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Piecing Piers
from phillyskyline.com
26 March 2009
“You have to do it piece by piece and mile by mile,” said Philadelphia’s Commerce Director Andy Altman earlier this month, while announcing progress in the city’s effort to reshape the Delaware waterfront. The city will adopt Penn Praxis’ plan to restore Philadelphia’s intimate urban fabric to the waterfront.
Altman’s statement reflects this philosophy — sustained redevelopment will result from dozens of small steps. Penn’s Landing, the last big vision, is often called a failure. Part of why it’s a failure to some — it feels inorganic, separated from the fabric of the city (and strangely, the river itself) — drove Penn Praxis to break down the vast landscape and repair its faulty connections.
“Piece by piece, mile by mile” is also a measure of the impact of recession, neighborhood control, and fragmented land ownership on and around Delaware Avenue. At present, superblock ideas have no credence.
The first piece will be the conversion of Pier 11, at Race Street, into a park, a $1 million project funded by the William Penn Foundation. Altman said the piers along the Hudson, in New York, are a model for the park. (Someone ought to investigate the St. Lawrence riverfront in Montreal, a much closer comparison in almost all ways.)
A riverfront playground at Race Street is most certainly a good idea. It’s a spectacular site. Good landscape design will reinforce it as a hinge — connecting multiple places with the river all at once. But as passive space, it will need programming. The Great Plaza — isn’t it too just another small piece of the puzzle? — fails largely because it has little quotidian purpose.
Though in part this first piece is meant to help carry the pedestrian north, it feels to me like a lonely bookend. So I worry. Are we building yet another noble public space that will be hard to get to and boring to boot?
We might instead use this first pass to visually clarify what everyone hopes will be a larger central waterfront. Why not give Pier 11 a southern twin and mark out the broad territory? A bike trail from Penn’s Landing south to Pier 70 has been approved and funded. It will help pull river-users south — into the car zone. But only some pedestrians and bikers are headed to Wal-Mart. The rest of us need things to engage and delight us.
The City owns Municipal Piers 38 and 40, at Christian …
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