02T10:59:00.006-05:00

They say every journey begins with a first step. But in the case of Robert Venturi's Lieb House it started with a slow roll through the streets of Long Beach Island on Friday. The Inquirer photographer Akira Suwa caught the grand sweep of the momentous event in this photo, which appeared on the front page of Saturday's paper. The house, as I reported last week, will eventually make its way by barge to a new home in Glen Cove. But for the moment, it's stuck in limbo at the 16th Street marina, while it waits for its papers to come through.

The house's adoptive owners, Debbie Sarnoff and Robert Gotkin, say they hope to obtain a zoning permit for the house within the next two weeks, maybe even sometime this week. Incidentally, this isn't the only house on the move. Check out this video of an 1880s house being slid across Minnesota's White Bear Lake.

Philly's Boast: Tallest 2008 Skyscraper

2009-01-28T14:53:00.003-05:00

Here's a top-ten list that's actually worthwhile: The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has just completed its survey of skyscrapers completed in 2008 and the only U.S. representative is Philly's own Comcast Center, which they measured at 974 feet. All the rest are either in China or Dubai.

I wonder what next year's list will look like?

Another observation: Tall buildings keep getting taller. As Architectural Record observes, this crop of supertall towers is bigger than in previous years. Given the race for the skies, I wonder how many are as well plugged into the urban fabric as Comcast? I don't believe Comcast's plaza set-back is ideal, but I suspect it's better than a lot of others on the list.

My reviews of Comcast and the proposed American Commerce Center are here and here.

A Sea Rescue for Venturi's Lieb House?

2009-01-28T12:24:00.005-05:00

So it looks like Robert Venturi's shore house will be rescued after all, but in a most un-conventional way. As I describe in today's Inquirer, a family in Glen Cove, N.Y. has offered to take in the unwanted Lieb House - Venturi's second completed commission. The only problem is getting it there. Since it's too big to travel by road, and it doesn't make sense to take apart the wood-frame structure, it will have to sail by barge up to Long Island Sound.

Floating a house from Long Beach Island to Long Island turns out to be easier said than done. As of yesterday, the house still hadn't been granted landing or zoning rights by Glen Cove officials. At the same time, the site's buyer, Ziman Development, which bought the house as a tear down, has given the Venturis only until settlement on Monday to move the structure off the site. Their house movers were scheduled to start jacking up the 30-by-37 -foot beach shack today - whatever the weather. Over the next three days, they'll roll it slowly over to the Barnegat marina parking lot. And there it will sit until it's cleared to sail.

Fate of Venturi Shore House Uncertain

2009-01-15T14:39:00.005-05:00

The staff in the Manayunk office of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates are holding their breath, waiting to learn the fate of Robert Venturi's well-known Lieb House on Long Beach Island. The 1967 house, which sits on a sizable lot in Loveladies, has apparently been sold as a tear down. But VSBA's Dan McCoubrey told me negotiations are afoot to move the boxy structure to a new location. The irony, of course, is that the house would lose its specific seaside context, a quality that it is so essential to Venturi's work in general and this house in particular. (See my recent piece on Episcopal Academy.)

This little house looks so modest and inoffensive today, particularly given all the bloated beach houses that have sprung up on Long Beach Island in recent years, covering every available inch of the building lots. But in 1967, what repelled neighbors and delighted architects was the design's boxy form and supergraphics (remember that word?). Venturi was already becoming well known for his writings and for Mother's House in Chestnut Hill, but he still hadn't built very much. The construction of Lieb House "showed that Venturi was not going to be a mere historical pasticheur," recalled Penn professor David Brownlee, who is author of the most comprehensive survey of Venturi Scott Brown's work.
While Mother's House riffed on our cultural perceptions of what a house should be, and was full of historical references, the Lieb house was assertively modern. Brownlee says it clearly rejected that "housey appearance" of Mother's House. So, instead of eaves and pediments, you get a flat roof and ribbon windows. The lineage is Corbusier rather than Hansel & Gretel.

In an interesting New York Times period piece from 1970 by Rita Reif (try here), the Liebs engage in a spirited discussion about which was uglier: their neighbor's pretentious shore houses or Venturi's faux-ugly shore house. Venturi, of course, has always used the word "ugly" to describe his brand of ordinary, seemingly vernacular, unheroic design. Here's what the architect himself had to say on the subject:

"We had to recognize that it was in a very ugly and banal environment, "Venturi said. "This house is purposely not pretty, not refined, not sensitive, not delicate, not full of high-fashion architectural articulations of little wings popping out and other lovely structural refinements. Anything else would have made the landscape look worse than it is."

The story goes on to say that the Lieb's neighbors stopped talking to them soon after they built the house (for $31,000! On a lot that cost $20,000!) For some reason, Venturi's love of bold signs - iconography - seems to upset people more than anything else about his work. The Liebs sold it a short while later to the Ellmans, who maintained the place intact, keeping the bold No. 9 next to the front door.

New Year, New Doubts about Projects

2009-01-05T13:16:00.007-05:00

Now that we're rested and clear-eyed again, we can start the New Year by recalculating the odds for the Philadelphia projects still on the boards. The New York Times ran a story the day after Christmas reporting that $5 billion worth of Big Apple construction has been delayed or cancelled. In Philadelphia, it's been evident for awhile that any project not already in the ground is dead, save perhaps for a couple of well-placed hotels hoping to benefit from the state-funded convention center expansion.

One of the lucky ones seemed to be ARCWheeler's sloping glass hotel tower next to the Boyd Theater. His development plan is deeply thought out and he has identified multiple sources of funding (see earlier post). But word came last week from Howard Haas at the Friends of Boyd that the developer has again decided to postpone the real estate closing for the theater and adjacent parking lot site, this time from January to February. Obtaining financing has got to be tough these days. PlanPhilly has a list of other projects it considers up in the air: Stamper Square, 1600 Vine Street, PhillyLive. Of course, you may want to add a couple of other highly speculative ventures, like the American Commerce Center and the Waldorf-Astoria South to the list.

There are, however, a few projects that may actually gain momentum from the country's deepening economic turmoil and the Obama administration's planned infrastructure investments. When the nation's governors met in Philadelphia recently to discuss priorities, they gave high importance to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's $500 million expansion plan. Alas, the feds wouldn't fund the snazzy new underground galleries, which are being designed by Frank Gehry. But according to museum officials, they might be able tap into the infrastructure pot to redo the art temple's ancient heating, ventilation and wiring systems. They might also be able to build a desperately needed, new loading dock, so they would no longer have to accept art deliveries in the same bays where they put out the trash. Not sexy stuff, but it would make the Gehry galleries more doable.

Next Round for the Roundhouse

2008-12-24T13:37:00.016-05:00

A building with a great nickname can't be all bad. But if you only read the disparaging remarks about the Philadelphia Roundhouse - aka the Police Administration building - in the Inquirer story about relocating the force to the Provident Life and Trust building, you wouldn't know this colossus had a storied architectural pedigree.

The design was written up in all the important architectural journals of the time. Yet Police Chief Charles Ramsey's lack of affection for the building, which many Philadelphians still associate with Frank Rizzo's head-busting tactics, suggests that the Philadelphia police's image of themselves may be changing. They're clearly more comfortable with the gentle classicism of the Provident. A more modern, professionalized police force is, of course, better for Philadelphia. Let's hope it will also do good things for the Roundhouse's architecture, which has its merits.

The Roundhouse didn't start out as a symbol of brutish power. The double-towered structure was designed in the early '60s by Robert Geddes, of the once celebrated Philadelphia firm of Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham , to provide a new headquarters for the city police, who were then sharing space in City Hall. Geddes ,who is still practicing up in Princeton, was a part of the Philadelphia School, the name used to describe the loose collection of architects who made the city a hotbed of innovation in the '60s and '70s. Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi and Romaldo Giurgola were some of the big names practicing in those days. What ties them together, as Pratt Professor John Lobell has argued, is their belief that the modernist style could be adapted to serve the needs of older, pedestrian-scaled cities.

I don't know if the name, "The Roundhouse," was in use before Geddes designed the concrete fortress on 7th and Race Streets in 1963, but for me it conjures up a gritty, sepulchral, Prohibition Era police lock-up, the sort of place where Hildy Johnson might run into Al Capone.
Geddes' design clearly expresses the might and power of law enforcement in its heavily, muscled concrete form. You can practically see the washboard abs in that window detailing.

The architects who pioneered Brutalist-style architecture saw their work as fostering progressive social goals. But maybe because they designed so many large government buildings, we look at the style today as anything but progressive. Constructed of rough concrete, the Brutalist-style designs started going up just around the time when our society was learning that it couldn't always trust its own government to do the right thing. It's no wonder that, from the vantage of 2008, the Roundhouse appears as a fortresses for establishment power. The impenetrable building tells you that those folks in blue are not to be toyed with. Of course, the massive concrete wall that surrounds the building doesn't do the otherwise interesting design any favors. Francis Morrone, the New York critic with an affection for Philadelphia, has called the place "ghastly."

At the time, however, the designers were more focused on taking advantage of technological breakthroughs that were coming on line in the early '60s. The Roundhouse, I'm told by Bill Whitaker at Penn's Architectural Archives, was the second building in the U.S. to employ a method of pre-cast concrete construction developed by the Dutch firm Shokbreton. The first was Philip Johnson's New Canaan lakehouse. August Komendant, who did Kahn's engineering, oversaw the structural work at the Roundhouse. If you look past the power issues, and concentrate on the aesthetics, you have to admire the level of custom, sculptural detailing of those windows. You sure don't see that level of originality on Philadelphia's civic buildings any more. By repeating the windows around the building's bold, biomorphic curves, Geddes created a dynamic, zippy rhythm.
With a good renovation and improvements at street level, I could see the Roundhouse as an interesting condo building. It would certainly put its neighbor and imitator, the former Metropolitan Hospital - another figure- eight structure that became a condo building - to shame.
Just compare these two images, one from the '60s of the Roundhouse, and the recently renovated hospital-condos from the Aughts. I see rich, human texture vs. bland, impersonal flatness.

Give Philly Books for the Holidays

2008-12-23T14:39:00.008-05:00

This has been a good year for books about Philadelphia and its buildings. Architect James B. Garrison, who specializes in historic preservation work at the firm formerly known as Hillier (Now some ridiculous combination of letters, such as RMJM), has just published a gorgeous survey of Philadelphia great houses, called "Houses of Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill and the Wissahickon Valley 1880-1930." The book, which is part of Acanthus Press' suburban domestic architecture series, is a follow-up to his previous treatise on John Russell Pope. There are long, lovely discourses on the great houses you've always driven past and wondered about, like the French Village in West Mount Airy, with its conical Norman turrets.

In many of the entries, Garrison was able to provide images of the houses in their original attire, and after shots. The before and afters of Lindenwold, in Ambler ( just outside Philadelphia) are striking. You'll never guess that this is the house that became the castle visible from Bethlehem Pike, now home to the Catholic Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth.

I was especially pleased to see that Garrison included Square Shadows, a 1932 modernist house that George Howe designed in Whitemarsh. The staircase pictured in the book is to die for, and just goes to show how great modern design can hold its own against the painted ladies that dominate the rest of the book.

Garrison isn't the only author to deliver a follow-up book this year. Nathaniel Popkin, who makes frequent guest appearances on Brad Maule's Phillyskyline blog, has just brought out a sequel to his earlier "Song of the City." Called "The Possible City", it uses a stream-of-consciousness style to try to imagine a different, better Philadelphia. This time Popkin has included some of Maule's wonderful, evocative, off-beat photos that always make you look at Philadelphia in fresh new ways. He doesn't get nearly the credit he deserves in the book. His name should have at least been on the cover!
Earlier this year, the historian Thomas H. Keels published a book that will not soon be forgotten: "Forgotten Philadelpha, Lost Architecture of the Quaker City". It's one of those heartbreaking works, like Edward Arthur Mauger's earlier "Then and Now" that reminds you how many great buildings Philadelphia created and then casually discarded. Keels takes a high-low populist approach. So along with all the lost Furness, you'll also find Tasker Homes and the amazing Aquarama.

A Brown Refrigerator On Every Corner

2008-12-19T12:02:00.015-05:00

Because the Inquirer sometimes chooses the oddest photos to go with my Friday column (I won't even mention headlines.), I thought I'd share some of my shots here. In case you haven't been wandering around the east side of Broad Street in Center City recently, the neighborhood has been sprouting refrigerator size boxes at every signalized intersection. They're part of a Streets Department project to digitize the traffic signals throughout the city, but thanks to the Department of Homeland Security the new system is three times the size of the old pole-mounted controls, requiring a 67-inch free-standing box. The reason? The boxes were made bigger so they could hold the computer equipment for a future surveillance network. Just what we need - a security camera on every corner!

In the first photo, workmen are installing one of the big behemoths next to Marjorie Amrom's early 19th Century home at 10th and Lombard. The box partially blocks one of the doorways to the historically certified house. Amrom told me she couldn't understand why they didn't locate the signal controller catercorner from her house, alongside the Seger Playground fence. There are already two postboxes there and another big brown installation would have blended right in.

As a point of reference, here is one of the pole-mounted signal boxes. This one is located on the west side of Broad Street. While it also contains the digital equipment, you can see it is much smaller and less intrusive. That's because it was installed in the first phase of the digitization project, before the federal government began require intensive surveillance monitoring of our little rowhouse neighborhoods.

I wonder what impact this box is having on Albert Maranca's antiques business at 10th and Pine? Didn't anyone notice that the box was blocking his shop window? One of the common complaints about the boxes is that their blank canvases are an irresistible siren call to graffiti artists. The project, which covers South to Market Streets, isn't complete yet, but already many boxes have been tagged.

Here's another window blocked by the box. This is the new Marathon Grill at 10th and Walnut, which has become a mecca for Jefferson Hospital employees. This corner used to be a real dump, but when Marathon decided to open a location at the intersection it hired Sandvold Blanda Architecture + Interiors to give the building a face lift. Although the structure isn't historic, they did research showing it once featured huge loft-style windows with cast iron detailing. The used that idiom to guide their splendid recreation of the exterior. It looks like the signal box has wrecked the best table in the house.

Even when the boxes aren't flush against Society Hill's historic, colonial-era homes, they often make a big statement on the street. Center City's streets are already so overpopulated with sign poles, hydrants, bus shelters, bollards, bicycle racks and honor boxes, there's just not much room to add any more urban equipment. Could these signal boxes be the tipping point?

What Do You Do with a $36 million Empty Lot?

2008-12-18T12:10:00.003-05:00

Now that ARCWheeler's Boyd hotel and theater project has received the blessings of the Planning Commission (Tuesday) and the Zoning Board of Adjustment (Wednesday), we thought we would turn our attention to the project on the opposite side of Sansom Street. Does the name Castleway Properties still ring any bells?

Just over a year ago, the Dublin-based company paid $36.7 million for the last buildable lot on Rittenhouse Square, rescuing it from the low expectations of the Philadelphia Parking Authority. The firm hired Brad Fiske of KlingStubbins to turn out some renderings for an ambitious mixed-use development, which you can see in the image. The plan called for a 525-foot condo tower backing onto Sansom Street - just across the way from one of the entrances to the proposed Boyd hotel. In the front, toward the northeast corner of the square, they envisioned a 220-foot boutique hotel, with the usual assortment of restaurants and cafes.

Castleway's Jim Osbourne told me back then that he also wanted to knock down the Warwick Apartment building and the funeral home on Sansom (read the Illadelph account), but would preserve the beautifully tiled Rittenhouse cafe. In place of the two demolished buildings, he said there would be a linear park connecting Walnut to Sansom, an idea that would dovetail very nicely with Hal Wheeler's plan to upgrade Sansom Street.

Exciting stuff. The Castleway folks, who broke all price records when then paid close $37 million for the .83-acre site, were no doubt flush with Euro wealth from the then-booming Irish economy.

By early 2008, Castleway appeared to drop out of sight. Disappeared. Vanished. The Center City Residents Association stopped hearing from them. Their urgent requests for a zoning upgrade, to C5, suddenly ceased. And then soon after, the real estate market went into its current nosedive.

This is another project that looks dead, but may still have a little life in it yet. Osborne, speaking by phone from Ireland, told me the company is reassessing the project's size and mix to account for the changes in the market. He said he still believes the company "still has the best site in Philadelphia. We're not about to give up on it." The question is how to develop it.

ARCWheeler's plans for the Boyd Hotel can't hurt. Osborne and Wheeler have been talking to coordinate their projects, and Osborne says he will be in Philadelphia early in the New Year to begin work on a new development plan for the Rittenhouse Square site.

Unfortunately, things haven't been going quite so well at another project that Osborne has been involved with, separate from Castleway's portfolio. Osborne is the development director for Shelbourne Development's Chicago Spire project, the ambitious, 2,000-foot tall condo tower on Chicago's lakefront. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, that twisting condo tower was to be America's tallest residential building, but now it's a mere rain-filled hole in the ground and the contractors have filed liens against the developer for non-payment. Osborne says, however, that the condos are still selling and that con-struction will eventually resume.

So, for now, I guess having a big grassy empty lot may be preferable to having a small lake.

Saving the Boyd Theater, Part II

2008-12-15T14:50:00.008-05:00

This will be a big week in the life of Chestnut's Street's Boyd Theater. Having narrowly escaped a threatened demolition, the theater is now being used as the means to leverage a glamorous new hotel on Sansom Street that will operate under the Kimpton's Monaco flag. The project's developer, Hal Wheeler, will be making stops at the Planning Commission Tuesday (1 p.m.) and the Zoning Board of Adjustment on Wednesday to seek the city's blessing for the curving, 320-foot hotel tower. I discussed the project in last week's column.

There's a lot to like about the design, by Martinez + Johnson Architects, who are known for their theater restorations. They did a huge amount of research on the theater when they were employed by Live Nation, which had planned to convert the movie house to a venue for Broadway-style shows. They even uncovered some decoration that had been masked by previous renovations. When developer Hal Wheeler agreed recently to buy the building and build the hotel, he wisely took on the same architects. Their beautifully detailed renovation drawings promise good things for the neglected theater. You can read some of the recent saga here and here in my columns, or go to the Friends of the Boyd website

Given the frozen state of real estate, you can't help but wonder how the developer expects to pull off this $130 million project. But the Boyd project actually has more going for it financially that some other recently proposed designs (ie. ACC). For starters, the financial world is likely to look more kindly on hotel projects because of the anticipated need for more guest rooms after the expanded convention center is finished in 2011. Wheeler's strategy for financing the project also taps into a variety of money pots. He plans to have the project qualify for federal historic tax credits. More immediately, he is applying for a $12 million grant from a state fund devoted to cultural projects. He's looking for additional federal tax credits for projects in blighted areas, which, believe it not, includes Center City. All in all, Wheeler says he feels confident that he can start construction in late 2009. He's even considering opening the theater first, before the hotel tower is completed.

American Commerce Gets Zoning. Now What?

2008-12-12T12:10:00.005-05:00

As expected, the site of the proposed American Commerce Center got its zoning upgrade yesterday from City Council, to the C5 classification. Fortunately, the rezoning doesn't mean that developer Hill International has carte blanche to erect a 1,500-foot tower at 18th and Arch Streets. Besides the minor problem of finding tenants who are willing to pull up stakes and take new office space in this plunging economy, the developer is going to have to get the architectural design approved by the Planning Commission and its staff.

That review should show us what stuff the Nutter Administration is made of. It's clear to many people - not just me! - that the developer is trying to cram way too much stuff onto that site. The Design Advocacy Group is preparing a position paper, which I hear will voice concerns about the project's excessive density. In my column last week, I pointed out that the mixed-use ACC project has close to the same square-footage as the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, but it would sit on a site less than HALF the size. Time Warner, by the way, overlooks Central Park; The ACC would lord over 36-foot-wide Arch Street.

The developer has left so little open space at ground level - in sharp contrast to the Comcast tower - that they would have to fulfill their open-space requirement with a garden on top of the six-level shopping mall. Just ask yourself: how many successful multi-level shopping centers have you encountered? How many have successful upper levels? For Exhibit A, please see our very own Gallery. There's a reason it's owners are jumping up and down about the possibility of leasing the third floor to Foxwoods Casino.

But as I wrote, I still believe there are ways to make this proposal acceptable. The developers could slim down the tower and reduce some of the square-footage elsewhere. But here's another idea they ought to consider: Tear down the Stirling Apartment House and move the project to JFK Boulevard. JFK is a much wider street than Arch, and having the entire block would give the city's tallest tower room to breathe. I don't think anyone would complain if Hill rid JFK Boulevard of one of its trio of ugly block-long , slab buildings. You might even argue that they deserve bonus points under the category of public service.

Another Casualty of the Library Closings

2008-12-11T17:06:00.009-05:00

You know that old Monty Python routine about the parrot, the one where shopkeeper Michael Palin claims, "'He's not dead. He's only resting."? Well you might say the same thing about Moshe Safdie's addition to Philadelphia's Free Library - first presented to the public in 2003.

The other day, I called Sandra Horrocks, the library's vice president for communications and development, to find out the status of the $175 million project in light of the Nutter Administration's plan to shutter 11 library branches. (Read my column on the system's downsizing here). Back in in April, when I wrote a column on the opening of a new cafe in the original Trumbauer building, project director Linda E. Johnson promised the library would absolutely, definitely break ground in December '08. But, not surprisingly given the branch cuts, Horrock says that the start date was postponed again by the library board on December 3- this time indefinitely.

She wouldn't go so far as to say the project is dead. "It's not over," she insisted. "We hope it will go forward. We were going to go to ground breaking this month. We had permits….But for economic reasons, and what’s happening with branches, the consensus was that it was inappropriate." She said the library board will reassess the postponement quarterly.

Sigh. The expansion and renovation of Philadelphia's central library on the Parkway is just as important to the future of the city as preserving the 11 branches. Library officials dreamed of creating a 21st Century information hub to serve a wide cross-section of city residents, especially those who don't have access to computers, the Internet and other information technology. They envisioned the modernized building as a kind of intellectual rec center where teens could hang out in comfy chairs (Not the Monty Python kind), young readers could sprawl on a carpet to read a book and adults could linger over a book with a latte in hand.

Safdie, who designed the much-praised Salt Lake City Library, was selected to design the expansion back in 2003 after a competition that was hailed then as a new model for handing out important civic commissions. He reworked the building several times as construction costs spiraled. But there's been virtually no work done since 2006, insiders say. "I'd say this project is dead," one person involved with the project told me. "No one wants to admit. It's more like "Dead Man Walking."

And in related news, the Preservation Alliance this week called on Mayor Nutter to reconsider his plans to close the Carnegie legacy branches, which account for four of the 11 to be shut down. Director John Gallery said he was particularly concerned about the fate of the historic four, especially if the city puts them up for sale or leaves them vacant for a long period. Meanwhile, at least one of the libraries, Holmesburg, isn't even owned by the city.

Judge Saves Burholme Park from Hospital

2008-12-09T10:10:00.007-05:00

This just in: Orphans Court Judge John W. Herron Jr. has just issued an opinion denying the city the right to sell 20 acres of Burholme Park to Fox Chase Cancer Center. The park remains a park. " The public trust doctrine, the appropriate rule of law applied in these circumstances, leaves no doubt and requires that the petition for court approval to lease Burholme Park be denied," Herron writes. Read the decision here and my recent column here. More to come.

After a quick read of the decision, here are some highlights. (Sorry, other stories and deadlines demand our attention today.)

-Judge Herron concluded that leasing the 19.4 acres of Burholme Park land to the cancer hospital would violate the longstanding public trust doctrine. He writes: "There was no evidence whatsoever presented during the seven days of
hearing that Burholme Park has ceased to fulfill its purpose as a vibrant public park. On the contrary, even proponents of the Fox Chase sub-sublease attested to Burholme Park’s vitality and importance within the Fairmount Park System."

His strongly worded conclusion lays it out directly."Public parks are protected by a common law rule of law known as the public trust doctrine which has been enshrined in Pennsylvania law since the early 1900’s. The one exception allowing for the alienation of such lands concerns nonviable park land which all parties agree does not apply to Burholme Park. Simply stated, so long as a community or neighborhood actively uses dedicated park land, the City is required to hold such land
in trust for their use, is legally stopped from divesting such land and is required to maintain these open spaces as public parks.

One thing I find interesting in the decision is the judge's implicit criticism of the Nutter Administration's deal-making efforts and of Councilman Brian O'Neill's use of councilmanic privilege to obtain $4 million in spending money for his district from Fox Chase as compensation. Judge Herrron goes to great length to say there was no actual misconduct by any officials, yet he clearly was disturbed that the city obtained no property appraisals before he agreeing to lease the land to the hospital.

"While all public officials involved appear to have acted responsibly, the result of the negotiations reflect a desperate effort to contrive a way to accommodate Fox Chase’s valid needs for expansion land and, in doing o, bargaining away the City’s fiduciary duty to preserve actively used park land held in trust for the public," the judge writes.

No one has ever questioned Fox Chase's need for more space, and the judge similarly acknowledges the hospital has legitimate growth needs. But he believes that alone isn't reason to build on a large section of the park. Even though two-thirds of the land would remain open, he observes that he surviving park would be severely compromised. "The once pastoral unity of the park would be bisected by up to 18 buildings as high as nine stories," he writes.

"The planned expansion in five stages over many years would result in the construction of as many as 18 large buildings between 4 and 9 stories high through the very center of the lush park, uprooting old growth trees, destroying vital recreational areas and irrevocably altering the unique character of this singularly beautiful park land and open space....Barry Bessler, chief of staff of the Fairmount Park Commission for the past 15 years, testified that Burholme Park is “very heavily used on a regular basis” by people of all ages."

Thanks to Judge Herron it may remain that way.

Last Dash Across the SS Bridge

2008-12-08T10:17:00.007-05:00

Gary Hack was in his first days as dean of Penn's School of Design when he was called to an emergency meeting to discuss a new design for the South Street Bridge. That was 1996, he told me during a recent conversation, and he remembers being informed the bridge's closing was imminent. But when he ended his 12-year term as dean this fall, traffic was still speeding across the bridge's pot-holed deck. He isn't the only one who has been fretting about the bridge's replacement for the better part of a decade.

I wrote my first column about the proposed design in 2001, after attending a packed neighborhood meeting at the Greater St. Matthews Church in Grays Ferry. It was clear then that the city was intending to replace the walkable, intimately scaled 85-year-old former drawbridge with a standard-issue, interstate-grade span. The neighborhood was furious and demanded that the Streets Department go back to the drawing board. But when the design was presented as a fait accompli at a second public meeting in February of 2007, not a single important detail had been changed.
The bridge probably would have ended up as the evil twin of the Walnut Street Bridge had it not been for the election of Mayor Nutter later that year and the efforts of a de-
termined group of concerned citizens, led by planner James Campbell of Campbell Thomas , the Democratic Party's 30th Ward Leader Marcia Wilkof, her predecessor Terry Gillen, and - yes - former state Sen. Vincent Fumo. Fumo secured a state grant that enabled opponents to hold a charette last winter that produced a more pedestrian and bike friendly alternative. (see blog post here.)

The changes aren't perfect, but the people who took part in the charette consider them a big victory. They came out in today's sub-freezing temperatures to celebrate with a last trip across the quirky, iron-railed bridge. Members of the Bicycle Coalition were out in force and fleece for a final ride over the bumpy deck. (That's Streets Department Commissioner Clarena Tolson being interviewed in the photo, as Marcia Wilkof looks on.) Trophy Bike's Michael McGettigan arrived just in time to provide the music with his pimped-out radio bike.

And what can we expect when the new bridge is finished, some 24 months from now? "It's going to a be a lot safer bridge than the one originally proposed," promised Kyle Gradinger, one of the planners from Wallace Roberts & Todd who worked on the changes. The new version will have four lanes, instead of the five originally proposed. That means there should be more safe territory for bicyclists and pedestrians. The group also managed to get the signal pattern for the traffic lights changed to make the crosswalk at the infamous I-76 death ramps more manageable. Once Mayor Nutter made it clear he favored a more pedestrian and bicycle friendly bridge , the city Streets Department did a 180-degree turn and began working with the neighbors to implement the changes. They even proposed one of their own: a mid-bridge cross walk to the ramp for the Schuylkill Banks trail. It shows you that mayoral leadership is just as important as federal dollars in determining the quality of Philadelphia's public spaces.
The one change that hasn't been finalized yet is the new design for the bridge railing and outlook towers. But it does seem that the awkward tin boxes in the 2007 design have been canned. The same group that organized last winter's charette plans to hold another one early next year to work out a new scheme. The city will probably be tweaking the design right up the day the bridge reopens. And if all goes well, that could be sometime in 2011.

Local Community College Bests Big-Name Schools

2008-12-04T16:05:00.007-05:00

Bucks County Community College is probably not the first place that comes to mind when people think of top architecture departments in the country. But the school's historic preservation students scored a major upset recently when they took first place in a prestigious national competition.

The Bucks students are savoring their first place showing in the Charles E. Peterson Prize competition, an annual contest that involves precise documentation of historic structures. Peterson - a long time Philadelphian until his death in 2004- is considered the godfather of the preservation movement. He was one of the few who had the foresight to object to the creation of Independence Mall and the destruction of blocks of historic buildings.

Competitors for the prize are required to create precisely measured architectural drawings of historic structures. Such drawing skill is an increasingly rare, but important discipline, in this age of computerized architecture. Peterson, who worked for the National Park Service, helped establish a federal program called the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), which is used to document important historic buildings. The HABS drawings are so detailed that they can be used to reconstruct or repair a damaged historic structure.

The Bucks' students measured an old stone barn for their entry, but ironically it wasn't one of the many local ones. They chose to examine the Best Farm Stone Barn at Monocacy National Battlefield, a Civil War site in Frederick, Md. It took two summers to compete the project. Although the barn was far from their home campus, documenting its design gave them insight into their own local vernacular architecture. The Bucks students aren't even part of a regular architecture program. Their course is listed under the Department of Social and Behavioral Science.

Nevertheless, they bested 13 other entrants, beating out Kent State University’s College of Architecture, which placed second, and a third-place tie between Clemson University’s graduate program in historic preservation, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago’s historic preservation department. Judges were from the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Atheneum of Philadelphia. “If this isn’t a David and Goliath story, I don’t know what is,” said John Petito, a dean in the Department of Behavioral and Social Science, noting that BCCC was the only community college in the competition.

The historic preservation team from Bucks consisted of: Diana Barbera-Horwitz, Petrona Charles, M. Scott Doyle, Jennifer Eagen, Patricia Fisher-Olsen, R. Stephen Gray, Mirka John, Kevin Keating, Lisa Mroszczyk, Geoffrey Raike, Lexa Rio, Stephen Russell, Christopher Smith, Suzanne Stasiulatis, Vickie Stauffer, and Maureen Victoria.

Macy's At Home Again in Center City

2008-11-25T16:12:00.012-05:00

Why aren't Philadelphians making a bigger deal about the recent opening of Macy's new housewares department in its grand Center City store? Ever since the Market Street Strawbridge's closed in 2006, downtown residents have had very few outlets to purchase the necessities of good housekeeping , like sheets, towels and blankets.

Of course you could always visit K-Mart in the Gallery, which claims to feature Martha Stewart products. More often than not, though, the thing you came to buy would not be on the shelf. Or it wouldn't exist in the size you needed. Or the design quality was so horrendous that you just couldn't make yourself buy it. The experience always made me suspect the K in K-Mart actually stood for Kaos. The alternative was to trek out to the periphery, to a Target or a BedBathAndBeyond. But the odds of finding the right thing were in those places were only marginally better.

But now my prayers have been answered in the most wonderful way. Macy's has opened a real housewares department in a closed-0ff section of the third floor, a gorgeous high-ceiling space with an intact forest of the great old Wanamaker columns. Macy's basically painted the architecture white and threw in some new lights, but that's okay. It does the soul good to be able to squeeze the down pillows (Levels, 1,2 and 3) in such a glorious room. Macy's has made the whole housewares-buying experience far more civilized by offering an excellent selection of products, neatly displayed on dark wood shelves. Besides bedding and towels, they also sell kitchen items, vacuums, luggage and fancy dishes and silverware, at prices that seem competitive with Target's. The only odd note is that they have chosen to staff this domestic paradise with teenage boys.

Otherwise it's just like being in the suburbs!

Why We Can't Trust On-Line Polls

2008-11-17T15:19:00.005-05:00

There was passion aplenty in response to my Friday column on Fox Chase Cancer Center's efforts to take over a third of Burholme Park so it can expand its medical operation. While it's all well and good and desirable for Fox Chase to grow and prosper, I took the position that it shouldn't do so by gobbling up public park land, especially when that land was bequeathed to the people of Philadelphia "forever" by the Burholme estate's former owner, Robert Waln Ryerss.

When I wrote that column, I assumed - naively, I guess - that I was pretty much arguing for the equivalent of mom and apple pie. Who could really take a hard-line in favor of paving over 20 acres of park?
Well, lots of people, it seems. If you read the on-line comments, you'll see many people think I am evil incarnate for favoring a park over a cancer treatment center. (Actually I think we should have both.) I was particularly surprised to see that the on-line poll the Inquirer sponsored favored Fox Chase's expansion by a landslide - 73 percent for Fox Chase, 27 percent for keeping the park intact. How interesting that so many people are willing to to get rid of a park. That bucks the conventional wisdom.

Then I received an email from a Fox Chase employee that made everything clear. It was sent out Friday afternoon by Fox Chase 's president. Remember it next time you look at one of those on-line polls.

Subject: Note from the President...Express yourself to the Inquirer

Dear Friends,
Some of you might have noticed an opinion piece in today's Inquirer that spoke negatively about our expansion into the park. Currently the Inquirer is conducting an online poll that will allow you to express your opinion as to whether we should be allowed to expand into Burholme Park.
I encourage you to log on to http://www.philly.com/ and cast your vote!
Sincerely,
Michael Seiden

BTW: The Sledding painting above is by Rob Lawlor, whose artwork is inspired by Northeast scenes.

Planning Starts for Downtown Casino

2008-11-14T12:48:00.006-05:00

The Nutter Administration

isn't wasting any time in laying the planning groundwork for a Center City casino. No sooner did City Council approve the creation of a Market Street entertainment district yesterday , then the Planning Department and the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. posted advertisements seeking five separate consultants to help the city prepare for the expected arrival of a Foxwoods slots parlor in the western end of The Gallery.

The job with the greatest implication for the city's future is the one listed third, calling for a firm capable of developing a strategic plan for the Market Street East corridor, from the Convention Center to Independence Mall, Chinatown to Wash West. The big reason that a Gallery-based casino has drawn such wide support is that many are convinced it will be the catalyst for new development on that tired street. Writing in the Center City District's Fall newsletter, Paul Levy argues that the casino will enable the city to use a special financing mechanism called a TIF to pay for infrastructure, transit and streetscape improvements, which would presumably make the street more attractive to hotels, retail and other development. It's astonishing how that once great shopping street has been allowed to languish. Poor Strawbridge & Clothier has been waiting for a suitor for well over a year. Which, of course, is nothing compared to the lifespan of the empty lot at 8th and Market - over 30 years. In the last few months, the number of empty storefronts has been increasing at an alarming clip.

Ideally, the development of the city's strategic plan will be accompanied by a vigorous public debate about how Market Street should evolve, similar to the open and lively conversations that occurred during the Penn Praxis study of the Delaware waterfront. Several people, including Levy in the Center City District newsletter, have been floating the idea of turning Market Street into Philadelphia's answer to Times Square, and allowing the same kind of exuberant lighting and signage. Just recently, the head of the Redevelopment Authority, Terry Gillen, who has been advising Mayor Nutter on the casinos, raised the possibility that SugarHouse may ask the city for a Market Street location - the obvious choice being the big empty lot at 8th and Market.

While Nutter says he strongly opposes a second downtown casino, it's not too early to start worrying that he could reverse that position. One casino, located on the third floor of the Gallery's anonymous box, is something, I believe, the area could absorb. But add a second, purpose-built casino and you start to create a gambling district. Better to talk about other uses that could be compatible with Foxwoods, like hotels and shops. It's not even unreasonable to imagine someday - after the current bust subsides - some residential towers creeping onto Market Street.

Caution Ahead: Council Votes on Foxwoods

2008-11-12T13:27:00.005-05:00

Take a look of these photos of Harrah's New Orleans casino and tell me what you don't see.

Okay, I'll answer that. You don't see any big, revolving, neon, roof-top signs. Sure the building has decorative night-time lighting and signage. But what they have is surprisingly low-key and tasteful, the kind of lighting that you might find on any urban civic building. Even the hotel tower, shown to the right of the casino, has very minimal signage. Harrah's branding of its downtown casino largely amounts to a pair of its globe logos on pedestals flanking the entrance. There are also a pair of globes on the roof of the porte-cochere, visible in the photo below.

You know how Harrah's lighting scheme differs from the average casino? It's pitched to the pedestrian, not the car. You only need a revolving roof-top sign if you're trying to lure motorists off the highway.

I bring this up now because tomorrow City Council is scheduled to vote on the Commercial Entertainment District legislation that will pave the way for Foxwoods to open a slots-only casino in the Gallery shopping mall, at 11th and Market Streets. And that bill will allow way more intrusive lights than those allowed at Harrah's - including animated and revolving signs. The bill also says nothing about requirements for landscaping - one of the things that makes the New Orelans casino so attractive - or transparency at street level.

New Orleans is currently the biggest city in America with a downtown casino. If Foxwoods jumps from the Delaware waterfront to the Gallery, Philly will gain that title. As I argued in a recent column, I think the move makes the best of the bad hand that Philadelphia was dealt by Gov. Rendell and the state legislature when they legalized slots-only gambling.

That said, I'm starting to worry that the Nutter Administration and City Council are moving too fast to facilitate the move. There are still lots of issues that need to be clarified. Signage is one. As I wrote in my column, Nutter has a responsibility to assure Chinatown that it will be protected.

How will the mayor prevent this great neighborhood - the last in the city where people live, work and shop - from being swamped with pawn shops and check-cashing outlets? What kind of planning and streetscape improvements can be made to buffer Chinatown from casino-related nuisances? How does the city expect to control traffic flow and parking to minimize the impact on Chinatown? Of course, the city doesn't have all the answers yet. That will take serious planning and traffic studies. But the city should be able to provide a general overview of its strategy.

Administration officials insist that it's still early days. They say the zoning bill is merely a first step, and that Foxwoods still must win approval for a Plan of Development from the Planning Commission. Part of the problem, I think, is that Chinatown bet the house on keeping Foxwoods out of the Gallery, rather than negotiating for protections. Now that it looks like they lost that game, it's crucial that the neighborhood representatives start negotiating with city officials for guarantees. And it's crucial that Nutter Administration and City Council respond in good faith.

Weak Market Hits MoMA Pre-Fabs

2008-11-12T12:32:00.006-05:00

Not that we need any more evidence that the real estate market is frozen, but it appears that the architects who participated in this summer's widely-praised MoMA show on pre-fab design can't sell their model houses. So reports New York Magazine . Only the smallest of the bunch, the MicroCompact House (watch the video) managed to snag a buyer. Meanwhile several other architects are slashing prices. Not Philly's own Kieran Timberlake, which listed its Cellophane House for $1.75 million. They're disassembling the see-through house and will store it till they get their prices. Any collectors out there?

Green Light for Transit

2008-11-07T12:46:00.001-05:00

Navigating Philadelphia's underground transit system has always been a challenge, particularly for occasional users. SEPTA's underground offers riders an abundant, but confusing, choice of "modes" - that is, subway, trolleys and regional rail lines - not to mention connections to Jersey's Hi-Speed Line. Then there is the diabolically confusing nomenclature for the services. Are you looking for the trolley to West Philadelphia or the Subway-Surface Line or the Green Line? My greatest sympathy goes out to the poor out-of-town souls struggling to find their way to the exact right spot on the right platform for the right regional rail train going in the right direction.

In the hope of standardizing the system, the Center City District commissioned a bunch of new signs, which were unveiled last week. They're doing a trial run to see how people like them. So in addition to any comments you leave here, be sure to register your two cents at the district's special website.

The District's goal is to mark every underground transit entrance, and every bus and trolley stop, with the lighted green T sign you see in the first photo. The poles can take up to four vertical signs identifying the lines that are accessible from that entrance. The designers - Joel Katz Design Associates and the Bresslergroup - have standardized the colors. Blue is Market-Frankford, Orange is Broad Street. Additionally, the district wants to dispense with the various names for the trolleys and identify those lines exclusively as....Trolley, which gets a green sign.
In some respects, the system is similar to what's there now. (see second photo). But the designers cleaned up the graphics and presentation. They've also ditched SEPTA's familiar, patriotically-colored, double-chevron logo. I agree it's high-time to retire this Bicentennial hold-over. I like the look of the green T, with its stylized rail lines, though I do worry it won't work as well at bus stops. The last we need is two identifying markers.
If you wander near SEPTA's concourse entrances at 15th and Market, you'll as see some additional signage. You may
recognize the look of these wayfinding signs from the green destination signs that you see around down. Katz design created those too.

The idea of standardizing and color-coding SEPTA's various service seems like a good idea, but I wonder if it's as simplified as it could be. If you're a tourist, the words "Market-Frankford" and "Broad Street Line" might not be all that illuminating. (Especially when you're told that you have to go downstairs to get to the El.) Would we better off if every rail, trolley and bus line were assigned given a number and a color?

I also believe that bus routes remain one of SEPTA's closely guarded secrets. Yes, you can view a schematic image of each route if you go to SEPTA's site. But those pitifully scanned versions of their paper schedules are hard to decipher. Why can't SEPTA at least post these schematics at the bus stops, as New York does, so you can figure out where a particular bus goes at the stop? And would it be too much to ask for SEPTA to show the points where you can make connections to other bus and rail routes?

Smaller Casino is a Better Casino

2008-11-03T11:58:00.009-05:00

To the surprise of no one, City Council's rules committee gave its blessing Saturday to a bill that would rezone the Gallery shopping mall for gambling and a Foxwoods slots parlor. The next step is for the entire council to take up the measure, which would create an overlay for an entertainment district on Market Street, between 8th and 12th Streets. Although it appears that the city is eager to smooth the way for Foxwoods, to get its planned casino off the Delaware Waterfront, City Commerce Director Andrew Altman says that the gambling operator still must clear several planning hurdles before it can move into the western block of the mid-'70s shopping mall, a joint design by what was then Bower and Fradley (nowB LT) and Cope Linder Associates.

In Friday's column, I suggested that one of the city's key demands should be the right-sizing of Foxwoods to fit more comfortably onto Market Street. Events have been happening so fast since Gov. Rendell announced that he would consent to the downtown location that there hasn't been any serious reconsideration of what sort of casino Foxwoods should operate at 11th and Market. As I argued on Friday, and in a similar vein back in September, it's dumb for the state to think you can "simply move a replica of Foxwoods' waterfront slots parlor to a downtown location." Foxwoods, like all the slots barns in Pennsylvania, was conceived as a stand-alone, highway box with 5,000 slot machines and a massive parking garage. (See my column on Harrahs Chester.) Altman and the rest of the Nutter Administration already acknowledge that a casino garage probably won't be necessary downtown, since the Gallery sits the region's best mass transit nexus. Now it's time for them to tell the governor that 5,000 slots isn't necessary or desirable either.

Best Little Rowhouses in Philly

2008-10-27T13:22:00.012-04:00

There are times when your eyes start to glaze over at the sight of yet another pseudo-historic, boxy brick rowhouse going up on the streets of Philadelphia. But the latest offering from the Onion Flats collective guarantees the reverse effect. Your eyes should pop when you get a look of its new eight-unit Thin Flats on Laurel Street in Northern Liberties.

I reviewed the project in my column on Friday, and took the liberty of calling it the best new rowhouse project in the city. The way that architect Tim McDonald creates a sense of movement in the facade of Thin Flats struck me as an updated version of the strategy that Baroque church architects once employed. That undulating, textured facade "dances with the exuberant boogie-woogie rhythms of a Mondrian painting," I wrote .

But this isn't just another pretty, edgy face for Northern Liberties. Thin Flats is on track to receive the highest rating (platinum) from the U.S. Green Building Council for its package of energy saving materials and low carbon footprint.
In the photo below, you can glimpse the roof deck, with its water-draining plantings. You can't see them here, but there is also an array of solar thermal panels which McDonald says are capable of providing all the heat for hot water and the underfloor radiant heating system.

Look Who Else is Building Underground

2008-10-23T14:49:00.006-04:00

When I saw that the New York Public Library hired Norman Foster to carve out a new library space under the celebrated reading room of main 42nd Street building, my trend meter lit up. That's the exactly the strategy that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is following for its expansion, which is being designed by Frank Gehry. Based on the report in the New York Times, the library project is going to be even more complex than the art museum's because Foster will have to remove some of the underground book stacks, which double as supporting columns. The art museum merely intends to push out underneath its front plaza.
In case you've been wondering (I certainly have been) how that project has been progressing since I wrote about the plans a year ago, you may be able to glean some details when an exhibit on Frank Gehry's design process opens Nov. 8 in the museum's Perelman building. Gehry will be in town Nov. 7 to deliver the annual Collab lecture and receive Collab's Design Excellence Award.The exhibit focuses on his unbuilt design for Peter Lewis' house, which is seen as a precursor of Gehry's groundbreaking Guggenheim Bilbao museum.
Gehry was chosen for the Philadelphia museum job partly because he is a master at getting light into underground spaces. Foster, who was seriously considered for the Free Library expansion (which is supposedly starting construction in December), will have a much harder challenge working in the cavernous vault below the New York reading room.

The Dynamos of Philadelphia Architecture

2008-10-21T16:05:00.017-04:00

What does it tell us that just four firms over-whelm-ingly dom-inated the local AIA design awards that were announced last week? Or that the winning projects were inno-vative, con-temporary designs that would look smart not just locally, but anywhere in the country? Perhaps that Architecture - with a capital 'A' -has clawed its way back to Philadelphia. It's only too bad the boom has run out of steam.

Once again, Kieran Timberlake walked away with more prizes than it could carry - four to be exact. The architects, who were named firm of the year last year by the national AIA, won the Gold Medal for Cellophane House, (photo and story) their astonishing demonstration project for MoMA's recent Home Delivery show (story) on the history of pre-fabrication. They also took honors for the recently completed Yale Sculpture Building and Gallery and a multi-family project in Ann Arbor, as well as the housing prototype they designed for Brad Pitt's New Orleans reconstruction effort, Make it Right. (story here)
It's to be expected that Kieran Timberlake would have a good showing at the awards, so the bigger surprise is that the young Kensington-based Interface Studio took home three awards, all for unbuilt projects - a Girard Avenue supermarket (which I reviewed, right), a gallery design and a proposed 100k house. They won a Silver medal in 2006 for their Sheridan Street affordable housing design (reviewed here), which happily broke ground this summer.
Right behind Interface was Wallace Roberts & Todd with two awards. Largely a planning firm, they were the obvious choice to receive the Community Design/Planning award for their work on the Penn Praxis Delaware Waterfront vision. But they also picked up an honor award for their downtown transit center in Charlottesville, Va.
The fourth familiar face was Erdy McHenry, for its charming cafe on Independence Mall that finally began providing sustenance to famished tourists this summer. I'm happy to say I also reviewed that one.
Rounding out the group of familiar faces was DIGSAU, which won for a training and education center in Wilmington, and John Milner Architects, in the Preservation category, for its work on Nemours Mansion. Two architects, Darryn Edwards and John Cluver, shared the Young Archtiect award. Arlene and Dan Matzkin received the John Harbeson Award.

When you think about it, it's been an amazingly good year for Philadelphia architects.

The Look of Penn's New Med Center

2008-10-20T12:51:00.006-04:00

Since it was impossible to tell anything about the new Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine from the Inquirer photo that ran with my Friday column, here are a couple of my own humble pics.
Basically, I have two beefs with this building, designed jointly by Rafael Vinoly Architects and Perkins Eastman: its aesthetics and its lack of urbanity. The $302 million design weirdly surrounds a gigantic, 110-high cube-shaped glass atrium with the most banal of ribbon-windowed suburban office buildings. I describe the look variously as an "architectural car crash" and a "python strangling its fragile prey."

It's bad enough when a building of this prominence (it replaces the much loved, art deco Civic Center) looks bad, but it's even worse when it thumbs its nose at the general public. My column takes issue with the massive driveway and porte cochere that dominates the entrance, which perpetuates the unfriendly street environment of Penn's hospital district.
A couple of emailers wrote to take me to task for begrudging the seriously ill an easy drop-off at the front door. Just to be clear, I never suggest there shouldn't be a drop off. What I argue for is a drop-off that also respects the thousands of people who work at the hospital complex (as well as the occasional pedestrian that might dare to enter through the front door.) Since CAM had a huge, cleared site to work with, it could have located that drop-off in any number of places. I suggested making it part of the large, underground garage, since it's just as easy to access the medical offices from there as from the front lobby. But the drop off mighthave been on the side of the building, which is a less traveled pedestrian street.

So why didn't they do that? If you examine the siting of the building, you'll notice it doesn't respond to the curve in Civic Center Boulevard. Rather, the structure is angled to be seen from 34th and Spruce. Pushing the front door back, behind the driveway, helps position CAM so it can be admired from the corner. if you look at the picture on the right, taken from the South Street Bridge, you'll note that the designers also made a point of showing a good face to Center City. I can only deduce that branding is more important to Penn's medical center than the well-being and comfort of its workforce.

Philly's Bicycle Jams

2008-10-13T12:56:00.010-04:00

One of the less remarked upon trends in Phila-delphia has been the upsurge in bicycle commuting. As I wrote in my Changing Skyline column on Friday, traffic is way up in the city's bike lanes. But now, as a consequence, bike parking is increasingly scarce. It's nearly impossible to find an untethered bike rack, parking meter or tree along Walnut Street during peak hours. But it's not only Center City. As Michael Schaffer (an Inquirer alum) reported in his lovely account of Saturday's Obama rally for the New Republic blog, not a single free pole or meter could be found near the West Philly event. The Nutter Administration is planning to add another 1,500 racks, but that won't make much of a difference when you consider they'll be scattered throughout town. The Bicycle Coalition says the city needs 7,500 at least. You can read their report, which details areas with the fewest racks. What are some other spots where bike parking is in short supply?

The increased prevalence of two-wheeled transport is not unique to Philadelphia. A day before my column appeared, the New York Times' Thursday Styles ran a photo essay about bike fashions, wittily headlined, "A Field Guide to the New York City Bicyclist." My bike style guru will always be the woman I spied in Florence many years ago, sailing along on a three-speed while wearing a fur coat and carrying a coffee in her free hand.

As long as we're talking style, be sure to check out Bill Cunningham's fashion essay from Paris, which offers images of some very bike-crowded streets, along with the latest Dior dresses.

ZBA Rules Against Unisys Sign

2008-08-26T12:18:00.006-04:00

When I decided to devote last Friday's Changing Skyline column to the saga of the Unisys sign, it looked like the zoning hearing might drag on for months. Who knew the zoning board, whose members interrupted their summer vacations for a special hearing this morning, would wrap things up so quickly. They voted to deny Unisys its request to place its name in 11-foot letters on the 38th floor of Liberty Two.

Now that they've been denied this billboard space (as well they should have), it looks like the lawyers can stop piling up briefs for the federal lawsuit. It's all moot. But it might have been an interesting, precedent-setting case that clarified the relationship between owners in mixed office-residential-retail buildings. My prediction is that there are going to be a lot more office towers converting empty floors into condo apartments.

Meanwhile, one city wag has this suggestion for Unisys: If they can't put their logo on a prestigious Philadelphia landmark, put the prestigious Philadelphia landmark on their logo. Redesign the Unisys signature to incorporate the outline of Liberty Two. Everyone wins!

Stamper Square: Where's the Cafe?

2008-08-25T10:23:00.018-04:00

There is much to admire about H2L2's design for Stamper Square - which is no doubt the reason the Nutter Admin-istration was so decisive in backing the project for the failed NewMarket site. But surely one of the most appealing elements is the proposal to add a new leg to Society Hill's historic greenway. The winding pathway would meander along the north side of the hotel-and-condo project, gently conveying the city's boulevardiers between Second and Front Streets and, rewarding them en route with a charming, tucked-away outdoor cafe. (Look closely at the indentation in the rendering)

So why, we must ask, was all evidence of the cafe erased like a photo of Joe Stalin from the drawings that received final approval from the Planning Commission last week?

For the answer, you have to go to Joe Jacovini, one of Philadelphia's most powerful lawyers. Besides his day job as chairman of the well known firm Dilworth Paxson (where he was Vince Fumo's boss), Jacovini is also a long-time Pine Street resident, whose double-wide, townhouse garden backs onto the New Market weedy and forlorn lot (see photo by PhillySkyline's Brad Maule).

Unlike some Society Hill residents, Jacovini did not oppose redevel-opment of the old NewMarket site. But he strenuously objected to the presence of a cafe behind his house - so strenuously that developer Marc Stein ultimately figured it was preferable to cut his losses and to scratch the amenity from the project, rendering Stamper Square's design much less interesting. Obviously, someone like Jacovini has the legal wherewithal to tie up the project in court for the next century or so. But Stein's pragmatic concession strikes me as an extreme response.

Alan Greenberger, the planning commission's vice chairman, and soon-to-be executive director, was taken aback to learn that Stein had actually promised Jacovini a deed restriction that would bar an outdoor cafe on the Stamper Square site forever and ever. Recognizing that outdoor cafes have almost single-handedly energized Center City's once sleepy streets, Greenberger and the commission refused to sanction the deed restriction. But they did acknowledge that Stein was free to work out a private - and presumably more temporal - agreement with Jacovini. Still they're appalled by the outcome. "It's a terrible way to do this," conceeds Greenberger.

It's more than terrible, actually. It's dumb. Jacovini is afraid that the cafe, which would be located 115 feet from his garden wall, will create a never ending din that will make it impossible for him to enjoy his garden. He also told me during a very pleasant telephone conversation that he's even more worried about the security issue once there is a public walkway open 24/7 right behind his six-foot-high garden wall.

These are very real and legitimate concerns, as anyone who lives in a Philadelphia rowhouse knows. But deleting the cafe from the plans isn't the answer. Good design is the answer. And I suspect H2L2 would have no trouble drawing a solution.

Incidentally, if security is Jacovini's main worry, he'd be a lot better off having a patio full of chattering people with a good view of that walkway. While the proposed Starwoods Hotel will certainly have plenty of electronic cameras monitoring its perimeter, nothing beats Jane Jacobs' classic eyes-on-the-street security.

As for the potential of noise traveling 115 feet - okay, it's possible. But noise can easily be buffered by building a higher wall. Under the city's code, garden walls can't be any taller than six feet. But I suspect the city would enthusiastically endorse a variance in exchange for allowing the cafe. A higher wall that is impossible to scale would also solve the security issue. Jacovini has good reason to be extra cautious; he lived through the rise and fall of NewMarket, and watched the original tony complex decline into a low-rent joint. Starwoods may promise to be a first-class neighbor, but who knows what kind of owner might replace it in the future.

Jacovini told me he might soften on the cafe idea if Stamper's wall were 30-feet - the height of NewMarket's old north facade. That's a little excessive, if you ask me. He could probably get excellent results with a wall that's 12 to 15 feet high. But if the man wants 30 feet - give him 30 feet. As Robert Frost observed many men are convinced that, "Good fences make good neighbors."

So, build the wall. And let the rest of us enjoy our coffee.

Last Days for Electric Plant?

2008-08-22T15:58:00.005-04:00

John T. Windrim's stately, early 20th Century cathedral of electricity, the Delaware Power Plant, has taken some hard blows. Graffiti mars the elegance of its stripped-down classicism, and a tangle of transformers and substations block views of its elegant Delaware Avenue facade. But until this week, the 1917 power station - one of four Windrim designed along the Delaware - had stood fairly intact. Then, on Thursday, Exelon (which bought PECO and its property a few years ago) began slicing off a small annex, leaving the power plant's north wall open to the elements.

Company spokesman Fred Maher insists the demolition is a limited operation - and not a prelude to total destruction of the generating station. But the unexpected deconstruction work has alarmed the building's champions, especially Hilary Regan. (Photo, right, by the Inquirer's Jon Wilson). They're increasingly worried about the future of the Delaware Power Plant and its sister station upriver, the Richmond Power Station, which was denied historic certification by the Street Administration.

Like many people who have devoted themselves over the last several years to creating a new vision for the Delaware waterfront, they see the two industrial relics as, well, generators of change. The grandeur of their architecture, coupled with their enormous high-ceiling turbine rooms, make them perfect candidates for a new museum of modern art. Obviously, they're keen to replicate the success of London's Tate Modern, which was carved out of old Bankside power plant on the Thames River with the help of Herzon & DeMeuron. But why not?

The Delaware Power Plant, which sits immediately north of Penn Treaty Park, is the more obvious candidate for re-purposing as an art museum, since it's closer to Center City. It's not hard to imagine it cleaned up, freed of its concertina of transformer wires, and installed with oversize sculpture. Sure beats a casino as a riverfront attraction.

Slasher Targets Downtown Street Trees

2008-08-20T13:25:00.004-04:00

The dog days of August are upon us, and as any grizzled veteran of the police beat knows, that means we've entered the season of the bizarro crime story. Today's crime is a most diabolical one. It appears that some madman armed with a machete-like instrument is cutting a swathe across Center City, attacking street trees (Innocent street trees!) and hacking off their bark.

Said attacker appears to favor young, subtle trees, according to an email being circulated by the Center City Residents Association. Most of the attacks have occurred in the vicinity of 10th Street, between Walnut and Chestnut - Jefferson Hospital territory. Not content to slash and run, this attacker apparently returns to the scene of the original crime to hack again at the same trees. Nancy Goldenberg, a vice president at the Center City District, told the CCRA that the young trees are particularly vulnerable and could die from their wounds.

Just what we need in that quadrant of depressing parking garages and surface lots - treeless streets with no refuge from the burning sun. Someone stop this evildoer!

The Failed Sci-Center Experiment

2008-08-18T10:47:00.003-04:00

After a long search for someone to lead the city Planning Department, the Nutter Administration finally found its man right here in Philadelphia. Alan Greenberger, a principle architect at MGA Partners, will take charge of Philadelphia's planning agency in November, as I reported on Friday. Appointing an architect to head the storied department - no doubt still stalked by the ghost of uber-planner Edmund Bacon - isn't without precedent, though. Up until a few months ago, the place was run by Janice Woodcock, another well known Philadelphia architect. The hope is that having a director with a well-tuned design sense will encourage planners to vet new buildings for more than just the usual suspects of mass, density and loading, and pay attention to the finer details of how new buildings engage the street. That's clearly something that didn't get much attention at the Science Center's newest addition, 3711. You can read about what went wrong in Friday's Changing Skyline.

Farewell to the Youth Study Center

2008-08-07T17:10:00.010-04:00

The Barnes Foun-dation is still in Merion and the Youth Study Center is still on the Parkway, but some frenetic activity in Philadelphia this week suggests that the planned relocation of both insitutions is picking up steam.

In preparation for the two moves, the city's public property department spent the week packing up two groups of sculptural figures that have humanized the forbidding juvenile prison for the last half century. The two groups, by the respected sculptor Waldemar Raemisch, are being relocated to the so-called Microsoft High School on Girard Avenue.

It's sad to see them go, especially since we're likely to have to look at the blank lower facade of the Youth Study Center for another year or so. The unbeautiful, but strangely fascinating, kiddie jail - by Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen - isn't coming down until the Barnes Foundation is ready to start work on its new Philadelphia building. Since the Barnes' architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, are still working through schematic design, they're unlikely to have a finished design until late this year, Barnes spokesman Andrew Stewart told me. So there is no urgency for the Youth Study Center to vacate its Parkway site.

Those sculptures were one of the few redeeming features of the Youth Study Center, surely the most oddly sited prison in the world. Because the building was located on the city's most monumental boulevard, the architects tried to camouflage its true purpose by giving the prison's Parkway facade a rather elegant, if strictly modernist, look. But they still couldn't get around the security issues and so the ground level is a brutally blank fortress wall. Hardly the thing you expect to encounter on a leisurely stroll along a major cultural thoroughfare Somebody must have gotten the idea that sticking some nice sculpture in front of the blank wall would make people forget what was behind it. So Raemisch , who escaped the virtual prison of Nazi Germany, was commissioned to design the two large ensembles to screen the real prison.

They're actually quite moving works, called the The Great Mother and The Great Doctor, that elevate their nurturing subjects to iconic status. Each ensemble is organized around a large figure, who dominates the group and offers comfort to the smaller members. They're beautifully composed, with small and large figures. For me, they evoke the hopeful spirit of early modernism, although they weren't dedicated until 1955, long after modernism's best years were past. You may not have paid much attention to the works in recent years. Sadly, the base of the Youth Study Center had become a dormitory for the homeless,and the sculptures were saddled with the additional burden of serving as cover for that social ill, too. Let's hope they can get the appreciation they deserve in their new home.

The Brothers Chawla's Big Mess

2008-08-06T13:24:00.007-04:00

Philadelphia's most notorious real estate flippers and speculators have got themselves in a spot of legal trouble again. This time, the Feds are accusing the Hardeep and Ravinder Chawla of trying to bribe an aide to at-large Councilman Jack Kelly with a Rittenhouse Square apartment, legal help and other assorted goodies, the Inquirer and Daily News both report today. Kelly, incidentally, is a good friend of the Chawlas.

Those among you who like to connect the dots will recall that the Chawlas are the guys who hired Daroff Design in 2006 to cook up the loony, George Jetson nutscape (see image) called New River City for the Schuylkill waterfront. The brothers, who hail from Burma and now live in Huntington Valley, claimed they were prepared to build 10 high-rise towers, containing a whopping 12 million square feet of space (that's 10 Liberty Places), in a L-shaped arrangement spanning the Schuylkill River and the airspace over Septa's regional rail viaduct. (See my 2006 column here, and blog post here.)

The Chawlas, who were then operating as the megla-manically named World Acquisition Group, got Gov. Rendell himself to make a personal pitch for the project to the skeptical Logan Square Neighborhood Association - after contributing some $31,000 to the guv's campaign chest.

Perhaps to cover their bets, the Chawlas had Kelly's aide, Christopher Wright, introduce them to people at the neighborhood association, the group's president, Rob Stuart, told me. Wright is alleged to have received $16,000 worth of favors for the introduction and other help. Those pitches "epitomize how business and politics get done in Philadelphia," Stuart observed.

Although they never received the hoped-for zoning variances for New River City, the Chawlas have continued to be generous to Philly politicians. In 2007, they hosted a fundraiser for Mayor Nutter, Mary Patel reported. It was arranged by PR it-girl Kelly Boyd and attended by the likes of DA Lynne Abraham and former controller Jonathan Saidel.

Considering all the money the Brothers Chawla have spread around, it's interesting how little they've built. They seem to prefer to collect than develop. In 2005, they took the infamous NewMarket site off Will Smith's hands. Initially, they came up with a proposals for a gruesome 20-story tower, by Daroff's James Rappaport (son of a federal judge, incidentally). But after intense neighborhood opposition, they leased the site to Marc Stein, the developer of the yet-unbuilt Bridgman's View. Stein's hotel-condo project won a controversial zoning change from the Nutter administration in May after much heated debate. (See rendering above)

Stamper Square, I would argue, is among better things to result from the Chawla's wheeling and dealing. They were the notorious landlords for the Architect's Building, before selling it to a developer to convert to a Kimpton Hotel. They also flipped the former Locust Club on Locust Street to philanthropist Gerry Lenfest, who is turning it into dorms for students of the Curtis Institute. But they still own the empty and decaying AAA building at 21st and Market Streets, as well as another office building at 1760 Market Street. The Chawlas' Sant Properties is also said to be the largest owners of industrial property in Philadelphia's Northeast - Kelly's stomping grounds.

For a time, they were the landlord for the IRS. But Hardeep Chawla apparently got a little greedy and tried to stiff the nation's tax collector by failing to pass along a mandatory property tax rebate. Whoops! He spent six months in jail for that one. Something tells me this latest indictment isn't the last we'll hear of the Brothers Chawla and their political friends.

Amenities Make the City

2008-07-11T09:39:00.001-04:00

Increasingly, smart cities realize that amenities and parks make them desirable places. New York, one of the most densely populated cities in the country, is paving (or, unpaving) new ground for open space. As the New York Times reports today, the Bloomberg Administration is colonizing two lanes of Manhattan's fabled Great White Way for a strip park of lunch tables. Wonder if that would work on Market Street? Or, the Parkway? What automobile territory would you seize for people?

Speaking of seizing open space, my Changing Skyline column today offers a couple of alternatives to the Delaware Waterfront for the planned casinos.

YIP to Nutter: Bring America's Mayors to Philly

2008-07-08T10:05:00.003-04:00

What major American city has never hosted a national conference of the Mayors' Institute on City Design?

Yes, that would be Philadelphia.

The folks at Young Involved Philadelphia - one of the worst-named, but best-intentioned good-government groups in the city - recently discovered this embarrassing lapse and is beating the drum for the city to make amends. Last week, the group sent a letter to Mayor Nutter encouraging him to make up for Philadelphia's lack of hospitality by signing up immediately as a host city for the group. So far, Nutter hasn't sent out any invitations, or even responded to the group. What's he waiting for?

This kind of conference, which allows you to have your photo taken with all the marquee names of urban America, seems right up the alley of our publicity-savvy mayor. You get to show off your town to tourists, chow down in some choice local boites, trade municipal secrets - and then the Mayors' Institute picks up the tab for the event. The group so badly wants to hold its conference here that its director, Jess Wendover, recently asked a YIP member if he could help bring the subject to Nutter's attention. The Mayors' Institute was set up two decades ago to show America's urban leaders how design can be used to revitalize cities.It's a joint project of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Architectural Foundation and the US Conference of Mayors.

Almost every big city worth its salt has hosted one of these conferences - Denver (Recognize Mayor John Hickenlooper in the photo above?), Chicago, D.C., New Orleans, Boston, Miami, Baltimore. It's true that Philadelphia did serve as the host for a regional conference in 2005, but Philly's mayor at the time neglected to show up. Lemme think - wasn't that John Street? Surely Mayor Nutter can do better.

Erdy McHenry Sails onto Mall

2008-07-07T13:42:00.002-04:00

If you were too busy Friday enjoying the waves and the fireworks to read the Inquirer, you may have missed my Changing Skyline column on Erdy McHenry Architecture's newest building, a ship-tight, 28-foot-long, open-air cafe on Independence Mall. As these images by Roman Torres of Pixelcraft (none of which made it into Friday's Inquirer. Grrrrr!) suggest, their new Independence Al Fresco Cafe is a taut piece of architectural craftsmanship, unlike any of the uber-conser-vative structures that have been built on the mall. The cafe may appear to be just a simple park pavilion. But you really have to experience it to appreciate its beautiful efficiency and clever subversion of the mall's long-standing brick imperatives.

Erdy McHenry has been on a tear in Philadelphia since they completed One Hancock Square, the apartment building on Second Street in Northern Liberties, for developer Bart Blatstein. They've completed so many complex projects since then - Avenue North, a Drexel University residence - that it was a surprise to stumble upon a feature about the already-familiar Hancock Square in the June issue of Architectural Record. (Here's a short version). The story was a real coup for the firm. You could almost count on one hand the number of completed Philadelphia buildings that have made it into the architectural profession's official magazine in the past five or ten years - Vinoly's Kimmel, MGA's Penn Facilities building, Kling's De Seta building (okay, it's in Wilmington), Gluckman-Mayner's Perelman addition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
And there's more coming: the controversial and humongous Radian near the Penn campus and yet another student housing project for Drexel, now going up at 34th and Race Streets. The tower (left) is a circular structure that appears to spin as it rises and looks to be their most daring project yet. Its faceted opening will have views of Center City. Pretty nice digs for student housing. No wonder they don't call them dorms any more.

Filling the Convention Center's Gap

2008-07-01T10:27:00.002-04:00

It looks like Phila-delphians will have to wait at least until September to find out how the Penn-sylvania Convention Center plans to fill the big Broad Street gap, created when the state Department of General Services callously tore down a group of protected buildings that were supposed to be incorporated into the center's new facade.

The Convention Center Authority, along with its bosses at DGS, had been expected to show up at the Art Commission's July 2 meeting with renderings in hand, showing how they intended to screen the three-sided opening where Pennsylvania Life Insurance Co. buildings once stood. (They were located just to the right of the now-departed Odd Fellows building, in the photo.) But the convention center isn't listed on tomorrow's Art Commission agenda and, since there is no August meeting, that brings us to September. No doubt, camouflaging DGS' mistake is turning out to be more complicated (and expensive) than first envisioned.

The front walls of the insurance company buildings, which included a remarkable addition by Philadelphia School architect Romaldo Giurgola, were originally supposed to be woven into the center's long glass front, perhaps to house a restaurant. So, why not just continue the center's airport-modern glass facade a bit further south on Broad Street? That's not so easily done, it seems. The center's design has an elevator core at the back wall of the gap, which is about 40 feet in from the original streetwall. So the three-sided space is something of a dead end. At one point the convention center said it would turn the gap into a pocket park. But the park would be so tiny and closed in, some complain it would end up a dark hang-out for the homeless - a waste of public space. Another reason why the expanded convention center is likely to end up the SUV of meeting halls.

Who Knew? Philly a Design Mecca

2008-06-30T16:37:00.003-04:00

As much as I love writing about architecture in Philadelphia, I would never claim that this city is a hotbed of cutting-edge design. The city's establishment is just too cautious, too penny-pinching, too old-fashioned, and too unworldly. (Yes, that is a huge generalization, and one that is sure to get me in trouble. Oh well.) So what a huge surprise to see Philadelphia weigh in as the 9th best design city in America in yet another one of those annoying Top 10 surveys featured on Business Week's website. Ahead of Washington, D.C. no less! And squeaking in right behind Denver, a city that has done a great job of simultaneously reinventing its downtown and waterfront.

The poll, of course, is as suspect as every other Top 10 poll. The authors responsible for this survey are RMJM Hillier, a not-particularly innovative architecture firm, which just happens to have a large office in Philadelphia. As usual, there's a disclaimer that the survey isn't scientific. Instead, the firm cobbled together a list of criteria that includes the availability of public transit, the number of LEED-certified green buildings and the population of creative types. Now these are a fine basis for comparing the merits of different cities, but hardly the sort of criteria you'd expect someone to use to establish a metropolis' design cred. (It would be no less scientific to count the number of people wearing cool eyeglasses.) But when you've made it to the finals, who's to quibble. Not only can Philadelphia claim to be America's Next Great City, we can now boast that we're one of America's design capitals, too!
(That great Comcast Center photo comes from - wherelse? - Phillyskyline.com.)

Giving the Capitol That Ghoulish Glow

2008-04-02T13:13:00.008-04:00

Isn't it interesting that the Phila-delphia firm that got a fat little contract to create an envi-ronmentally friendly lighting scheme for the dome of the U.S. Capitol (designed by Philly's own Thomas U. Walter in the late 1850s) is the same one that gave City Hall its ghoulish nighttime appearance? The Washington Post reports, and the Inquirer reprints, a story suggesting that Rep. Bob Brady did a favor for The Lighting Practice and helped them get a $671,900 contract to design a more energy-efficient light system for the Capitol's high-visibility dome. That's a lot of money to save a little energy.
To be fair, City Hall's lighting doesn't come across as macabre and Halloweenish because too much money was spent on the treatment. As I wrote in this 2005 column, it looks like something out of the Addams Family, in part, because the lighting designers didn't have a proper budget to light individual features. So, they chose to bombard the "silent, weird, beautiful**" Second Empire pile with beams from giant fixtures screwed onto buildings around Center Square. The result is both patchy and overly-dramatic. Instead of admiring the glow, you're distracted by the particle beams that the big fixtures shoot out into the sky. It's gotten a little better since 2005, either because some of the bulbs have burned out, or because the beams have been redirected. But on a misty night, you still feel like you're walking into a fight scene from Revenge of the Sith.
That said, the Washington Post story feels a might circumstantial It suggests that the bill for greening the dome is out of line, but offers no meaningful comparisons. It's true the Lighting Practice didn't offer the lowest bid, but with professional services lowest isn't always the best choice. However, Brady's connection does make you wonder (especially since his stand on waterless urinals didn't suggest a keen interest in things green). But then there is the Thomas Walter connection. He had a hand in designing City Hall.
**The quote is Walt Whitman's famous description of City Hall.

Skyscraper Height No Object?

2008-03-24T11:04:00.013-04:00

When its exterior was completed last year, the 975-foot-tall Comcast Tower ended One Liberty Place's 20-year run as Philadelphia's tallest building. It seems unlikely that Comcast will be able to hold onto the city's height record for quite so long. Even as Comcast puts the finishing touches on its plaza and underground concourse, a group of developers is proposing an even taller tower - the 1,500-foot American Commerce Center. While it's a long-shot of a project - as I wrote in a story that ran Saturday - it signals that Philadelphia is entering the age of super-tall towers.

The project is being shopped around by Joseph Grasso's and Garrett Miller's Walnut Street Capital, which spent $30 million on the site. Some handicappers suspect they are in way over their heads. Unlike Liberty Property Trust and Brandywine, which are the only companies to actually build new offices in Philly in the past two decades, Walnut Street Capital has never put a shovel in the ground. Their ambitions for the American Commerce Center are very grand, considering. First there is a 1,200-foot office tower (topped by a 300-foot spire) that would include 1.3 million square feet of office space (same as Comcast). But there is also supposed be a second, 477-tall cubular donut that would house 300,000 square of retail in a five-level base and a hotel, located in the southern leg of that open rhomboid you see in the rendering. The architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox, of New York, envision three different plazas, which would host various cafes, a movie theater complex and the hotel ballrooms The dense array of activities could, theoretically, be a smaller Philly version of the shops at Time Warner's building. There's even space set aside for an upscale supermarket in the lower level, just like Time Warner's Whole Foods space.

The architects have done some clever things with the design, like hollowing out the lower structure to preserve some views for the Stirling on JFK Boulevard. The top level of the open rhomboid would have gardens and meeting rooms that can do double-duty as both a conference center for the office tenants and ballrooms for the hotel.

But it would be nice if KPF designers Eugene Kohn and William C. Louie had worked out the architecture beyond this schematic form. You would think they'd be a little embarrassed at stealing the idea for the crown from Daniel Libeskind's original pass at the Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan (see image below). And while the architects say they haven't begun to work on the details of the facade, it's disheartening to see their starting point is the same bluish glass used at Le Petite Cira and half the new office buildings in New York. KPF, which designed cool, angular One Logan Square and the far-less-cool, Post-Modernist Two Logan , as well as the Mellon Bank Center, does seem to have a good recent track record of manipulating glass curtain walls to give them depth and shadow. Of course, most of their recent clients have been in places flush with money, like Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur. We haven't seen any Philly developers willing to spend money on the detailing necessary to make a glass facade more than a vertical ice rink.

My greatest concern, however, is the boxy mass of the tower. It appears to slam down hard on the ground at the corner of 19th and Arch Streets with no set backs and no grace notes. If you've walked around to the back side of the Comcast Tower, then you known how these sheer glass skyscrapers walls can easily become an urban cliff. Given that Ron Caplan, et al, are assembling land for yet another tower immediately to the west, on Arch Street between 19th and 20th, Philadelphia needs to plan now to avoid building a forbidding palisades of skyscraper walls. See my Friday column for more on that subject.

The Architect as Provocateur

2008-03-14T12:26:00.008-04:00

In today's Changing Skyline column,I take a look at the provocative poet-artist-architect Vito Acconci, whose work explores how our built spaces dictate our actions and feelings. Acconci, hasn't built very much. But he does have one existing project here, a sculpture at Philadelphia Airport's Terminal C (pictured below). The piece riffs on Acconci's interest in creating continuous movement from level to level, sort of like what UN Studio did at the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart. Acconci had an even more ambitious proposal for Philadelphia that would have taken those ideas a step further. He was commissioned by SETPA in the '90s to design the public art piece for the lightwell at 16th Street and JFK Boulevard. His design envisioned a vine-shrouded igloo (Think 34th Street Bells) over a spiraling walkway that brought you down to the concourse level. Only problem was the cost was about ten times the measly $350,000 budget. So that project never went anywhere. Septa instead commissioned artists Barbara Grygutis. Working with that budget, she came up with a kind of dwarf sculpture. Her group of illuminated leaves aren't so bad, but it seems dumb that they barely crest over street level.They just beg to be taller so we can see them as walk along the street. The image here, of course, shows them to their best advantage.

You can learn more about Acconci from the exhibit at the Slought Foundation gallery, which conveniently recorded the lecture he gave Feb. 15 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Preservation Postscript No. 2

2008-03-14T11:50:00.006-04:00

During the arduous fight last fall and winter to save the Phila-delphia Life Insurance Co. buildings on Broad Street, state officials from the Department of General Services insisted - actually, they swore in a court of law - that the entire $700 million convention center expansion would be in financial jeopardy unless the state was allowed to tear down the two protected buildings. Failure to get rid of these historic nuisances, they claimed, would add $2.25 million a month to the already exorbitantly expensive project. Worse, the convention center might fail to open in time for several pre-booked conventions in 2011. So, DGS got its way. It tore down the buildings in January.

But guess what? As Dave Davies reports in today's Daily News, the convention center still hasn't gotten around to seeking construction bids. I suspect that foot-dragging will cost the project a whole lot more than two innocent historic buildings. Based on convention center own numbers, the cost is now up to $702.25 million.

It's interesting how all the problems with the convention center construction began when the Rendell Administration fired the convention center's long-time project manger, Perks Reutter Associates, and handed the project to DGS. At this point, as I reported in the Feb. 20 post below, the convention center doesn't even have facade approval from the city Art Commission.

Preservation Postscript

2008-03-13T11:30:00.005-04:00

A charming historic building goes down in Philadelphia - as the poor Philadelphia Life Insurance Co. headquarters did last month - and eventually someone in Harrisburg hears about it. In this case, it was Sen. Gib Armstrong (R-Lancaster), the chair of the budget committee.

During a routine budget hearing, Armstrong took the opportunity to question the head of the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission, Barbara Franco ,about why her agency sat on the sidelines while the Department of General Services carried out a classic bait and switch. You can watch the filmed testimony and hear it all for yourself. (Armstrong raises the issue in the first five minutes, so you don't have to stay for the whole hour.)

In case you've forgotten the sorry tale, the state historical commission negotiated a landmark deal in 2004 with the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The center agreed to retain those two charming little buildings - including a famous addition by architect Romaldo Giurgola - in exchange for permission to demolish several more inconveniently located historic buildings. Only one problem: DGS, which is building the center, says it didn't make the deal. Ergo, it could do whatever it wanted. Which was to let the wrecking ball swing away.

Armstrong raises a very good question: Why doesn't the state historical commission have greater powers to enforce its rulings? It's time people in Harrisburg started looking for an answer.

Philly Buildings Make News

2008-03-10T11:57:00.008-04:00

Philly's new buildings don't get much coverage these days in the national architectural press. We can only guess at the reasons. Is it because they so rarely break new architectural ground? Or is it because of Philadelphia 's preference for soft-spoken designs in an age of shouters? Certainly there have been several recent projects that deserved more exposure than they received: Penn's Skirkanich Hall by Tod Williams/Billie Tsien Architects, Bryn Mawr's Anthropology building by MGA Partners, Hancock Square by Erdy/McHenry Architects, and the Perelman addition to the Philadelphia Museum of Art by Gluckman Mayner Architects.

So, given the drought of media acknow-ledgement, last week's coverage amounted to a deluge In his critique of the Bilbao effect in Architectural Record, Martin Filler offers some understated praise for the understated Perelman addition, which fared badly in a December review in the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, this Sunday, the Suzanne Roberts Theatre by Kieran Timberlake received some major national exposure in New York Times' Arts and Leisure Section. Kieran Timberlake is one Philadelphia firm that hasn't suffered from a lack of publicity. Not only did their Loblolly House get featured in half a dozen glossy magazines (and Changing Skyline, natch), but they had heavy exposure for the prototype design they did for Brad Pitt's Make it Right New Orleans project and the upcoming survey show of Fab pre-fab houses at MoMA. Let's hope this recent attention to Philadelphia firms is evidence that sophistication is returning to the city's building design.

How to Redesign SS Bridge

2008-03-09T12:53:00.009-04:00

In an impassioned, 11th-hour effort aimed at convincing city officials to reconsider a harsh, automobile-oriented design for the new South Street Bridge, about 75 residents, planners and traffic engineers spent three hours on Saturday morning pouring over engineering drawings and satellite images. Like the recent brainstorming efforts for the Delaware Waterfront and the Kimmel Center, the design charrette helped clarify the community's values and identify some creative strategies for making the project better.
The sad part, of course, is that residents were acting in desperation. They were forced to hold the charrette now, just one month before the city Streets Department plans to bid the $54 million bridge project, because the Street Administration left the design of the city's the most important new bridge entirely in the hands of traffic engineers, without any thought about the role it plays as a neighborhood connector and symbolic urban gateway. Not surprisingly, the engineers came up with an interstate-style span that that will increase the psychological divide between Center City and the University of Pennsylvania area. Now they are claiming it's too late to change the design because the bridge is exfoliating concrete at a rapid rate and could become dangerous.

So, there isn't much time to reconfigure this bridge from an interstate speedway to a neighborhood gateway. But as organizer and planner Jim Campbell told the group, "If we do nothing now, nothing is going to be done. We can influence what choices are made." The charrette was a good first step, but Campbell and others conceded that the only hope for getting a better bridge now lies with Philadelphia's elected officials: Mayor Nutter, Council President Anna Verna, Sen. Vincent Fumo and Rep. Babette Josephs (who attended the Thursday night session). Ward Leader Marcia Wilkof urged participants to write letters encouraging them to show the kind of leadership that John Street failed to display. No doubt she's right, but I'm always amazed that Philadelphia officials still need to be nudged and cajoled into taking an interest in a major civic construction project as important as the South Street Bridge. As one of the most photographed perches in the entire city, this bridge will shape Philadelphia's public image for generations.

It was heartening that one of the Streets Department's most progressive engineers, Dave Perri, participated in Saturday's discussion, and was willing to offer both practical advice and a sympathetic ear. While he cautioned that "there isn't time to do a complete redesign" because of the bridge's poor condition, he said it is still possible to make some improvements to slow down traffic and increase the comfort zone for pedestrians and bicyclists on the new bridge.
Here are some of the most interesting ideas I heard from the break-out groups:
-Use crash barriers to separate the car lanes from bike lanes. That means engineers won't have to put an ugly crash-rated fence along the bridge's outside edge and can instead use a handsome decorative railing.
-Incorporate pedestrian lights into protective bollards that double as crash barriers.
-Add a traffic light on the east side of the bridge, where it intersects with the ramp from the Schuylkill River Park. That will slow traffic and make it easier for walkers and bikers to get to and from the park safely. It's almost hard to believe that, in the current design, you'll exit the park ramp directly into the whizzing bridge traffic.
-Eliminate the tin can look-outs and use the savings for sidewalk improve-ments. Several people said the design (see post below) looks like garage elevators.
-Reconsider the plan to demolish the beautiful arches leading the bridge on the east side. The city will not only save money and preserve a historic structure. Keeping the stone arches will retain the odd curve that forces motorists to slow down as they approach the bridge.
-Extend construction from 18 months to 24 months and eliminate excessive overtime costs. Use savings for pedestrian improvements.
-Write letters to politicians to let them know that the city residents value Schuyllkill river crossings that feel like a continuation of the city's streets - not a highway interloper.

The Next Liberty Place?

2008-03-07T16:33:00.004-05:00

Philly's developer-dreamers just don't quit. Trinity Capital Management, which took a 75-year lease on the Girard Estate block (Market, btwn 11th and 12th) in 2006 for $90 million, has come up with the outlines of a massive development scheme that would dwarf Liberty Place. It calls for three skyscapers, a massive, Marriott-sized convention hotel, a large mall - as well as a pedestrian arcade that would cut through all the way to Walnut Street.
The tallest skyscraper, proposed for 11th and Market Street, could be taller than the Comcast Tower under the existing zoning. Unfortunately, the developer is too eager to level the site, which includes some wonderful early, 19th century skyscrapers like the Stephen Girard building, pictured here. Read all about it in Friday's Changing Skyline.

Say Something About SS Bridge

2008-03-06T13:58:00.004-05:00

No, the new South Street Bridge doesn't have to look like this - not if Philadelphians put pressure on city and PennDot officials to redesign the passage. Residents will get their chance to do just that starting tonight.
The South Street Bridge Coalition is holding a public design charrette at 6:30 p.m. at the Philadelphia School, 2501 Lombard Street, to outline the aesthetic and urban objectives for the new bridge. Then on Saturday, starting at 9 a.m., there will be a full-scale re-visioning of the bridge design. Wallace Roberts & Todd, the architecture and planning firm that played a big role in the PennPraxis waterfront study, will guide the discussion.
Even if the one-day event does yield useful design ideas, the public shouldn't expect miracles. Unfortunately, many of the most important aspects of this bridge were set by engineers years ago, with little input from city planners or residents. I've chronicled the process and its failings in columns over the years from 2001, 2007 , 2008 and in an August blog post.

Amnesia Sweeps Society Hill

2008-02-27T12:20:00.008-05:00

I suspect that if someone from Burkina Faso or Lapland happened to read Harry K. Schwartz' letter to the editor in today's Inquirer, they might assume that Society Hill was some kind of village of small houses. He writes to take issue with last week's column , in which I conclude that Stamper Square's carefully modulated massing won't destroy the neighborhood. Indeed, I believe there is a good chance that the plan for a luxury hotel, a park that continues the beloved St. Peter's Way path, and outdoor cafe might boost the neighborhood's elegant ambiance.
Yet, residents are so fixated on the height of the project's 15-story, asymmetrical towers - which top out at 166 feet - that their memory banks seems to have been wiped out.
They've con- veniently forgotten about the presence of three 31-story skyscrapers by I.M. Pei just up the block, which are probably twice as tall as the proposed replacement for the NewMarket. (I shamelessly stole the photograph here from Brad Maule, who has a good analysis at PhillySkyline.) They've also forgotten about the rather bulky Abbott's Square, right across the street from the NewMarket site. Harry seems to have completely blocked out that his Society Hill Civic Association allowed in the 1970s-80s the construction of two 25-story towers at Independence Place, which, of course, are located across the street from the 35-story Hopkinson House! And wasn't it just a couple of years ago that Society Hill Civic approved Will Smith's 112-foot W Hotel without any of the sturm and drang we're seeing today. Hardly an unsullied low-rise enclave.

Society Hill-ians, who will vote tonight on the project, are immensely proud of Society Hill Towers, which jump-started the neighborhood's landmark revival, and frequently point to that design as a model. While the project is certainly important historically, it's hard to overlook the designs serious urban flaws. For starters, there is the towers-in-a-park layout and the separation from the street grid - two mistakes that should not be repeated in Philadelphia. One of the very good things about the layout and massing of Stamper Square is that it connects with the grid in multiple urban ways. It also pushes those two, now modest, mid-rise towers to the far edge of the site, so they hardly interfere with the blocks of low-rise townhouses. They will overlook the broad openness of Front Street, with I-95 and the Delaware River in the distance.

In arriving at this massing and layout, the architects at H2L2 have essentially articulated some useful, basic rules for siting tall buildings in Philadelphia:

1) Bring the buildings to the street line

2) But make sure the massing responds to the urban context on the edges

3) Place tall structure on big streets, facing parks or other broad expanses

4) You can never be too rich or too skinny. Tall, skinny towers are usually better than short fat ones. Rich articulation beats large, under-detailed expanse.

5) Include public open space, but avoid anti-urban setbacks from the street line.

I'm sure there are other rules that could be added to the list, and I'd love to hear suggestions.

It's Not 'Goodbye Broad Street' for Inky

2008-02-25T11:24:00.012-05:00

Patriot Equities may not have fully sewn up the deal to buy the Inquirer Building, as Publisher Brian Tierney says in today's Daily News, but I'd wager a year's subscription to the Inquirer (what can I say, I'm partisan) that the building's two newsrooms aren't going to be packing up and leaving anytime soon. Philadelphia Media Holdings, which bought the Inquirer and Daily News in 2006, put the landmark white tower on the block last August. While no official price was disclosed, developers said the original number was upwards of $60 million.

It's not clear how much Patriot, a Wayne company that was assembled by alumni from Mike O'Neill's Preferred Real Estate, is offering now, but many suspect the sale price will be much less. The big question now is what will Patriot do for PMH. We know that Patriot specializes in lease-back deals. For all Tierney's broad hints about being courted by New Jersey Gov. Corzine for a a high-profile spot on the Camden waterfront, one suspects the talks are nothing more than a strategic flirtation. Why else would architects from H2L2 be prowling the newsroom here all last week, with clipboards and blueprints in hand? They're getting ready to renovate.

They most likely scenario is that Patriot will buy the 1924 neo-classical tower, along with the former printing building, adjacent parking garage and surface lot - and then lease a good part of it right back to PMH. Tierney and Co. get a much-needed cash infusion for PMH, and Patriot gets a ready-made tenant.
It's very clever on Patriot's part: It buys the historic and symbolically charged Inquirer property at a rock-bottom price, then waits until the market comes back. By then Bart Blatstein will have packed the State Office Buildings with apartments and shops. David Grasso will have completed his Whole Foods complex at 16th and Vine. And the Inquirer's parking lot site - right next to the Vine Street interchange - will be in position to attract big box retail and maybe even an office tower.

In the meantime, the Inquirer and Daily News newsrooms stay exactly where they are, but Patriot remodels our archaic offices so they no longer look like a set from The Front Page. I've even heard talk that Patriot intends to put a Starbucks-like cafe in that fabulous, but wasted, ground-floor space on Broad Street, where you used to be able to watch the presses run. Oh let it be so!

But as a battle-scarred veteran of the old-media biz, I know that our working conditions may occasionally change, but never actually get any better. Most likely, PMH is going to lease-back only the lower five floors,
with their immense and problematic floorplates. The vast, open-plan spaces are perfect for an old-style newsroom, but not much else. Patriot will then be able rent the more manageable tower as offices to boutique clients.

If that happens, Patriot and PMH will have to consolidate the thousand or so employees now in the building into the lower five. Some employees may go to PMH's printing plant in Conshocken, but I suspect it's going to get more crowded in here. Patriot and PMH may even decide insert an extra floor into the Inquirer's glorious double-height newsroom to fit everyone Wouldn't you know it - just when I've finally assembled a nice little cubicle empire from the empty desks!

Pa. Convention Center Approval Revoked

2008-02-20T17:20:00.006-05:00

It's pretty clear that Pennsylvania officials didn't bargain on a public fuss when they decided unilaterally to tear down the two protected Broad Street buildings that were supposed to be part of the expanded Pennsylvania Convention Center. Nor, I suspect, did they expect any trouble from one of Philadelphia's more obscure agencies, The Philadelphia Art Commission.

But now the project's architects have some explaining to do.

The art commission wants to see the revised design for the facade - sans the Philadelphia Life Insurance Co. headquarters - before it will allow the $700 million mega-project to receive a building permit. That's sort like having your dam project derailed by a snail darter.

The art commission, which is charged with reviewing designs for all publically funded buildings, approved the center's new Broad Street facade in February 2007. But once the state Department of General Services edited out the two historic buildings, the commission felt the facade design had been radically altered. The two masonry buildings, including Romaldo Giurgola's landmark 1962 addition, were supposed to anchor the southern end of the airport-modern facade.

What will take their place? Will the glass curtain wall be drawn across the ugly gap? Will the gap be converted into a pocket park, as the Convention Center's Al Mezzaroba promised? Will the space be left as a refuge for the homeless? No one knows. And that's why the art commission is asking to review the new design, said director William J. Burke Jr.

Burke sent a letter dated Feb. 11 to Vitetta's Richard Holland, who is responsible for that part of the design. There's been no response yet. The earliest that Vitetta can show the revised facade to the art commission is at March 5 meeting.

But that would presume that someone has actually produced design drawings to fill in the gap.

Until that happens, no art commission approval, no building permit - and no new convention center.

Pa. History Exec:Demolitions Unauthorized

2007-12-28T13:57:00.000-05:00

The chorus of outrage over the Saturday-before-Christmas demolition attempt on the Broad Street Two continues to grow. Barbara Franco, the director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, has sent a withering letter to the Department of General Services, condemning its assault on a pair of historic buildings that were supposed to be incorporated into the Convention Center's new Broad Street facade.

The department, which is overseeing the construction of the expanded center, was prevented from completing the legally questionable demolition on Monday after the Preservation Alliance secured an injunction from Commonwealth Court. Now, Franco, who has tended to be fairly cautious in her statements, lets loose in a Dec. 26 letter to DGS' acting head, Elizabeth O'Reilly. The Inquirer's editorial page also urged Gov. Rendell to stand by a 2004 agreement by the state to preserve those structures . All those righteous claims that the deal was non-binding are starting look pretty disingenuous.

Franco's letter should help boost the Alliance's case Jan. 8 when it goes to court to ask for a permanent halt to demolition. In the three-page document, Franco criticizes DGS for "abruptly terminating consultations" with her agency, taking "pre-emptive action to demolish" the former headquarters of the Philadelphia Life Insurance Co., and "failing to do due diligence." Franco concludes that "the preponderance of the engineering evidence clearly shows it is feasible to save the building facades."

Meanwhile, in a small bit of irony, the Convention Center just released an update rendering of its new facade, (above), done in a style that might be called "airport modern." This version has a few more details to keep the new wall from killing us with boredom. And significantly, it still includes the facades of the buildings that the center and itshenchmen tried to tear down last weekend. Love to hear that parsed by the DGS.

Bulldozers Away: Convention Center Tears Down Historic Buildings

2007-12-22T17:28:00.000-05:00

Call off the celebrations. The Pennsylvania Convention Center Authority decided it could roll over the state historic commission just as easily as it could roll over a couple of little historic buildings. Here's my report, which will appear in Sunday's Inquirer.

The state agency overseeing the expansion of the Pennsylvania Convention Center yesterday began tearing off the facades of two historic buildings on North Broad Street, in defiance of a protection ruling issued Thursday by the state’s top preservation official.
The demolitions, which began at 6:30 a.m. and by midday had produced a waist-high pile of broken limestone, sent shock waves through Philadelphia’s preservation community, which was still celebrating Thursday’s action by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. They believed the commission’s two-page ruling amounted to a legal pardon and would stop the convention center’s bulldozers from reaching Broad Street.
But an official close to Gov. Rendell insisted that the preservation commission’s ruling was “only an opinion,” and therefore the center was not bound by it. “We have no intention of leaving those buildings,” added the official, who asked not to be named.
“I don’t get it,” said Alan Greenberger, the chair of the Design Advocacy Group, which campaigned with the Preservation Alliance to save the historic structures in the middle of the block between Arch and Cherry Streets, the former headquarters of the Philadelphia Life Insurance Co. “We, as architects, have never been able say, ‘That’s just PHMC’s opinion and we’ll ignore it’.”
The remaining bones of the historic pair will be completely demolished over the next several days, said Edward Myslewicz, spokesman for the Department of General Services (DGS), the agency that coordinates state construction projects. The conjoined structures — a modernist masterpiece from 1962 by the renowned Philadelphia School architect Romaldo Giurgola and an ornately-carved early 20th Century commercial building — were supposed to be incorporated into the convention center’s new Broad Street facade.
That arrangement was the result of a negotiated compromise, enshrined in a 2004 legal agreement between the convention center authority and the state historical commission. Although there were several other important historic buildings in the path of the center’s expansion, the commission agreed to permit their demolition on the condition that the critical block of Broad Street just north of City Hall would be left intact. Nearly all the other historic buildings in the two-block expansion zone have now been razed, with the exception of the Race Street firehouse, a beloved municipal structure adorned with gargoyles in firefighting gear.
Greenberger called yesterday’s demolition “an outrageous breach of trust,” and added, “To do it on the Saturday before Christmas, when no one is looking, is despicable.”
It is not clear why DGS chose yesterday - a day when work crews normally receive overtime pay — to start the demolition, particularly since the agency has been in discussions over the pair’s fate since August. No one from the historical commission was available for comment yesterday.
But it appears that the final decision on demolition was made only on Friday, just one day after the historical commission took a strong stand in favor of retaining the threatened buildings.
The head of the demolition crew, who gave only his first name, Pat, said their boss, Geppert Bros. did not ask them to work this weekend until midday Friday.
In her Thursday letter, historic commission director Barbara Franco rejected the DGS claim that the buildings were structurally compromised or beyond repair. Indeed, she quoted the convention center’s own architects — Emmanuel Kelly of Kelly/Maiello and Richard Holland of Vitetta — as saying the structures were sound enough to be knitted into the center’s new glass facade, as originally designed.
“We therefore conclude that there is no reason to amend the current Memorandum of Agreement,” she wrote, referring to the 2004 contract with the convention center.
But on Friday, DGS shot back with its own letter to Franco. The agency said it would be too expensive to incorporate the two old buildings into the center’s new facade. It also cited the opinion of a convention center architect, Hy Myers of Vitetta, a noted preservation architect. According to the DGS letter, Myers “strongly recommended the demolition.”
Myslewicz noted that because the 2004 contract was signed by the convention center authority, rather than DGS, “it was viewed as a non-binding agreement.”
Greenberger warned that the demoliton could seriously erode the credibility of the state historic commission, and other agencies.“Why should anybody now trust a deal made with a public agency on historic preservation?” he asked. “They don't honor deals. That's the message of all this.”
The loss of the Giurgola addition is the second important building by the architect that was demolished in the last year. The National Park Service recent tore down his jaunty Liberty Bell pavilion on Independence Mall, built for the bicentennial. Giurgola, who now lives in Australia, was one three or four internationally famous architects who made Philadelphia a hotbed of design in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
His 1962 addition to Philadelphia Life Insurance’s Broad Street headquarters was immediately hailed as a step forward for modernism because it demonstrated how contemporary design could accommodate itself to the traditional scale and masonry materials of old Philadelphia, without sacrificing its own personality.
Because the decision to demolish the two little buildings came after the convention center design was already complete, it is not clear what will take their place. In a recent interview, one convention center official said the area would problably remain empty, though he suggested it might be landscaped as a plaza.

Decision: The Bulldozers Stop at Broad Street

2007-12-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

Tough luck, Pennsylvania Convention Center: The bulldozers stop at Broad Street.
In an eleventh-hour decision, the Pa. Historical and Museum Commission has just ruled that the behemoth center must abide by a 2004 agreement to preserve the better part of two charming and historic commercial buildings that make up a crucial block just north of City Hall. Based on the strong wording in the letter, which went out Dec. 20, it looks like the PHMC means business: The center will have to stop its devious efforts to get out of its preservation promises.

This is a big win for the Preservation Alliance and the Design Advocacy Group, which adopted the cause of the two buildings after I wrote several columns (1) (2) in their defense. In the letter, which was addressed to another state agency, the Department of General Services, and copied to the Preservation Alliance, the newly empowered state historic commission concluded that there is simply no justification for the convention center to weasel out its contact protecting the little gems. PHMC director Barbara Franco recommends in strong language (for a bureaucrat, that is) that the center should stick to its original design, which weaves three-quarters of the block into the new North Broad Street facade.

It's pretty amazing. Only two months ago, it looked as if the state historic commission was prepared to cave and allow the convention center to raze the pesky pair, which includes a stately early 20th Century insurance company building and its modernist sidekick, a 1962 addition by Romaldo Giurgola, one of the most important architects of the so-called Philadelphia School of the '60s and '70s. The convention center and DGA had claimed that a city building inspection indicated the two structures were too far gone to be saved, but later examination suggested they were exaggerating the structural problems.

There were several important issues at stake here. First, and perhaps foremost, is the relevance of the state historical commission. The deal to save the Broad Street buildings was a compromise worked out after the state commission and others agreed to sacrifice several other historic structures that were standing in the way of the center's expansion. What's the point of drawing a line in the sand if you're going to let it be crossed?

But just as important for me is the logic under girding the choice of what to preserve. The deal recognized that you need to retain whole, intact blocks for preservation to be meaningful, not just isolated, free-standing buildings. Hence the decision to sacrifice the wonderful Race Street firehouse, which is all by its lonesome, and to retain this crucial block that frames Philadelphia great City Hall.

WSJ's Take on the Perelman

2007-12-19T13:24:00.000-05:00

Culturegrrl, aka Lee Rosenbaum, opines in today's Wall Street Journal on the Perelman addition to the Philadelphia art museum. Boy, does she make it sound like a snooze. I had a different take in my September review. That skylit atrium with the Serra-style arcing wall isn't a "glorified corridor," it's the whole shebang. I guess you either you appreciate the zen of minimalism, or you don't.

1706 Rittenhouse Condos: Dig They Must

2007-12-19T12:08:00.000-05:00

If it seems like years since the developers of 1706 Rittenhouse began running ads in the New Yorker for their 29-unit luxury condo tower on 17th Street - it's because they have. But judging by the machines that have been pushing dirt around the tiny site near Rittenhouse Square, they may be ready finally to start building the slim, 31-story tower designed by David Ertz of Cope Linder Architects.
Developer Tom Scannapieco, who partnered with the site's owner - Philadelphia parking king Joe Zuritsky - will only say that the crews were summoned to the site to shore up the wall of the neighboring townhouse. Over the next few weeks, soldier piles will be sunk into the ground to underpin the wall and prevent collapse. The developers own the house and will use it as a future sales office.
Judging from this model photograph, the design looks pretty much the same as it did in 2006, when Mayor Street personally intervened to settle a zoning dispute with the neighbors at 250 s. 17th Street. As a result of those talks the tower was pushed back 33 feet from the sidewalk line to preserve the neighbors' views, creating what will be a private forecourt and - unfortunately for the rest of us - a gap-toothed sidewalk line along 17th Street.
What you don't see is that the back of the tower will cantilever slightly over the townhouse. As I wrote in February 2006, it will look like the tower is"squashing the house like a bug."
Don't be surprised if the developers formally green-light this understated, but very elegant, tower, which features full-floor units starting around $3 million.
Although the condo market is slumping in lots of places, including Philadelphia, developers say there is still demand for high-end units in prime spots. Rittenhouse Square, and a few waterfront locations, like Locust Point on the Schuylkill River, have continued to sell. No wonder Castleway Properties is moving steadily ahead with its hotel-condo project on the square, which I discussed in a column this month. The developers will present the project at a meeting sponsored by the Center City Residents Association on Jan. 10 at 7 p.m, in the Lutheran Church at 21st and Chestnut Streets.

What's behind (or, in front of) City Hall's concrete adddition

2007-11-09T12:36:00.000-05:00

Not surprisingly, Philadelphians reacted suspiciously this week when workers started constructing a cinder block structure at the northeast corner of City Hall. What new act of official vandalism could be perpetrated now against Philadelphia's great civic center?
Well, suspicious minds can rest easy. The city is a constructing a wheelchair ramp for the disabled, which will feed into the new security entrance. The 24-foot-long ramp, which was more than two years in the making, was meticulously designed by Joseph Powell of Buell Kratzer Powell "to look as if it were something that had always been there."
The cinder blocks will be faced in three-inch-thick panels of rusticated granite that were selected from a Quebec quarry to match the stone at the base of City Hall. Although the individual sections are not the exact dimensions of City Hall's stones, they have been sized in a proportional relationship to the originals.

The design was approved after a lengthy vetting process by the city Historical Commission staff. Two changes have been ordered since the above rendering was completed: The stair rail has been eliminated. And the design of the metal side rail has been simplified. It will looked more picket-like, Powell said, and will be topped with brass finials.
There may be a lesson here for Schuylkill River Park, which is now furiously trying to design a 1,000-foot-long ramp to go over the CSX tracks. (see post below). If it took two-plus years to create a handsome 24-foot ramp for City Hall, is it humanly possible to design a decent park ramp many times that size, with many more complications, in just two years?

Images of Schuylkill Park Bridges

2007-11-07T10:49:00.001-05:00

See post below.

See Broad Street in a New Light

2007-11-06T10:34:00.000-05:00

The Center City District is determined that you see Philadelphia's great buildings in a new light. Having previously turned City Hall into a Victorian tart (see post here) for Christmas in 2004, the downtown business improvement district now plans to give some other landmarks an extreme, if temporary, make-over for this holiday season. The CCD will draw its light sabers at precisely 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 7, (speeches start at 5:30 p.m. at the Bellevue) with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony blasting down the Avenue of the Arts in accompaniment.

First to get to bathed in light will be the Terra Building, a University of the Arts tower on the southeast corner of Walnut Street. I saw a test lighting in red, white and blue the other night that looked fairly understated in comparison with the heavy duty Victorian gilding planned for McKim Mead and White's marble columned temple at Chestnut Street (above), now the entrance to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The Merriam Theater and two University of the Arts' buildings at Pine Street, John Haviland's austere Greek Revival hall and Anderson Hall, will also be colorized for the rest of the year. Being a holiday promotion, there will be food and some free goodies. The son et Lumiere show is designed jointly by the Lighting Practice, Artlumiere, Philips Lighting, and Vitetta.

Their intent was to find a clever and fun alternative to the usual Christmas lights, and to make us look afresh at buildings we pass all the time. It's unclear if the five custom-designed light costumes will work together as an ensemble, but it's a good bet that they will be anything but serene. But it's nice to know that if the lights turn out to be a little gaudy, at least they won't color Broad Street forever.

Why Does a Philadelphian Cross the CSX Tracks?

2007-11-04T18:45:00.000-05:00

More than 120 people descended on Schuylkill River Park Sunday afternoon, but they didn't come to stroll, bike, blade, garden, play with their dogs, or relax on a bench. They were there instead to evaluate three possible routes for a new bridge over the CSX tracks. As I wrote in my Friday column, the city is under a federal court order to construct a ramp alternative to the Locust Street grade crossing by October 2009. But by the end of the three hour public meeting, it was clear that each of the options would take its toll on Schuylkill River Park, the wonderful mixed-use neighborhood enclave designed by acclaimed landscape architect John Collins.

The event was a commendable effort by its sponsors - Fairmount Park and the Schuylkill River Development Corp. - to gather public input about a bridge that will loom large over both the park and the Schuylkill Banks recreation trail. (It was an especially refreshing contrast to the top-down process used to choose a design for the South Street Bridge. ) Sunday's event was the culmination of a design study that was proposed and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. With a $195,000 Pew grant, SRDC was able to hire HNTB Engineers and Menke & Menke landscape architects, which identified the three most feasible routes and worked up some very pretty renderings.

The renderings were a little too pretty, if you ask me. They made all the options look palatable, when really the best option is probably none of the above. (Look here Monday for the renderings.) The renderings were also a bit deceptive because each version showed overpasses decked out in attractive, high-end architectural finishes. But as the SRDC and Fairmount Park acknowledge, there isn't even enough money to build a bare bones, concrete overpass, nevermind a fancy brick-trimmed and arched one.

It was the prettiest of the pretty ren-derings, the red option, that came in for the harshest criticism. This proposal calls for a 1,000-foot-long, combination ramp-overpass-ramp (not 400 feet, as I was told last week. That appears to be the length of the structure once it crosses into the park.) . The red option would start near the trail's current end point, Locust Street, span the CSX tracks, and fly over the dog park, before landing as a curving earthen berm in the middle of the park. There seemed to be near universal agreement on Sunday that the curved berm, which would rise as high as 15 feet, would divide the park like the Berlin Wall and dangerously reduce visibility inside the park. Although some admired the concept for its sculptural quality, most agreed there were too many problems.

The green option, which would run along the northern edge of the com-munity garden, didn't fare much better in public comments. Although it looks fairly harmless and direct as a thin green line on the map, the renderings revealed that this overpass would require a heavy-duty series of switchbacks before its conclusion on 25th Street. It would displace some six to 12 garden plots, which would have to be recreated by taking land from another section of the park. Worst of all, the switchbacks would create a 30-foot-long wall - that's equal to the width of two rowhouses - along 25th Street. The wall would probably block views into the garden. It unlikely to be an attractive feature in the park Think of the clunky Walnut Bridge staircase on 24th Street - only wider.

Given these two un-appealing choices, quite a few people said they favored the yellow option. It's a long, straight run from the trail's donut at Locust Street, but at least the ramp would hug that unused strip between the park fence and the railroad tracks. The beauty of this proposal is that it only dips its toe into the park itself. It lands on a strip of unclaimed asphalt between the dog run and the basketball courts. The downside is that bicyclists zooming down the ramp into the park might clash with pedestrians, children and dog walkers. But this could be mitigated somewhat by placing a large bollard at the base of the ramp, where it empties into the park. That would force cyclists to dismount, and walk their bikes into the park. Tim Kerner, an architect and planner, noted that it was the only option that "didn't take a nice area and make it worse."

One other thing to consider with this option is that it could become a heavily used park entrance if Penn ever gets around to building its pedestrian bridge across the Schuylkill. But from what I gleaned in a recent interview with Penn officials, that river crossing isn't going to get off the drawing board for at least another 30 years - if ever.

Although most people attending the discussion accept the argument that the city has no choice but to build the court-ordered overpass, a few people pointed out that the exercise bordered on the absurd. Paul Levy, head of the Center City District and an SRDC board member, says he's concerned about inserting something so intrusive into a successful public park. A couple of people said it's crazy to gobble up park land when there is a large asphalt parking lot just north of the community garden, owned by developer Carl Dranoff. Could the city acquire air rights and land the bridge there? (I decided it would be a nightmare for me to take part in this discussion.)

You also have to wonder about the wisdom of sending people on an 1,000-foot-long detour from Locust Street when there will soon be a connecting ramp to the trail from the South Street bridge. It's true that the South Street bridge is 2,000 feet south of Locust Street. But is the inconvenience of traveling the extra 1,000 feet really worth spending $4 or $5 million in public money on an enormous detour ramp that will forever alter the character of these serene and well-loved green refuges?

And here are the proposals in plan:

Of Parking, Plans and Planners

2007-10-18T09:51:00.000-04:00

During Tuesday's strangely schizoid Philadelphia Planning Commission meeting, it was interesting to watch the members veer between rejecting the whole notion of planning on the Delaware River, and demanding more serious planning on the Schuylkill River, where Brandywine Realty Trust is seeking City Council permission to build an $800 million mixed-used development. One moment they were threatening to derail Brandywine's transformative Cira Centre South project because the developer hadn't completed a traffic study. Next, they were grilling Penn Praxis' Harris Steinberg because the Delaware waterfront study will offer some strong ideas about traffic and parking.

There's no doubt that traffic and parking are big issues for Cira South, which includes a 2,400-car garage (above) sandwiched between a proposed 50-story tower on Walnut and a 25-story tower on Chestnut. As part of the project, which I wrote about Monday, Brandywine will overhaul the 30th Street post office, designed by Rankin and Kellogg - architects of the Inquirer Building, among other things - for 5,000 employees of the Internal Revenue Service now housed on Roosevelt Boulevard. You don't need to be a traffic engineer to know that means Cira South will draw an awful lot of drivers from the Northeast, who will arrive at their jobs after fighting their way off the I-676 ramps. So, members of the planning commission were absolutely right to zero in on the traffic issues.

The problem was the ways they flailed at the issue without really having any sense of how it might be solved. If the Street Administration had bothered to employ a transportation director, or if actually attempted to implement the parking plan it completed last year, the commission might have had policies in place that would have enabled it to give Brandywine guidance on the issue. Instead, all they went around in circles - like a motorist searching for a Center City parking space on Saturday night - on the subject of whether a 2,400-car garage was too big or too little.

Perhaps if they did have a clear parking policy, they would have instead talked about more progressive measures than simply building a bigger garage. What about instituting van pools from the Northeast, providing remote parking at Septa stations, and staggering work hours to ensure that all 5,000 IRS workers do not descend on the Cira South garage at the same moment? Solving the parking problems in Center City isn't about providing more parking; it's about finding ways to keep cars out of the center.

As I wrote on Monday, Brandywine is promising that its project will help fill the void between Center City and the universities, and create a new neighborhood on the west bank of the Schuylkill. It's an exciting concept. But I'm not sure they can deliver with this plan, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli. For one thing, Brandywine is counting heavily on PennDot and other highway agencies to pay for the desperately needed sidewalk and street improvements. But the bigger issue is the moat in front of the garage, which overlooks Amtrak's Northeast Corridor tracks. Until that big gap is decked over, this project can never fulfill its claim to be a connector. But you didn't hear the auto-obsessed planning commission members discuss those kind of pedestrian issues. They're just not on their radar.

Which reminds me of another reason Philadelphia needs the Penn Praxis vision study. Plans help you define the issues worth caring about and provide a road map for finding solutions to complex urban problems.

Gloves Off on Waterfront Plan

2007-10-16T21:07:00.000-04:00

If the reception that Penn Praxis' waterfront vision plan received at Tuesday's Planning Commission meeting is any indication, then the year-long study is in serious danger of ending up on a shelf - and with it, Philadelphia's last, desperate hope of realizing a humane, urban-scaled neighborhood on the Delaware. As I wrote in a recent column, a coalition of real estate interests is lobbying to scuttle one of the plan's big ideas, extending the city grid to the river's edge, because they feel it would restrict their flexibility to develop their property. The opposition launched its shock-and-awe campaign on Tuesday.

Of course, the opponents didn't specifically say they don't want a grid. Instead, the forward attack team made up of lawyer Michael Sklaroff and developer consultant Craig Schelter simply listed all the things wrong with the waterfront study. But it's not like they want to see those weaknesses corrected; they want to take the whole plan down. Certainly there are aspects of the study that reasonable people will want to quibble over: Is the recommended, 100-foot recreation path a bit too wide? Has Penn Praxis set aside enough land to accommodate the large-scale industrial users who might come along?Is it realistic to reduce Delaware Avenue to just two lanes? Does the plan offer a viable alternative to the ugly parking podiums like the one built at Waterfront Square?

It's true that the plan isn't perfect. But what plan is? The point is that it offers a planning philosophy that can be used as a starting point. We know there will have to be exceptions. The problem right now is there is no philosophy, no direction, no energy to shape the waterfront. As a result the Delaware has languished more than any big city waterfront in America. The situation isn't good for the public, which can't take full advantage of the river's beauty.

And it isn't good for developers either, as developer Sam Sherman pointed out Tuesday in a principled dissent from Sklaroff and Schelter. "This proposal will add value in the long term he argued. "Mangling the Delaware shore with suburban style gated cul de sacs will not only damage Philadelphia, but would undermine the development value of the waterfront. It is astonishing, even breathtaking, to think that a developer could be so foolish as to devalue their own development by requesting that their site be converted from a prime urban development opportunity to Sprawl Junkspace." Sherman, who is active with the Congress of New Urbanism, which just held its convention in Philadelphia, says the group has unanimously endorsed the Penn Praxis study.

Incredibly, several members of the planning commission actually voiced doubts about the wisdom of setting out a broad planning philosophy: "If we say where the streets should be, then we'll be pre-determining the type of development," commission member Gloria Levin fretted. Well, yes, pre-determining the shape of development is what planning agencies do.

Top Planner Janice Woodcock, who introduced the presentation, and Harris Steinberg, who has been overseeing the waterfront study, tried to make a pre-emptive strike against the forces of opposition. "Vision plans allow us to imagine the future," Woodcock said. But Sklaroff and Schelter seem to want to control what we imagine.

Developer really, really means to shore up Girard Warehouse

2007-10-11T10:22:00.000-04:00

The Inquirer's Stephan Salisbury reports today that Philadelphia is filing suit to force the owners of the Girard warehouses to stabilize the teetering historic building. Developer Geoff Flournoy, of BRP, goes to great lengths to insist that they've been meaning to make repairs all along. He also blames a previous owner, the Board of City Trusts charity, aka Girard Estate, for the poor condition of the property. How convenient that he overlooked the fact that it was his company that ripped off the back of the building in May - and has done nada since then.

Front Street's Domino Scenario

2007-10-09T11:17:00.000-04:00

The block-by-block demolition of Phila-delphia's surviving maritime arch-itecture seems to be going quite nicely, as these shocking images of Front Street's Girard Warehouses suggest. With the north corner of Front and Chestnut Streets having been just transformed into a smooth asphalt parking lot by the Spear brothers, it looks like the next logical place for the wrecking ball will be the long, handsome facade of the Girard Warehouses, the row of early 19th Century buildings that Stephen Girard built between Market and Arch Streets.
Talk about a domino effect. It was only June when the Spears, who own a collection of apartment buildings and parking lots, succeeded in manipulating city building code officials into letting them level two historically certified buildings that had defined the Front Street intersection of Chestnut since the 1830s. Now the virus of destruction is spreading uptown.
Officials at the city Historical Commission first became concerned in May, when the Brooklyn company that was supposed to be turning the Girard Warehouses into condos began tearing wildly at the facade. BRP Development ripped out the historic wooden frames, and then sheared off the rear of the building - apparently without a building permit! Commission staffers
got involved in the spring, but then all work stopped. The warehouses have been sitting in this condition ever since, waiting for winter to deal the final death blow.
And now - surprise, surprise - the owner, Tom Stafford is quietly talking to city planning officials about abandoning the approved renovation project. He wants to demolish the historic structures and erect a brand new condo tower. If the city agrees to that, it may as well write out a death certificate for its historic preservation law. Both Plan Philly and Skyline Online are concerned that the buildings could collapse any minute.

Over and over, we've seen developers buy fragile historic buildings, only to let them fall to pieces and then claim they have no choice but demolition. The only way for the city to stop that scam is to just say no: If you don't want the head-aches and expense of renovating a certified historic building, then don't buy it. Interestingly, in the same time that BRP and Stafford have been picking at the poor Girard warehouses, their neighbor to the north has successfully completed a beautiful renovation and filled the old historic building with tenants. So, it can be done, so long as you're not too greedy.
Front Street, as I wrote in this February post, was, until the start of 1993, a glorious, intact edge of the city, a living reminder of what Philadelphia was like in its maritime heyday, when clipper ships jostled for space among the wharves. But then Ed Rendell made his middle-of-the-night decision to allow the Bookbinders restaurant to demolish the Elisha Webb Chandelry at Front and Walnut. Within two years that entire block had been razed. And most of it is still empty today. If the Girard warehouses go, Philadelphia will have lost nearly four blocks of Front Street, the original Center City portion.
The waterfront activity is the reason that Stephen Girard built his series of warehouses and shops on Front Street. The ground floors were leased out to shopowners, while shipping merchants rented storage space and counting houses on the upper levels. The business had all but dried up by the time the city's port moved to South Philly in the 1960s. The old warehouses sat abandoned and forlorn for 30 years until people started to figure out that they were tailor-made for a loft living.
It's been frustrating watching the Girard Warehouses grow more decrepit while so much else in Old City has been spectacularly renovated. The buildings' bad luck was to have I-95 in its front yard. But at least the buildings managed to survive the imposition of that highway barrier. Now, ironically, that interstate road no longer seems to be such a deterrent to residential development. Several towers have been completed on Front Street. How ironic if these poor warehouses should be done in, not by the loss of the port or a massive highway, but by the overly grandiose expectations of a residential revival.

RIP: Herbert Muschamp

2007-10-04T11:43:00.000-04:00

Herbert Muschamp, the former New York Times architecture critic who died yesterday at the way-too-early age of 59, was brilliant and bizarre in equal measure. He loved the wonderful chaos of cities, but could care less what buildings did to their fragile human balance. He wrote a riveting, 6,000-word personal history of his experiences with Edward Durell Stone's 2 Columbus Circle (see my post), yet refused to advocate for the preservation of its facade; indeed, he opposed the whole idea of preservation on the grounds that it was a form of urban calcification. Muschamp was given to the kind of extreme pronouncements that make you involuntarily spit your morning coffee all over the newspaper, and yet there was no contemporary critic in any speciality who could fuse disparate ideas into such a fireworks of blazing insight.

Muchamp, a Philadelphia native who attended Chestnut Hill Academy and, briefly, the University of Pennsylvania, lived an amazing life. He was present at the ICA on the famous day in 1965 when Andy Warhol's first museum show opened and the artist was besieged by a wild crowd. He later became a friend of Warhol' and a denizen of the Factory, his famous art commune. Julie Iovine, who worked as Muschamp's editor at the New York Times, gives a good account of his over sized personality in the Architects Newspaper, and Verlyn Klinkenborg makes a stab at describing what made his work so intellectually thrilling, even when he was dead wrong.

In honor of this great critic, here's a teensy sampling of the most over-the-top, infuriating, certifiably mad Muschampian statements:

-On 2 Columbus Circle: "No other building more fully embodied the emerging value of queerness in the New York of its day."
-On perfume bottles and urban skylines: "Few new buildings, tall or short, match the aesthetic appeal of the flacons, vials and jars that crowd the perfume and cosmetics counters at department stores and duty-free shops all over the world. They are my favorite skyline."
-On Daniel Libeskind's proposal for Ground Zero:
From September 2002: It "attains a perfect balance"
From February 2003:, “Daniel Libeskind's project for the World Trade Center site is... a war memorial to a looming conflict that has scarcely begun.”
-On the Kimmel Center: "Rafael Viñoly's Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, the new home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, is precise, luminous architecture for lovers of rich, cultivated sound

Back to Philadelphia: Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Will Design the new Barnes Foundation

2007-09-10T15:33:00.000-04:00

One of the nice things about Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects winning the commission for the Barnes Foundation (as I reported today) is that it means that they will get a chance to do a second Philadelphia building. They are responsible for the best new building in Philadelphia: Skirkanich Hall labs at Penn, which I reviewed in 2006, and when the design was first presented in 2004. But in this day of jet-setting stararchitects, it's rare for a designer to come back for a return engagement.
The new Barnes won't necessarily start up a dialogue with Skirkanich. But the architects did tell me during our interview yesterday that they intended to "top" what they did at Skirkanich, so it's obviously a point of departure. These days, two major buildings by the same designers, in the same city is practically a body of work. I've always felt you can't understand an architect just by looking at one building. You get more meaning and enjoyment when you are able to see the same ideas applied to different problems, and can pick out the variations on a theme. It might take three or four years, but Philadelphians will eventually have a little compare-and-contrast exercise to ruminate over.
Williams and Tsien don't have a huge list of completed works, but they are represented on both coasts by excellent projects, the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California. All their projects are distinguished by an effort to bring the landscape into the building and blur the boundaries between indoors and out. That's exactly right for the Barnes collection , which is so thoroughly integrated with the landscape surrounding Paul Cret's limestone villa in Merion. The experience obviously won't be the same on the Parkway, but it could be wonderful in its own right.

The Barnes Inches Toward Philadelphia

2007-09-05T10:54:00.000-04:00

The conspiracy theorists have always believed that the Philadelphia Museum of Art was out to steal the Barnes Foundation's collection. But it looks like the Barnes might steal some of the limelight this week from the PMA. While the PMA prepares its big roll out for the new Perelman Building, which I reviewed on Sunday, the Barnes board is planning a one-two punch of major announcements over the next several days.
First, the board of the Merion art museum will travel en masse today to City Hall for a joint, 1 p.m. press conference with Mayor Street. You don't need to be telepathic (or read the Daily News) to guess that they will announce a deal for moving the Youth Study Center off its Ben Franklin Parkway site, so the Barnes can take up residence on that nice green acre. Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell has been blocking the center's move to 46th and Market Streets for eons, waiting for someone in City Hall to make the right offer. Until then, Street and Rendell want to locate the juvenile prison temporarily at the former Eastern State Psychiatric Insitute on Henry Avenue, next to the shuttered MCP Hospital. No shortage of space there.

The stage for a revised plan was set last month when Street announced that Family Court, the center's companion, would move to 15th and Arch Streets, instead of the old Provident Insurance building, at 46th and Market (see post here). Once that change was made, there was less of a reason for the juvenile detention center to be in West Philly. But getting the prison off the parkway will be just the first of the Barnes' headline grabbing efforts. The museum, which announced a short-list of six architects this spring, and seems undeterred by the latest lawsuits aimed at stopping the move, is expected to name a designer for the project by next week. One unofficial, but informed, source speculates that it's either going to be Rafael Moneo , author of Los Angeles' Catholic Cathedral, or Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, creators of Philadelphia's best recent building, Skirkanich Hall. The Barnes is probably the most important architectural commission of the decade, so whoever wins should be one happy designer.

Blue Light Special on Newspaper Buildings

2007-08-30T09:09:00.000-04:00

Think the proposed sale of the Inquirer building is an isolated case? Think again. These days, the land occupied by America's great newspapers is increasingly being eyed as a cash-generator. See the Wall Street Journal's take on the subject.

Also For Sale: My Shining White Knight

2007-08-21T14:39:00.000-04:00

It's now official: the shining white Beaux-Arts tower that has housed the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1924 (and later, the Daily News) is on the block, along with the big chunk of real estate behind it. Ever since I first stepped through the doors in 1984, I always loved the building, by Rankin, Kellogg and Crane, for its mix of lofty ambition and no-nonsense, ink-stained utilitarianism. Sure the lobby was slathered in marble pilasters and graced with a globe of the world, but all pretense to grandeur ended right there. A few steps beyond those polished walls, and you were deep into a forest of bare concrete, broken and unmatched desks, cluttered stacks of yellowed newsprint, discarded food containers and several generations of detritus. When I first arrived, a Rube Goldberg network of pneumatic tubes still snaked around the interior, so editors could send glass rockets of typed paper copy to the composing room and pressroom. The tubes are gone, but I suspect that some of the fixtures - most notably the toilets in the third floor women's room - date to the original building. The newsroom didn't get carpeted until a renovation in the late 1990s because one crusty editor was of the firm belief that we should be able to grind our cigarettes out on the floor. Now that that the New York Times has moved to a gossamer -pretty, Renzo Piano-designed tower, the Inquirer and Daily News building is among the last of the gritty,big-city Front-Page era news buildings still in use. Its exact contemporary, Raymond Hood’s Chicago Tribune tower, still holds on.

For a great, metropolitan daily - "An Independent Newspaper for the All the People" - you couldn't find a building that better expressed the brand. Located seven blocks directly north of City Hall, the Inquirer's modest white, terra cotta clock tower was a blunt, symbolic counter-point to the ornate, marble one atop city government's lavishly decorated birthday cake. One tower was the bastion of the city's political rulers; the other, the crusading defender of the people. You'd see the pair lined up from a distance, staring each other down. I called the Inquirer a "shining white knight" in my post below on the state office building because its coloring , scale and isolation on the skyline spoke volumes about how its owners saw the newspaper's role: the noble, lone seeker of truth.

When the Inquirer's 23-story steel-frame tower went up at Broad and Callowhill Streets, it was the tallest building that far north of City Hall. Eighty years later, it is still among the tallest on North Broad Street. The decision to locate it so far north of Center City was an instance of hope triumphing over reality. The Inquirer's owners at that time wanted to believe the city's business district would continue its march uptown. It didn't. Oh well. There's still time. The Inquirer's isolated perch made it a landmark that could be seen far and wide across the city, reassuring evidence of democracy at work. Publisher Brian Tierney, a guy who knows a thing or two about branding, says he wants a new icon for the Inquirer, Daily News, Philly.Com and whatever else it is that we publish. Let's hope it speaks as clearly and passionately about the role of journalism in the 21st Century media as this out-moded old house of scribes did.

CCRA Attacks SS Bridge Design

2007-08-20T12:32:00.000-04:00

The Center City Residents Asso-ciation has launched a major assault on the city's planned design for rebuilding the decaying and structurally deficient South Street Bridge. In a strongly worded letter signed by President Vivian C. Seltzer, and mailed Aug. 8 to a full-page worth of city officials, the neighborhood group complains that the Gannett Fleming/H2L2 design will insert an inappropriate, interstate-scaled bridge into a fine-grained pedestrian neighborhood.

I made some similar arguments in my Feb. 9 post and recent columns. But the group's letter shows just how widely held those concerns are. "It appears evident," the CCRA letter complains. "that the principal design criteria for the Bridge were to feed more traffic to and from existing ramps, and to accommodate large trucks" - hardly the conditions necessary to promote an evening's stroll between Center City and the Penn campus.
That's just the warm up. Not only is this the wrong bridge in the wrong place, the CCRA argues, but the new design will actually be "less safe to all users, including an estimated 4,000 pedestrians and 1,000 cyclists" who cross daily. The group predicts that wheelchair users will be especially vulnerable as turning motorists whip around the newly curved corners that will lead to the world's most scary highway access ramps. The group is especially irked that the city and PennDot are investing $50 million in deluxe turning lanes, without doing squat to make those merge-or-die ramps on I-76 any safer. "It seems only logical that any bridge design should be compatible with a future ramp redesign," the letter argues. Sounds reasonable to me.

Like anyone who has ever glanced at the official rendering (above), the CCRA was thoroughly non-plussed by the pasted-on design elements the city intends to use in a pathetic attempt to disguise the standard highway bridge. "Of even greater worry, however, is the opportunity the proposed semi-enclosed stainless steel towers create for high-risk hiding places for muggers, convenient urinals, trash receptacles and as targets for vandalism."

None of these are new complaints. But coming from a well-run, influential neighborhood group like the CCRA, these points ought to carry weight with the decision-makers, if not John Street, then certainly mayor-to-be Michael Nutter. Up until now, the Streets Department has stubbornly stuck to its position that 1) this is the only way to build a new South Street Bridge, 2) it's too late to think about it any more, 3)and besides, a nice bridge would cost too much. The department's engineers - and other city officials - should be required to read Saturday's stunning Op-Ed in the New York Times by David P. Billington, a Princeton University professor and renowned bridge expert. The article was written in response to the Minneapolis bridge collapse, but applies equally to the South Street Bridge. He maintains that bridge designers have gotten lazy and simply insert one-bridge-fits-all highway designs into any situation. Billington says American engineers need to start designing bridges that are specific to their place and task - and also beautiful. In this case, the place is a dense rowhouse neighborhood with a postcard-worthy view of the Center City skyline. The task is to make that a view that everyone can enjoy, whether they're traveling by foot, bike, wheelchair or car. Maybe it's time for someone in City Hall to sign up this guy Billington as a consultant.

Blurred Vision on Scheie Designer

2007-08-20T12:25:00.000-04:00

Whoops. I was mistaken in attributing the Scheie Eye Institute to Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen. Center City architect Dan Kopple informs me the building was designed by the Kling Partnership's Dick Colville. Kopple should know since he was the partner in charge. Must have been the blurred vision after the eye drops. It's still a building worth seeing next time you're near 39th and Market Streets.

For Sale: Groovy Gov't Office Bldg.

2007-08-16T17:18:00.000-04:00

There's not much love in Philadelphia for the state office building at Broad and Spring Garden Street, designed in 1959 by the once ubiquitous Philadelphia firm, Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen. I'll admit there was a time when I thought the slab couldn't be blown up soon enough. (Yes, that is the shining, white knight of the Inky tower in the background.) But then the state gave the marble facade a good scrub a few years ago, and I began to take a shine to the relic of bureaucratic modernism. Somehow the cleaning made its grid of square windows dance the Cha-Cha. The architects didn't just rotely plug in window squares at regular intervals; they gave the otherwise, by-the-book International Style high-rise a serious sense of rhythm by alternating windows that are flush with the facade, with ones that protrude. The squares are finished off with a thick metal outline. But the designers didn't stop there. They also pleated the walls of the penthouse. It's a surprisingly playful touch for a government office tower, more in keeping with one of Morris Lapidus's Miami confections than the stuff of Philadelphia officialdom.

Now, two years shy of its 50th birthday, the state office building is about to go on the block. Sean Pressmann, chief-of-staff for the Pennsylvania's Department of General Services, says the state will post a Solicitation for Proposals soon on its website. The legislature approved the sale in July, and the department is already hunting for office space to lease for the 1,000 state workers now housed at Spring Garden Street. It's a little ironic, given that one of the excuses for not building a ballpark at Broad and Spring Garden was the need to retain the state presence. Now there's an even chance that the building could end up as condos.

And what swell condos it would make, with a few significant tweaks. Although I've grown to like the general look of the building, I'm still appalled by Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen's lifeless handling of the ground level. All the usual, pre-counter culture, anti-urban architectural tendencies are on view: the raised plinth separating the building from the surrounding streetscape, the shrouded entrance and the graceless, unwelcoming plaza/park. But unlike the federal courthouse at 6th and Market - one of the architects' most reprehensible projects - the mistakes at the base of the state office building could be easily corrected. It's not hard to imagine that plaza transformed into a lovely, green spot with a cafe and tables. With Loft District condos sprouting up across Broad Street and swarms of students and workers pouring out of the subway, it's an increasingly busy intersection. Ever since Lofts 640 and Marc Vetri's Osteria established their beachhead up the street, the neighborhood has been on a gentrifying tear.

You won't hear many people rem-iniscing about the work of Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen, a firm that no longer exists. But the more of their buildings I encounter, the more I'm impressed by the originality of their forms and the stylishness of their details. I doubt their reputation will ever experience a big revival, but several of their buildings are starting to look pretty good to me. My favorite is one of their last efforts, the 1972 Scheie Eye Institute at Presbyterian Hospital, a muscular concrete and brick building that is softened by curves and deep-set windows. Next time you have your eyes checked, stop (before you're blinded by the exam) to admire the rotunda lobby, which has lots of lovely details from the era, including wooden screens. The juxtaposition of the roughly sculpted concrete and brick forms put you in the mind of some of Louis Kahn's work. It's almost as if they designed the building's sensuous forms to be understood by touch, which is a nice way of approaching a building that serves people with serious eye problems. When you think about some of the plain, boxy hospital buildings going up these days, the Scheie seems an even more remarkable achievement.

Yet, even when Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen were good, they were often bad. Their designs are nearly always socially maladroit on the ground floor. Every time I pass the David Rittenhouse labs at 33rd and Walnut, I admire the round-edged, deep set, tactile square windows and then shake my head in amazement at the blank hostility of the street-wall. Ditto for the Youth Study Center on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, another of their elegant atrocities. The detailing of the limestone facade and classic ribbon windows shows real skill, but that base! There will be no tears shed when that building goes down for the Barnes Foundation's new building. Their perfectly round Bucks County Courthouse in Doylestown is another fascinating curiosity: bold in its form, inventive in the organization of the courtrooms, yet utterly blinkered to the lovely town at its feet. And then there are the What-Were-They-Thinking?failures like the Library Company on Locust Street.
While there is a lot wrong with Carroll, Grisdale and Van Alen's work, their failings are often typical of the architecture of the late '50s-early'60s, when cities were fumbling around for a way to compete with the suburbs. And yet it's evident that this was a creative bunch bursting with ideas, even as they stayed loyal to Modernism's rules about geometry and regularity. They didn't repeat the same forms over and over. Each project seems to be an attempt to create something fresh and original. And that's still worth admiring today.

Family Court: Farewell Logan Square, Hello Love Park

2007-08-15T16:40:00.000-04:00

On the same day at that Philadelphia officials gleefully began blowing up several blocks just north of City Hall for the Convention Center expansion, Mayor Street announced that he wants Family Court to move from its neo-classically styled palace on Logan Square to a spot close to City Hall: the corner of 15th and Arch Streets, now the site of a parking lot that faces Love Park. You can see, way in the bottom right corner of this old photo, what stood on the spot long, long ago.

All in all, it could be a very good move. Now that the Barnes Foundation is supposed to displace the Youth Study Center, there is no reason for Family Court to be off by itself on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The Arch Street site is closer to city offices, closer to the city's other court buildings and it's way more convenient to transit. Considering the site's prominence and proximity to City Hall, the city should commit itself to doing a first-rate design.The only way to get a decent piece of civic architecture - on the caliber of some recent federal courthouses - is to hold a serious design competition, rather than running out and hiring the usual suspects. (Exhibit A: the unremarkable Criminal Justice Center on Filbert Street).

Meanwhile, there is the question of what to do with John T. Windrim's family court building. This was the last neo-classical piece of Philadelphia's Champs-Elysee-inspired parkway to be built. Although Windrim began the design in the 1920s, the family court building wasn't built until 1939. It formed a companion to the Free Library and completed Paul Cret's homage to Paris' Place de la Concorde, but it was a pretty stuffy piece of architecture. (See my November post here.) It does boast some very fine stained
glass by Phila-delphia's D'Ascenzo Studios and a series of paintings on the themes of family and childhood done for the Depression-era Public Works Administration. It might be nice to move them into the new building.

Along with finding the right architect to design the new family courts, the city needs to give serious thought to the best use for the imposing old palace. Before the building goes on the block, the Free Library should be given a chance to see if it would make a suitable addition. But given today's real estate market, it's more likely that the columned courthouse will end up in private hands, as a condo or hotel development, following the trend established by the Philadelphia School District when it sold off its Paul Cret-designed headquarters on the other side of the parkway. It's being converted to luxury condos at this very moment.

Blowing Up the Convention Center Neighborhood

2007-08-10T18:34:00.000-04:00

Leave it to the Pennsylvania Convention Center to send out invitations to a demolition. Actually make that multiple demolitions. Starting Aug. 15 at 2 p.m., with Buck's Hardware on 13th Street, the center will begin demolishing, imploding or otherwise destroying all the structures in its expansion path, from 13th to Broad, and Arch to Race Streets. (with the exception of the worthies remaining on Broad Street). The evite, which went out last week, welcomes guests to a pre-demolition bash in Room 114 of the center.

Philadelphians have known for a long time that the demolitions were a foregone conclusion, but still their imminent approach comes as a shock. The condemned beauties include the Lithograph Building on 13th Street and the Gibson Building on Cherry Street. The center's expansion is being fueled with casino money, which is now starting to pour into the state treasury. One bad box begets another. You can read my views in my March 2 and April 13 columns and posts on the subject here.

Among the worst casualties will be the Race Street firehouse, a proud Italian Renaissance/Medieval Gothic castle designed by J. Molitor , the city's chief architect, which has stood guard for that part of Philadelphia since 1925. Decorated with gargoyles in firemen's suits and elaborately turreted, this was a historic building until it was decertified by the Historical Commission earlier this year. Let's hope convention officials have the wit to rescue the gargoyles who witnessed so many firemen race off to rescue Philadelphia's citizens.

Cover Up at the President's House

2007-07-25T17:11:00.000-04:00

Don't be alarmed if you see city workers dumping dirt this coming Tuesday on the amazing brick foundations of the President's House. The cover-up should be only temporary. The fragile brick foundations, which were revealed during a required archaeological dig this summer (see my May 9 post and May 25 column), are being draped in a three-foot-high blanket of soil to protect them from the elements while architects rework a plan for memorializing the historically complex site.
The expectation now is that the foundations will eventually be dusted off and put on view as part of a major national shrine that somehow acknowledges both the creation of the American presidency and the American practice of slavery. Getting to this point has been quite a saga, as the Inquirer has chronicled, so some will certainly see this step as another frustrating delay. But frankly, the longer this project takes, the better it is likely to turn out.

Kelly/Maiello's winning design for the memorial, which was selected by the Street Administration before the foundations were uncovered, is a heavy-handed mess that will simply add to more clutter to the mall. Once the discovery of the foundations became a national sensation - attracting more than 250,000 curious visitors since early May - the Philadelphia architecture firm was asked to see if it could find a way to incorporate the foundations into its memorial design. It was clear to many that the rough, time-scoured foundations speak far more articulately and movingly than the planned Kelly/Maiello structure. Those old stones testify to the site's multiple and conflicting meanings. In one glance, you can see the outline of both the oval room where George Washington learned to practice democratic accountability and the kitchen where his illegal slaves were kept hidden. Where else is America's noble experiment so bluntly juxtaposed with the evil institution of slavery?

The only question now is how to incorporate the foundations into the President's House memorial. There's no point in looking at them through a window from the floor of the Kelly/Maiello design. The brick ruins are 10 feet below the sidewalk level. A better approach would be to build a memorial that somehow ramps down to the protected foundations, so that you are able to see them up close. I encountered a great example of this approach recently when I visited Philip of Macedon's tomb in Vergina (photo), a World Heritage Site just outside Thessaloniki, Greece. (Philip II was Alexander the Great's dad.) After his crypt and tumulus were unearthed in the 1970s, the Greek government built an underground museum that incorporates Philip's burial chamber and a museum's worth of artifacts. The descent from the bright sunshine of the surrounding park, down into the earth makes for an extraordinary, emotional journey. When you finally come face-to-face with the 4th Century burial temple, you have a mystical feeling of having traveled through time.

But it's wrong to think you can have that level of design excellence simply by asking Kelly/Maiello to adjust their old design. They will have to start from scratch. Better yet - the city should go back to square one. Hire a design consultant. Organize a national design competition. Invite the world's top designers. Include the best historians in the field, Only then will Philadelphia make this site into the national memorial it deserves to be.