Charles Willson Peale, who added a second “l” to his middle name to remind himself and others that a man is self-created
Raphaelle, his son, named as all the Peale children for a European master…the most perceptive painter of the early 19th century, who nonetheless would only paint in still life, and who refused his willful father’s admonitions to “act the man”
John Lewis Krimmel, AKA Johann Ludwig Krimmel, German immigrant, whose paintings—the only urban street scenes of early America, used on the covers of countless books of history—poked holes in the American narrative Peale was so careful to create
Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, exiled in Philadelphia, who dreamed of building a palace of art
Edward Hicks, unbalanced painter of “The Peaceable Kingdom”
Pavel Svinin, Russian attaché, art thief, liar, who pilfered Krimmel’s watercolors and published them as his own, and who was the basis for Gogol’s Government Inspector
Harriet and Henrietta Miller, sisters, characters invented from one of Krimmel’s paintings
Eliza Hamm, fruit peddler to the stars
Ylaire Charlotte de Chevalier, a streetwalker of Haitian ancestry rescued from slavery by Harriet Miller
Caleb Cloud and Victor Blanc and William Dixcy, young men from the tiny village of Easton, who come to Philadelphia in search of a distant star
The year 1818, economy crashing, American art up for grabs…Peale’s museum is failing…to make up for the lost income he attempts to turn his farm Belfield into a cotton mill…an act with tragic consequences…
This is my recently completed novel I WILL FLOOD YOU, a flood of voices, a father-son tug of war, America in search of itself…
At present I am in search of an agent and a publisher for the book, which might be called literary-historic fiction. I’m going to use this space to document my search (indeed as any writer the breakout novel is a distant star)…
We imagine William Penn sitting in an English estate looking out fearfully at the chaos of London, and inventing our rational grid, a stamp of a new way of life on the edge of a wild river. Reality, as I have noted before, was quite different. Penn wished for a great piece of land—10,000 acres—on which to superimpose his great city; after negotiations with the Swedes and the Lenape, he got his narrow slice between the rivers. But the act of making a city, as landscape architect Dilip da Cunha says, was one of encountering the ground itself, and building little by little, only as the ground would allow (for decades trees stood in the middle of streets and creeks sprang everywhere).
The resulting man-nature compromise, amplified now in the post-industrial retreat, is a city, as writer Sharon White puts it in Vanished Gardens, that is “an extensive garden, a bit wild in parts…Because isn’t it a wilderness of sorts? The bones of the wilderness still there in the brooks flowing in pipes under the city, the soil that pokes up with its history of the old wilderness soil, rerouted, recycled elements.”
Not so, perhaps, the other one, the 1811 grid of New York, which celebrates it 200th anniversary in a show at the Museum of the City of New York. New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman says in yesterday’s paper, “the grid was big government in action, a commercially minded boon to private development and, almost despite itself, a creative template…The planners proposed a grid for this future city stretching northward from roughly Houston Street to 155th Street in the faraway heights of Harlem. It was in many respects a heartless plan.”
“The plotting of the streets and blocks,” writes Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York, “announces that the subjugation, if not obliteration, of nature is its true ambition.”
“New York,” writes Jerome Charyn in Metropolis,
decided to grow along a grid, ignoring bumps, ditches, and heights, and the particular bend of its rivers. It would be a phantom grid of 2028 blocks, where anything that was built upon them could be removed at will. So we have the Empire State Building dug into the old cradle of the Waldorf-Astoria. And the Waldorf is shoved into another grid. We have a Madison Square Garden on Madison Square and then the Garden starts to float, like a gondola on the grid. It reappears uptown, caters to circuses and rodeos, the Rangers and the Knicks, becomes a parking lot, and the Garden is born again over the new Penn Station. It’s an ugly ass tank, but who cares? Nothing is sacred except the grid.
Image above: Museum of the City of New York. Notice how Park Ave. filling in, 1882, looks like Lancaster Ave. emptying, 2012.
After three months of research, expert interviews, and script development, and four days of reenactment, “Yellow Fever and the Remaking of the City” has moved into post-production. Broadcast in Philadelphia will be on 6ABC in March.
One of the challenges in making the film—only 26 minutes long to fit the TV format—was to keep the focus on the city as a character, and to try to understand how that character shaped the city’s response and was ultimately shaped by it. The epidemic, which killed 10 percent of residents of the US capital, ushered in an ambitious period of infrastructure development meant to improve urban public health, The story is equally about the freedom struggle; Yellow Fever arrives in the US in the wake of the Haitian slave revolt; it finds black Philadelphians in mid-agitation themselves, attempting to find a place as citizens in the republic of the free.
The film still above is of Dr. Benjamin Rush bleeding a patient.
Stephen Girard: A Philadelphia Legacy (and one fierce dude)
20 December 2011 | Share:
A couple weeks ago, at the premier of “Stephen Girard: A Philadelphia Legacy,” Girard experts and Girard College officials and alumni spoke at length about the inspirational life of merchant and banker who gave his fortune to start a school for orphans. It was perhaps more love than the old man has received in quite some time. Then the film was shown, thank God. Here, at last was the man as we imagined him: irascible, dispassionate, unsentimental, and deeply conflicted.
Our film intersperses expert analysis with scenes that imagine Girard hard at work on his will—the document that creates Girard College—with his lawyer William Duane. Girard is old but mentally sharp. He rejects Duane’s fawning, which seems to bore him. All he really wants to do is look ahead. Even a year later, as we catch him at the end of the film, days from his death. “Come on!” he growls, “let’s get on with it.”
Nearly a full term of the Nutter administration under their belts, there is a sense among some city officials that the city is in full transition from “old Philadelphia” to new. Old Philadelphia: corrupt, parochial, its own worst enemy. New Philadelphia: innovative, progressive, transparent. “Our brand is changing,” says deputy mayor for planning and economic development Alan Greenberger. “Mythology dies hard, but we’re slowly killing it off. We’re doing it by building back our reputation as a city that is serious about itself, that we’re a city with standing in the world.”
Greenberger points to the enormous number of talented young people, in nearly every field—from nanotechnology to modern dance—who see in Philadelphia a chance to advance themselves and their careers. He points to real progress reforming the zoning code; he points to the Philadelphia2035, the first master plan in 50 years. He points to the Navy Yard, which is slowly fulfilling its potential as driver of the city’s economy. He points to patents and technology transfer—both on the rise, and nearing the top, where they should be in a city with such richesse in science and medicine.
And yet, one foot so firmly stuck in old Philadelphia: development deals fat with cronyism, spot-zoning (read: legal circumvention of the law), sloppiness, underhandedness, infighting, NIMBYism, defensiveness, architectural censorship, bureaucracy, bureaucratic confusion, fear, and simplemindedness.
High time in serious city? No, all too often, in matters pertaining to preservation, site planning, and design, it’s a prolonged, and boring, amateur hour.
So we end 2011 without St. Clares Monastery, without hunks of the Frankford Arsenal—a place any serious city would never have handed to a hack developer for a song—without the last Cramp Shipyard building, without Shawmont Pumping Station, without Orinoka Mill, and we go into 2012 with a pipeline full of buildings already slated for removal.
In one way or the other we can rationalize this list. Orinoka, which lent scale and elevation to its neighborhood, never really had a chance: the mill stood a half block from the busiest drug corner in the city. And moreover, its owner was ill-equipped to make anything happen. Now, perhaps, removing half the building will open up an opportunity to reshape the beleaguered streetscape. Cramp’s: had to go—didn’t it?—for the upgrade of I-95. St. Clare’s: a baffling series of miscues and bureaucratic oversight that allowed this small but endearing, lovely and well-located building to fall through the cracks. The way it went down you would have thought that quite deliberately no one was looking.
Next year’s pipeline? A slew of churches, schools, mills, and rowhouses, victims of poverty, certainly, but also a fundamental lack of rigor in the way we manage our inheritance.
And so the slow ache of a city rich enough to dream and seemingly too poor to act endures. The ache of incompetence, the ache of insistent pragmatism, the child’s ache of destruction: joists dangling, plaster ripping, brick plummeting. And so often nothing really in mind as replacement.
But why, instead of seeing our inheritance of architecture and material culture as another asset to build upon and engage with do we spend our resources in savage self-destruction? Not for progress, usually. Not because we’re swelling with confidence in our own architectural ideas. Not because we’re building so quickly we haven’t time to notice.
There are answers inside of answers: an Historical Commission so short of funding and so underutilized it wouldn’t even serve a small town and can’t come close to managing the city’s paltry few historic districts, let alone miles of jewels that live on by accident, or luck; uneven L&I enforcement; spot-zoning; last-minute deals; pathologically uncreative developers; poverty; poverty of imagination; poverty of municipal self-regard; financially unsophisticated non-profits; desperation.
The effort to protect old buildings and neighborhoods is so anemic there are only 5 neighborhoods designated by the city as historic and 9 total; in New York City, which we imagine runs hot and heavy over its past, there are 102 historic districts, and 11 more proposed.
For years, John Gallery, who directs the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, has dreamed of a city-wide survey of historic buildings, so that we merely know what it is that we possess. But funding hasn’t been forthcoming—ignorance requires nothing.
Now the city controller Alan Butzovitz, who must think he’s in a shouting match with the School District, wants eight empty schools to be torn down. But has he even been inside them? Has he analyzed the value of those buildings? Tested them on the market? Our Rachel Hildebrandt says dozens of old schools—so often with scale and muscular architecture in a sea of flimsy rowhouses—have been adapted to new uses. Why not these?
Well, we shall see. It’s a day to lament and to remind ourselves of what we have. Later this afternoon, Peter Woodall presents a true Last Light, photos of the last Cramp shipyard building lost this year. For Pete, who loves crawling around old buildings, it’s personal. See the city through his eyes, perhaps we won’t be so quick to cast it all away.
Trolling around the Internet seeking news on the urban world (which is to say the half the human world), I came across Mercer Consulting’s recent list of the 50 “best cities for quality of life.” Vienna is first. Toronto is the top-rated city in North America. The best US city, according to the report, is Honolulu, followed by San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington, New York, Seattle, and Pittsburgh. Interesting that no US cities make their list of 50 safest cities (all of Canada’s major cities rank well).
The Urban Age Project just released its rankings of health, education, and wealth among 129 metropolitan regions around the world. The healthiest of these regions are Hong Kong, Osaka, Tokyo, Singapore, and Stockholm. Philadelphia ranks 26 in health (10th among US cities), 5th overall in education (behind Sydney, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco), and is tied for 3rd overall in wealth (behind Boston and Washington).
It’s sometimes nice to be reminded of our extraordinary assets; of course wealth and education matter only so far as we put them to good use—certainly a debatable proposition.
In any case, these rankings are intrinsically suspect and often besides the point, which is why I far prefer to start this week with this, the opening poem of Jorge Luis Borges’ first book of poetry (Fervor de Buenos Aires), published initially in 1923. The soul is in the streets…
Las Calles (1969 edition)/The Streets (translated from the Spanish by Stephen Kessler)
Las calles de Buenos Aires
ya son mi entraña.
No las ávidas calles,
incómodas de turba y de ajetreo,
sino las calles desganadas del barrio,
casi invisibles de habituales,
enternecidas de penumbra y de ocaso
y aquellas más afuera
ajenas de árboles piadosos
donde austeras casitas apenas se aventuran,
abrumadas por inmortales distancias,
a perderse en la honda visión
de cielo y de llanura.
Son para el solitario una promesa
porque millares de almas singulares las pueblan,
únicas ante Dios y en el tiempo
y sin duda preciosas.
Hacia el Oeste, el Norte y el Sur
se han desplegado–y son también la patria–las calles:
ojalá en versos que trazo
estén esas banderas.
THE STREETS
My soul is in the streets
of Buenos Aires.
Not the greedy streets
jostling with crowds and traffic,
but the neighborhood streets where nothing is happening,
almost invisible by force of habit,
rendered eternal in the dim light of sunset,
and the ones even farther out,
empty of comforting trees,
where austere little houses scarcely venture,
overwhelmed by deathless distances,
losing themselves in the deep expanse
of sky and plains.
For the solitary one they are a promise
because thousands of singular souls inhabit them,
unique before God and in time
and no doubt precious.
To the West, the North, and the South
unfold the streets–and they too are my country;
within these lines I trace
may their flags fly.
**
(If you’re wondering, Buenos Aires ranks 31 for health, 26 in education, 29 in wealth…)
On a recent afternoon, a woman in a minivan pulled up to the group of neighborhood activists and city officials gathered outside Germantown Town Hall. “You’re planning to do something with this building?” the woman asked. “Please, you’ve got to do something good with it.”
The 1923 Town Hall - a refined Beaux Arts version of the neoclassical Merchant’s Exchange in Old City - has been empty since 1995. It stands, deteriorating, on Germantown Avenue directly across the street from Germantown High.
“It’s really depressing to be in that school all day looking out here at this building wasting away,” said the woman. She drove away.
For those at Germantown High, and for the assembled activists and officials, Town Hall is a daily reminder of Germantown’s lingering unmet potential.
The ceremonial hall with entablature memorials to Germantown’s World War I dead is a refined, graceful space, remarkable even in a neighborhood that is a showplace of American architecture between 1700 and 1930. Germantown’s streetscape is as exuberant and variegated as any city district in America, its organic urban form the antithesis of Center City’s oppressively rational grid. And today, like Town Hall, it is stuck, seemingly too expensive to fix, its potential obvious and yet painfully elusive.
“Where’s Germantown going?” asks Alan Greenberger, deputy mayor for planning and economic development. “That’s a question we keep asking. Germantown should be fabulous. I’m not sure I know why it isn’t.”
“I have always thought,” says Cindy Bass, newly elected Eighth District councilwoman, who will take office in January, “that this is one of the neighborhoods that has the most potential to grow and develop. Its potential speaks for itself.”
So much of that potential lies in the neighborhood’s turrets and towers, crests and colonnades, porches and porticos, in the slate and stucco and stone. In 1933, when the National Park Service launched the Historic American Building Survey, they began the immense project in Germantown because of the area’s rich architectural history.
“We are a 326-year-old community with connections both deep and broad,” says David Young, the director of Cliveden, the historic mansion on the site of the Battle of Germantown. “We think that’s cool, but it means nothing if there’s no connection to contemporary life.”
Connections are so often made through the buildings themselves. Ken Weinstein, a real estate developer known for his adaptive reuse of train stations and other commercial properties, has been buying Germantown buildings for 22 years. “I fell in love with taking something decrepit and making something wonderful,” he says.
But Weinstein, who estimates he has invested $10 million in Germantown, says the net result has been stasis. “For 22 years, 99 percent of the people have been saying the same thing as they are today: ‘Now, Germantown is going to take off!’ “
Everyone is still waiting.
A group of businessmen started Colonial Germantown Inc. in the 1930s with the idea of consolidating historic sites into a fabricated pedestrian village. It never happened. In 2006, the caretakers of 15 historic sites tried again to market the area as a tourist destination by forming the nonprofit Historic Germantown.
Unlike the 1930s, the idea today isn’t to objectify the past, but rather to engage with it. In May, Historic Germantown hired a full-time director, Barbara Hogue, and charged her with helping the sites connect with neighborhood residents and with tourists who are drawn to Philadelphia for the Liberty Bell and better-known historic attractions. “We want to give people a chance to engage with their own history. They want to know, ‘Where do I fit in?’ ” says Hogue. “It’s not just about 300 years ago something exciting happened to a stranger. We’re telling stories about today.”
Already, attendance is up. Cliveden hosted a record number of visitors in 2011, surpassing its projected annual attendance in August. Altogether, the sites bring up to 50,000 people a year to Germantown, making an estimated economic impact of $3 million to $4 million. Hogue’s goal is to double that in two years.
All this is possible, community advocates are quick to note, because Germantown has enormous assets - intact residential blocks with relatively little abandonment, a few strong educational institutions, churches (90 of them, in fact), a significant retail avenue with ample storefronts, considerable transit infrastructure, and the historic sites. Urban planners say Germantown has “good bones.”
“But we’ve got to figure out how to put some meat on the bones,” says Yvonne Haskins, a lawyer who has worked extensively in community development in Philadelphia and who has been representing neighbors in the recent efforts to stop two low-end chain stores from opening in the Chelten Plaza shopping center. “How do you build on the bones? That’s the question. I’m telling you, people are hungry for answers.”
The hunger has been made worse by the unraveling of community leadership. “Why is Germantown not better off?” asks Weinstein, the developer. “Because we’ve had a community-development corporation that worked against the interests of the community.” After that organization, Germantown Settlement, was dragged down by debt and corrupt management in 2010, community members came together to form Germantown Community Connection. That effort fell apart when neighbors divided over the Chelten Plaza store issue.
And now, says Councilwoman-elect Bass, “there is a void in terms of direct leadership.”
Beyond that, say city officials and community leaders, there is lack of unity. “The neighbors are fragmented,” says Deputy Mayor Greenberger, in part due to wide class differences across the geographically massive neighborhood. Once the neighborhood can speak in a unified voice and prove it’s competent at managing its resources without corruption, Greenberger says, development money will flow.
Of course, the difficulty with all of this - and perhaps also why it is so exciting - is that it places the burden of directing neighborhood investment on residents and business owners, and not the city.
The latest effort to address that fragmentation is Germantown United, a nascent community-development corporation with about 22 local civic organizations and neighborhood associations as members that formed out of the opposition to the Chelten Plaza project. “We have to attract people from every corner and allow them to demonstrate they can get things done,” says Haskins, who has been a driving force behind the group.
Germantown United has been holding regular stakeholder meetings. “People are coming to the table religiously, envisioning what they want to see, and they’re serious about it,” says Haskins. Organizers hope the process will produce an action agenda by January.
One hope for ambitious neighborhood-based groups is to ride waves of investment that come from peripheral agencies. This month, SEPTA plans to begin the $30 million renovation of the turn-of-the-century Wayne Junction regional rail station at Wayne and Roberts avenues. Wayne Junction is just what its name indicates, a conduit between North Philadelphia and the Northwest. It’s also one of the few regional rail stations that offer constant - and fast - service to and from Center City and University City.
Both Haskins and Weinstein see the investment in the station, part of a broader transit-oriented development pushed by the City Planning Commission, as a major catalyst for development in Germantown. Weinstein has purchased two major parcels near the station. “I want to be part of that energy,” he says. Germantown United, for its part, wants to link the station’s redevelopment to further investment in the worn but architecturally vibrant Wayne Avenue commercial district.
Almost everyone wishes for a similar spark for Town Hall. Councilwoman-elect Bass says she’ll seek tax credits and grants for its preservation. It’s easy to see the monumental, circular hall (and the series of smaller offices and conference rooms) becoming something inspiring. Perhaps the public face of a community-development agency like Germantown United, or even as a visitor center for the entire Northwest. One educator, John Churchville, proposes an incubator for green businesses linked to the science program at Germantown High School across the street.
Haskins isn’t sure if renovation of Town Hall will lead or follow Germantown Avenue’s resurgence. She only knows it has to happen. “Sooner or later,” she says, “human beings figure things out.”
Poll the members of the Republican presidential traveling circus and it’s likely most of them will tell you they believe in “originalism” as a judicial philosophy. Originalism means the constitution, which has been amended and reinterpreted for 223 years to reflect our evolving society, is to be read and followed only as the founders themselves instructed in the original document. Never even mind the Bill of Rights.
The most dangerous originalist is Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who doesn’t even bother to read case law or review legal precedent. Never mind that Thomas the originalist would only be 3/5ths of a human being according to the founders’ original instructions.
Well, originalism, which for my mind is as bankrupt and intellectually dishonest an ideology as, say, one that prescribes violence in the name of piety and holiness, is having its day in the sun. Because of the configuration of the Supreme Court, Thomas holds enormous power to shape the future of the United States.
This makes the National Constitution Center, which posits the constitution as a living document, dynamic in its capacity to evolve with the nation itself, a critical counterbalance to the reactionary forces behind originalism. The point of the museum is to engage us—all of us—in the sometimes messy but always progressive process of applying the constitution to the present day.
Now well beyond grammar school history, we have the unsettling story of slavery amidst freedom (at the President’s House) and a rather comprehensive exploration of the confusion and contradictory impulses of immigrant life (at the Jewish Museum).
These advances make it even more difficult to stomach the still prevalent tick of literal interpretation in our streetscape that reveals—rather than the dynamism and excitement of city life—a dull simplicity and provincialism. The effect is to make this city seem less interesting than it really is and make us all a little more simpleminded. Thus, a museum of the American Revolution must apparently be built of brick (why? wasn’t the point of the Revolution to rebel against inherited British ways?) and a cathedral must be built of stone. How wearisome.
Thus, statuary memorials to Irish and Scottish immigrants must be Hallmark interpretations of literally hungry (or proud) refugees instead of imaginative explorations of historical experience, which is never only about hunger or pride. What about memory? What about landscape? What about loss? What about identity? These things are missing from both memorials. Thus, buildings and accoutrements on Temple University’s campus must by necessity be painted the school color, cherry red. Thus—in a city with only two subways lines—the stairs and seats and walls and bridges and tiles of the “Blue Line” must be painted blue and the stairs and seats and walls and tiles of the “Orange Line” must be painted orange lest we forget where we’re going end up hopelessly lost.
And thus we are still stuck with simplifying labels—Greene Countrie Towne, Quaker City—that pin us somehow to an architecture and design based in a misinterpretation and misalignment of history (is this not also a city of revolution? of machine power? of ENIAC?). “That Quaker excuse makes me want to puke every time I see it coming,” historian Michael Zuckerman told me in an e-mail. “It wouldn’t be an excuse even if it were true: Quakers haven’t been a majority of the city for 300 years (if they ever were), and they haven’t even been a majority of the rich and powerful people of the city for 250 years; basically, they’ve been 1% or 2% of the population for the past two centuries.”
Yet it goes on anyway, blindly, and we remain—quite literally—stuck. The lack of imagination is akin to pretending 223 years of constitutional evolution never happened and declaring only the original text sacred (that too of course a blind misinterpretation, to pretend that the constitution itself isn’t the product of bewildering political compromise). Like the originalist vision of history, the literal city is bankrupt and dull. It’s also one without a clear future.
All photos but National Constitution Center: Bradley Maule, PhillySkyline.com
Terror, patriotism, the free market, racial equality: It’s not farfetched to say that the issues of the American Revolution still obsess us.
Now, with the announcement that a new Museum of the American Revolution will open in 2015 at Third and Chestnut, we will have a place dedicated to sorting them out. “It’s a great opportunity to really deepen our understanding of the formative moment,” says Daniel Richter, director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “I would hope it would tell a more complicated story than what is currently told. We had many different revolutions, among rich, poor, women, African Americans, Native Americans. These people were involved in a messy process. There were many different winners and losers.”
One of the challenges for the museum will therefore be to simultaneously deepen and widen the familiar story of the American Revolution. It must teach while also drawing firm connections to the lives of Americans today.
“The process is more akin to filmmaking then writing a textbook,” says Scott Stephenson, the museum’s director of collections and interpretations. “People don’t go to a museum to go to school.”
At the heart of the museum is a collection of more than 2,000 objects mostly amassed in the early 20th century at the Valley Forge Historical Society by the Rev. Herbert Burk. But the vivid collection, which includes the field tent used by George Washington and the original commander-in-chief’s standard flag, armaments, paintings, busts, and manuscripts, is heavy on iconic souvenirs of war and light on the grist of revolution.
The question, then, for Stephenson and for Robert A.M. Stern, who was recently named the project’s architect, is how to create a museum of national objects that also feels as vitally alive as do the ideas and conflicts of the Revolution itself. “Will they see the objects in the collection as artifacts, or as a starting point for a conversation?” wonders historian Michael Zuckerman, an organizer of the 2013 conference “American Revolution Reborn: New Perspectives for the 21st Century.”
“This is an immensely plastic moment in the study of the American Revolution,” he says. “The museum could take a leadership role in figuring out what the Revolution means to Americans now.”
For that to happen it will have to open itself figuratively and literally to the neighborhood, which teems with diverse and counterintuitive stories of Americans - white and black, patriot and pacifist, radical and loyalist - struggling to forge a new identity.
“We want people to understand the American Revolution not just as a struggle for independence, but as a struggle to remake society in a different way,” says Stephenson.
Stern says the museum design will accordingly be “bold.” But besides the handsome Comcast Center, little his firm has produced here has felt bold. In fact, just the opposite. The brick high-rise condominium 10 Rittenhouse manages to be at once garish and uninteresting. The McNeil Center for Early American Studies building, which opened in 2006 at 34th and Walnut, was intentionally designed to look like a piece of early America. It comes off as a 1920s neocolonial public school and doesn’t make any effort to address the busy, cosmopolitan corner. “Inside it’s a splendid and pleasing and appealing building, which works like a charm for our community of scholars,” says Zuckerman. “But it’s atrocious on the outside.”
At the core of the problem is the architect’s dependence on a narrow reading of history, and the urban context, to inform the design. Moreover, what is appropriate for an academic center focused on a particular period is not necessarily right for what is hoped to be a broadly engaging public institution. “It’s like comparing apples and oranges,” says Richter, who is confident in Stern’s capacity to translate vision into reality.
“If we do our job well,” Stern said when the project was announced, “the Museum of the American Revolution will look like it could never have been built anywhere else but in this hallowed precinct of democracy.”
Hallowed it may be, but happily the neighborhood is as architecturally messy, conflicting, and stunningly diverse as the people who forged the Revolution. And for that matter as Americans are today. Within a block of Third and Chestnut: the neoclassical First Bank of the U.S., the behemoth 19th-century buildings of “banker’s row” (minus the most inventive of them, Frank Furness’ Provident Life & Trust, torn down in 1960), the art deco Custom House, the modernist Constitution Place and Chemical Heritage Foundation, and Venturi Scott Brown’s postmodern Benjamin Franklin “ghost house.” So what does it mean to look like it belongs?
Stern says he plans to use “the familiar language of traditional Philadelphia architecture: red brick, limestone, possibly wooden windows. ... What is important is that our building will use those familiar elements in an inventive new composition that will seem very much a part of the traditional urban fabric and architectural family of the Independence Hall area.”
“To build in brick,” Zuckerman responds, “is to capitulate to the idea that the past is back there, and all we can do is look at it.”
It’s also to make the same mistake as the President’s House, the Liberty Bell Center, and the Independence Visitor Center. These buildings attempt to bring history to life through imitation instead of invention.
Stern seems conscious that the American Revolution demands more. “It will be a small building at the foothill of a mountain,” he said. Stern was describing the museum’s spatial juxtaposition to the muscular Custom House, yet he might have been referring to its metaphoric relationship to the Revolution itself.
The museum, in fact, will be our guide up the mountain - in the ongoing and sometimes conflicting ambition to remake the world. We have to hope it will be engaging enough to lead us there.
In an interview a few weeks ago with the Inquirer’s Melissa Dribben, Robert A.M. Stern, the architect chosen to design the Museum of the American Revolution, at 3rd and Chestnut, said, “[The Museum of the American Revolution] will use the familiar language of traditional Philadelphia architecture: red brick, limestone, possibly wooden windows, though I’m not sure about that yet. What is important is that our building will use those familiar elements in an inventive new composition that will seem very much a part of the traditional urban fabric and architectural family of the Independence Hall area. If we do our jobs well, it will look like it could never have been built any other place but there.”
As I argue in today’s Inquirer, Stern’s reliance on traditional materials is a misguided exercise in contextual architecture. Actually, 3rd and Chestnut is the center of a neighborhood of wildly—wonderfully—diverse architectural expression, a testament to many layers of this city’s history. But what Stern seems to say is that if the museum is about the American Revolution, it must therefore be built to feel like it is from that same period.
This literal interpretation of context, I worry (though no designs are yet forthcoming), will result in an uninspired building. “Actually,” says Daniel Kelley, principal of the Philadelphia architectural firm MGA Partners, “I think that retro architecture—if that is what Stern intends to produce—is even more pernicious than “uninspiring.” Seen more darkly, that kind of architecture can and will strengthen the toxic neo-traditional cultural forces that are already at a dangerous level in our country. If that seems too dark an idea, then I can also imagine a dismal sort of ‘Disneyfied‘ character brought to the National Park, confusing millions of tourists and confounding the relationship to the First Bank across the street and the Customs House (one of the best buildings in Philadelphia) down the block.”
“Anyway,” he says, “wasn’t the Revolution a progressive act? And isn’t it really still ongoing? Then it seems like the architecture of the museum should be progressive.”
Stern appears genuinely charged to take on the commission, a little awed perhaps by the subject of the birth of the nation, and he said something else to Dribben I quote in the newspaper article: “It will be a small building at the foothill of a mountain.” Stern means literally that the Museum will be dwarfed by the massive adjacent Custom House, but I take it to mean the Museum’s relationship to the other sites, like Independence Hall, and the enormity of the events that took place in them.
The metaphor of a museum at the base of mountain gives us an opportunity to consider the American Revolution project in light of another, quite similar museum, that actually sits at the base of a mountain in a lively and historic urban neighborhood: the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, designed by Bernard Tschumi, and which opened in 2008.
Like the Museum of the American Revolution, the Acropolis Museum is meant to show off an iconic collection while simultaneously revealing the history of an epic period. With the Acropolis (literally highest point in the city) above, the museum makes no effort to imitate the materials or the time of Ancient Greece, rather it uses the language of contemporary architecture to reveal, educate, and evoke the mountain’s many stories.
“There were people who advocated that the New Museum should be in the style of the Parthenon,” Tschumi told Wallpaper Magazine. “I always say that I did not want to imitate Phidias, but to think like Pythagoras. In other words, think of mathematics and master geometry, and start from a level of abstraction. But the top room, the glass enclosure, is really all about the Parthenon—it is absolutely parallel to it.”
The result is a dynamic building—perhaps the best contemporary museum I have been to—which fluently reveals centuries of history while at the same time giving the nation’s most beloved artifacts a place of supremacy and grandeur. One key to the project is the way it provides a window onto the 19th century neighborhood around it, while exposing the archeological remains of ancient cities below. In fact, the entrance is a translucent surface that allows you to see walls and floors and streets of those cities.
It happens that the Museum of the American Revolution will be required to do an extensive archeological analysis of the site. Given the amount of Native American artifacts recently uncovered along the Delaware River, it’s possible this site could reveal more—and much about the layers of people, ideas, and architecture we condense into “history.”
This is the hope. Planners say they envision using the Museum to reveal some of the adjacent sites, including the neoclassical First Bank of the United States (pictured above). What they must do is use the opportunity not to imitate but to abstract. There are still lessons to be had from the ancient world, especially if we follow Tschumi’s instinct, to invent a place of parallel stature to the mountain.
In the late 1990s, when Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center was seeking an architect to design its new, high-visibility museum, it considered a proposal from Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born, London-based architect who is being honored Saturday night with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Collab Design Excellence Award. Hadid had completed only a few commissions at the time and her potent, generative architecture, which appears at once prehistoric and space age, was relatively unknown in the United States.
The sculptor Michele Oka Doner, whose Lexicon: Justice is installed in the lobby of the Philadelphia Criminal Justice Center, was brought to Cincinnati as they considered Hadid’s proposal. “I’ll never forget,” she recalls, “there was a man there and he said to me, ‘She’s a real curiosity, isn’t she?’ “
“Well, I took him to task,” Doner says. “I went to battle. I knew she was more than a curiosity. She was a force to be reckoned with.”
Hadid received the Cincinnati commission and the museum, still her most important work in the United States, opened in 2003. A year later she won the Pritzker Prize, given annually to an architect of singular vision and accomplishment.
Among the so-called starchitects - globetrotting designers who build high-profile projects - Hadid presents the most far-reaching and transformative vision for the human landscape. “She pushes the limit,” says Kathy Hiesinger, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s curator of post-1700 European decorative arts and the curator of “Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion,” presented by Collab in the Perelman building. “She has invented her own formal language. She’s not afraid to make shapes that have not existed in architecture before.”
“Form in Motion,” the first U.S. show of Hadid’s product and furniture designs to be exhibited within a space of her invention at the Perelman, is ostensibly meant to reveal Hadid’s talent and vision as a product designer. There are jewelry, light fixtures, furniture, shoes, even a car designed for the British art collector Kenny Schachter. But it’s really the Hadid world in miniature. “You can stand here and see the connections between the architecture and the objects,” says Hiesinger.
“The exhibition is a reflection of our approach right now to all the work, total fluidity on every scale,” Hadid explains. “Our work explores an organic design paradigm and evolving architectural language that emphasizes complex curvilinearity, seamlessness, and the smooth transition between elements. We like to work with fluidity because we believe it visually simplifies everything, and you can then cope with more complexity without crowding or cluttering the visual scene.”
“The vocabulary she uses in the exhibit, the sinuous lines and organic forms, is the same as in her architecture,” says Lisa Roberts, an Art Museum trustee, Collab member, and author of the contemporary design anthology Antiques of the Future (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2006). “You get a sense of the wonder of her work.”
Hadid grew up in Baghdad in the 1950s. The city was cosmopolitan and forward-thinking and her family valued the progressive nature of modern design. “The style of the furniture in my room was angular and modernist,” she told the New Yorker in 2009. “I remember as a child wanting to know why these things looked different.” The era, she said in her Pritzker address, was fueled by “an unbroken belief in progress and a great sense of optimism about the potential of constructing a better world.”
At the American University of Beirut, Hadid studied mathematics (Hiesinger says her understanding of math surpasses that of most other architects working today), and entered a field overwhelmingly dominated by men. Having survived that, Hadid moved to London to attend the Architectural Association School of Architecture, a place renowned for pushing the limits in the field. She found herself among other future starchitects - Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi - who sought inspiration from early modernism. They studied a group of Bolshevik avant-gardists known as the suprematists. The paintings of that era were studies of motion - lines converging from different planes and different perspectives. Hadid was struck particularly by the work of Kazimir Malevich, who wanted artists to capture the dynamic movement of the machine age as it engaged with the systems and forms of nature.
Hadid seized on the suprematists as a way to develop a new formal language of architecture. For almost two decades, however, as her capacity to create architectural forms from multiple perspectives evolved (and engineering technology caught up), she had to force her way into a defiantly male profession, mostly by submitting drawing after drawing and being overwhelmingly turned down. “She is a warrior,” says Doner, who adds that visionary male architects like Koolhaas “are granted a license to invent, while women have been made to pay.”
The Cincinnati project was a turning point and by 2009, with the opening of the MAXXI: National Museum of the XXI Century Arts in Rome (which won her the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize), Hadid was regularly receiving ambitious commissions, including the opera house in Guangzhou, China, and a master plan for a rundown waterfront warehouse district in Istanbul.
All the while, Hadid’s complex designs, based on non-Euclidean geometry, forced material engineers to expand the possible. “There is a strong reciprocal relationship whereby our more ambitious designs encourage the continuing development of new digital technologies and construction techniques required to make those visions a constructed reality,” Hadid says. “And those new developments in turn inspire us to push the design envelope ever further.”
“Designing the furniture products is very beneficial to us as the pieces are experimental and quicker to execute than the architecture,” she adds, “allowing us to express our ideas in a different scale and through different media.”
Last year, Hadid delivered a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and the next day, Roberts brought her to the Art Museum’s Perelman building and showed her the main gallery (where “Form in Motion” is presented). The idea for a show was born.
Roberts’ hope has been to help make Collab a magnet for world-class designers. Each year the winner of the Collab award is given a chance to create an exhibit of his or her work. “This is not a museum exhibit,” Roberts explains, but “a chance for the designer to reveal her capacity.”
What Hadid reveals, even in this microcosm, is the inadequacy of conventional architecture to express our visceral and emotional connections to the Earth. “I’ve always been interested in how movement affects architecture,” she says. “As in the frames of a film: not seeing the world from one particular angle, but having a more complex view. This developed further when we began to think of architecture as a landmass, like a landscape. An artificial landscape that meets the ground without interrupting the urban connections at street level: the ultimate mobility and fluidity.”
Inside Perelman, Hadid transformed what is otherwise a lovely, classically proportioned, and well-lit rectangular room into a subtly moving interaction with time, distance, and motion. Hadid built a rockface wall (of foam) and then used her Vortexx chandeliers, which change colors, as does the sky through an airplane window, and tables, benches, and shelves, which seem to gather and fall away like volcanic formations across the millennia, in order to draw you through it. You end up behind the wall nestled in front of a projection screen showing slides of her commissions. Hadid provides a specially designed seat for viewing, and a number of people were observed sitting there recently as the afternoon rolled away, rooted, so it seemed, to the very Earth itself.
A strange form of architectural censorship was on display at a recent zoning committee meeting of the Bella Vista Town Watch. Such meetings take place in the multipurpose room at Palumbo Recreation Center on 10th Street, and that night the room was packed. In question was a small parking lot a block away, at the corner of Ninth and Bainbridge, which adjoins David Guinn’s 2001 mural Autumn (also known as Your House in the Forest). The lot is the subject of a heated conflict between a developer who wishes to build a rowhouse and the neighbors and public art advocates who’d like to preserve the mural.
The pixelated mural, impressionism for the digital age, depicts a neighborhood child in a clearing in a November forest. In the child’s hand is a bird, representing her newborn brother. The mural glows in the late-afternoon sun.
Advocates were legitimately concerned about losing the mural, which has become a city landmark. But if they were going to have to lose it, they wanted to make sure the building that would replace it would “feel right” for the neighborhood. The builder, anticipating this, revealed his best guess at the vernacular, a torrent of rowhouse cliche: stoop, eave, bay window, and a whole lot of brick.
Architectural censorship, indeed.
The reaction to the ham-fisted design was swift and angry (and regrettably tinged with elitism and fear). But perhaps most telling of all, no one asked for architecture that would inspire or delight, as the mural does. No one suggested that a building in such a prominent location should feed our urban imagination. They only wanted to demand that the builder “make it look like it’s always been there.”
How? Use more brick! If not, said one neighbor, and others under their breath, “it will stick out like a sore thumb.”
“Part of our Quaker legacy is that Philadelphia seems to favor restraint and avoid showiness,” says contemporary design advocate Lisa Roberts, explaining what seems to be an ingrained reflex. Roberts is a trustee of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the host of My Design Life on Ovation, and the sister of Comcast chairman and chief executive officer Brian Roberts. “We have a traditional heritage that we celebrate. Of course, there are some exceptions, but they are only exceptions.”
“The fact is,” wrote former Inquirer reporter Peter Binzen in the book Whitetown, U.S.A., “Philadelphia is rather stodgy. It is square. It thinks small.”
But to drink the Kool-Aid, as we’ve all done for so long, is to engage in a damning misreading of history that says only the colonial, or early Federal, period matters. This is why the brick - symbol of one historical moment, metaphor for a shrunken imagination - is so dangerous. By limiting our architectural palette to the metaphorical brick, not only do we end up with uninteresting, forgettable, and compromised buildings, but subconsciously or not we’re also limiting our ability to employ history in a more imaginative way.
In 1800, after enduring four epidemics of yellow fever on top of the usual smallpox, dropsy, and diphtheria, a 28-year-old physician named Charles Caldwell wrote a treatise on climatic causes of epidemic disease. What was it about Philadelphia that engendered infection? Caldwell’s answer: a warming climate, made worse by the use of the wrong building materials.
Why, he wondered, did Philadelphians continue to construct buildings that would only make the city hotter? “Instead of being in all respects adapted to the genius and character of our climate, they are built in perfect imitation of the houses of Great Britain.” In other words, he observed, Philadelphians couldn’t stop throwing up bricks.
Caldwell’s idea was to adapt an entirely different architectural form to the particular climate, topography, and geology of Philadelphia: thick stone walls, high ceilings, and large open spaces. He imagined a city that would look less like London and more like Madrid.
In a certain sense it was a perfect time for such an experiment. Having endured a series of vicious epidemics and losing its place as the U.S. capital, the city was at a crossroads. It was as desperate for a way forward as it is today. At that point Philadelphia’s future might have been foreshortened, as it was for so many early towns - Salem, Mass., and Newport, R.I., were top-10 cities in 1790 - and largely forgotten.
It wasn’t. And in reimagining a future for itself, it didn’t confine itself to brick, real or metaphorical.
Instead, Philadelphia pulled on its strengths in science, engineering, and medicine and reinvented urban life in the New World. In successive turns, the former capital, a place of loss and recalibration already, began by erecting two of the largest American public works projects of the day, the Water Works and Girard College.
Critically, the Water Works immediately became a place of delight and inspiration. Why? In part because it so successfully responded to the genius of Philadelphia’s landscape, as Caldwell had hoped. But also because it was a celebration of the city’s future and the technological imagination that would create it. Noticeably too, both the Water Works and Girard College embodied the city’s ambition. Thinking small was not part of the lexicon.
Half a century later, engineers, bred to think they could exploit every advantage offered by nature, seized on the technology that made Philadelphia first in transport and manufacturing. The buildings those Philadelphians erected? Among them Reading Terminal and Broad Street Station and John Wanamaker and City Hall: the largest, tallest, busiest in the world. The same generation of engineers built the Centennial Exhibition, a city within the city meant to educate, thrill, and inspire. There was little stodgy in all the boisterous and colorful terra cotta, glass, stone, and steel.
We live in the ashes of that city. Because the fall was so hard and so long, perhaps we’re justified in ignoring that part of the story. But it was there I went walking last week, across Allegheny Avenue and Lehigh Avenue, down under the El, through the butterfly fields of East Kensington - massive vacant parcels once filled with castles of machinery now thick with meadow flowers - seeking examples of delight in the fragmented postindustrial landscape.
After a while I arrived on York Street and found myself inside what was once the Alfred Box Co., which is made of steel and wood and real bricks. But I hadn’t come for a lesson in architecture. For it’s artists, like Guinn in Bella Vista, who have been far more successful than architects in projecting a contemporary vision on the streetscape, artists who can teach us how to create a sense of wonder and delight.
I was taken into the core of the building, which is now called 2424 Studios and contains loft spaces for creative professionals, by curator Eileen Tognini. At once we entered what she has named the “Skybox,” three vaulted stories rung by a catwalk, the original beams sanded clean, the five-ton Shepard crane restored, where each year she installs a single artist’s work.
Inside the voluminous space: a logjam of 10,000 tree limbs, each individually burnt charcoal black, tumbling from the catwalk, reaching again up to the sky. This was artist Alison Stigora’s Crossing Jordan (on view until Nov. 19), as surprising and imaginative as a new building should be.
“It’s about destruction and rebirth,” said Tognini, “all the tension in the struggle to find a land of paradise.” From ashes comes opportunity, she said.
Like Guinn’s Autumn mural, which turned an uninspired surface parking lot into a tourist destination, Crossing Jordan transforms the traditional factory into a place of reflection and hope. It was designed not to fit in, but to interact with and even enlighten its surroundings.
We walked around the immense work, which took two weeks and many people to build and install. “You won’t ever look at wood the same way,” Tognini said.
Or the box factory, or the city, for that matter.
Crossing Jordan is a reminder of what’s possible when we use the city, and its complex history, to help us imagine another way. It begs us to find new architectural purpose and ambition.
And hopefully a framework for something greater at Ninth and Bainbridge in Bella Vista.
“My, my, my, my, my, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to the land of Expectations, to the land of Expectations, to the land of Expectations,” says the Whether Man in Norton Juster’s 1961 classic, and my favorite book as a kid, Phantom Tollbooth. Juster, a Penn-trained architect, knows a thing or two about Philadelphia, so long a place of expectations, expectations, expectations…and perhaps not so often met. (A few months before Juster took his degree in architecture, Mayor Joseph Clark initiated the demolition of Broad Street Station to make way for Penn Center, whose plazas today still defy those expectations.)
Juster returns Saturday to be interviewed by noted artist and children’s book author Alexander Stadler (Beverly Billingsly, Julian Rodriguez) at the Central Branch of the Free Library. It’s interesting timing, for despite the relentlessly grim economy, our urban expectations are growing.
Why? My sense is that it’s a result of a recent push for planning and civic engagement. After a good two decades or more of purely reactionary public policy, meant only to avert disaster, we’re planning. And planning means imagining, planning means creating, planning means playing out the conceit that we can shape the future.
Well then, welcome to the land of expectations, expectations, expectations. (Truth is, there is so much planning going on—from city district plans to campus plans to stormwater, bike, and vacant land plans—it’s too much to keep up with.)
Worldwide, our urban expectations are growing by necessity. More than half of human beings live in cities, a proportion to grow to three-fourths by 2050, according to the Urban Age Project. That project, and others like it, are consumed by the act of reimagining cities as the generators of wealth, culture, and ideas—and as places to raise the human condition.
Today: two opportunities to take part in the discussion. Click HERE at 2:30PM to watch a live-streamed debate on the urban futures sponsored by the Ove Arup Foundation. In a similar vein, there are still spaces left for the 9PM screening tonight of “Urbanized,” a film with some of the Urban Age thinkers made by noted film-maker Gary Hustwit (“Helvetica”). The 6:30 screening will be followed by a discussion on the urban age in Philadelphia with Hustwit and planner Rick Redding. Our Ariel Diliberto will review the film in Vantage tomorrow.
This weekend: the past, present, and future of City Hall at Monumental! a symposium sponsored by the School of Design at Penn. Lauren Drapala will cover the symposium on the Daily.
Next week: TEDx Philly, on Tuesday, November 8, an all day action-focused city jam. Hidden City will be there with a booth and coverage by our newest writer, Julie Morcate.
When Marianne Bernstein was a little girl, her mother eschewed regular toys. Instead, she was given a simple wooden cube with a hinged door - a playhouse - and there had free rein to invent her world. She has been reinventing her playhouse in city lots ever since.
In 1999, she persuaded the mayor of New Haven, Conn., John DeStefano, to give her keys to a needle-filled parcel on Chapel Street. She turned it into a vanguard space for public art. Two years ago, for DesignPhiladelphia, she installed the Welcome House in LOVE Park. Now, on Philadelphia’s seminal vacant lot, on Broad Street across from the Kimmel Center, Bernstein has repurposed her playhouse, this time as an aluminum performance cube and four-sided video monitor running films that document artists’ interventions on vacant lots throughout our city.
Bernstein’s Play House, which she designed with Daryn Edwards of Interface Studio Architects, is part of a multimedia DesignPhiladelphia project that has transformed the Broad Street lot into the glimmering and forceful “This Is Not a Vacant Lot,” meant to reveal new possibilities for the transformation of the city’s more than 40,000 vacant parcels. “The idea,” she says, “is about what you can do in an empty lot when you don’t have any money.”
Bernstein is well-known in the art world as a pusher of boundaries. “They used to pat me on the head and say ‘dream on, little dreamer,’ ” she says, but “it’s almost like magic seeds. If you bring positive energy to a space, things change.”
This makes the art installation - with 250 PVC poles representing the geographic distribution of the 40,000 lots, installed by Edwards’ partner Brian Phillips and Julie Beckman of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design - a rather perfect microcosm of the city itself. With limited resources, Philadelphia faces a monumental problem: how to reorganize and reposition more than 3,000 acres of vacant land, which cost taxpayers $20 million annually to maintain, have drained property values by about $3.6 billion, and sap the life out of neighborhoods from Kingsessing to Kensington.
Philadelphia shows the scars of deindustrialization and economic recalibration perhaps more than any city but Detroit. In part because of a policy of working to conserve the industrial economy in the 1950s and ‘60s, the life of the factory neighborhood unraveled slowly, but now it is truly gone. And we are the inheritors of the mess.
In Philadelphia, the mess is particularly vexing, according to Rick Sauer, the executive director of the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations. The slow unraveling means abandoned property is difficult to acquire en masse. Moreover, the portion of the vacant property that is publicly owned is fragmented among 17 agencies, each with different protocols, regulations, and processes for the disposition of land.
The scale of the problem and a groundswell of concern by Sauer and his neighborhood allies have pushed the Nutter administration to act. About a year ago, the Managing Director’s Office convened a working group, co-led by the Redevelopment Authority, to overhaul the city’s management of vacant land. “Get the land back into productive use, that is our guiding principle,” says Bridget Collins-Greenwald, the deputy managing director in charge of the initiative. The agency has beefed up code enforcement, begun reviewing tax policy, and created a single database, now public, that lists a significant portion of publicly held vacant property, owned by the RDA, the city’s Department of Public Property, the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp., and some of what is owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority.
The hope among many participants is that the database will be a first step toward placing all the publicly owned vacant property under single ownership in a land bank. In theory, single ownership will allow the city to sell parcels without unnecessary red tape and enable strategic acquisition of property in order to bundle large parcels. State legislation authorizing land banks failed last year, but officials here are hopeful enough that City Council has readied a bill, introduced by Maria Quiñones-Sanchez and Bill Green, to create the land bank as soon as it is enabled by state law.
None of this means the problem will be easily solved. Indeed, the city’s database doesn’t include vacant industrial land or industrial buildings, and no inventory of defunct factories exists. And Sauer and other neighborhood activists worry that political momentum will end, leaving the city with a nice, though incomplete, database, and no mechanism for the strategic repositioning of property. “It took us 60 years to get this far,” says Beth Miller, director of the Community Design Collaborative, whose “Infill” project focuses on rethinking vacant parcels, “and it’s going to take more than one administration to figure it out. And anyway, who is going to be the steward? It has to be the neighbors.”
Miller’s point that top-down solutions are necessary but insufficient is echoed by Nora Lichtash, who directs the Women’s Community Revitalization Project (WCRP), an organizing, advocacy, and development group that focuses its efforts on eastern North Philadelphia, a section of the city that is fully a quarter vacant. “There is no way government can address a problem of this magnitude,” and so, she says, “we need to be thinking about what happens after the database is running.” And that means who gets to decide how the land is used. “It’s about what’s equitable and for who and who gets to weigh in.”
In the spring, WCRP launched a Take Back Vacant Land Campaign to support the land bank and promote the idea of a community land trust, which gives communities the power to own, develop, and direct the use of land, with the intent that it remain affordable. “Even if you’re poor, you have the right to think about the future,” she says, “and we have an opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t work.”
The experimenting has been going on in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods full force since the early 1990s, when community development corporations gained enough capacity to purchase land and try to redevelop it. Vacant land was a kind of lever, which gave neighborhood leaders some control by simply cleaning and maintaining the lots.
At that time, in the part of Kensington served by the New Kensington CDC, there were 1,100 vacant lots, most of which were trash-filled depositories for “short dumping.” “Land had absolutely no value,” says Sandy Salzman, the executive director of the CDC, “there were few businesses on Frankford Avenue, and those who were there were hidden behind plywood, prisoners.” One of the only groups to assert itself was the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, whose Philadelphia Green program seeded lot cleanups and gardens. Following this lead, New Kensington cleaned its worst lots, including the corner of Frankford and Montgomery Avenues, where Jersey barriers - the very symbol of urban dystopia - had been installed to curtail the dumping. Activists planted 100 trees one Saturday and removed the barriers.
That night, someone stole one of the trees. But the desired change had already occurred. Neighbors saw the theft and grabbed the tree out of the vandal’s car. Says Salzman: “That made us realize this neighborhood was turning around.”
“It’s a process that rarely goes smoothly or easily and it’s full of conflict,” notes WCRP’s lead organizer, Jill Feldstein, “but conflict is what builds community.”
It’s the conflict and the messiness that create the sense of possibility and opportunity with vacant land, says Dilip da Cunha, professor of landscape architecture at the Penn School of Design. Da Cunha thinks that notions of filling in the city lot by lot are outdated. We should think instead about the wider terrain, and this is just what such large-scale abandonment is offering.
“There is a fantastic infrastructure opportunity to rework the ground,” he says, “and the ground holds infinite possibilities.” To clarify his point, da Cunha suggests we reconsider the history of William Penn, who arrived on the bank of the Delaware without controlling any land and with settlers - sleeping in caves - awaiting his arrival. “Penn was opportunistic in how he handled it,” says da Cunha, negotiating, exploring, trading, “and yet we still describe the city as starting with the Penn plan. That’s rubbish. To think he had some view from the air.” Da Cunha means the genius of Philadelphia emerged in the very negotiation with the land. “From the messiness of what he saw, he invented the city.”
WCRP’s Feldstein says this same sense of open-ended possibility is precisely what makes today an exciting time. “The future of the city is really unwritten,” she says, “in a way that’s just not true of other East Coast cities, because there is so much land available. That’s the promise and that’s the opportunity.”
Bernstein, for one, is game. She’d like to see artists given grants to get to work on vacant land. She thinks the time is right - with the economy in flux and so much land in play - for risk taking. “You can’t just stay on the sidelines,” she says, “and hope no one’s going to get hurt.”
On my way to talk Collab and Zaha Hadid at the Perelman Building on Tuesday, I walked the Parkway for the first time in a while. Paul Levy’s goal has been in effect to complete Paul Cret’s vision for the grand promenade, which was immediately compromised by the automobile and by the city’s pathological lack of follow-through. A few weeks ago Levy showed me plans for the various unbuilt fountains meant to ring the Swann Fountain (these are partly his inspiration for the Sister Cities Plaza fountain and mountain stream). His goal has also been to give the long and largely ceremonial space some life, with the ultimate hope of having something engaging for the pedestrian between City Hall and the Art Museum every few minutes.
In the bright autumn sun it’s easy to see the rather ambitious project coming together, particularly once Dilworth Plaza and Love Park are renovated next year. The cafe and gardens at Sister City are nearing completion, the trees are planted in the garden next to the Barnes, which itself is far along. A child was playing in restored Rodin Museum garden, the fountain bubbling for the first time in my memory. In front of the Central Library, temporary plantings have replaced the decrepit plaza and soon, a section of Logan Square will be reclaimed (victories come large and small), as an opening for the Vine Street Expressway is covered by PennDot (look for the Library to push for covering another, slightly larger opening to the east).
The restored sidewalks and curbs have been done quite well, with high-quality materials, smart signage, and new street paving. The same crew we captured painting the South Street bike lanes green has moved to the Parkway, where they’re at work now. This is certainly Philadelphia putting its best foot forward.
And yet even with the Barnes open this spring the Parkway will fall short of Levy’s goal, especially on the south side of the street. It is still an arduous, boring walk to the Art Museum. All the energy of Center City—and on the north, of Fairmount—seems distant. In Athens, in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, planners reclaimed a similar road, Apostolou Pavlou, which leads to the real Acropolis. They did so most effectively by drawing the energy of the Thissio neighborhood into the juniper landscape of the ancient world. But can Center City’s energy hurdle the band of street, fence, expressway, and parking on the south, and the wide yawn of Pennsylvania Avenue on the north? In Athens, the neighborhood streets run right up to the edge of the Apostolou, and they are filled with cafe tables and vendors.
The dead zones along the edges—created by the Vine Expressway and the intersection of the bust, at 19th and Arch—are in a sense a reminder of the monumental difficulty of reweaving the city through a landscape yet wedded to the car.
But one point on the southern edge, of course, was supposed to be activated by a Calder Museum. That seems now like a distant dream. On Friday in New York, and seemingly in conjunction with the Calder Foundation, which was to open the museum here, the Pace Gallery Uptown will open “Calder 1941.” Randy Kennedy, writing in the New York Times, calls the show “a kind of miniature museum.”
The ghost of William McMullen was feeling it last night. Fighting. Irrational. A little territorial.
Bella Vista residents came out in force to oppose the construction of a single family house at Ninth and Bainbridge, the site of David Guinn’s well-loved 2001 mural “Autumn (a.k.a Your House in the Forest)” and once the site of McMullen’s tavern, where the alderman-cum-city councilman made deals and protected his turf.
Fittingly I suppose, Monday was the 140th anniversary of McMullen’s ordering the election day assassination of African-American leader Octavius Catto, in a failed attempt to reduce black influence on the vote. McMullen’s Democrats lost that day, but from Ninth and Bainbridge he lorded over the neighborhood for three more decades.
Last night, neighbors were just about as hospitable to David Orphanides, a lawyer representing a builder hoping to build a spec house on their beloved turf. The house is a suburban architect’s typically crass attempt to imitate the urban vernacular. The bay windows exaggerated and roofed in asphalt shingles, the brick too dark, the cornice too small, the stoop something out of 1910 Chicago. Too much Al Capone, too little McMullen, I suppose. (McMullen’s killer Frank Kelly escaped to Chicago after killing Catto.)
The neighbors wanted none of it. They argued nonsensically about losing open space (the lot currently holds nine off-street parking spaces), about a hardship to the renters of the spaces, about needing the house to “fit in,” a ridiculous claim in a neighborhood of eclectic architectural style and form. Bella Vista ain’t Society Hill but you would have thought it was last night.
I was struck by the architectural conservatism in the room, a conservatism that felt elitist and hostile at times. And clearly no one has made a cogent argument to neighborhood groups like this one that contemporary architecture has value in a “traditional” neighborhood. Least of all this developer, whose architect is working from Looney Tunes.
And yet the neighbors made a strong and at times emotional case to save the mural, one of Guinn’s set of four seasons. If contemporary architecture doesn’t capture the mood of Bella Vista, Guinn’s pixelated, impressionist scenes do. “‘Autumn,’” said Amy Johnson of the Mural Arts Program, “is the spirit of the neighborhood.” Guinn spoke about his connection to the work and to the family that commissioned it. “It’s a big loss,” he said, “for me its one of the most beautiful murals in this city of murals.”
McMullen-like, the neighbors persevered, coming down on a plan to possibly purchase the lot themselves. If not, several nearby sites were identified and Guinn agreed to repaint the mural, should funding be assembled.
The New York Timesreports this morning that three dozen states have proposed mandatory drug testing for recipients of welfare, housing assistance, job training, and food stamps. Arizona, Indiana, and Missouri have passed such laws; in Florida, welfare applicants have to pay for their own drug test—a requirement that implies guilt and must assuredly be unconstitutional.
What frustrates me about all this is the response: that such requirements reinforce stereotypes about the poor. Well, forget that. The real issue is the galling double standard. No drug test is required for recipients of federal-backed school loans, mortgage tax credits, corporate bailouts, Medicare, Social Security, investment tax credits, tuition tax credits, what Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University calls the “submerged state,” invisible public benefits provided by tax dollars. In other words the bulk of taxpayer money goes to these invisible services—and no one, yet, has to piss in a cup to qualify.
No, only the visible state—in GOP-land, handouts for the poor—counts.
And here’s the justification: “Working people today work very hard to make ends meet, and it just doesn’t seem fair to them that their tax dollars go to support illegal things,” said Ellen Brandom, a Republican state representative in Missouri, in the Times article.
Our Katrina Ohstrom, urban explorer, spent part of the day yesterday at the Occupy Philadelphia protest at City Hall. We’ll have some of her photos and a short dispatch in News a little later. I suspect she’ll be there as long as the occupation lasts, so you can count on more as the days, and possibly, weeks go by.
Some of you might wonder what we’re doing covering the protest. What does it have to with the meaning and evolution of place? What does it tell us about the past-present-future of this city? The answer, of course, begins with a story.
Having lost its bearings as the nation’s financial capital in the late 1830s, Philadelphia reemerged as the railroad capital of the nation. The Pennsylvania was the largest; the Philadelphia and Reading, hauling the black gold from the Pennsylvania coal lands, was second best, but hungry to challenge its rival. The Reading’s President was a megalomaniac named Franklin Benjamin Gowen (for whom Gowen Avenue is named); Gowen was a Robber Baron supreme, in the age of extreme wealth and inequality. In her recent biography of New York anarchist leader Emma Goldman (Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life, Yale University Press), Vivian Gornick lays out the territory:
In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, all over Europe as well as in America, as the heartlessness of Victorian industrialism deepened in the coal mines and clothing factories, steel mills and lumber camps, wherever roads and houses and bridges were being built, a desperation of relations between those who owned and those who labored was growing ever more deadly.
Gowen hungered for the confrontation, breaking up the Molly McGuires, and then in a particular trick of Victorian industrialist power, he sat as their prosecutor. As Gornick puts it:
Whenever worker protest mounted, hired guns—often aided by the local police, national guards, or state troopers—appeared to shoot at, jail, blacklist, and, if necessary, kill the protesters and their organizers.
But Gowen was a victim of his own greed. The Panic—read depression—caused by railroad overspeculation reduced the price of coal, which in turn reduced the Reading’s profit. Yet Gowen pursued a new passenger line to rival the Pennsy, overextending, and by 1884, crashing the railroad. J.P. Morgan eventually saved the Reading, Gowen killed himself, and by 1893 big capital had backed the construction of the nation’s largest rail station, the Reading Terminal. That’s the year of the next great panic, also caused by railroad competition and overextension, and interestingly the moment the leaders of the Pennsy decided they wouldn’t be outdone. Their terminal, the prickly Gothic station at Broad and Market, would have to become the largest train shed in the world.
Which brings us back to City Hall, now mostly built, capital in the city of William Penn most unequally shared. Unemployment in the early 1890s creeping up, working conditions deplorable. As Gornick tells us:
Everywhere, the protesters replied in kind: with guns of their own, or even dynamite, the poor man’s only real source of return fire.
And there, a few years later, stood the fierce and beautiful Voltairine de Cleyre, Philadelphia’s moral voice of the oppressed, feminist, friend and ally of Emma Goldman. In 1901, she began, as her biographer, Paul Avrich, notes:
a series of open-air meetings in different parts of the city, but especially at City Hall Plaza, in an effort to win new adherents. Voltairine threw all her energy into this work, “speaking in the open air, getting ready copy for leaflet, journeying to the printer, dodging the policemen while I distribute the leaflets under doors (there is a fool municipal regulation against it) collecting dues, writing postal cards to lazy workers…”
This, then, is the heritage of City Hall. Not yet even fully complete in 1901, it was sanctified: open territory. The heart of the city still beating out beneath the founder’s benevolent hand. Freedom and equality not yet resolved.
“Maybe all the little things add up,” says architect Mark Sanderson, standing on Logan Square in front of what will be the new Sister Cities Plaza, a cafe, pavilion, and garden designed by his firm, DIGSAU. This is surely the prayer of the decade: that in an age of shrunken budgets, a city such as Philadelphia can nevertheless reassert itself on the urban scene.
In the morning shadow of the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, Sister Cities Plaza is indeed an ideal place to test the power of this prayer. The plaza is one section of one square on the long Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which itself is one stitch in the reknitting of Philadelphia. But if successful, the project will tell us a great deal about the potential of small interventions to transform the way we experience the city.
Like many public spaces in Philadelphia, Sister Cities Plaza has been a moribund place, heavy on meaningful gestures - in this case a monument to Florence, Italy, and Tel Aviv, Israel, two of Philadelphia’s 10 sister cities - and light on things to do. Split by four and five high-speed traffic lanes, the square itself has long ceased to function as a unified space, its edges, including Sister Cities Plaza, taken over by homeless encampments.
In 2003, the Center City District began to think critically about how to re-stitch the Parkway, which opened in 1927 already compromised by the automobile. “We decided that a simple proposition would be to design nodes of activity,” explains Paul Levy, the district’s president and chief executive, “so that you would pass a cultural institution, a sculpture, a cafe, every two to three minutes.” The district, masterful at fund-raising, raised enough from various sources - particularly the Pew Trusts, the William Penn Foundation, and the state, under the administration of former Gov. Ed Rendell - to install pedestrian and architectural lighting, revamp Logan Circle and Swann Memorial Fountain, upgrade sidewalks and curbs, and, in 2008, to build Cafe Crêt at 16th Street. Last year, the Fairmount Park Commission and the district designed interpretive signs for the vast collection of art and architecture.
In 20 years, many of the district’s installations, including Cafe Crêt, have borrowed heavily from classical designs of a century ago. “In taste,” says Levy, “I’m rather formally inclined.” But Sister Cities marks a notable turn toward a more contemporary vision. “A realization came to me a few years ago, teaching students at Penn,” says Levy, who for years has taught a course there called Downtown Development. “These kids are living in the same city I’m living in, but they’re living in it differently,” meaning the city ought to reflect this youthful informality and sociability, and the students’ willingness to break boundaries and explore.
For Sister Cities Plaza, Levy hired young landscape architect Bryan Hanes, a member of the team that has designed half a dozen key public spaces across the city, including Swann Memorial Fountain and Independence Mall, to work with Sanderson and his DIGSAU partner, Jamie Unkefer, to make the withering space welcoming to families and children already drawn to the Parkway by the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Franklin Institute, and the art museums. Levy had always wanted a children’s garden with a Luxembourg Gardens-style toy boat pond on the Parkway, but otherwise he required only that they build a cafe to be illuminated at night and a more revealing and engaging monument to Philadelphia’s sister cities.
Demographic change certainly factors into Levy’s recalibration. Center City, particularly, is growing younger and Levy wants the district to respond to market needs. Hanes and the DIGSAU partners are among a cadre of ambitious young designers with strong visions of the city’s future. Meanwhile, our urban tastes and expectations have changed. “We use parks in totally different ways than the original planners envisioned,” says Hanes.
“I think we see them now as outdoor living rooms,” adds Sanderson. With Sister Cities, the district put no restrictions on architectural style. In fact, says Unkefer, “they let us go.”
On the south side of the plaza, Hanes designed a clever multi-jet fountain that will represent Philadelphia and its sister cities as an urban constellation (with Philadelphia, of course, at its center). Nancy Gilboy, president and chief executive of the International Visitors Council, the agency that administers the Sister City program, believes the fountain “will bring the program alive,” she says. “What’s nice about Sister Cities is that we think of our partners as family. Families are welcoming, and that is what this is going to be, a welcoming place.”
During the planning phase, Hanes spent a weekend in a cabin with his son Isaac, then 7, and one of the boy’s friends. “They took it really seriously,” Hanes says, and the boys drew pictures of what they would want to see in the park. The answer: a lot of rocks. “If they’re big enough, you climb them. If they’re small enough, you throw them,” notes Hanes. The rest of the team spent time in the Wissahickon Gorge, imagining what it would mean to capture the ancient landscape and make it a playful part of the urban experience.
The result is a park, now under construction, that shifts the Parkway’s immense scale, transforming it into a child’s wonder world made of Wissahickon creek, cliff, and forest. The new plaza thus shrinks the space so that it feels more intimate and expands it all at once. “We’re creating a universe here,” explains Unkefer, who grew up just a few blocks away. A mountain stream at the north end of the site will feed the pond, which will meet a cafe whose low, green roof is meant to reflect the horizontal rock ledges of the Wissahickon. The cafe itself is a bright, forward-looking glass pavilion clad partly in Emerson limestone. The building is heated and cooled by a geothermal system.
Perhaps the youth movement is just the answer to Sanderson’s prayer. “I used to go to London and see all this contemporary art and architecture and hate it,” says Levy. “Then I realized they had the guts to be doing it, they had an orientation and willingness to do new things.” We might then think of a small project such as Sister Cities not as patchwork on an old and tired city, but instead as a bolt of new material. Sister Cities Plaza - though sadly not the planned Mormon Temple immediately adjacent - may be a harbinger of the city yet to come.
Perhaps more than art or literature or even film, architecture is a barometer of the times. Post-Franco Spain exploded with ambitious, progressive-minded buildings; post-Reagan America fizzled into pastiche, cheap materials, and poor memory. Have a look at the immense, 824 page Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture, published in 2004. There are about as many entries for Girona, a Catalan university town, as there are for New York. There are none for Philadelphia. Herbert Muschamp, the late Philadelphia-born New York Times architecture critic, spent gallons of ink complaining about the moribund state of New York architecture.
After the Phaidon book came out, with the High Line framing the action, New York architecture rediscovered its grit. Monday, the current Times architectural critic, Michael Kimmelman, explored the ideas behind the ambitious “Via Verde” affordable housing complex in the Bronx, designed by Grishaw Architects, of London, and Dattner Architects, of New York. The 20 story, 222-unit building–with heaps of green and “healthy” amenities for a resident population with scarce resources–reminds me of the optimistic, sun-glimmering countenance of early modernism.
The same values and ideas that inform Via Verde were employed in Interface Studio Architects’ excellent 13-unit Sheridan Street Houses, reviewed here on Monday by Kevin McMahon. Both projects were the result of intentional efforts to redefine public housing with new architectural forms and green building practices. The Sheridan Street project garnered ISA four awards for architectural merit and sustainability.
The difference, of course, is scale. But thinking small, as we have been forced to do in Philadelphia, is no excuse for not thinking at all. In a sense it means each individual project matters all that much more. Thus, it’s particularly painful to see yesterday’s announced Hilton Home2 Suites, a convention center hotel with less architectural vision than a dunghill–this across the street from the Reading Terminal–on top of Jefferson University’s rear-guard tower a few blocks away. “You can’t imagine a worse building,” says University of Pennsylvania historian and former vice-chair of the city’s Historical Commission Tom Sugrue, about the Jefferson tower. I might say the same of the Mormon temple, on Logan Square, with its pandering, circa 1911 design. Each one of these projects is a lost opportunity to prove that we mean to take ourselves seriously as a city in 2011.
This is not, of course, a condemnation of Philadelphia architects (or recent gems, like Tod Williams Billie Tsien’s Skirkanich Hall). “The issue,” says Sugrue, “is that we have so many unimaginative developers.” It’s worth reminding ourselves that with Frank Furness Philadelphia merged architecture form and engineering precision, elegance and muscle, brilliant color and mud and steel; that Lou Kahn and Oscar Stonorov pushed American public housing into the modern era with the brilliant Carl Mackley Apartments (named for a striking textile worker gunned down by a scab), at M and Bristol Streets in Juniata Park.
In those days, Kahn and Stonorov and others in the vanguard were keen to prove their own and the city’s mettle. Never mind the Depression, Howe and Lescaze’s PSFS building had just opened. The proof was in the steel and glass.
In Chicago in the 1992 or so, researching the relationship between the University of Chicago and the Hyde Park neighborhood, I was taken to a massive vacant lot near the lakefront. On the lot was a series of model houses, each designed by a different architect. The point had been to reinvent Chicago residential architecture by allowing designers to experiment–and by doing so to capture the public’s imagination for new urban forms.
It seems to me this is precisely what we’ve neglected to do. At just about every chance, bludgeoned with the notion that we were a great city, we were a great nation, we continuously, and blindly defer to precedent (or to the market). Conventioneers want a certain “product,” we tell ourselves, eliminating our own power as a city to delight, inform, and inspire. This is why even a small project like Sheridan Street Housing is so important. It forces us to think forward, and it doesn’t waste our time.
On a recent afternoon, I strolled the worn brick sidewalk of American Street in Northern Liberties. Amid horse chestnuts and morning glories, alongside the ruins of Ortlieb’s brewery and bottling plant, this is one of the busiest construction zones in the city. It is also an architectural free-for-all. On blocks freed from much of their historic fabric by arson in the 1980s, the architectural impulse - from William Strickland to Winka Dubbeldam - covers three centuries.
Just beyond the muscular scale of Ortlieb’s is the Walter Moleski-designed modernist home of photographer Ray Metzger and a set of wonderful little glass and metal houses facing Liberty Lands Park. “When I have guests in town,” says Tom Sugrue, the University of Pennsylvania historian and former vice chair of the city’s Historical Commission, “I bring them to Northern Liberties because of the architectural energy.”
But on American Street, the contemporary record is mixed. “So much of what we build now is going into the dustbin of architectural history,” Sugrue laments. And that is why American Street rather instructively points up this moment in Philadelphia’s evolution: While we are still devoting too few resources to preserving our inherited fabric, we’re also not reliably producing strong contemporary architecture.
Meanwhile, advocates for contemporary design and champions of historic preservation, at odds over the character of the Philadelphia street, have split further apart. “Over the years, the line between designers and preservationists has hardened,” explains Randall Mason, chair of the graduate program in historic preservation at Penn’s School of Design and author of The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City.
Given a political climate that demands development by any means, Mason says, preservationists are often forced to see themselves as defenders of the existing city against mawkish developers. This conservative position has diminished their influence over the larger urban future.
Now, says Mason, “it’s time to change that. We want to erase the line.”
Mason was one of the original participants in “Gray Area,” a fledgling project initiated by Bill Adair, who directs the Heritage Philadelphia Program at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. The idea is to bring designers and preservationists together to give both fields new life. “Gray Area is a chance to launch a two-way exchange,” Mason says. “And really, any city worth its salt rigorously protects its inheritance just as it rigorously pursues good new design. It’s best to connect them.”
“Preservationists need to be part of the conversation about the future of the city or they’re going to be left out,” adds Adair. Seeking a vehicle for the conversation, he recruited Hilary Jay, the founder of DesignPhiladelphia, who organized the Gray Area team and conceived a panel discussion, which will take place Oct. 19 at 5:30 p.m. at the Center for Architecture (free, register at http://grayarea.eventbrite.com).
The panel - with Mason, landscape architect Carol Franklin, policy analyst Mark Alan Hughes, architect Tod Williams, Metropolis writer Susan Szenasy, and builder/inventor Lloyd Alter - and an accompanying catalog “of projects and provocations” are meant to elicit further exchange. “We really want to explode the conversation about preservation,” says Gray Area organizer Elise Vider, a longtime advocate for preservation and design.
“What we’re asking,” says Jay, “is how can we use preservation as a catalyst, as opposed to using it to embalm our city.”
The Gray Area protagonists think designers can reignite preservationists’ charge by expanding the ways of reinterpreting old buildings and landscapes, using them as platforms for new development. “What if the conversation were therefore more about design” rather than protection or restoration?, asks architect Brian Phillips.
Mason, of Penn’s School of Design, says preservationists are ready to answer. “We have a lot of things to say about the world. Regulation is not the only tool in our tool kit.”
I asked John Gallery, the longtime director of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, what he thought of all this. Gallery wasn’t invited to participate in the panel discussion and his staff has had little to do with organizing the catalog or the event (though Mason is a board member of the Preservation Alliance, as is Sugrue). “I think it’s healthy for people with different points of view to broaden the conversation and I’m looking forward to hearing what these different viewpoints might be,” he says. But it’s clear Gallery sees safeguarding and restoring significant buildings as the mainstay of his organization’s work. “And given that,” he wonders, “what different approaches would you come up with? Take the Victory Building” at 10th and Chestnut Streets. “What would be the variations? Is it apartments, offices? The basic preservation of buildings is really narrowly limited.”
And, as Sugrue notes, the alliance, as well as the city’s Historical Commission, is woefully underfunded. The commission, which is charged with reviewing proposed new development in the city’s 12 historic districts and beyond, and with protecting historic sites, survives on about $400,000 a year. Sugrue says that’s a pittance compared with cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago: “It’s amazing they get done what they get done given the few resources.”
Gallery reminds me that the Preservation Alliance has been criticized for thinking beyond the protection of significant buildings in historic neighborhoods. But Gallery, who has also been the city’s housing director, is one of the most careful Philadelphia observers, and he thinks broadly about the urban landscape. “I guess it’s the question of what it is you think will make Philadelphia a distinctive city in the future,” he says. “To say that the future is dependent on building new as opposed to fixing the old is a questionable assumption.”
But, he says, new architecture can be successful in a historic setting if it takes its cues from the existing fabric. “Look, you can do both” - meaning promote strong contemporary architecture and preserve the historic streetscape - “but everything should be contributing to the overall environment.”
This philosophy, which says a city’s distinctiveness is derived from the coherence of its urban fabric, is disquieting to contemporary architects such as Phillips and Dave McHenry, who seek a more dynamic relationship between the new and the old.
And that means turning historic preservation on its head. “We think one way to prove an old building’s value is to see how hard it can work for us today,” says McHenry, whose firm, Erdy-McHenry Architecture, designed the Piazza at Schmidts, a half-block from American Street, one of a handful of assiduously contemporary projects around the city. “We want to make preservation a future proposition. If our generation doesn’t build enough that’s physically and intellectually strong, there’s going to be a gap in history.”
Sugrue says that’s the point of an initiative like Gray Area. “Advocates of good design and historic preservation can find a lot of common ground in imagining buildings that will be worth preserving 50 or 100 years from now.”
Last December, Thaddeus Squire, Pete Woodall, and I started talking about a website that would explore the evolving city. Thaddeus had learned that Brownstoner Philly had closed. Could Hidden City pick up where that site had left off? We’d involve the best writers and photographers and provide the kind of informed context and nuance that marks great reporting. We thought we’d “reward the curious,” just as the Hidden City 2009 festival had done. Last Thursday, we finally opened for business. We’re calling it the Hidden City Daily. It’s a web magazine, not a blog, which means we have sections and different kinds of articles, including some that are image only. There are still things to be worked out and sections to add, but after five days of publishing, I hope we’re rewarding the reader.
The Hidden City Daily marks the return of my old PhillySkyline column, the Possible City, which will publish every weekday at 7AM. (Hopefully the return now and again of B Love, as well.) A little less ponderous, this time I’m taking things in bite-sized chunks. Today, I write about the sequencing of the first phase of the creation of the Reading Viaduct park. Coming tomorrow: the huge drop-off in community gardens.
Talking Flash Mobs and Flash Robs in La Vanguardia
26 August 2011 | Share:
photo by Eva Guillamet
I was interviewed about flash mobs and flash robs and South Street by Marc Bassets’, a Washington-based reporter for La Vanguardia, Catalunya, Spain’s leading Spanish daily. Marc had been at my house visiting with our house swappers, Eva Guillamet, a photographer whose photo made it into the paper edition of the article (and whose photo appears here), and Daniel Venteo, a writer and historian of Barcelona’s architecture and urban design. Daniel’s new book, on Barcelona’s iconic street La Rambla, is out now in English. I ended up talking a great deal about race and alienation, and growing inequality on the streets of Philadelphia. That’s a subject that supersedes race, of course, and probably has little to do with aggressive and violent anti-social behavior. But it’s hard not to notice the pummeling so many have taken as a result of the Great Recession, which has left our streets full of the desperate, broken down, addicted.
“What do you think Thomas Eakins would think of this?” asked my father. We were standing on the Schuylkill Banks admiring Miss Rockaway Armada, the floating circus made entirely of trash docked under the Walnut Bridge. Visitors were invited on the “Armada” to lay down on the waterside bed—think Nile houseboat, 1960s—attend a personal lecture, have a ride on the three-person bike-pedaled Ferris Wheel, make music in a sound chamber, have a seat at the galley—really a farmhouse table spread with purple figs, chocolate-covered strawberries, and champagne glasses filled with lemonade. It was there, at the sunken table, I discovered the answer. It was obvious, really. With nowhere to put my feet, I slipped slipped them in the river. Sure, it was a bit filthy—a few feet away a slurry of garbage and debris had collected—but it was also magical. With the sun setting and the breeze running through the gauzy curtains, I felt Eakins’ pleasure, the body at one with the river, the river animating the city.
It is only 18 feet of worn macadam, filthy as any never-washed city street, just another miniature piece of hard packed clay on this burning earth, and yet it might as well be frontline in the class war that’s threatening the fiscal and economic stability of the globe.
It is 18 feet of symbol.
It is 18 feet of real, contested turf on my block in Philadelphia.
This is fitting, since I designed a history tour for the neighborhood that has as a central theme the competition among waves of immigrants for control of the turf. But this isn’t about group space and identity, ethnicity, religion, or race, it isn’t even about what some people think it’s about: parking.
The 18 feet, of course is a public parking space subject to the street parking regulations of the block: 2 hour parking, 8-6 except Sunday and Permit Parking 4 and 22.
That space, in front of 622 Bainbridge Street, was until a week ago, such a public space. Given our location near South Street and the presence of 8 retail businesses on the block, in addition to 10 recently built apartments, the preservation of public parking is a priority (say that ten times fast). Everyone knows I believe a city should be designed for people and not, as Louis Mumford feared was happening mid-20th century, “for cars,” but this contested 18 feet isn’t about cars versus pedestrians, or highways versus neighborhoods, but about access to a public good versus purely private gain. For a while, of course, Philadelphia acceded to the auto times and actually required new houses to have interior, off street parking. But by 2000 or so, it was understood that the curb cut required for the garage space meant at least one less on-street, public space. Furthermore, on principle, such a policy of encouraging garages was detrimental—deadly—to the life of the street. By 2005, the policy had just about reversed.
Our block is already a victim of the old way of thinking. Across from my house is about 75 feet of contiguous curb cut for private, off street parking. Two houses down, there are four more interior spaces, making much of the south side of the street essentially a dead zone. Too bad, because so much else—the relatively high density and the mixed uses—creates an otherwise optimally functioning city street.
And then there is the 18 feet of entitlement.
The four interior, private spaces are part of a contemporary house that fronts on the alley behind our block, Kenilworth Street. Its back, therefore, and the two long, often grafitti’d garage doors, face the main street. This back-facing plan is also a rejected mode of urban design. But no matter, the house is interesting, and when it was originally constructed it received a great deal of positive attention. Some years ago it was purchased by a well-heeled lawyer, interestingly active in public interest law, and his wife. They are empty-nesters who moved from Society Hill. In 2004, #622, the house immediately adjacent to their house, burned. They purchased it, tore down the remains, and eventually built an addition to their house, with guest accommodations and an interior swimming pool.
The construction process was prolonged and for the block, extremely painful. The foundation pit was left with a fence that enclosed the entire sidewalk and some of the street, eliminating access to both. Trash, which regularly accumulates inside the garage bays of the house, collected all around the fence. There were construction and code violations, and for about six months last year a construction crane sat without being moved or used in the public parking space in front.
The addition itself was a piece of contemporary architecture, a sober gray pastiche of cement board and metal. I liked it. But the addition was set back from Bainbridge Street, and I had a feeling why: the owners of the property, which already contained four interior, private parking spaces, would take one more, and eliminate this little piece of public good. Permeable pavers were laid in the set-back and a tree was planted. On the block, we made private wagers: was this a patio or a driveway?
When the ugly roll-down grate, which blocked much of the architecture at street level, was installed, we had our answer. The property owner, in a time of entitlement, felt entitled. He would take the curb cut because he could. And because no one, apparently, required a public hearing. As one neighbor put it, “don’t they think they’re being a little piggy?”
“The world burns and the rich just go on, oblivious,” said Peter Siskind, my friend, last night. Code violations, a blocked sidewalk, an interminable crane, a roll-down grate smack in the middle of our block’s shopping area, “we’re good neighbors, we don’t bother anyone,” they say.
But I don’t even wish to dislike them. They are probably entirely nice and reasonable people, and, as I told their son, we’d probably agree on most things most of the time.
And yet I don’t understand their carelessness and disregard for the neighborhood.
In September, 2009, after the roll-down grate was installed, a Philadelphia Parking Authority crew arrived. They moved the parking sign twenty feet up, eliminating the public space in front of 622. I happened to come outside as the drilling started, and suspecting the worst all along, felt like I was acting out a pre-packaged scene. And I used my lungs. The crew had no idea who authorized the move. “This can’t be a curb cut here, because the property owner already has 4 spaces,” I said and furthermore, there was no public discussion. No notice, no permit, just a clueless crew whose foreman found a nearby police officer. The sign was replaced to its original location, and just to be sure it would stay there, I collected petition signatures from just about every other member of the block. We presented those petitions to Councilman Frank DiCicco, whose staff informed me that for #622 to have permission for an interior parking space, a zoning change would be required.
Alas, you can’t just remove a public parking spot because you feel like it. The opposite now: interior garages are discouraged as a matter of policy.
Or can you—disregarding the well articulated desires of the street—if you feel just entitled enough? Was DiCicco’s staff wrong about the zoning issue, or is the sense of entitlement among the wealthy—the same pervasive nonsense that has let bankers off the hook the world over while the poor suffer cuts to education and social services—so great that it negates the need or requirement for principles of planning and community development? Is an exception always made for the rich?
We all wonder why the need for yet another private parking space? The semi-occasional visit of a son who lives far away. And also, “we’re going do some work on the house and I need a space for the carpenter to park.”
No, it can’t always be. No matter how much the property owner—my neighbor—wishes to have a guaranteed parking space for his son when he arrives for his occasional visit—and what father wouldn’t?—isn’t the question at hand about weighing the difference between private gain and public good? In this case, there is no question, the needs of many—whose property taxes have gone up yet again, I should add—overwhelm the “needs” of one.
It is 18 feet. Hard packed dirt, utilities, cobblestones, layers of petroleum lummed into blacktop. And now it is smoking. I am not, I can assure you after collecting another trove of petition signatures in an attempt to force what should have happened long ago, a zoning hearing, the only angry one. One is entitled to being oblivious, but not also insidious and greedy.
The narrator of Carlos Fuentes new novel Destiny and Desire is a severed head—the “thousandth severed head so far this year in Mexico”—a casualty of a nation imprisoned by its own greed and violence and paralyzed by its uncomfortable and debilitating relationship with Europe and the US. This is Fuentes ennui and the story is told with grandfatherly imagination and almost wearying narrative control. (Having gone to see Fuentes, along with his English translator Edith Grossman, speak at the Free Library, I am struck by the way that Grossman projects Fuentes’ English voice and cadence into the text. Remarkable artistry.)
Fuentes’ characters—and the main one is Mexico itself—are all stuck. One, the owner of a chain of whorehouses, dies as he is tormented by his favorite prostitute (and second wife); another leaves the country for the iconic European Grand Tour only to never actually leave; another, a schizophrenic young woman, keeps trying unsuccessfully to steal airplanes from the airport in Mexico City; another, a prisoner in an underground jail, refuses to be set free just so that he can maintain his power over fellow prisoners; and finally, the narrator himself, a promising young lawyer, beheaded by the forces of nonsensical narco-violence that have cost some 30,000 lives.
Isn’t this, too, the ennui of urban America? Yes, amid the urban resurgence—there is a Mexican resurgence too, more on that below—most old American cities are paralyzed by economic, political, and fiscal forces outside their control; by blind and willful ward politicians who seek control over ever-withering fiefdoms; by the constant American instinct to flee; by poverty, addiction, and mental illness; and by narco-violence (community-wide suicide, it seems). In Philadelphia, our nascent growth is indeed threatened by these forces. It is no surprise that Philadelphia grew while Ed Rendell was governor: he sent hundreds of millions this way to prop up schools, transit, and human services, and to improve the built environment. Governor Tom Corbett just made those hundreds of millions disappear, and there isn’t anything we can do. “Philadelphia is among the many things Corbett is not interested in,” writes Tom Ferrick on Metropolis today. In other words, he says, we’re screwed. (Actually, and most poignantly, it is the poor, as everywhere during this belligerent time of class warfare, who are screwed most of all.)
But that’s not the only reason why. If Rendell gave this city a chance, foreign-born immigrants made the most of it (truth be told, and to prove I listen to both sides of the argument, they probably also drove down wages, hurting the poor). This is simply how American cities grow. Chief among those immigrants, particularly in South Philly, were Mexicans. Now, Damien Cave of the New York Times, whose work on Mexico City’s underground rivers I cited recently, reports this morning that net immigration of Mexicans to the US is zero. “For the first time in 60 years,” says former Penn and now Princeton demographer Doug Massey, “the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”
At the heart of the story is the Mexican resurgence:
Over the past 15 years, this country once defined by poverty and beaches has progressed politically and economically in ways rarely acknowledged by Americans debating immigration. Even far from the coasts or the manufacturing sector at the border, democracy is better established, incomes have generally risen and poverty has declined.
If we ignore the sloppy writing—a “country once defined by poverty and beaches” (¿is this the Times best understanding of Mexico, didn’t Carlos Slim bail out the paper?)—this is a critical piece of journalism, for it exposes several fundamental shifts in our world: the Mexican economy is surging as ours is still withering and as a consequence, at long last the wage gap between Mexico and the US is narrowing (in Mexico, six years ago, all I heard were complaints about few jobs and low wages); educational opportunities are growing in Mexico (and perhaps shrinking here); and the US is encouraging legal paths to immigration.
Is Mexico poised to be the next Turkey, or Brazil? Is Carlos Fuentes, dean of Mexican letters, hopelessly behind? Indeed, not. One of the book’s antagonists is the entrepreneur Max Monroy (perhaps a spoof of Slim), who shovels easy credit and consumer goods into the open mouths of hungry Mexicans; impressively, and perhaps surprisingly to Fuentes, factories and schools have followed. And meanwhile ours wither and no one dares listen to the cries.
There are some 56 Chinese central cities with more than a million residents; most of us can’t even name the top five (Shanghai, Beijing, Guongzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin). Despite our ignorance, Chinese urbanization is one of the great human stories of our time, of course, with much recent discussion centering on the nearly complete evisceration of ancient Beijing in favor of high density high rises and “Chinese” decorated big box retail (particularly along the once deeply textured Qianmen Street). The city’s famous Huntongs—impossibly dense, ancient alleys and courtyards—are all but completely gone.
The change has meant massive displacement of the poor, as Thomas Campanella writes in The Concrete Dragon (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), “This is human upheaval on a scale seen previously only in time of war or extreme natural catastrophe.”
Campanella’s book is one of six discussed in a terrific essay, “The High Price of the New Beijing,” by Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books. Johnson seeks a moment of clarity on the subject of urban planning in China. “On some days,” he writes, “it seems that all people talk about is housing and the problems of living in Chinese cities.” Beijing is particularly beguiling for all that has been lost. Massive destruction of the traditional city began in 1949 with the Communist defeat of the republican government and the wholesale abandonment of the past.
Like nothing else, Beijing exemplified this vilified past. The entire city—all twenty-four square miles of it, from its layout based on geomancy and mythology to its tens of thousands of tree-shaded courtyard homes—was China’s traditional belief system incarnate.
So it had to go. Johnson notes the attempts by Liang Sicheng, a Penn-trained architect (who must have been a friend and colleague of Ed Bacon’s), to protect the ancient city from Communist planners who sought a Soviet-inspired monumental form. Liang was badly harassed, but even Mao didn’t wipe the slate totally clean. The rest of the job was left to contemporary real estate developers and Beijing Olympic planners, who erected more monumental, symbolic architecture. Gone were the last layers and with it “the cultural legacy of all mankind” (Simon Leys, “Chinese Shadows, NYRB, May 26, 1977).
A trio of urban dreamers—young Mexico City architects—have submitted a plan to uncover three of that city’s lost rivers (there once were 60 of them). “Imagine kids singing, playing in the water and dancing,” said one of the dreamers, Delfín Montañana, to New York Times writer Damien Cave in last Tuesday’s paper. The Mexico City rivers in question are covered over by highways and choked by sewage and trash. The architects’ plan is to remove the highways, clean the water, and build parks, meadows, and trails—so desperately needed in that smothering city of 25 million. “It’s urban surgery. It’s not acupuncture,” said the project’s lead architect, Elías Cattan.
Naturally, after reading about their dream—the writer Cave is suitably circumspect about the potential reality of the proposal—I asked Adam Levine if such a thing might be possible in Philadelphia. Adam is the Water Department archivist and the expert in the history of Philadelphia’s physical transformation from a hilly landscape of marsh, pond, stream, and meadow to rowhouse jungle. His wonderfully informative website is PhillyH2O.org. Adam explains that unlike in Mexico City, where the rivers still exist—they are just covered over by infrastructure—in Philadelphia most of the lost creeks are buried in culverts and turned into sewers. Thus, he says:
To try to reclaim these streams would be hugely and, in my opinion, prohibitively expensive, as well as ultimately futile, if the goal is to create a viable stream in an attractive landscape in an urban neighborhood. In combined sewer areas, stream restoration would first involve building a new sewage-only pipe and then re-connecting all the buildings to that pipe. If that was done, and the fill (ranging from 15 to 50 feet deep) was removed from on top of the pipe, the result would be a stream flowing in a deep trench many feet below the street. To recreate the contours of the original valleys though which the streams once ran, thousands of buildings built on filled land in those valleys would have to be razed and all that fill removed as well.
Unnecessary urban surgery indeed. However, a bit of acupuncture could work in certain places. Levine says in places where original streams were placed in culverts but not combined with sewers, the culvert could be removed, especially possible if the creek is in an existing city park. One such place is the Indian Creek, under Morris Park, at 69th and Haverford. “In such areas,” he says, “where streams run under parkland, the original contours could more easily be reconfigured, few if any buildings would have to be demolished in the process, and no new pipes would need to be built.”
Thumbnail graph from Taller 13 Regenerative Architecture via the New York Times
William Penn was a regionalist. In Philadelphia, he envisioned a “great city,” with its port and institutions of religion and governance, connected to large plantations and farm communities in the hinterlands, or liberties. The symbiotic relationship between city and liberties lasted well beyond Penn, as the Northern Liberties took on a more open, and in some ways more tolerant, character than the city itself. And by the early 1800s, with its huge Second Street market (3 miles long!) and numerous inns, mills, and workshops, it too became one of the largest cities in the nation. Fueled by innovation and relative freedom, it was a place to make one’s own.
Flash forward to 2011 and the Northern Liberties clings to its culture of individual daring and creativity. But has wealth and “gentrification” compromised this history? “Destitute Urban Circus,” a 2-part film by artist John Thornton, explores the tensions inherent in urban change. The film is fun and funny and full of insight about this iconic place in urban America.
Twelve years ago I stepped into the enchanted, and hidden, terrain of Frank Hyder on Second Street in the Northern Liberties. Frank told me about the pioneering days in the mid-1970s, when he and compatriot Ira Upin moved into the neighborhood: encounters with revenge-filled Sonny Rosenberg, Mickey Grossman’s “Trashman’s Special,” and Mr. Big Balls. I put all these and Harry Schur, the “King of Nails,” into chapter seven of Song of the City. But mostly I was captivated by the world that Frank and Ira had built on everyone else’s ruins. This Friday at 6PM I return to Frank’s world for the opening of an art show: “Northern Liberties: A Transformation” at the Projects Gallery at 629 N. 2nd organized by Jennifer Baker. I’ll read selections from Song of the City. Plus there will be a viewing of a film about the neighborhood by John Thornton.
This Thursday, May 26, I’ll be at Drexel University’s literary fest, “Week of Writing,” participating in a panel discussion, “Making History,” with Paula Cohen, Jay Kirk, and Buzz Bissinger. Scott Knowles is our moderator on “the challenges involved in manipulating historical events and characters” in fiction, literary non-fiction, and film. The event is free and open to the public.
“The rules of the game,” wrote Marguerite Yourcenar, whose Memoirs of Hadrian might be the baseline for all historical fiction, “learn everything, read everything, inquire into everything.”
“Making History:” 12:30-1:50 PM, Mandell Lobby, Creese Student Center, 33rd and Chestnut Streets
On Tuesday, outside of Old City Coffee, I had the pleasure to meet Paul vanMeter and Liz Maillie. They are self-styled imagineers, conjurers of urban magic. Their project is called ViaductGreene, a four-mile-long park connecting the abandoned Reading Railroad Viaduct and the mostly subterranean City Branch, which extends west just above the Ben Franklin Parkway. (The related and long-standing Reading Viaduct Project focuses mostly on developing the one mile section of the elevated Reading Railroad Viaduct and its neighborhood.)
“We were fired up,” said vanMeter, a landscape gardener. He and Maillie had been discussing Witold Rybczynski’s op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times. “American cities,” wrote Rybczynski, the Penn School of Design professor of urbanism,
are always looking for quick fixes to revive their moribund downtowns. Sadly, the dismal record of failed urban design strategies is long: downtown shopping malls, pedestrianized streets, underground passages, skyways, monorails, festival marketplaces, downtown stadiums — and that most elusive fix of all, iconic cultural buildings. It appears likely that we will soon be adding elevated parks to the list.
Rybczynski thinks High Line-style projects will fail outside of New York and Paris for a variety of reasons, from low population densities to the high cost of converting a train trestle to an intimately landscaped park (the first two phases of the High Line cost $152 million). He is certainly right about density and the extraordinary need for quality public space in Paris and New York. Philadelphia, it can be argued, already has too much of it. But his analysis betrays a lack of insight into the ways that contemporary cities, Philadelphia certainly among them, are fomenting our desire for urban exploration. We want sky and vision and likewise, we want rust and stone; more than anything, we crave new vantages. To a certain extent therefore Rybczynski’s analysis is wrong: the health of downtown isn’t the question here, it’s the need to expand our horizons.
“We find Rybczynski’s article appropriately challenging,” said vanMeter, in an e-mail. “To counter it, ViaductGreene believes there are many levels of attraction and affordability in a variety of materials and a variety of richnesses in planting design yet unexplored. In large part, authenticity of place, the true genius of place, is what needs to be celebrated.” In other words, they have no intention of replicating the High Line: the urban magic is already here. And getting you to it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. VanMeter and Maillie envision a combination of low cost landscape strategies, exposing the power of “spontaneous nature;” charm, they note, is not necessarily the result of over-engineering. “I probably mentioned the ‘ah-hah moment’,” said vanMeter. “That’s what all of it comes down to. It’s that first impression—that very private and privileged experience—the magical world of wildness in the midst of urbanity and in this case, realizing all its connectivity. It’s palpable. So the point is to share that without wrecking it.”
[note: this is a work of fiction]
Who knows, might be hundreds of starlings in the pear tree right outside my window. Damned birds: I was forced to read in the National Geographic, which just won’t let this sort of thing alone, that they don’t belong here; they’re like an invasive weed, strangling out the other species. It’s likely if they keep reproducing and if at the same time domestic cats, which are more destructive to the environment than an average Republican governor, keep fornicating, in ten years there will be an all out war between the species. Just to put things straight, I don’t really know if they are starlings, I’ve never trusted my skills as an ornithologist, they could be finches or robins, which are probably kind and considerate birds, polite and helpful to the others. I can’t really see them anyway, the leaves of the pear tree are so thick. I refuse to worry about it. Instead I dream of figs, giant figs, lain in alternating directions, front to back, in two rows of a holiday box, just like the tasteless* pears that arrive when a loved one dies. But in my dream the figs open, which leads me somewhere else altogether.
One out of ten Parisians bought Henri Barbusse’s L’Enfer when it was published in 1908, but in the play adaptation the only memorable line was something like, “the trouble with women is that one wants all of them.” When extrapolated to all desire, this concept—we can’t have what we desperately want—signifies our inconceivable mortality (we want to live forever, natch). The play, and I suppose the book (though I don’t know for sure, since I haven’t read it), goes to great length to illustrate this idea, which is actually the basis of all art and religion. Only the play Hell pretends to be the first to imagine it. The fucking pretense! Actually, the play doesn’t illustrate a thing, it just tells, same as the National Geographic, and somehow, now beaten down by it all, I am supposed to care.
But my soul is weeping for Marguerite. At 1:33 this afternoon, I can’t stop thinking of her, she who has filled these last six weeks, “the lapse into despair of the writer who does not write,” I am the reader who cannot find enough time to read.
The sun is out, finally. I don’t know how to shut up, how to stop adding subordinate clauses, how to contain a single thought into a single, concise, and yet elegant phrase and Marguerite, who was born into an aristocratic family the communist Barbusse would have despised, writes as if she is a glass bucket, collecting drops of water. A perfect glass bucket in which each drop remains yet visible.
Does she realize that inside the word despair is spare?
Marguerite lived most of her life on an island off the coast of Maine with her lover and translator Grace Frick. (There: I have done it, a sentence that contains a single idea. All right, two intertwined ideas.)
For 30 years she collected the drops that make her Memoirs of Hadrian. And some of them evaporated part way (actually she burned those she no longer found useful, another thing I can’t get myself to do).
I’ve opened the window, but the starlings have gone for some reason, like entering a dead grandmother’s house. There is a voice on the street below: a Spanish woman. This isn’t an accent, but a quality of sound, the color brown if I were to pretend to have synesthesia. Her hair, however, is black, and long. She is walking on crutches toward her Smart Car, midnight blue, same as the cast on her leg. “Hay temprano, no?” she says to her American friend, a blond. She bends down to throw her crutches in the hatchback door. Her hair drifts across her face.
But early for what?
And where are you going?
*Joyce Carol Oates says this is so and I believe her.
Is there hope for the small American city? In Buffalo, says NY Times writer Thomas Kaplan, there is a plan for a massive expansion of SUNY Buffalo meant to leverage the University’s economic role. “Skeptics see the plan as a fantasy,” says Kaplan, yet another dream of urban renewal that inevitably will fail to produce results. Economic deconcentration is just too much. And the notion that educational and medical institutions alone—and without other synergistic industries—can save a city is a misreading of the evidence. Even in Philadelphia, with a diverse, vibrant regional economy and a handful of major eds and meds investing in the urban landscape, the most difficult questions of poverty and injustice persist. But Buffalo, once the 8th largest in the US (and now # 70), isn’t alone. While the oldest and largest east coast cities have at least survived a half century of relentless suburbanization, what is Buffalo or Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Trenton or any number of rust belt cities to do? We’ve been talking about this so long, the rust has burned a hole in our collective imagination.
Thumbnail photograph by Kevin Bauman
Sattler Theater photo unattributed
To have seen and heard this city roar and dance and fly last weekend, to have sensed the clap of feet on dirt, pavement, track, to have stared into the fading night sky utterly entranced as a child’s dream became a spinning hallucination 100 feet in the air, is to have been an instrument in a refined and wondrous urban orchestration, a truly grand performance. Perhaps the air was scored first by the bat of Ryan Howard Friday night, bat as baton in front of 45,000 plus, and from then on—but for the porous goaltending across the street—the mere everyday city would cease to matter.
“So often,” I wrote in the Possible City , observing quotidian Philadelphia, “the city seems small when, in fact, it is huge; it seems stifling when it might be freeing; it seems homogenous when it is unendingly pluralistic; it seems fragmented and disconnected when it might be integrated and therefore broadly enticing.”
But on the other hand, “a city that performs…raises the specter of our consciousness.”
Saturday morning, in the wind and the high clouds, the performance started slowly. Hundreds of syncopated brooms emerged as a momentary anti-rain dance against the rubbish storm. The sun emerged and bit by bit the lines began to form: on Broad Street for the Ferris wheel, on Passyunk for the culinary tent, on the track at Franklin Field. The women’s 4X1,500 was about to begin.
So many of us, sensing the delight, took to the magnificent urban stage.
Around 3:30, in front of another 45 grand, Roy Halladay finished a 107-pitch complete game. An eight year old shortstop snagged a line drive at Taney Field, but the 48,000 across the Schuylkill roared (as if in reaction to a line in a speech by Mussolini or Caesar) because Omo Osaghae of Texas Tech finished the 110 meter hurdles in 13.35.
And then in the evanescent light we waited. Flyers fans emerged from the subway to the join the mounting crowd, and eventually some 300,000 eyes rested on the members of La Compagnie Transe Express, who were about to transform steel into a whispering dream, and all the while inside Verizon Hall the Philadelphia Orchestra began to play Stravinsky, a program themed “Greek gods and mythology.” A bell was rung and torches were lit and slowly the steel contraption positioned at Broad and Spruce rose and the magic flower opened. Drummers swirled 40, 60, 80 feet in the air and when they stopped the city froze: a lone, illuminated woman made love with the the flying trapeze.
When the dream night ended, the vacuums came and Broad and Spruce became Broad and Spruce once more. But only until sunrise. Then some 30,000 pairs of feet slapped the pavement, from Central High to the Navy Yard. The fastest performer at this year’s Broad Street Run, which is the largest 10 mile race in the country, belonged to Ketema Nigusse of Ethiopia. He crossed the finish line at 00:46:29, having run at about the same speed as the Broad Street Subway.
PIFA photograph by Christian Carollo
Penn Relays photograph by Washington Post/Getty Images
A strange pleasure of Istanbul, according to Orhan Pamuk: counting the oil tankers and warships and trawlers and deep water explorers and massive oceanliners traversing the Bosphorus between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. “In the course of a normal day,” he writes in the memoir Istanbul, a large number of us make regular trips to our windows and balconies to take account, and we do so to get some sense of the disasters, deaths, and catastrophes that might or might not be heading down the strait to turn our lives upside down.”
Accidents are frequent on a waterway that’s also the realm of pleasurecraft, rowboats, and tourist ferries. No small thing in this exploding city of near 17 million.
So this week the Turkish president Recep Erdogan, Istanbul’s former mayor, proposed a solution, what he calls “a crazy and magnificent dream”: to carve a 30 mile long canal for commercial ships, leaving the Bosphorus for pleasure. “We are building the canal of the century, a project of such immense size that it can’t be compared to the Panama or Suez canals,” he says. “Water sports will take place on the Bosphorus, transport within the city will be established, [and Istanbul] will return to its former days.”
It’s a dream, says Erdogan, fit for this place of once and future ambition. Pamuk in his memoir strikes a different but no less immense chord, and I include here the entire wondrous riff. Enjoy the ride.
To be traveling through the middle of a city as great, historic, and forlorn as Istanbul, and yet to feel the freedom of the open sea—that is the thrill of a trip along the Bosphorus. Pushed along by its strong currents, invigorated by the sea air that bears no trace of the dirt, smoke, and noise of the crowded city that surrounds it, the traveler begins to feel that, in spite of everything, this is still a place in which he can enjoy solitude and find freedom. This waterway that passes through the center of the city is not to be confused with the canals of Amsterdam or Venice or the rivers that divide Paris and Rome in two: Strong currents run through the Bosphorus, its surface is always ruffled by wind and waves, and its waters are deep and dark. If you have the current behind you, if you are following the itinerary of a city ferry, you will see apartment buildings and yalis, old ladies watching you from balconies as they sip their tea, the pergolas of coffeehouses perched by landings, children in their underwear entering the sea just where the sewers empty into it and sunning themselves on the concrete, men fishing from the banks, people lazing on their yachts, schoolchildren emptying out of school and walking along the shore, travelers gazing through bus windows out to the sea while stuck in traffic, cats sitting on wharfs waiting for fishermen, trees you hadn’t realized were so tall, hidden villas and walled gardens you didn’t even know existed, narrow alleyways rising up into the hills, tall apartment buildings looming in the background, and slowly, in the distance, Istanbul in all its confusion—its mosques, poor quarters, bridges, minarets, towers, gardens, and ever-multiplying high-rises. To travel along the Bosphorus, be it in a ferry, a motor launch, or a rowboat, is to see the city house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, and also from afar as a silhouette, an ever-mutating mirage.
The long-brewing effort to bring the history of Philadelphia to film gets its official start Tuesday night at 7:30. The pilot film of what will hopefully be a 7-part documentary series airs on 6ABC in the Philadelphia region. This slightly edited for TV version captures the city trying to come to terms with the death of Lincoln. From there, the floodgates open on development, civil rights, and industrial innovation. “Anything is possible,” says historian Shan Holt. Ellen Gray from the Daily News reviewed the film on Monday and the City Paper covered the film project last week. The project is a labor of love for all of us closely involved. I hope you’ll tune in!
Yesterday, as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad promised government reform, I reviewedThe Other Side of the Mirror, an insightful travel book on that little-understood country. Today, the Syrian people have defied their government again, and for the first time are now on the march to Abasseyeen Square in Damascus. Meanwhile, the Guardian reports on Syrian youth harnessing technology in an effort to substitute for detained journalists and international reporters who aren’t allowed out of Damascus. Al Jazeera has the latest on what may be a turning point in this nascent uprising.
In the yesterday’s review, I noted the tension in Syria between the modern and the traditional. Damascus and Aleppo, two of the oldest and best preserved cities in the world, are also growing rapidly (in great measure because of the influx of 1.5 million Iraqi refugees), and urban life is degrading. This morning at a conference hosted by the Penn Institute for Urban Research, Mohammad al-Asad, the founding director of the Center for the Study of the Built Environment in Amman, Jordan, said that the focus these days on urban development in the Middle East is not on architecture or public space, but on government corruption and transit. “If you can move easily around the city, it is a healthy city,” he said, and indeed, in Damascus today the people are rolling in, demanding, at long last, an end to the corrupt and ineffectual regime.
It is there, right in the thick of it, and it always has been. It is desert and citadel, ruins and trade route, marketplace and sacred space. Its cities are the oldest in the inhabited world, its ruins the most intoxicating, its people the most welcoming. For the half of us human beings who identify as Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, its history is our identity, its civilization the emergence and syncretic evolution of our creed.
In The Other Side of the Mirror, due out this week from Paul Dry Books, noted author Brooke Allen unleashes this powerfully exhilarating place from its political shackles and places it in the center of our imagination. Allen deftly handles this travel writer’s sleight of hand with extraordinary historical and literary range—from the Aramaic-writing satirist Lucien to Luis Buñuel to Lady Hester Stanhope, who reinvented herself as Queen of the Desert—and a seemingly infinitely iterative sense of place. Syria, she shows us, always with a keen eye for details that matter to the traveler, is human synthesis:
First there were the ancient Babylonian gods; then the Semitic Arab gods; the Phoenician gods; the Anatolian gods penetrating Syria from the north; the Parthian gods from the east. In the wonderful museum at Suweida in southern Syria (practically empty, like all provincial Syrian museums), we found a Roman-era door lintel of local manufacture with Aphrodite and Eros on one side, Athena on the other, and in the middle none other than the Semitic deity Baal Shamin!
What makes Syria special, however, is the manner in which all these layers have gathered. Particularly in comparison to the Americas, she says, “Syria is totally different. There seems to have been no particular impetus for new settlers, or conquerors, to obliterate the traces of the vanquished. The custom the invading Muslim armies had of building a mosque next to a Christian church rather than destroying the church is symptomatic of what appears to be a widespread local tendency to leave older architecture alone, even if it seems worthless and defunct.”
This provides a wonderful landscape for the informed explorer. And indeed, Allen obliges by taking us to the birthplace of the alphabet—“the one and only alphabet, from which all the world’s alphabets derive” (Ugarit), the only place in the world where Aramaic is still spoken (Maaloula), the stronghold of the Assassins, who were the first terrorists (Masyaf), the spot in which Cain killed Abel (in the Cave of Forty Men, above Damascus). The cave, she writes:
remained a holy place, perhaps the oldest known holy place in this very old land….Abraham is said to have prayed in the cave. So have Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and even St. George, lest any Christians feel excluded. ..Catherine and I, though not believers, were nevertheless impressed by the place’s aura of ancient sanctity, and by its smiling Imam. We sat there in the falling afternoon shadows, savoring the utter silence broken only by the cawing of a circling bird…This, we thought, might be the very birthplace of monotheism. Considering all the trouble it has caused in the world, it seems a peaceful spot.
One way the broadly visionary travel writer disarms the ideologically-minded reader is to place contemporary power struggles in the context of history. One can’t really single out Bashar al-Assad, or even his father, the far-more brutal Hafiz, and the repression they have wrought for forty years, in the light of the crusaders, the French colonialist “protectorate,” or the ruthless reign of Nur al-Din, the so-called prince of Aleppo, who was the first to put into practice the idea of jihad.
Among the most memorable of these figures in Allen’s narrative is the best known ruler of Palmyra (of whose ruins there is “nothing comparable in Europe, in all the world”), Queen Zenobia, whose ambition and lusty aggression is seemingly comparable—in the retelling, anyway—to Cleopatra. Zenobia was born in the third century, married the Roman governor of Palmyra Septimus Odenathus. When the heroic Septimus was murdered, Zenobia “attacked Palestine, then Anatolia, then, most boldly of all, Egypt.” This, and placing her face on local coins, was a direct threat to the Emperor Aurelian, who retook Anatolia and Antioch, and then reportedly placed Zenobia in chains, draped her in jewels, and marched her through the streets of Rome.
Much of Allen’s point in writing The Other Side of the Mirror is to pull back the curtain on a society little understood in America. Syria is one of the safest nations in the world (at least it was until March 15, when residents of the town of Deraa initiated the long-coming protests against the Assad regime); by standards of the region it is broadly diverse—10% of Syrians are Christian—officially secular, and immensely social. She fell quickly in love with the intimate, energetic, colorful life of the Damascus and Aleppo medinas (old cities) and the souqs (tradesmen’s quarters), which are far better preserved as centers of daily commercial life than those in other cities in the region, and with the sense—often felt by travelers in similar places—that life there is more immediate, intense, fulfilling.
But of course Syrian life is changing. Assad came to power with the promise to open the economy (though certainly not the political system), with the predictable effects on daily life. “These souqs,” says Allen, “have lasted for a couple thousand years, evolving somewhat but still recognizably what they must have been in early Arab and even perhaps in Roman times. How will they fare in the age of the shopping mall? Will they go the way of America’s mom-and-pop stores?”
Allen is right to wonder. As all of the best writers of place, she is alive to the inherent tensions between the traditional and the modern; the title “The Other Side of the Mirror” is meant to reflect that tension. But for all of Allen’s tremendous range in so much of this work, on this she comes up flat. She substitutes an honest discussion on what’s gained and lost through modernization (even sometimes for the traveler) with a declension narrative full of digs at contemporary American life. And indeed, America, with its canned sense of the past, plays foil to Syria, where history it is simply and unselfconsciously lived. Thus all new buildings are rot and all elements of modernization signs of a society in decline. When Allen visits the evocative ruins of the fortifications of the city of Zenobia (once controlled by and named for the Queen of Palmyra), she is “horrified” to learn that it is threatened by a proposed dam. Unfortunately, she carries this tension no further.
In the wonderfully lyric novel Return to Dar al-Basha, on the Tunis medina, the novelist Hassan Nasr treads these same themes. The protagonist, Murtada, grew up in the medina, but fled in the wake of religious repression and domestic abuse. Some forty years later he returns, only to find that the city has changed drastically. The family house with its thick walls and generous courtyard is crumbling (Allen spends a great deal of time in just these sorts of homes in Damascus and Aleppo). Murtada, seeking meaning in the old urban fabric, wants to restore it. But having no money he seeks out his cousins, the last of the family to have been born in the house. He visits one of them, the interestingly named Nur al-Din, “a man of substance, with many responsibilities and enterprises,” in his modern office.
Like his namesake, this Nur al-Din is a bit of a fundamentalist. When Murtada says he wants all the cousins to chip in to restore the house, al-Din responds, “The world has changed. People have stopped looking backward. That old house no longer has a role to play. It played its part, but that’s over. It’s not good for anything now—no way. People’s lifestyles have changed…Their manner of thinking is different. That old house and all those old neighborhoods need to be torn down, so they can be rebuilt with structures that have the amenities that correspond to the requirements of modern life.” Like Murtada, Allen would be appalled by this theory. It’s just what has produced so much muck. The Syrians who haven’t quite come this far in their thinking, she says, don’t know how lucky they are.
Certainly, the traveler to Syria is the most fortunate. But the average Syrian? Nur al-Din wonders about Murtada’s attachment to the old ways. “What past?” he asks. “The past befouled by dishonor and catastrophes, the one based on exploitation and tyranny, on slavery and the oppression of women, on the expropriation of workers’ rights, and on the denial of liberties? These old neighborhoods, which you have come to defend, Mr. Murtada, were built on injustice.”
Surely, Allen would say and so is the Saudi-built shopping mall and the jerrybuilt slums spreading out from Damascus and Aleppo…and she would be right, of course. But she has done this otherwise extraordinary book—so filled as it is with so many engaging voices and landscapes—a bit of a discredit by not grappling honestly with the attraction of the new.
Oh, but of course intellectually she gets it spot on (and therefore so do we, the lucky reader). Standing on a Damascus street, she senses the way that city has responded to its succession of people, ideas, and innovations. “The architectural synchronism of this great Levantine city,” she writes,
in which each age and faith has left visible relics of the previous ones to make up part of the ensemble, is unlike anything to be seen even in that most synchronistic city of Western Europe, Rome. The sight in Damascus of the enormous propylaeum of the Roman Temple, with its Corinthian capitals and its entablature half smashed away, rearing forty feet into the air over the great walls of the mosque, the old souq spread beyond it covered with its gracious nineteenth-century arched roof, is an unforgettable image, especially considering the casual street life going on all around it: stalls selling books, a wagon piled high with pomengranates and blackberries, peanut-sellers, shwarma stands, the bustling crowds, the gawping tourists, whether Japanese with cameras or burqa-clad Iranians in town to visit the spot where the martyr Husayn’s head is said to have touched ground (on the site of the mosque, of course, the timeless holy site) after the Batttle of Karbala.
Envisioning this wondrous accumulation I was reminded of one of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, the aptly named Zenobia. (Calvino, too, was worried about the coming malls and the dehumanizing sprawl.) Evaluating Zenobia, Calvino wonders if it is the kind of city which continues, across the centuries, “to give form to desires.” Allen’s Damascus, her Aleppo, her Syria, now so carefully revealed for us: can we name another place that has so profoundly and consistently given form to human desires? And yet, it seems, never erasing what came before.
The Other Side of the Mirror: An American Travels Through Syria
by Brooke Allen
Paul Dry Books, 2011
March came and I found myself in the fervid world of Mercè Rodoreda, the Catalonian novelist (Open Letter, the new translation press out of the University of Rochester, is giving the late Rodoreda a grand embrace). Having read Time of the Doves (La Plaça del diamante, 1939), her early, unfiltered novel on Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, I walked into Death in Spring (La mort i la primavera, 1986) expecting to hear that work’s tone of naïve resilience. Instead I stepped into a dusty mountain village suffocating on its gruesome rituals, drowning in its turbid river. The rituals—locking children in kitchen pantries, stuffing concrete in the mouths of the dying so their souls don’t escape and then sealing their bodies upright inside of trees, sending a man each year in spring into the fast-pounding river to be thrashed by the rocks, etc. –are a surprisingly effective mirror on own uncontrollable violence, but Rodoreda meant them as a metaphor for a nation so oppressed it knows only how to repress itself. The freest man is the town’s prisoner.
The writing is so lyrical, so lush and aware of the natural world, you almost forget that death is all around. Indeed, Rodoreda was at the end of her life when she invented this place (Death in Spring was published posthumously). “Where does death begin?” she wonders, does “it spring from your skin or surface from beneath it?” At the close of the book, the main character is dying. His wife, who was also his stepmother, has fled, on feet, he laments, which “carried something warm and tender above them that would have helped me to live and sleep and breathe.”
Rodoreda, at death’s door, is philosophic: life may be a slow dying but death is unfailingly brutal. Cross the Iberian peninsula and there is the king of the philosophic novel, José Saramago, who died last year, writing one of his last books, Death With Interruptions (As intermitências da morte in translation from Mariner Books, 2009). Here he is trying, with the great specter of his deceptively hilarious prose, to trick death. Yes, Mercè, he is saying, death is everywhere and immutable, but can she be seduced?
And so here is his imaginary Lisbon, which wakes up on New Year’s Day to realize no one has died. Death has vanished. She returns sometime later with a public announcement and a note for an ordinary 49-year-old cellist. The fun ensues as death tracks down the cellist, who has, without even realizing it, cheated her already. And then, in the cellist’s usually barren bedroom, and in the once cold hands of death, life truly blossoms. I guess it really is spring.
I walked out of the unforgettable film Marwencol, which played at last fall’s Philadelphia Film Festival, intensely aware of every form in the cityscape: every brick, every stoplight, every painted sign, door handle, newspaper box…everything manufactured by human hands, a little world of our creation. Marwencol is a miniature WWII town created by Mark Hogancamp from a point of almost desperate vulnerability. Eleven years ago today he was beaten and left for dead. As he recovered from brain damage, he built Marwencol, which is a living place of his own deadpan imagination. Aren’t our cities too?
Hogancamp is profiled in today’s New York Times by Penelope Green. The film Marwencol will play on PBS’ Independent Lens April 26, the same night, incidentally, the film I co-wrote,The Floodgates Open—on the post-Civil War reimagining of Philadelphia—airs on 6ABC.
“I dream of shaping urban spaces,” said sculptor Janet Echelman in her lecture Monday night at the Fairmount Park Art Association’s annual meeting, “of shaping that experience we can’t exactly describe.” Indeed, there is something of the inventive child in her dazzling interactive constellations that float above city spaces. (Echelman is a hot public artist; her Every Beating Second will be installed today at San Francisco International Airport and other cities, including Phoenix and Denver, have commissioned works in the past few years.)
Last year she was asked by Paul Levy of the Center City District to collaborate with Olin Partners on the recreation of Dilworth Plaza, the public space on the west side of Philadelphia’s City Hall. “What do you do when someone says you can’t do anything you’ve ever done before?” she wondered. Her answer was not to look skyward—she didn’t want to create a sculpture to compete with City Hall—but backwards to take cues from the city’s past. She researched the history of the site and came to realize the importance of water. Benjamin Latrobe’s original neoclassical pump house and Benjamin Rush’s fountain, both the first of their kind in the US, stood on the site in the early 19th century. Levy reminded Echelman of Philadelphia’s industrial heritage and she began to think of Broad Street Station across the way and of steam from locomotives. She examined the present site, coming to realize the rail and subway lines that run just below. The result is a rather remarkable interactive steam fountain that serves as an “x-ray of the city’s circulatory system,” by tracing the real time path of the subway trains running below. “There is a practical aspect to this,” she noted, “you’ll be able to tell when you’ve just missed the train.” (One wonders, as my friend and colleague Pete Woodall notes, why this technology is not available to the regular rider in any old station or, imagine, someone waiting for a bus.) Echelman says she is influenced by Mark Rothko’s use of color and so the steam will contain the muted and yet sultry colors of the urban landscape.
Echelman says construction documents for the new plaza, with all its complicated engineering (the subway lines begin 18 inches below), will be complete this week. The new plaza will be finished in 2013. This project has special resonance for me. In 2007, when this most recent discussion about the public spaces in and around City Hall was begun, I imagined a range of uses for Dilworth Plaza. None of them were nearly so elegant as Echelman’s fountain. Hers is a dream, indeed, of becoming part of the magical beating heart of the city.
A statue to Octavius Catto will rise, at long last, on the northwest corner of Centre Square, in Philadelphia. From his vantage point across Arch Street, the statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo can keep a careful eye on the statue of Catto, who was a civil rights hero of the late 19th century. The 32-year-old Catto was assassinated on Election Day, 1871 by Democratic party operatives working for boss William McMullen, who created the role of populist thug Rizzo would revise a century later.
As markers of history, of course, the role of statues is to simplify and idealize, rather than expose and complicate. And yet it is a mighty complex city that places these two men together—at the heart of the city, no less—a proximity, we might imagine, that should ignite a thousand silent conflagrations.
Catto is rising on newfound interest in uncovering the long and mostly lost story of Northern civil rights. In his monumental Sweet Land of Liberty, Tom Sugrue framed the 20th Century part of this story. Isabel Wilkerson’s much lauded The Warmth of Other Suns, on the people of the great migration from the South to Chicago, fills in Sugrue’s framework with the quiet, but no less heroic, rhythms of real people’s lives.
But the story didn’t begin in 1919, which is the very point of two new books, one centered in New York, the other in Philadelphia. One must pull the curtain back even as far back as the late 18th century. It was Richard Allen in the 1790s, after all, who innovated the sit-in, the boycott, and the walk-out. Catto himself is the central character of Murray Dubin and Dan Biddle’s Tasting Freedom, which came out last fall from Temple Press, and “The Floodgates Open,” a documentary film I co-wrote with Sam Katz and Mark Moskowitz as the pilot to a proposed multi-part series on the history of Philadelphia (to air on 6ABC in Philadelphia on May 26).
We can add Carla Perterson’s Black Gotham, just out from Yale University Press. Peterson, who is a professor of English at the University of Maryland, sought to uncover the lost history of her ancestors, members of New York City’s black 19th century elite, many of whom were so critical in divining the political strategies that challenged slavery in the South and the lack of voting and other civil rights in the North. In doing so, she takes us onto the streets of Five Points in lower Manhattan, a mixed Irish and black neighborhood, where “threats of white violence lurked at every street corner as students were insulted, and even beaten or stoned.”
At the center of the neighborhood was the Mulberry Street School, part of a network of free African schools set up by the NY Society for the Manumission of Slaves. It becomes the lynchpin in the hope for racial justice in the 1820s and 30s, producing stalwart leaders like Henry Highland Garnet, James McCune Smith, and Patrick and Charles Reason, and the author’s great-great-grandfather Peter Guignon.
One of the strengths of the book is that it isn’t an academic history, but instead a quest to understand her own roots, and as such it proceeds from questions, some of which are hers, and some of which she puts in the mind of Guignon and his son-in-law Phillip White, and the other protagonists in the story. This is lovely pedagogy—and indeed Peterson exposes her own process of archival research as a way to illuminate just how deeply buried all this history has been. This is pre-Harlem black New York, and one of the implicit questions Peterson asks is, how, ultimately, does New York become the center of black urban life in America?
By asking and searching, Peterson slowly tells the story, which gathers in layers, across Manhattan and Brooklyn. Inside the layers is each of the milestones of this period in New York civil rights: the competition with the Irish for status and jobs, restrictions on voting, education, and public transportation, the riot of 1834, the draft riots of 1863, the role of wealthy whites like the tobacco moguls the Lorillards, who employ Guignon’s father, and Horace Greeley, and national figures like Frederick Douglass.
Pair Black Gotham with Dubin and Biddle’s Tasting Freedom and you emerge with the power to see both New York and Philadelphia anew (and to anticipate the course of 20th century civil rights). Both books are grounded in the tumult of neighborhood life, in the schools, in the strategies and disappointments of civil rights visionaries. And the books share a considerable number of events and characters. Charles Reason graduates from the Mulberry Street School to become the first principal of the Institute for Colored Youth on Lombard Street in Philadelphia. The Institute becomes the center of a local and national fight for justice, producing Catto, Jacob White, Robert Adger, and Caroline Le Count—figures who end up standing “among giants.” But whereas Peterson ultimately becomes limited by the personal nature of her inquiry and the layers she accumulates become organizationally awkward, Dubin and Biddle weave a magisterial narrative. They took the same—or very similar—archival material and transformed it into a singular gripping drama, in which every detail is carefully placed to reward the reader.
Tasting Freedom puts Philadelphia at the center of a long story that begins in the racial twilight of turn of the 19th century Charleston, South Carolina. Here, Catto’s grandmother is sold in and out of slavery and her son, Catto’s father William, claims a place among the white Presbyterian ministry. The story moves to Philadelphia, not only with Catto and his family, but with the Grimke sisters, upper class Charleston whites who find the quiet brutality of slavery and racial oppression unbearable. But because this is a fully fleshed out narrative, as stunningly devised as a work of fiction, it finds credence in the hearts and hands of the Irish immigrants who pack the Fourth Ward. And here the conflagrations begin.
This is the pilot film of the 7-part documentary “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment” being produced by History Making Productions. The half-hour film, which centers on the fight for civil rights in the immediate post-Civil War period, will air in Philadelphia on 6ABC, April 26 at 7:30PM. The story is told through interviews with experts, including Chris Matthews of MSNBC and journalist Juan Williams, and dramatic interpretation. Here are two short clips from the film.
At the end of the War, Philadelphia, which had been so crucial to the Union victory, boomed. As historian Shan Holt says in the film, “Anything was possible.” This film tracks the expanding possibilities, from the creation of the modern city to the campaign for equal rights. The campaign was led by the young teacher and activist Octavius Catto whose assassination foreshadows the coming violence of 20th century civil rights. Philadelphia, meanwhile, shrugs of infamy and depression and keeps on growing, staging the largest public gathering yet in US history, the 1876 World’s Fair.
I am the senior writer of “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment” and co-screenwriter of “The Floodgates Open.”
In Derek Cianfrance’s recent film Blue Valentine, the short marriage of Dean and Cindy is coming undone. Dean is content with his life as a house painter; it’s the kind of job, he says, that allows a guy to have a beer in the morning. What’s more, he just wants his wife to be happy. His lack of professional ambition enables Cindy to focus on her career.
But Cindy, who had wished to become a physician, is stunted in her role as a nurse, a frustration that Dean probably doesn’t understand. Dean’s contentment becomes a foil for Cindy’s disappointment. Why won’t he live up to his potential? Why can’t he be more serious?
Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane
Such are the very pleas of the equally strong-willed Christine in regard to her foolish, fun-loving husband, Helmut, in Theodor Fontane’s modern masterwork, Irretrievable (Feb. 15), rereleased in Douglas Parmée’s translation of the original German by New York Review Books. Fontane, who was nearly 60 when he started writing novels in 1878, constructed wonderfully precise and carefully observed narratives in the mode of the Portuguese Eça de Queiroz and the Brazilian Machado de Assis.
Like Blue Valentine, Irretrievable is a study of a marriage drifting apart. Always careful to examine all sides and explore every complexity, Fontane tracks Christine and Helmut’s decline, from differences in personality — “In spite of all their love, his easy-going temperament was no longer in harmony with her melancholy” — to silence, belligerence and then resentment. Helmut is left cold by Christine’s dogmatism. “A woman,” he says, “must have some warmth, some temperament, life, sensuality. What can one do with an iceberg?”
Soon enough, for Fontane was obsessed with the specter of adultery, Helmut is forced to answer his own question. He is skating on Lake Arre with Ebba, a young, vivacious countess, and they find themselves at the edge of an ice floe heading out to the North Sea. Is he daring enough to prove his bravado? “We’ve reached the limit, Ebba,” he says. “Shall we go beyond it?”
Helmut’s words dangle marvelously in this carefully restrained narrative; so calculated, they raise the hairs on the arm. Ebba is simply too hot to handle. Beyond it is a place that Helmut, a bare insouciant who likes to discuss genealogy and local history, can’t really imagine. Beyond it is something Helmut couldn’t have fathomed: the 20th century.
The good folks at New York Review Books — so accustomed they are to finding and polishing the treasures of modern literature — have brought us that, too, in Bohumil Hrabal’s marvelous one-sentence Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (May 3). Before Milan Kundera, Hrabal, who died in 1997, was the master of Czech literature. Where Fontane is coolly observant, Hrabal’s narrator, a 70-year-old shoemaker entertaining some girls in a bar, is spasmagoric. The prose, in the translation by Michael Henry Heim, combines the sheer anti-romantic heft of Norman Mailer and the bewitching absurdity of Isaac Babel. Gone for good are Helmut’s days. “Marriage,” says Hrabal, “is like dragging a cowhide along a sheet of thin ice, there are days when a wife says to her husband, You know what you need, Papa? you need a good smack in the kisser and he says to her, Mama, you dirty bitch, if you get plastered once more I’ll tear your mouth open with a camp iron, and then young ladies, ideals start to crumble, even Goethe had his troubles, to say nothing of Mozart. ... ” Just ask Cindy and Dean of Blue Valentine, whose unraveling marriage finally erupts in violence and hatred: Gone for good are Helmut’s days.
Father of Philanthropy: Life and Legacy of Stephen Girard
23 February 2011 | Share:
The first documentary film on the life of the fourth wealthiest American, Stephen Girard, who died in 1831. Told by experts, including former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and fellow French emigre, the restaurateur Georges Perrier, and through seven dramatic reenactments, the film explores his motivations as the first American to leave his fortune for “people he would never know.” Girard made a fortune in shipping trade, finance, and real estate, but is widely misunderstood—his life story is laden with myth and misconception. We attempt to clarify the record by exploring his ideas on education, race, and economics. Girard emerges as a determined, lonely man of principle and action. The film is currently in production and will be complete in Spring, 2011. I have been historic consultant, screenwriter, and co-director.
War of Ideas: Founding of the Union League (working title)
10 February 2011 | Share:
1862 was turning into a disaster for the Union army. The South was gaining, and worse, in Union cities like New York and Philadelphia, political allegiance was shifting to the South (many elites maintained economic and social ties to the Southern states). For those loyal to Lincoln and the Union, and particularly for principled anti-slavery advocates, the political temper was devastating.
In Philadelphia, a group of such like minded people, including the poet and playwright George Boker and newspaper publisher Morton McMichael, joined to together to battle back. This film, told entirely in reenacted vignettes as “scenes from a revolution,” is their story: of forging political alliances, writing and disseminating propaganda, and forming a chain of “Union Leagues” throughout the nation. This film is in production and will be a permanent exhibit in the Union League of Philadelphia’s new “Heritage Center.” I am screenwriter and historic consultant.
A feature film from director Anders Uhl on “the good death” of a man who gets caught up in circumstances he cannot control. In rural New Mexico—or contemporary Northern Africa or the Middle East—a group of children are abducted by men whose own futures have themselves been abducted. What follows in turn is a search by various people for a measure of their own humanity. Based loosely on the history of New Mexico’s three cultures (Hispanic, Anglo, and Native American), the film will be shot on location in the hills and plateau’s of Uhl’s own childhood. Currently in development. I have worked with Anders as a co-screen writer, expanding on his original director’s script.
This hour long documentary will be the first full episode of the 7-part “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment.” It’s the end of sweltering summer and the capital of the United States is under siege. From the airless alleys of a neighborhood called Helltown—jammed with thousands of political refugees—to the mansions of cabinet members and diplomats, scores of people fall ill and die from a mysterious disease that baffles medical experts. After two weeks, politicians finally acknowledge the crisis—but the death toll continues to mount. Across the city, dozens of funerals are held each day. By the fourth week, with still no certain explanation, and fear mounting, all essential government operations are forced to relocate. The Treasury Secretary is stricken. The President flees. Soon Congress follows on his heels. On most days, all that’s left is silence. Authorities have even banned the tolling of church bells for fear of further upsetting the public.
Avian flu? Swine flu? Or bio-terrorism? No, the epidemic is something doctors call “Yellow Fever,” so named for the pallor of its victims. The year: 1793. The city: Philadelphia. The result: more than one in ten are dead, America’s first great city lies in ruins. The country itself is teetering in the midst of a diplomatic crisis. Anger and resentment linger, as does a mystery: what’s the source of this modern plague? And on everyone’s minds: what to do about it?
This film is in pre-development, awaiting funding. I am the screenwriter.
Born a slave, Richard Allen was America’s first civil rights hero, the first black man in America to own property, and the father of the AME church. Apostle of Freedom was produced by History Making Productions for the AME. Allen’s actions—writing pamphlets, staging walkouts and sit-ins and standing up to the force of repression and violence against blacks—set the stage for 200 years of civil rights battles. Here is a short clip of the film.
Our film uses experts, including historian Richard Newman, the author of Freedom’s Prophet, and staged reenactment of the famous walkout of St. George’s Church and of the spiritual rise of Jerena Lee, one of the first female preachers. I am co-screenwriter and historic consultant. The film premiered on February 13, 2011.
On the first morning of December, milky light streaks the city and the day gets going. I’m on top of Drexel University’s new Millennium Hall, a 17-story residence designed by Erdy McHenry Architecture and structural engineer Cecil Balmond as a model integrating engineering and architecture. The tower, which stands on the rise of 34th Street, is wedged midblock on a small site that previously housed university tennis courts. Clad in offset stainless-steel panels and rotating to manipulate sunlight and views of the city, Millennium Hall seems to move. From the south, the panels give it the appearance of a tall, powerful woman whose skirts shimmer against the wind.
Another effect of the building’s elliptical rotation is to deliver skyline views to every residence, a gift extended and multiplied in the penthouse lounge. Here is the remarkable and unusual vista; on a ponderously clear morning like this one, nearly everything is illuminated — from Overbrook High School to John Penn’s Solitude mansion. In between, on the gridiron: the great stand of Center City towers, Packer Avenue Marine Terminal in the far distance, the Aker Philadelphia Shipyard, the old-school skyline of University City, the rich brown brick and castle tops of West Philly. In the immediate foreground: a marvelous, multilayered web — three passenger trains and a freight train, pedestrians crossing the new Drexel Park, automobile traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway, West River (Martin Luther King) Drive, the Spring Garden Bridge. Here is the transparent, god’s-eye view of people moving through time and space, the real life evocation of city planner Edmund Bacon’s original vision for the “simultaneous movement systems” of Market East.
From here, indeed, it is hard to resist thinking like a god of the city, rearranging and replacing things as I see fit (re-erecting the half-tumbled Drexel Shaft just below might be my first act of magic). Alas, no one has such power, not even Ed Bacon at the height of his career. This quite misunderstood point punctuates a new, rather illuminating book just out from Penn Press — Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City. Smartly edited by Drexel historian Scott Gabriel Knowles, the book is the first to assess the ideas and impact of Philadelphia’s legendary city planner, who died in 2005.
Imagining Philadelphia is a series of essays-as-dialog by Knowles, Gregory Heller, Guian McKee and Harris Steinberg (with an afterword by Eugenie Birch), arranged as responses to an article written by Bacon, “Philadelphia in the Year 2009.” Bacon’s 1959 essay was published in Greater Philadelphia Magazine as “Tomorrow: A Fair Can Pace It.” The fair refers to the 1976 World’s Fair and Bicentennial, the fair that would never come to be. The heart of this book is Knowles’ carefully knit story of the fair’s unraveling, and what that tells us about the limits of a master planner. Ultimately, like all of us, the author wonders, “Where are we now as visionaries?”
A Salesman of Ideas
In 1959, a world’s fair must have felt blisteringly possible, and even necessary. In a fair, as Knowles explains, Bacon sought, and thought he had found, a natural extension of his efforts “to liberate William Penn’s grid from over a century of industrial-age clutter and to make the city simultaneously auto-, pedestrian-, and investment-friendly.” Bacon had been a student of world’s fairs; he lectured on their impact on host cities and their role as progenitors of urban change. So in advancing the idea of a world’s fair, nothing less than the future of the city was at stake. Philadelphia would be its leading American example, “the key prestige city of the country.”
“What could be more natural,” he reasoned, “than to establish, as a national policy, the idea that the United States will receive the world in Philadelphia in 1976, and that the location of the Exposition will be downtown Philadelphia? In this way the reconsideration of the ideas of 1776 will occur in the place where they were originally formulated, and the world will determine, by observation, that the vision of [the American display at the 1958 World’s Fair in] Brussels was not a dream, but a driving force that led to the actual reconstruction of Philadelphia as an unmatched expression of the vitality of American technology and culture.”
Having orchestrated the remarkably successful 1947 Better Philadelphia exhibit, with its 30-foot, manipulable model of Center City, Bacon had come to realize the value in producing a tangible icon of the possible city: It gave people a sense of wonder, control and participation in determining the future. Bacon, as Gregory Heller notes in his Imagining Philadelphia essay, “believed that an effective planner had to sell his ideas actively in a persuasive way.” That’s the key to understanding Bacon’s impact, according to Heller, president of the Ed Bacon Foundation and author of a forthcoming biography. Bacon, he says in an interview, was “not purely a planner — he was a planner and implementer. He was a salesman of ideas.”
Bacon surely wanted to show off. By 1959, the redevelopment of Society Hill, Independence Mall, Penn Center and Eastwick in Southwest Philadelphia — all projects Bacon had conceived or influenced — were complete or under way. A new urban model (though not without detractors and not without significant compromises) was emerging. Now to complete it: “The form of the city then [in 2009] will be set by the nature of the ideas we generate now.”
But Bacon knew his vision would fall short without significant support from the federal government. A world’s fair would provide the political cover and financing to build the rest of his dream: Market East as the center of a region-wide, integrated transit system; a circuit of expressways around Center City; Chestnut Street as the world’s classiest pedestrian promenade dazzled by “open-sided electric cars with striped awnings”; and to decisively reverse white flight and suburbanization.
From 1976, Bacon looks confidently ahead. “By the year 2009,” he imagines, “no part of Philadelphia is ugly or depressed.”
He Ripped Its Heart Out
From the 17th floor of Millennium Hall, right on top of Bacon’s imagined 1976 World’s Fair riverside amusement center, this is just how the city appears. Fifty years of neighborhood dissolution is invisible, the one-in-four rate of poverty silent, addiction and desperation smothered by the glass. Bacon wrote convincingly of designing for people in place, but he often reverted to thinking of the city as I see it here, as a chessboard. “His favored solutions [to problems of poverty] and his understanding of the city itself,” writes Guian McKee, a University of Virginia historian, in Imagining Philadelphia, “relied on a model of physical determinism: the idea that manipulation and improvement of the built environment of homes, streets, commercial areas, and open spaces could strongly influence, or even control, social and economic outcomes. ... The problem was not that Edmund Bacon cared only about design: it was that he believed far too deeply in its power.”
The power is evident in his network of Society Hill alleys. These are graceful, carefully proportioned spaces that caress, delight and surprise. Modern architecture is employed skillfully, certainly proudly, but the overall sense, one of the great pleasures of Philadelphia, is of being in infinite time, in an organic city. The opposite is of course true — and it speaks to the deep ambiguities of Bacon’s approach. His plan for Society Hill was hoisted upon a hot, cluttered, pulsing neighborhood, perhaps what had once been the most dynamic of the early republic. He ripped its heart out to make it beautiful, so that wealthy people would feel comfortable moving back to the city.
“[W]hat did Bacon ultimately want to motivate Philadelphians to do?” asks Christopher Klemek, a George Washington University historian and co-founder of Poor Richard’s tour service, in a 2007 assessment of Bacon in Context magazine. “Nothing short of reviving the heart of the old Quaker City, reinvigorating Philadelphia’s stagnating downtown. ... Yet that goal was deceptively simple, for Bacon thereby asked his contemporaries to buck a powerful national trend, not to abandon a great American city, but instead to relinquish their suburban dreams.”
Heller notes that Bacon employed a well-to-do Society Hill woman, Connie Fraley, to market the neighborhood. He would bring prospective buyers from the Main Line to her apartment so they could imagine living there. But, says Heller, “She hated what happened to the neighborhood.”
For this reason, Klemek, author of the forthcoming Urbanism as Reform (University of Chicago Press), is broadly critical of Bacon as a designer, calling his major downtown projects very possibly “the least interesting sites in contemporary Philadelphia. In every direction from Center City,” he writes in 2007, “it is the areas just beyond Bacon’s reach, precisely the areas he didn’t touch, that exhibit the most viability and attractiveness today.”
But McKee and Knowles, particularly, caution us against assigning undue power (and therefore blame) to Ed Bacon. That, too, is one of the most striking ambiguities of Bacon’s legacy. Despite his reputation and despite the myth of the master planner, Bacon wasn’t ever very powerful. He wasn’t an ally of reform mayors Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth, and was often out-maneuvered by the city’s strong development coordinator, William Rafsky, Clark’s closest adviser. Later, he was confronted by a swell of neighborhood-based activism.
Planners, indeed, were often left powerless. As Arcadia University historian Peter Siskind, who is at work on a book called Landscapes of Liberalism (Penn Press), says, “Private housing developers and corporations usually dictated development. Even when government did play an important role, those creating public policy often dismissed or only selectively listened to the professional planners. A lot of fascinating plans were produced during the 1950s and 1960s that were ignored because they were out of step with the market realities and political priorities of the times.”
The Question of 1959
Which brings us back to the question of 1959 — or 2009, or 2059: Where are we now as visionaries? Today, the most striking vision comes from ambitious institutions of education and medicine, and from media and design innovators. Yet, in no small way, we rely on ourselves, a fragmented pulse of neighborhood dreamers, of do-it-yourselfers. Heller is one. As a managing director at The Enterprise Center, he’s building the Center for Culinary Enterprises, a food-industry incubator in an abandoned supermarket in West Philadelphia.
But, as Knowles goes on to ask, “Is it desirable or even possible to employ … far-reaching visions?”
“This is actually where Bacon’s legacy is strongest,” says McKee. “Wherever he had an opening, he set out a vision of a city that could be different and better (or so he claimed), and in the end he managed to get at least some of it built, and in fact some of it was better. Ideas do matter in getting people to at least consider a future that can transcend the limitations of the past. To be willing to think big and not be defeated going in. The constraints will continue to be real, and not all of it will work, but some of it might, and in fact probably will — because Philadelphia, for all its problems, has real strengths, too.”
Interestingly, Ed Bacon, the salesman, didn’t consider himself a visionary. “Visionaries don’t get to see their ideas built,” he said in 1988.
And, as Heller notes, “When I knew Bacon in his final years, he was thrilled by Philadelphia’s progress. Essentially, many of the concepts that he predicted in his ‘A Fair Can Pace It’ article are occurring, though decades delayed.”
Perhaps Bacon’s was the confident stance of 1959, when — despite the loss of notable factories like Philco and Rohm and Haas — this city manufactured the world’s most powerful computer, when its port handled the most in-bound cargo in the nation, when it remained an economic giant. All the smart planner had to do, it seemed, was seize the opportunity.
Then, as the 1960s took hold, gradual economic change became an unraveling. Racial tension and discontentment and broad democratic protest mounted. Bacon — and his fair — were essentially drowned out. Fifty years on, we inhabit the sediment of that prolonged storm. Gone is a powerful, concentrated private sector (and its tax revenue); gone is the possibility of a single, compelling government vision.
2059
Harris Steinberg, director of PennPraxis, the University of Pennsylvania School of Design agency charged with synthesizing often discordant dreams into a “civic vision” for the Delaware Waterfront, concludes Imagining Philadelphia with his own prayer for the city, the reflective “Philadelphia in the Year 2059”: “The civic engagement process was often loud, raucous, and not always polite,” he writes. “Yet, through the haze of conflicting opinions and, at times, bellicose voices, we were able to arrive at common ground.”
Now, PennPraxis’ plan is the city’s official blueprint for the development of the waterfront. But the experience made Steinberg reticent to pronounce a single, unifying vision for the city. In an interview, he says, “I struggled with the whole idea of a 50-year vision, and thought of the city as I do my children and what I would hope for them. Therefore, it’s about a vital, functioning, welcoming, innovative, healthy city — and less about a physical vision. ... It’s focused on the sum total of its parts rather than a big, sexy idea …. That’s why I end with [William] Penn’s Prayer for Philadelphia.If we’re not articulating the issues and working toward solving the problems, we risk irrelevance and extinction.”
Bacon, I think, would have admired Steinberg’s immense savvy, determination and idealism. Both men, of strikingly different temperament and fueled by opposite strategic impulses, have tried to hoist the city forward.
Yet, I also wonder if Bacon, the salesman, might push Steinberg to nail down a single, deeply resonant, perhaps even sexy idea — a torch to light the way forward. In “Philadelphia in the Year 2009,” Bacon writes, “I have tried to show … that a strong idea has a life of its own, and can become a dominant factor if it is clear enough, and if the leadership is stimulated to action.”
So, looking forward with Bacon eyes, what idea might we find?
The Sum of the City
Let’s return to Millennium Hall, Drexel’s new high-rise dormitory. The building isn’t at all perfect, particularly in the way it seems to loom over the soft, quiet streets of eastern Powelton Village. It feels a bit like a Martian waiting, just waiting, for the right moment to snatch the unsuspecting college professor from his study. But a building that can be a Martian and also, from another angle, a strapping woman, is not merely a building. It is a work of interpretive sculpture.
To set a useful contrast, just walk to the next corner. Towers Hall is a perfectly adequate, functional and not entirely unattractive 15-story dormitory. That’s all. It need not — it really can’t — do anything else. We might say Towers Hall represents the belief that a building, or a city, works best when assigned a clear function. Such a belief emerged from the same Modernist impulse that produced Ed Bacon.
Millennium Hall, of course, is also a dormitory. But already, it’s three other things, four if you count the extraordinary and delightful gift of the penthouse view. The architects, on their Web site, say that because its design integrates — privileges, even — the role of engineering, the building is also meant as a conceptual monument to “the fundamental pedagogy of Drexel’s historical roots.” Because it expands the range and possibility for structural rotation, it’s a learning model. By ably, and interestingly, contrasting with the 19th-century city around it, it exposes, rather than diminishes, what’s special about the neighborhood. As such, it peels itself away to reveal and frame the surrounding streetscape. Finally, and not surprisingly, it is green, designed to maximize solar gain in winter and to cool itself in summer. In sum: It lives, it performs.
It therefore commands our interest.
The city we inhabit today isn’t much like Millennium Hall. It works sometimes, and for certain people, quite wonderfully (and for others very poorly). That’s obviously no longer enough. No, the city of tomorrow, of 2019 or 2029 or 2059, will likewise be a city that performs. Here’s an idea that borrows from, but transcends, Edmund Bacon’s instinct to extract value from a world’s fair. Sure, the city that performs is functionally efficient, delightful, inspiring and beautiful. But in much larger part, it requires us to ask a fundamental question about the power of the city to transform the human condition (and the power of people to transform the city): Is the sum of Philadelphia greater than its parts?
We’ll know we’ve landed in the future, in the city that performs, when we can confidently respond, yes.
“I remember writing in my journal that I loved the idea of ‘a city dialoguing with itself,’” says photographer Marianne Bernstein, who this year curates one of Design Philadelphia’s seminal events, the Welcome House in Love Park. There, for each of 10 days (Oct. 4-13), a different artist will perform a daylong interactive piece inside a 10-foot glass cube.
“All of [the performances] will be interactive,” explains Bernstein. “Anyone who stops by will become part of the art.” Then, at night, a video of the previous day’s performance will be projected on the cube. “I see the Welcome House as a catalyst for change, a portal for creativity,” she says.
Bernstein has a history of orchestrating projects that engage people with each other and with the city. “The entire process becomes art,” she says. “Many documentary filmmakers and theater directors also work this way. They have an idea, they work with others, and everything unfolds organically.”
Collaboration, indeed, has made the Welcome House possible. Bernstein teamed up with Eugenie Perret, co-owner of Old City furniture gallery Minima and co-curator of last year’s “A Clean Break,” an exhibit of “smart” houses on Broad Street. Perret, who Bernstein calls Philadelphia’s “doyenne of style,” will turn the park into Design Philadelphia’s public lounge (she’ll also perform in the Welcome House on Oct. 7, knitting herself into a cocoon). Daryn Edwards of Interface Studio Architects transformed Bernstein’s concept of a shelter for artists into the glass cube; Kurt Schlenbaker and Will Stanforth are heading up the build and installation; Ricardo Rivera of Klip Collective is producing the video. The project, presented by First Person Arts and InLiquid *(this line has been modified from its original published version), will culminate in November, when the First Person Festival of Memoir and Documentary Art will produce a multimedia exhibit of the artists’ Welcome House experiences.
Collaboration is intrinsic to Design Philadelphia, now in its fifth year the nation’s largest and most ambitious celebration of design’s potential to remake the world. Day to day, it’s what fuels so many of the city’s most inventive artists, designers and software developers.
“What I see happening so often,” says architect and industrial designer Beth Van Why, the event’s project manager, “is people coming together over a shared idea. At Design Philadelphia, we see people interested in topics, not products, that lead to them collaborating throughout the year.”
Neil Kleinman is the former dean of University of the Arts’ College of Media and Communication and a senior fellow and faculty member at the university’s still-nascent Corzo Center for the Creative Economy. He’s an adviser to Design Philadelphia and a catalyst within the city’s various overlapping communities of designers, artists and technology entrepreneurs. “These young entrepreneurs are remarkably bright, well-educated, generous, engaged, curious. They are willing to share.” The result, he notes, is that the sum, in terms of the viability of ideas, is greater than the parts. “No,” Kleinman corrects himself, “more than that: These conversations create a new sum and new parts.”
Integral to all this is the impact on the city. “My role is to help to create the city I want to live in,” says Kleinman. “Without my ego, my agenda,” he adds with practiced calibration, “getting in the way.”
Longtime design advocate Hilary Jay co-founded Design Philadelphia in 2005 with former UArts faculty member Jamer Hunt. Jay, who has been a jewelry designer and the Inquirer magazine’s design columnist, is the executive director of the Design Center at Philadelphia University, which administers Design Philadelphia. (Full disclosure: From 2007 to 2009 I have been Philadelphia University’s writer-in-residence and an adjunct professor in the School of Liberal Arts.) Jay is quietly intense and reflective about the role of design in imagining the city.
“Design is a thread that runs through everything,” she says. “I’ve selected to imagine that through the design disciplines we can run threads through the bigger issues of sustainability, economic justice, ecology, because design has a unique ability to be an agent for change. If we can build a better mousetrap, we can build a better city.”
“The bottom line for Design Philadelphia, she says, “is imagining Philadelphia. It’s all about what we can be.” She is, indeed, a careful urban observer. “We are shifting,” she notes, referring to the city’s ongoing economic recalibration. The impressive growth in Design Philadelphia — from 55 events in its first year to more than 125 this year — and the event’s emergent impact on the citywide conversation reflects and reinforces the shift.
When I ask her how, in a city of countless design mistakes and seemingly endless missed opportunities, the event can ultimately have deeper impact on policy, she notes the role of young people. “I see it as beyond a festival at this point. It’s really more visual and vocal advocating. Students end up staying. The energy is everything. I put my faith in the little guys.” When I press still, she is matter-of-fact. “I have to look at the Piazza. This is a guy [developer Bart Blatstein] who is a strip-mall king. So I hope for every misstep, there’s a real step.”
It’s good, if limited, evidence. The Piazza at Schmidts, the work of architects Scott Erdy and Dave McHenry, is extraordinarily well designed; moreover, its presence — who it attracts and how it reinforces the urban fabric — amplifies the very energy of which Jay, a longtime Philadelphian, is so justifiably proud. The Piazza asks us to pay attention, to notice, to imagine. Doing so, we might realize we can design things better and that, indeed, new sums and new parts — new urban forms — are possible. What might Philadelphia therefore become?
Jay Corless, who has spent the last two months traveling among 35 American cities in search of best practices and innovation in design and the creative economy, found in Philadelphia a city well-immersed in transformation. Corless and his partner, Sali Sasaki, are former United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) consultants who worked on the International Creative Cities Network. Corless has worked on the business plan for the London Design Festival and helped prepare London’s 2012 Olympic bid. He worked on last year’s Design Miami. This summer, in search of the American creative economy (beyond New York and Los Angeles), and emboldened by dreams of Steinbeck and de Tocqueville (Corless is American; Sasaki, born in Japan, was raised in France), they invented a project called Cities X Design.
“In the American context, Philadelphia is unique,” Corless says. Among the most advanced 10 to 15 cities, with a well-established design and arts community, strong institutions and a major annual event, in UNESCO-speak the city also has a high cultural heritage index. That means its history of innovation and production is alive in the minds of creative people, today (a nice example is the Design Center at Philadelphia University’s just-opened exhibit “Lace in Translation,” a ravishing conversation between contemporary artists and the lace patterns of the 19th-century Quaker Lace Co.). Critically, he notes, “Design Philadelphia and the London Design Festival are the only two in the world that employ the city as an open-source platform for ideas.”
We might therefore think of early October as a time to experiment. One of Jay’s aforementioned little guys, Andrew Dahlgren, the industrial designer who last year founded the Web site Made in Philly (madein-philly.com), has taken the cue. At Design Philadelphia, Dahlgren will curate “Philly Works,” a survey of objects designed and made in the city, with a particular emphasis in the former “workshop of the world” on documenting production.
Dahlgren, who came to Philadelphia to study industrial design at UArts, was impressed immediately by the sense of collaboration and openness. As Van Why observes, “As soon as you’re open to changing the city, the city is open to you.”
“Philadelphia,” says Dahlgren, “is sort of this really awesome scale: big enough that there’s a lot going on, small enough you can call up anyone. Everybody is willing to talk to you.”
Both Dahlgren and Van Why participate in Green Village Philadelphia, a design collaborative inventing “restorative urban design.” Dahlgren is program director of the group’s Urban Studio. Their goal, long in discussion, is to create a new kind of neighborhood where food production and wellness are accounted for in design. At Design Philadelphia, Dahlgren will present one aspect of their work, a rainwater collection system for the Philadelphia rowhouse (there is nothing commercially available that’s appropriate for Philadelphia). It’s a project of Green Village, the Water Department and New Kensington Community Development Corp.; the exhibit, Dahlgren hopes, will attract new ideas and partners.
Strikingly, so much of the recombinant, expansive energy that surrounds Design Philadelphia has emerged during a recession that’s hit design firms particularly. Moreover, the event itself is in flux. Jay’s contract with Philadelphia University, the administrator of the event since its inception, is up. University President Stephen Spinelli Jr. says he isn’t sure about the relationship. It appears to be a matter of raising enough overhead. “I believe a concerted effort by interested parties might pull it off. Maybe the effort is ongoing and we shall see,” he told me in an e-mail. Jay, for her part, says, “Design Philadelphia has to move forward because it’s so integral to Philadelphia’s reputation.”
But the recession, which deferred ambitious plans on the part of some participants, has opened up other opportunities. “There’s something good about a good crisis,” says Kleinman, echoing President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Kleinman has taken the opportunity to nudge together Innovation Philadelphia’s Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit, a big-picture event taking place at the Pennsylvania Convention Center Oct. 5 and 6, and Design Philadelphia. Now, the two events are presented jointly under a shared October calendar called Next Up Philly. Critically, says Innovation Philadelphia President and CEO Kelly Lee, it’s an open calendar. Anyone can add an event. The point, she says, is “to promote a broader celebration of innovation.”
Not everyone has supported the move. Some, in the city’s “grassroots” entrepreneurial communities, decry Innovation Philadelphia, a nonprofit economic development agency, as cumbersome and ineffective. To them, moreover, it feels inauthentic. They see little direct benefit from the Summit. Sensing this, Kleinman, who sits on the group’s advisory board, has set out to make it more “porous” to the grassroots. Lee agrees. Aligning the event with Design Philadelphia and others, like Ignite Philly and Fashion Week, she hopes, will incite “a lot of cross-pollination.”
But Lee, a native Philadelphian, has already given the city something of value — the first economic assessment of the creative economy, a study called “Creative Footprint.” The 2008 report says it’s an industry worth $60 billion to the region; it employs 766,000 in relatively high-paying, knowledge-intensive work (a follow-up will gauge the impact of the recession on employment). By qualifying an industry sector still only vaguely understood, the numbers help make a political case. They also form a label: Philadelphia as a strong and variegated hub of designers, software developers and artists.
That may already be widely understood. This June, in partnership with building products distributor C.H. Briggs, DuPont opened a Philadelphia design center for the synthetic material Corian. (It is worth noting an economic shift: The Corian studio opened just as plans were finalized to close the DuPont Marshall Laboratory in Grays Ferry, where auto paint was developed and tested since 1917.)
The contemporary space in the Marketplace Design Center is meant to showcase Corian’s flexibility as a building product much beyond the kitchen counter. “There is nothing the material won’t allow us to do,” notes Luis Arias, C.H. Briggs chief marketing officer (indeed, last year the Seekoo Hotel in Bordeaux, France, opened, clad entirely in “Glacier White” Corian). As Arias explains, the economic downturn presented an opportunity to tap a strong design market. After New York and Milan, the Philadelphia Corian design center is the company’s third. “In times like this,” explains Arias, “it’s even more important to invest in and drive strategy. It is not the time to hold the cards close.”
And so “with stars aligned,” Arias of C.H. Briggs and North American commercial marketing manager for DuPont Surfaces Elizabeth Lawson agreed to help sponsor Design Philadelphia. This kind of corporate support, says Jay, “reinforces the message that design … is vital to the economic health of the city.”
Lawson, for her part, says she was “blown away” by Design Philadelphia. The company agreed to sponsor the event’s Dialogues on Design series and forged a partnership with the industrial design program at Philadelphia University, where the product will be employed in studio this fall.
Lawson also imagined having designers turn the material into public benches. Some 40 designers accepted the invitation to design a Corian bench (in Glacier White) and a dozen were chosen to be installed near Café Cret on the Parkway; in the small enclosed park at 17th and Chestnut; and along the Schuylkill Banks. There, you’ll find two of the most interesting benches, Francis Cauffman’s spiraling, natural-form “Twist” and Josh Owen’s “Philadelphia Stoop,” a sharp pair-down and reimagining of the stoop’s potential for socializing. Owen, a Philadelphia University professor of industrial design, says the project is “precisely the kind of activity that can enhance a deeper civic understanding of design’s transformative power on the urban scale. It’s also a way to remind us that we are all stakeholders in this conversation.”
Artists and designers, says Chris Garvin, who has replaced Kleinman as interim dean of UArts’ College of Media and Communication, sometimes forget they are part of the conversation. “Artists are not outsiders in society,” he says. “They are insiders, integral. Artists and designers make the world around us,” he argues. “Why give up that power?”
Francis Cauffman’s “Twist” and Josh Owen’s “Philadelphia Stoop” are among 12 bench designs chosen to be produced by DuPont Corian and installed in various Philadelphia parks.
Garvin, who trained as a painter at Ohio State, is a grassroots entrepreneur — his projection technology firm Educated Guesswork partners with institutions around the city. He is warm, affable, optimistic and also sharply analytic. The current energy of the grassroots, he argues, isn’t near enough.
“We’re working way under capacity for the amount of talent in the city,” he says. The solution, he thinks, is to transform design education. “Design education is the heart of UArts,” but he wonders, “how does it work in this city, how does it make this city thrive?” It’s a question he and others are examining publicly during Design Philadelphia. There, on the school’s vacant Broad Street lot, he’ll present the panel series Studio Next, an early exploration of what’s possible when multidisciplinary teams of designers are immersed in their community.
Marianne Bernstein, the Welcome House curator, is confident that she already knows. “Love Park,” she reminds us, “has been neglected and needs our care. Time to put the paddles on — a little electro-shock therapy. We’re planning on power-washing it a week before, planting and Eugenie has orchestrated Gandia to provide the park with gorgeous Spanish furniture (for everyone to sit on!). The Design Philadelphia opening night party will have a DJ, alcohol and I will be the first out to get everyone dancing if I have to. And you know what? It’s not costing the city one penny. Everyone is working for free. This is what artists do: They give; they take risks; they invent. And if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”
[In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sit in the Emperor’s garden. Polo recounts his journeys across Khan’s empire.]
Marco enters a city: he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in the square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts await him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
“Journeys to relive your past?” was Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journey’s to recover your future?”
When Calvino wrote Le città invisibili in 1972, cities everywhere were in decline. Venice, Polo’s home and the book’s foil, had long since devolved into a tourist icon, but the pace of change from perhaps the most brilliant expression of organic urban form to stilted commodity was accelerating. The city was also deeply decayed. Meanwhile, Calvino faced what seemed like a future world of endless megalopoli — “a shapeless dust cloud,” observes Marco Polo. “Traveling,” says Polo to Kublai Khan, “you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities . . .” The only differences among them, he says, are the names on the map.
The dual vision of decay and merciless expansion prompted Calvino’s meditation. He no longer thought the city livable: so many “dead branches” (such evocative phrasing!), so many possible futures not achieved, opportunities squandered. Can a tree survive with so much dead weight?
While listening to Polo, Kublai Khan begins to worry. To us, however, it sounds like a familiar question, one so often repeated. In the 1790s, when Philadelphia was the American capital, it was also the financial, intellectual, and culture center of the nation. Many Philadelphians, ignoring the political winds and the desires of the first President, wanted to keep it that way. They decided to build, at great public expense, a presidential mansion, at 9th & Market Streets. Surely, if we build it, they will stay. Both Washington and Adams refused to move in. The capital removed to Washington in 1800. Up to 1808, when the city’s strong bid to regain the capital was narrowly lost, the empty mansion — that early dead branch — stood as cruel reminder.
It’s possible that futures not achieved are simply failures: a subway system invented but never built; a United Nation’s headquarters thwarted; a Piccadilly Circus lost to a traffic circle; a Bicentennial planned and then abandoned; a shipbuilding deal arranged and then badly bungled. We might also see countless urban mistakes as lost opportunities. The state-sponsored monolith going up right now at Broad and Cherry (and without a green roof) is only one of many at present.
But Calvino reminds us that all cities are inventions, reflections of desire, the product of choices. The city form, therefore, is not inevitable. Inside those choices, inside even forests of dead branches, there are possibilities. And so like Marco Polo, we take a journey. To relive the city’s past? Perhaps. Like William Penn sometime in the 1660s, I come to Turin, in the Italian Piedmont. He saw a walled city of streets carefully laid out to intersect at right angles. During Penn’s short stay there, Turin put a picture of urban order in his mind. For a future city planner, it was powerful antidote to chaotic London and Paris. When I explain this to the owner of Libreria Peyrot, an antique bookstore in Piazza Savoia, another customer interrupts, “Ah, yes, Turin engineering.”
In the Alpine foothills nearby, Penn also likely saw the monastic community of L’Eremo dei Camaldolesi, three dozen detached houses and gardens situated on a generous grid and buttressed by square garden plots. If walled Turin is a model for Penn’s plan for a “great city,” then it’s almost certain that Utopia-like L’Eremo is the origin of the Greene Country Towne. (These two things, so often conflated, are separate creations. The Greene Country Towne wasn’t ever meant to be Philadelphia, but rather a template for farm towns related to both farm plantations and the city. The only one realized, apparently, is Newtown, in Bucks County.)
Arriving in Turin, the original Italian capital, I see a gridded post-industrial city with a large, but walkable downtown. The streets are long and straight. Here, on humid July days, tall London Plane trees shed bark and the first brown, dry leaves. The summer light is bright and diffuse. Rowers grace an intimate river, the Po. The Piedmont itself, of gentle hills and vineyards, begins across the river.
But for the slight glacial green, the Po is a Schuylkill doppelganger; the Piedmont, the fertile region that extends west across Pennsylvania, starts with the geological rise on the river’s banks, in Powelton Village. (Penn was therefore justified in believing he could make wine in Philadelphia.) Bus shelter maps of Turin show the clearly highlighted rectangle of Center City, river to river, Vine to South Street. Wait, check again. Which city? “They are exactly the same,” says writer and translator Cristina Vezzaro, from Turin, who stayed in my house while we stayed in hers. (You can find her blog entries on Philadelphia HERE.) Vezzaro refers to the scale of the two cities and the dimensions of the centers, and the quality of the space. I say intimate; she says cozy.
The cities aren’t, in fact, doubles; a more careful metaphor may be the relationship between father and son. In 1682, the sovereign masters of Turin published Theatrum Sabaudiae, a manifesto on the perfection of Turin engineering. Here, city planning, architecture, politics, and religion are combined in a “clear plan of communication,” a grid of monumental buildings, arcades, and piazzas. The intent was to communicate power, wealth, and control. In 1682, that same year, Penn gave form to Philadelphia. It would have many of the same qualities as rational Turin, and also be a careful integration of city planning, architecture, politics, and religion. But sons often rebel against their fathers; they choose a different future. Philadelphia, then, would forcefully and consciously eschew monumentality in favor of republicanism, the power of the Court in favor of the rights of the individual.
The father-son relationship is complicated. The son finds himself unconsciously parroting the father. The father, now older, lives through the escapades of the son. Their lives, anyway, mirror one another. And so it is with these two cities, emotionally intertwined, unnervingly akin. Both are historically the R&D labs of their nations, the places where ideas emerge and things are invented. Often enough, the capital associated with those innovations leaves, and so both are second cities, and places of abandonment and loss. They are conservative, backward-gazing, private places of restraint and aristocratic wealth and also, at times, the seats of jarring political upheaval. They have been industrial and technological powerhouses, great magnets for immigrants. (The shared immigrant is a worker from Sicily, mistreated and abused no less in Turin in 1950 than he was in Philadelphia fifty years before.) But these are mere generalizations.
Early in the 1860s, with Turin as the new nation’s capital and having enjoyed religious freedom since 1848, the city’s Jewish community hired enigmatic architect Alessandro Antonelli to build a synagogue. Construction of a building to cost 280,000 lira began in 1863. Construction underway, Antonelli kept raising the height of the roof tower. By 1876, the unfinished synagogue, what Torinese scribe Giuseppe Culicchia calls Antonelli’s “greatest folly,” had cost the congregation 692,000 lira. It was already the tallest building in Turin. The congregation lost patience and the construction site sat idle. A deal was made to reconstitute the building as a monument to the first Italian unification king, Vittorio Emanuele II. Antonelli raised the roof again — and again, and by the time it was finished in 1889, 26 years after construction began — and after the architect had died — the tower of the Mole Antonelliana reached 167 meters — 548 feet — the tallest masonry structure in the world.
Ten years after construction of the synagogue began, architect John McArthur’s plan for Philadelphia’s City Hall — what appeared to many a monument best fit for a king — was approved. Still, the architect kept altering the design, particularly of the tower, and as each year passed the building became more expensive, a “marble folly,” according to the Bulletin. McArthur died in 1890. Four years later, in 1894 — some 23 years after construction had begun — Alexander Calder’s statue of William Penn was hoisted to the top, reaching 547 and 3/4 feet, not quite the tallest masonry structure in the world.
“If on arriving at Trude,” recounts Marco Polo to Kublai Khan about his experience in yet another city in the Tartar empire, “I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off . . . Following the same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares . . .” To Calvino, the sensation is menacing. What if global capitalism erases all difference? He imagines a global dystopia. “You can resume your flight whenever you like,” Polo is told, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail.” It may indeed be that global capital produces hierarchies of cities, that Turin and Philadelphia fulfill a certain, precise role in the production of wealth. But for the traveler far from his home city, the experience of encountering a parallel place is surprising, mesmerizing, alluring. The colors of Turin’s flag? Azure and maize. It’s the details that prickle.
The cities expanded rapidly during the Industrial Revolution. From 1870 to 1930, Turin’s population grew by 181 percent; Philadelphia’s by 189 percent. At Midvale Steel, Frederick Winslow Taylor revolutionized the factory, “systematizing” the management of the shop floor; the year after Taylor died, in 1916, Giacomo Mattè Trucco installed the Philadelphian’s ideas at Fiat’s new Lingotto plant, the largest in the world. Industrial decline left both factories vacant and sent the cities spiraling. Turin’s population fell 25.9 percent from 1970 to 2000, Philadelphia’s by 22.1 percent during the same period.
As loss and resilience frame the narratives of both cities, they don’t account for everything. Turin is home to Juventus F.C., the New York Yankees of Italian soccer. Juventus is controlled by members of the Agnelli family, founders and longtime of owners of Fiat. The Agnellis are one of the wealthiest families in Europe. Like the Yankees, the Juventus fan base extends well beyond Turin. Unlike the Yankees, local support for the team is relatively small. Attendance is mediocre (this for the team that has won 40 Italian championships, more than any other). Emotional support rather goes to the city’s other team, the second division Torino F.C. Why? They are upstarts whose string of championships in the 1940s helped to heal a place devastated by war. Critically, the championships were punctured by tragedy. In 1949, the team airplane crashed into the Superga, the cathedral that stands on a hilltop above the city. Nearly every player died. In 1976, amidst the unraveling of Fiat and the industrial landscape, amidst filthy streets and vacant factories and the scourge of heroine, glory came again. It was fleeting. They haven’t been champions since.
To be a fan of Torino F.C. is to mythologize, to gaze backwards, to despair. The official team store is decorated with photos of the magic and tragic 1940s squad, and shelves filled with books on past glory. Fans gather at the team’s elegiac field, long a ruins. It’s called Stadio Filadelfia. (Stadio Filadelfia and indeed Stadio Olimpico, where Torino and Juventus play today, is on Via Filadelfia, named for Philadelphia.) If I stand in the center of that vacant lot, do I hear the grunts of Chuck Bednarik, imagine the grin of Bernie Parent, feel the whip of a Dr. J slam?
Through the 1970s and 1980s, observers often noted Center City’s empty nighttime streets. Stores closed early; there were famously few sidewalk tables. By the end of the 1980s, says Culicchia, author of Torino è casa mia, at night the streets of Turin’s centro were mostly deserted. As Georges Perrier nonetheless saw Center City’s potential (amidst what felt like an eerie urban desert) and opened the groundbreaking Le Bec Fin (“I changed everything,” says Perrier), another immigrant French restauranteur, Rémi, transformed the Torinese night. “Rémi gets all the credit,” writes Culicchia. In the late 1980s, he was the first to “intuitively realize the potential of a place like Turin.”
In mid-July, in Turin’s lovely Piazza Carignano, where Italy’s first king was born, a group installed an exhibit on contemporary architecture in Turin. I found the work on display weak, even boring. Very little felt groundbreaking, and this seemed to confirm what I had automatically assumed: like Philadelphia, Turin is strangled by the weight of a customary restraint and fear of bold ideas. This isn’t uniformly the case, surely. In Turin, there are many exceptions, including parts of Renzo Piano’s remake of the Fiat Lingotto complex and the contemporary Fiat factory, lauded for manufacturing innovation and design. But the Olympic architecture I saw is formulaic. (Stadio Olimpico, where Juventus and Torino F.C. play, notably opened the same year as Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s groundbreaking soccer stadium in Munich.) Worse are the blocks of aggressively bland new apartment buildings replacing the ruined industrial landscape along the city’s second river, the Dora. Torinese builders, too, make a habit of throwing up bricks.
Part 2. Philadelphia
“Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know,” says Marco Polo to the emperor Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
“There is still one of which you never speak.”
Marco Polo bowed his head.
“Venice,” the Khan said.
Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”
The emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”
And Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
“When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice, when I ask you about Venice.”
“To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice.”
Turin at heart is a cold, unforgiving, staid city. Many have used the same words to describe Philadelphia. But in Turin, quite unlike the comparatively garden and flower box crazy Philadelphia, there are tellingly few flowers planted in public squares or even on balconies, where pale green hanging sedum is preferred. This is in part why five hours east Venice startles. The Philadelphia that’s missing from Turin is here in the intimate streetscape: seemingly endless vignettes of rowhouses and hidden gardens tumbling across the archipelago. “Do you see all those tiny houses in front of us?” asks Tiziano Scarpa, author of Venezia è un Pesce, “It’s mad! All attached and yet each has its own little entrance! Now, as then, we live in this square observed by all, and at the same time each of those doors declares a desire for privacy.”
Perhaps no one has made a more compelling observation of the emotional geography of rowhouse life. Sidewalk, stoop, doorway: each is a liminal stage between the purely public and purely private realms. To live on a rowhouse street is to constantly navigate these borders. In the most emblematic example, where neighbors roam freely in and out of each others’ houses but are wary of strangers, the stoop boundaries are fluid and neighborhood borders carefully guarded. (Venice has always been governed in such a way.) One’s identity informs, and is reinforced by, the reputation and reality of the neighborhood. In Venice, says the late Philadelphia-bred New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, “The result is a map where subjective perception and objective reality appear to merge.”
We all of us carry these maps, marked by personal experience and memory, by a sometimes conscious dialogue between our own private lives and the vast life — past and present — of the street. The city, in this way, becomes ours — and we part of a landscape that accumulates time and people. Venice meanders through Scarpa, the author, just has he inhabits its streets. “I remember a game where we traced out a course with chalk in the lanes and campo and even into people’s shops, and crawled along shooting corks ahead of us in a kind of race.”
Is it madness to stand in Campo San Sabastiano and see Fitzwater Street? Surely Kublai Khan wonders the same thing of Marco Polo. “The other ambassadors warn me of famines, extortions, conspiracies, or else they inform me of newly discovered turquoise mines . . . And you? . . . you return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on a doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?”
Because rarely do the most piercing insights come from within. Clarity of thought and vision comes from broad perspective, from unexpected connections. Philadelphia — what it is, what it might be — reveals itself most forcefully from far away. With the Philadelphia Museum of Art in charge of the American Biennale exhibit this summer and fall, the connections are inscribed in the streets of the city. Only slightly lost inside the Giardini, Venice’s lovely park, we came upon the American Biennale house from the rear, drawn into a little landscaped woods by the familiar neon of Bruce Nauman. “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths,” flashes the swirl-form sculpture, which in spirit might have been the work of Isaiah Zagar or the recently deceased Washington Square painter Tom Chimes. The artist, said Chimes, is meant to reveal “a truth and beauty beyond the realities of everyday life.”
The Nauman exhibit, “Topological Gardens,” is curated by Carlos Basualdo and Michael Taylor (who lovingly conceived and organized the 2007 Chimes retrospective), spreads from the United States Pavilion to two other locations in the city. In between is the thread of Venice itself, according to Basualdo, “as its systematic confusion between outside and inside, and private and public suitably interplays and dialogues with Nauman’s works. It is there, in between works and buildings, where the viewer’s imagination allows her to piece together her experiences, reinventing the work while traversing the city.”
She is, of course, step by step, also reinventing her city. It takes an intimate city, one accessible to the personal touch, accessible to time and memory, to bend in this way. Thus, even impermanent physical markings, like Scarpa’s chalk cum memory, become indelible. Lasting ones, like Zagar’s labyrinth of Bella Vista mosaics — portraits and homages to people living and gone and assertions of poetic self-reference — use and manipulate city space — public and private, flat and topographical — as a fluid medium. They are the product of an evolving dialectic between past and present, where loss and memory, as two forces aligned, are alive in the landscape. In Venice, two Philadelphia curators take this notion and turn it into international spectacle.
Perhaps we don’t need them. Late Friday afternoon on the island of Murano, a working class district centered on an eight-century-old glass-making industry, the sky is searing blue. Muscular former gondoliers and retired glass-makers take cover in a worn, wood-paneled bar. Fading twenty-year-old photos of the men climbing the Dolomites are tacked to the wall. Their wives in bright dresses chat dockside in what appears to be daily ritual. Rowhouses everywhere are shuttered and some are abandoned. Brown, desiccated flowers submit to the sun. Streets are aggressively, brutally quiet; glass stores — with meager, dated displays that play on the Murano reputation and faded glory — are empty. Clouds only amplify the sleepiness.
Time endures this parochial hell, energy trapped in the listlessness. “Venice is not a sentimental place of honeymoon,” says the Venetian Mayor, professor of philosophy Massimo Cacciari, in National Geographic. “It’s a strong, contradictory, overpowering place. It is not a city for tourists. It cannot be reduced to a postcard.” Near the Faro vaporreto stop, overweight teens plays sex-charged games with bottles of water. They dance their irreverence and uncertainty. Well before the coming inundation and hail, their cackling laughter is the only sound to fill the street.
Part 3. New Philadelphia
“In Maurilia,” recounts Marco Polo, “the traveler is invited to visit the city, and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory . . . .”
“[S]ometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of their faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.”
Imagining the form of the future city, Calvino wonders how at present our desires account for the past. Do we believe a city is bound by its past glory — or tragedy? That’s the long-time fear in Venice, where the residential population continues an “inexorable” decline, to below 60,000. Annual tourists outnumber residents 350:1. Many see Venice therefore as a kind of urban museum — depicted — frozen — not quite as it was but as an image of what contemporary tourists would like it to be. Those left, like the bored teens of Murano, inherit a place that has lost its threads to the future.
Do cities, as products of desire, expire, as Maurilia, only to be replaced by each subsequent generation, one city after the next in endless, disconnected succession? In other words, can a city become something much different, perhaps even the opposite of what it was? The British writer Neal Ascherson says this is just what’s happened to London. In 19th century London “nothing much ever changed . . . [A] deeply conservative, law-abiding society,” it was “impervious” to even major economic upheaval. “Now,” he writes, “everything is different. It’s change, not permanence, that makes London famous . . . London has accelerated through ghetto multiculturalism to become one of the most adventurously hybrid cities on earth.”
But the past — so alive in the cityscape, so present in our collective memory — feels intractable in Philadelphia. It beguiles, and we can’t quite let go. We push it away but can’t resist. We egg it on, resurrect it, employ it willfully. In the popular marketplace — among builders, tourism marketers, even municipal policy experts — its the most valuable commodity we have. The rowhouse form, therefore, barely advances. Brick is an inane material in a hot, wealthy city in 2009. Yet it’s become the visual symbol of revolutionary virtue. It is Philadelphia. So we paste it on as if to prove authenticity.
If, as the Venetian Mayor Cacciari claims, the past isn’t only commodified dead weight, but is rather something more powerful — or powerfully contradictory — can it be seized to define a future? How? No one in Venice, it seems, has figured that out. Calvino despairs.
Amidst the haze of the infinite megalopolis, he sees also danger to humanity. Trude, Leonia, Procopia, Cecilia. These are some of his “continuous cities.” Cecilia, for one, “is everywhere,” an endless concrete jungle, ugly and inhumane, indeterminable from the next city. This, he concludes, “is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.” Calvino’s inferno is much like the state of things in the unnamed city in Jose Saramago’s Nobel-winning novel Blindness. The inferno, we might say, makes us blind to our own suffering and inhumanity.
Saramago and Fernando Meirelles, who last year adapted Blindness for film, ultimately find reason to hope. Connection among people in intimate, mutually-dependent social networks, they demonstrate, makes life beautiful. Only humanity can humanize. In the voice of Marco Polo, Calvino gives form to the thought. It is Invisible Cities’ closing statement.
There are two ways to escape suffering [the inferno]. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
What, in the midst of the inferno, is not inferno? To try to answer such an evocative question, we are compelled to ask this one: What, in the powerful reach of this city’s history, can we pull forward, and make endure? The answer may be the city’s borrowed Torinese form. As it plans the city’s future waterfront, Penn Praxis thinks so. Its plan is predicated on stretching the grid down to the Delaware. There, an authentically intimate Philadelphia can grow.
I’d like to think what’s not inferno is even more basic to the notion of Philadelphia: the impulse to invent, experiment, create. Penn borrowed the Torinese idea because it fit a new way of thinking about the equality and rights of people. That impulse to experiment wasn’t fleeting. It’s what made Philadelphia for two and a half centuries a place of almost constant innovation. The trouble today, when we think about making such an impulse endure, is that we find ourselves trapped by the way we’ve internalized the past. It weighs so much that we’re constantly discounting our own ideas.
Perhaps this sounds contradictory. Don’t we celebrate the richness of our history, so tangible, powerfully alive in the contemporary city? Indeed. Aren’t we proud to listen to lost voices? And aren’t I, here, doing just that? Indeed. I’d simply like to privilege certain voices over others.
At present, there is another reason we’ve stopped inventing the city. We haven’t the space. Each impulse to experiment, invent, create is therefore compromised, often enough neutralized by a need to measure, negotiate, adapt to an existing urban fabric. That, too, you say, is an attribute. Indeed, invention is adaptation. Invention is borrowing, listening, marketing.
But it mustn’t always be — not to such an extreme and arduous extent — or we won’t do justice to ourselves, our ideas, our own vision. Do we have the confidence to invent a New Philadelphia?
It was my journey not to Turin, but to Venice, that reminded me we have an ideal location for New Philadelphia. We return to a city trapped by its own past to retrieve our future. Lewis Mumford is our guide. Venice, he notes, is well-known for its beauty. We all agree to that. But the city was never recognized for its fundamental innovation in city planning. “The Venetians,” he explains, “no doubt inadvertently, invented a new type of city, based on the differentiation and zoning of urban functions.”
One of the earliest functions was industry. The district of the Arsenal, a shipyard that was Europe’s first massive manufacturing center, was first built in 1104. By the 15th century, the shipyard employed 16,000 workers and housed 36,000 seamen. It’s an assemblage of long, handsome brick buildings and at least one dry dock, ships, lighthouses, cranes, bridges, empty warehouses, and hidden inlets. In the context of Venice’s intimacy, the scale of the Arsenal feels grand. It’s the outward-facing industrial redoubt to the inward-facing, intimate center. One kind of space balances, relieves, empowers the other.
At present, with the Biennale exhibits inhabiting much of the Arsenal’s available warehouse space (and some of the waterways), visitors are led along endless, sun-baked paths of crushed limestone. The experience is ameliorated by stools clustered near the entrances of galleries and in groves of trees. These are the lauded “SOS stools” created by Philadelphia industrial designer Josh Owen. Luminous white in the Venetian light, I take these little innovations as talisman, a timely reminder, for we in Philadelphia have an Arsenal, a space that would allow us to once again innovate freely.
That space, indeed, is our Arsenal, the Navy Yard. We’ll build New Philadelphia there.
To not do so, I argue, is to condemn ourselves to an eternal future of adaptation, and not invention. That’s not to say creating a new city at the Navy Yard doesn’t require adaptation; it’s already a living, magical, visually powerful place. But its power comes in part from its location at the logical base of the city. For whatever reason — it was a swamp, or already occupied by Swedes or Lenape — Penn chose a different location for his grid. New Philadelphia allows us then to reclaim the city’s first “dead branch,” critically at the opposite end of its main axis — or “trunk” — from Center City. This is potent planning: old and new Philadelphia not to fight it out, but instead to communicate, relieve, balance one another. (Not an untried approach, particularly by the French, who employed it in their occupied cities of North Africa; it’s precisely the idea behind La Defense in Paris and Rem Koolhaus’ New Lille.)
It’s a point, I believe, that the architect Robert A.M. Stern, the Navy Yard’s master planner, intrinsically understands. New Philadelphia mustn’t copy the old, but rather somehow find way to balance it. So Stern’s Navy Yard plan employs broad, curving streets as the apotheosis of the intimate grid. But it does so in the language of suburban development. In other words, Stern passes on the chance to invent, declaring instead he doesn’t think us capable of imagining a New Philadelphia. (His official client, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, may have had something to do with that.) This is folly, and dangerous. To take a forceful place and turn it into an office park is to give into the inferno. But dare we think differently? Is there any conceivable way to imagine an already struggling city amidst a crippling economic recession finding the kind of resources commensurate with such outsize urges? The last such attempts, during Urban Renewal, were desperately compromised. New Eastwick, the most ambitious of all, was shredded by public outcry, bureaucratic blindness, and rapidly evaporating funding. Wouldn’t New Philadelphia, by stealing resources, reduce funding for the rest of the city? Very likely so. The Federal government would have to be convinced this new kind of city is a model for urban development. This administration has already demonstrated a serious interest in urban issues and a sensitivity to Philadelphia as the national crucible. What remains is convincing vision.
New Philadelphia, Calvino might say, shouldn’t be a city at all. The Navy Yard is already a place of strange, incongruous magic: its winter palate of ships and steam and bridges and cranes and heavy chains, its water — everywhere — its wilds of suburban ruin: all these things like Richard Hayne’s anthropological gardens bend time and manipulate reality. Don’t mess with it. It’s already a trip, man. Once, thousands came here to swim in the dead river. Carve a beach and let them come again. Call in Christo or Richard Serra: there are miles available here and gray ships like an infinite canvas (let artists do what Tom Chimes and Bruce Nauman say they do best: reveal hidden powers). Scatter Josh Owens’ stools and let them sit and marvel. Tastykakes for all.
Let them marvel, let them absorb the powerful landscape — and let them dream. One can’t stand at the water’s edge, at the edge of the city, and not find oneself at the edge of an idea. The place, alone, compels us to dream. It solicits our most fantastic ideas. Form — forms — will follow. They don’t quite matter now. In 1916, in Turin, Mattè Trucco took Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas of scientific management, studied how they were applied by Henry Ford, and invented a new industrial form. At the Fiat Lingotto factory, the assembly of a car would start on the ground floor. Bit by wondrous bit, the car would rise through the factory. Eventually complete, it would emerge in the sky, a wonder of pretense. On the rooftop test track, the car would take a spin then circle down the five story ramp, and out into the expectant world.
The visionary William Penn has ideas about city planning. He’s experienced the great London fire of 1666 and observed vulgar Paris. The wide streets, ample lots, and regular squares of his “capital city” will guard against fire and vice; its uniform street grid will encourage rational land development. The city, in Penn’s thinking, is connected to country by hierarchies of land use: farm, town, city. Thus regional planning is born. A purchaser of a 5,000- to 10,000-acre farm is given a 100-acre plot in a “greene country town” and a lot in Philadelphia, near the port. Philadelphia will be located at Upland (the present Chester). All this is formulated in London. Meanwhile, Upland is too built-up to acquire, plantation sales are poor; indeed, most Quakers are city folk, who want small plots and urban lots. Many arrive before he does. They live in caves along the Delaware.
Nothing goes quite as planned. Instead of a 10,000 acre city, Philadelphia will be wedged into a much smaller site between the Delaware and the Schuylkill. Instead of rural towns, Penn’s surveyors demarcate suburbs, what they call “liberties.” The only green country town is Newtown, in Bucks County. Instead of Philadelphia growing evenly from each riverfront toward centre square, most people want to be as close to the Delaware wharves as possible. Instead of a city of airy lots, by 1698, there are nine crowded alleys carved between Front and Second streets.
There’s no tabula rasa, even in the New World. It only gets harder later. Civic visionaries endure a long battle against “Pennsylvania Conestogaism” to establish Fairmount Park, a longer one to design and build a somewhat diminished Parkway. Mayor Rudolf Blankenburg’s 1913 transit plan—for a dozen or so subway lines—goes almost completely unbuilt. Ed Bacon, Philadelphia’s post-war city planner, is never able to convince entrenched neighborhood residents of the value of his transformative ideas.
Philadelphia presently hopes to be America’s greenest city. It’s a natural idea for the American city longest-engaged in bold questions of public health and city planning. As the effort unfolds, there’s a common tendency to draw on William Penn’s idea for a “greene country town.” We now know that’s the wrong lesson. And even if the reference could be accurately applied to Philadelphia, its only value is to those who recoil from the brilliant grit of cities in favor of something quaint and less dangerous. Indeed, the genius of Philadelphia, from the very start, is the intersection of grand vision and untidy reality. It’s there, in the clash of individual dreams, in the battle between progressive policy and tradition, reform and parochialism, that a particularly Philadelphia solution to global warming will emerge. There won’t be “biketopia” unless car drivers are engaged, cajoled, lured, confronted. There won’t be a sea of green roofs without the active participation of the thousands of small builders who by habit currently employ the cheapest materials possible. Penn understands. “Government,” he reminds us, “like clocks, go from the motion men give them.”
I resist. Sitting in a luminous apartment, I hear a car’s engine. I hear birds. I hear church bells. “I think I am getting accustomed to those bells,” says Lena, 9. Actually, aside from a noticeable lack of police sirens, the sounds aren’t that different. We have church bells on Bainbridge Street.
This sort of thing is what I resist for now: the need to compare this city and ours, the form of one quite apparently based on the other (more on that subject later this week or next); and also the endless and centuries’ old cliché of American urban inferiority. They know how to live here. This too I resist.
Instead, and at least for now, resistance reveals: rhythmic monumentality. Unfurling piazzas. Aperitif. A languorous river. Arcades. Arabic in the market — Europe’s largest in open air. The Alps linger, and sometimes they are visible. But they are mostly forgotten here. This — Torino — is a serious city, a haughty, elegant, thinking place.
Awash in Voices
Philly Skyline
8 June 2009 | Share:
I’ve spent the last two months wandering, loitering, dancing. Above all, I’ve been listening — to some four centuries of voices; to ideas and inventions, to observations and recriminations, to stories of love and stories of horror. The journey began in pre-history, passed through a remarkable Lenape meditation called the Prophesy of the Four Crows, and forward to:
I’m from Phila with a Del but not the Rio
Well, I’m guessing here is like exactly where the Phi go
Now, we got the Phila-Del-Phi why not top it off with an A?
The Philadelphiadic rhythmatic way I’m straight from Philly
Silly but rugged then a hillbilly
Just like I said before I sport my skully when it’s chilly
My cap is from The Lay Up, my bows from The Gilly
The Roots, is out to blow up like a clip from out the milli
or the oo-wop, I do drop, gizzantic, the crew wop
From out the darkest field I goes to pick the funk crop
You can’t deny the props so stop before your fronts
get loosened, introducing, The Roots y’all.
In between, a cacophony. A Swede named Rambo, Quaker power broker brothers named Lloyd, Pastorius, Preaching-Dick and Benezet, James Dexter and Joseph Read, Paine and Peale, B. Ross and Dinah, a slave, Polly Haine and Israel Israel, Girard and Hercules, James Forten and Fanny Kemble, William Still and Joseph Leidy, Anna Broomall and Voltarine, Tanner and Whitman, Leo Ornstein and Bessie Smith, Crystal Bird Faucet and Jimmie Foxx, Salvatore Sabella and Tony Mammarella, Gillespie and Goodis, Maggie Kuhn and Isaiah Zagar.
Philadelphia’s story is vast, complex, beguiling, and painful. It’s being retold — and all the cliché and reductivist narrative jettisoned — through a project tentatively called America’s First Great City (now up-dated and much improved to Philadelphia: the Great Experiment). It’s the brainchild of Sam Katz. In the last year he’s galvanized just about every institution and player in Philadelphia’s sprawling history industry to participate in the project, which has as its core a documentary film for national and local audiences. Under Katz’s guidance, the Fairmount Park Department of Parks and Recreation historian Rob Armstrong and I led a team of writers, historians, PhD candidates, clergy, scholars, and researchers to collect people and stories that help us to understand the city. The task was made particularly rewarding because of the amount of new scholarship conducted in the last two and half decades. Synthesized, it’s a tantalizing panorama.
History adds dimensions to our own flat plane of existence. Applied to a city, it makes every corner a hot link to somewhere. Now, more than ever, when I walk I hear voices, I peel layers. The voices are humbling. So many have come before us; they’ve grappled, dreamed, imagined, reacted, fought, accused, demanded, and observed, just as we do. Oh, the dreamers — Penn and Benjamin Rush, Richard Allen, Joseph Willson, Caroline LeCount, Siegmund Lubin, Presper Eckert, and Lily Yeh — forced to endless compromise. We can’t help but see parallels among eras, ideas, proposals; we can’t help but recognize our own hopes, our own words, repeated, endlessly, back in time.
In The Origins of the Urban Crisis and now Sweet Land of Liberty, Penn historian Thomas Sugrue has shattered the conventional narrative about the struggle for Civil Rights in this country. The new book was published on the same day a black man was elected president; still, says Sugrue, “We’ve got a lot of overcoming to do.”
The sky on this mid-January day is opaque, the color of gauze, and large snowflakes are falling. From time to time, a wind slashes, but for two hours of walking, Tom Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, and I have ignored it.
We had met at a buzzing Mount Airy café, InFusion, whose back room was given over to young parents and small children. Sugrue, who lives nearby in a grand, wood-paneled house with a thick garden, is 46. He has a round, boyish face, a small mouth, and dimples. His hair is white and eyebrows black, an owlish composition. Two months earlier, his highly anticipated and narrative-altering Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North had been published by Random House to immediate acclaim.
The book was named a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Book Prize in History (to be announced after the Gazette went to press). Writer and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., who directs Harvard University’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research, called it “revelatory, daring, and ambitious.” Penn colleague Steven Hahn, the Ray F. and Jeanette Nichols Professor of History, whose A Nation Under our Feet, on Southern Civil Rights, won the Pulitzer Prize, said it’s “one of the most important works on modern American history to appear in recent memory.” Not surprising for such groundbreaking work, Sweet Land of Liberty has also been met with uncertainty. Writes historian David L. Chappell, in Newsday:
Sugrue’s lavish attention to extreme rhetoricians only occasionally distorts his story. More often, it spices it up—and his notes will lead skeptical readers to a more balanced view…The book covers more fresh ground than any history of race has in many years. Despite its occasional cheerleading tone, it opens up a lot of complexities and hard questions.
Because the book is so thoroughly researched—it occupied Sugrue and some of his graduate students for a decade—most often these questions don’t relate to content, but rather to issues of emphasis and impact. Which political movements deserve the most careful attention? Whose voices, yet unheard, require emphasis?
My walk with Sugrue had begun at the top of the Mount Airy shopping district on Germantown Avenue. Extending some twelve miles from the Delaware River through the heart of North Philadelphia at Broad and Erie, to Nicetown, Germantown, Mount Airy, and then Chestnut Hill at Philadelphia’s northwest border (and beyond, into Montgomery County), Germantown Avenue is one of the longest and oldest urban streets in the nation, Lenape trail cum German Quaker trade route to the mother city.
“When I walk around I see the taken for granted,” Sugrue explains. “I don’t see the street just as buildings and people but the embodiment of political and economic forces. But I also have different ways of encountering space. When I get to the Northeast [the once homogenous part of Philadelphia largely developed in the 1950s and 60s], I marvel at heterogeneity: the old Jewish delis, the Brazilian places on Castor Avenue, the Vietnamese cafes. It’s a relatively banal urban landscape. It’s ugly. But the diversity makes it interesting.”
Sugrue has honed his observational skill in part by spending days with the photographer Camilo Vergara, whose best known work on Detroit, Harlem, and Camden, New Jersey documents the continuous transformation of the urban street. In the 1990s, Vergara was the first to call Detroit a living American ruins. “With Tom, you can see how he’s physically moved by the city,” says Vergara. “Maybe I’m the same way. It’s almost like a piece of music is being played for him.”
Jerold Kayden, co-Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University School of Design, where Sugrue was visiting professor last fall, says the enthusiasm in intrinsic to his work. “He has an infectious love of cities, an excitement that can’t be manufactured, that animates the best scholarship. You can read it in his teaching, scholarship, and lectures.”
Now, as we descend into the oldest part of Germantown, the winter day has turned colder still. The diffuse light has sharpened. Sugrue suggests we take a moment’s refuge at the Friend’s Free Library, a vaulted space that serves the students and staff of the Germantown Friends School. As a quasi-public library, it’s also open to the community.
Here, the Avenue reverberates with voices of urban invention and urban struggle. The very first American anti-slavery protest took place just three blocks down, at Manheim Street, in 1688. In a campaign swing through Philadelphia in October 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered a particularly resonant paean to black America three blocks up, in Vernon Park. The Yellow Fever escape house of the nation’s first president is a block away. Across the street: the birthplace of Little Women author Louisa Mae Alcott, now the Cunningham Piano factory, the last in Philadelphia. “You know they still employ a blind piano tuner. He has really acute hearing,” says Sugrue as we pass through the library’s gate.
“My kids might be a little surprised to see me here,” he continues without pause, or reticence (he enthusiastically asks a librarian if any lower school students are there). As we warm our feet, Sugrue receives an e-mail on his Blackberry from a reader, a former journalist who had witnessed and reported on an event described in Sweet Land of Liberty. He wants to comment on Sugrue’s account and share his own observations. He’s found a willing audience. “Tom’s work is as granular as the sources allow,” notes Robert Self, an associate professor of history at Brown University and author of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. But while a great many historians are careful archival researchers, “not many are producing synthesis,” says Michael Katz, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History. Sugrue, “a terrific synthesizer,” does both, a practice of thorough and careful engagement and integration that also noticeably reaches into, incorporates, and infects every aspect of his life.
“With someone like Tom there is the totality of the person,” explains social entrepreneur Greg Goldman, CEO of Wireless Philadelphia, the heavily promoted municipal broadband project that at present—under Goldman’s direction—is primarily concerned with bridging the digital divide. “All the aspects of his life experiences—family life, friendship, scholarship, community engagement—are fundamentally integrated,” Goldman tells me when we meet in his Center City office. Goldman and Sugrue are close friends and neighbors; their kids have grown up together. “I don’t know him as an academic. But he doesn’t have a narrow mode of operating. Really, it’s his broad engagement in the urban environment. That’s the thread that connects.”
The spool is what Sugrue calls a “typical 1920s/40s northwest Detroit neighborhood,” where he grew up on an elm-lined street called Asbury Park, with small houses on one-eighth acre lots, an easy walk to St. Mary of Redford Catholic Church and school, shops, and a movie theatre. His father helped to bring the first African-American family into the parish. Then, in 1973, when Sugrue was 10, amid a vast white exodus from Detroit, his parents decided to leave the city, moving the family to suburban Farmington. The two events together are the kind of thing a sensitive child absorbs, and indeed, the experience fundamentally informs his two major works, the 1998 Bancroft Prize-winning Origins of the Urban Crisis and Sweet Land of Liberty. From Origins:
Between 1943 and 1965, Detroit whites founded at least 192 neighborhood organizations throughout the city, variously called “civic associations,” “protective associations,” “improvement associations,” and “homeowners’ associations.” Few scholars have fully appreciated the enormous contribution of this kind of grassroots organization to the racial and political climate of twentieth-century American cities. Their titles revealed their place in the ideology of white Detroiters. As civic associations, they saw their purpose as upholding the values of self-government and participatory democracy. They offered members a unified voice in city politics. As protective associations, they fiercely guarded the investments their members had made in their homes. They also paternalistically defended neighborhood, home, family, women, and children against the forces of social disorder that they saw arrayed against them in the city.
Sugrue’s analysis of that dynamic, according to Bill McGraw, a long-time Detroit Free Press reporter and the co-editor of the popular Detroit Almanac, has produced groundbreaking history. “I was pretty familiar with a lot of the books and other writing about Detroit, and what has happened to it since World War II. So when I read Tom’s book in 1996 I was really blown away by a number of aspects, among them his tracing of the urban crisis back to the 1950s; his vivid documentation of how white residents had “defended” their neighborhoods by fighting, literally, black families when they moved in; his explanation of how Detroit’s economic crisis also began in the years after World War II, and, of course, his telling the story of how African-Americans got the short end of the stick. That part of the story is certainly understood in general terms by most Americans, but Tom’s research of how it played out specifically in Detroit was eye-opening and amazing.”
At the heart of that research is what Harvard’s Kayden calls a “voracious appetite for knowledge.” Sugrue, he tells me, “is one of the most un-siloed historians, wonderfully broad and inclusive.” This means he’s adept at illuminating political movements with vital strands of social and cultural history, and vice versa, a skill that was attractive to Michael Katz and Nichols Professor of American History Bruce Kuklick C’63 G’65 Gr’68, who led the committee that hired him. “Michael would have hired a social historian. I wanted him to be a true political historian,” admits Kuklick. “We were both wrong.”
Kuklick and Katz were eager to find an energetic addition to the history faculty, someone to effectively teach large classes in a department with a huge enrollment. Kuklick says Sugrue did so immediately by taking over Michael Zuckerman’s iconic class on the 1960s. But perhaps his greatest impact has been in recruiting and working with graduate students. Katz says of all Penn history faculty, Sugrue, who is the department’s graduate director, attracts the most applicants. What’s more, “the graduate students revere him.”
Karen Tani is a student in the joint JD/History PhD program Sugrue helped design. “He has had a huge influence on my work, mainly in terms of topic selection,” she tells me. “Tom ‘thinks big’—he’s not afraid to go after big ideas and complicated questions. The project I’m now working on is ambitious—maybe too ambitious—but I’m excited about it. When I go to work, I don’t feel like I’m digging through dusty archives (even though that is what I’m doing); I feel like I’m on the trail of a big idea.”
Another graduate student, Clem Harris, is a current member of New York Governor David Patterson’s staff and a former New York state trooper. Harris says that in his work on race and politics in late 20th century Philadelphia, Sugrue “has pushed me to think more critically about the role of electoral politics, to look beneath the veneer” of racial identity, corruption, and machine control. The effect, he says, is profound. “You start to recognize it’s not solely a machine.”
Tani says Sugrue is “the best person I know for a brainstorming session. He loves to talk about ideas, he has a great memory, and he’s very creative, which means that you can go into his office feeling despondent about your work—totally muddled and lost—and leave with a list of books to read, three or four great research topics, and renewed sense of purpose.” For all this, Katz notes, “Sugrue can have any leadership in department he wished.”
But in 1991, the year Sugrue was brought to Penn (after receiving his PhD from Harvard he did a post-graduate stint at the Brookings Institute), neither Katz nor Kuklick would have imagined the extent of his involvement in Philadelphia. “Philadelphia worked for me right from the start,” Sugrue explains, adding that as a “wannabe architect” he was moved by the vital remains of the 19th and 20th century city, its walkability, and its large, residential-commercial downtown. Beginning in 2001, Sugrue spent seven years as vice-chair of the Historical Commission, serving as senior historian and often presiding over monthly hearings (the chair, lawyer Michael Sklaroff L’67, was repeatedly forced to recuse himself because of conflict of interest). In the summer of 2006, as Sugrue neared the end of the research that would form Sweet Land of Liberty, a 1950s Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood called Greenbelt Knoll was brought before the commission for historic designation.
For Sugrue, it was a not-so-unusual confluence of scholarship and community involvement. Fellow commissioner Harris Steinberg C’78 GAr’82, director of the School of Design’s civic planning agency Penn Praxis, says, “Here was Philadelphia, architecture (it’s believed that Louis Kahn Ar’24 Hon’71 designed some of the development’s houses), the story of breaking down racial barriers, and his own ongoing scholarship. All this came together for him.”
Greenbelt Knoll was one of a series of purposely-integrated suburban style housing developments built by Philadelphian Morris Milgram, who was among the vanguard of open housing advocates in the 1950s and 60s. According to Sugrue in Sweet Land of Liberty, “open housing activists came to view the creation of stable, racially integrated communities as the key to breaking down the psychological barriers of race.”
Soon after being hired by Penn, Sugrue moved to Mount Airy, one of the first urban places to resist white flight and rapid social dissolution by embracing open housing and intentional integration. In 1953, with African-Americans from North Philadelphia moving up the “Gold Coast” to upper-middle class neighborhoods like Mount Airy, three religious organizations—one Jewish, two Christian—formed a covenant, an embrace of racial integration. The covenant, one of the first of its kind in the country, fomented a new kind of local activism. Residents fought “block-busting” real estate agents, made straw purchases for black families, lobbied large employers to hire African-Americans, and spent time in neighborhood schools helping newly integrated students and teachers adapt. In 1959, community activists formed a civic organization, West Mount Airy Neighbors. The goal wasn’t to defend territory, but to open it, in a way that achieved social stability. By the early 1990s, with about half its residents black and half white, Mount Airy was one of the most thoroughly integrated places in the nation. West Mount Airy Neighbors, however, had lost its efficacy.
Enter Sugrue, who took over the organization’s presidency in 1996. “When Tom became president was the beginning of the organization’s spirit of renewal,” says West Mount Airy Neighbor’s Executive Director Laura Siena, who for five years until 2003 was chair of the Fund for Open Society, the organization started by Morris Milgram. “Anything I’ve done in four years is part of Tom’s legacy,” she says. Much of that legacy followed his own study of the social history of the grass roots. He wanted the organization, so seated in progressive ideas and urbanity, to reengage with the wider political process. That meant shaking off the parochial interests of an increasingly affluent constituency and reaching out across Germantown Avenue—to join forces with East Mount Airy Neighbors, a more traditionally African-American and working class group, to solve broader, more intrinsic problems. The initiative met with opposition.
“One of the main issues we struggle with,” Sugrue explains, “is that often our vision is really small. We can’t solve the problems of the city in gussying up storefronts. I love and am a member of the grassroots, but ultimately they have the will but not the capacity. One take away from Sweet Land of Liberty is that far-reaching gains in Civil Rights require people to organize locally but form a broader coalition, providing a longer reach. But we tend to think real small.”
On the other hand, he says, “It’s the small things that matter,” to people in city neighborhoods. He means that a meaningful understanding can only come from close observation. “One of he most interesting features of the urban landscape is going to places in the day and night. I don’t play golf or tennis, but I do go out and explore, ride the buses and subways. So, for example, at night the street changes. In some places it becomes marked. Women, especially, feel trapped. They’re made to feel they can’t go out.”
We’re walking near the corner of Germantown and Chelten avenues, the bustling, cacophonic, commercial heart of Germantown. Men, in groups of five and six, gather on street corners. Some make deals, some leer, and some shuffle and laugh. Here are church towers and high rises, Dunkin’ Donuts and Villa Sneakers, Divine Toddler Town and Risque Video, the Foxy Diva and Empire Books (“We Ship to Prisons,” it says in the window), Dollar Crazy and Dahlak, the Germantown branch of the well-loved Baltimore Avenue Ethiopian restaurant. There are vestigial murals and vestry robes, the Lions of Judah and Mr. Hook (“We Fry Fresh Fish”).
Sugrue mentions he needs a new winter hat, but the mission is soon forgotten. “Tom has a kind of childlike ability to look up and around him to see details, immense riches,” says Siena. Foxy Diva’s traditional storefront displays black iconography, memory, exhortation, and hope. Here are reprints of slave auction announcements, the faces of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X. Here are large, framed prints of the First Family, and a poster of Barack Obama. In large letters, it says, Destiny.
“In some ways, my single intellectual trait is insatiable curiosity,” Sugrue tells me. “I find the city endlessly fascinating. There’s always something to see with new eyes.” It’s no passive joy. Sugrue’s willingness to look harder has thoroughly altered the narrative of cities in the 20th century. Says the Free Press’ McGraw, “Tom’s analysis eviscerated the accepted wisdom for years in Detroit that its downfall really dated from the 1967 riot and especially from the reign of Coleman Young, Detroit’s first African-American mayor, who held office from 1974 to 1993. Young was very controversial, especially among whites, but he had become a scapegoat for much of what’s wrong about Detroit. Tom effectively demolished that school of thought.”
Likewise, Sweet Land of Liberty pushes the narrative of modern Civil Rights—that now typically begins in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education—back in time to the “Great Migration” of the 1920s and up, across the Mason-Dixon line, and into the small towns and big cities of the North. In the book’s introduction, Sugrue argues,
The exclusion of the North—or its selective inclusion as a foil to the southern freedom struggle—comes at a cost. It ignores the long and intense history of racial violence and conflict in northern towns and cities. Though the differences between North and South were real, our emphasis on southern exceptionalism has led historians, journalists, and political commentators to overlook the commonalities across regions. The long and well-publicized history of racial atrocities in the South gave northerners a badge of honor, a sense that they were not part of America’s troubled racial history.
Sugrue goes on to trace the path of people, organizations, and events, alliances and political pressure, geography and perception across 70 years of boycotts, deals, double-talk, idealism, riot, disillusionment, policy, and politics—from boards of education to the calculations of Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. The story moves across the vast north, at times to California, and often stopping in small towns and suburbs, where Jim Crow-like conditions endured in meager black schools. All along, he is careful to account for the evolution, interpretation, and deployment of ideas across the world and the American political spectrum, a complex, circling feedback loop of opinion, analysis, events, hope and reaction, fear and assertion. With terrifically still and restrained prose, he makes the dynamic tumbling forward apparent and alive.
From the chapter “Long Hot Summers”:
Acts of resistance and rebellion usually have unintended consequences. Black revolutionaries hoped that they would destabilize the political system; black rioters hoped to stick it to “the Man,” whether brutal police officers or white shopkeepers. The fear of rioting led white elected officials, from the Johnson administration on down to local mayors, to fashion policies to try to buy off black discontent, what sardonic observers called “riot insurance.” But riots also fueled urgent demands for law and order and enhanced police power … The Kerner Commission warned of the “indiscriminate use of force against wholly innocent elements of the Negro community” during the riots. The vast majority of riot-related deaths came at the hands of law-enforcement officials.
Sweet Land of Liberty was published on November 4, 2008, a day marked in places like Germantown by a kind of surreal stepping forward, one voter at a time, and a night—from Chicago and out across the North and South—steeped in tears of melancholic joy and magical disbelief. It was a colossal moment in Civil Rights, surely, a time to stare back, long and derisively, and to gaze forward with still more hope and terrible uncertainty. There are some who call it the start of a different, much less racially polarized America. But Sugrue can’t see it that way. “The conventional wisdom says, ‘This is proof positive we have overcome.’ I think it’s a wrong interpretation. Well, you only need to go ten blocks from Barack Obama’s house on the Southside [of Chicago] to see that racial history is not over in the US. We’ve got a lot of overcoming to do.”
As the day grows colder, Sugrue and I descend farther down Germantown Avenue. We pass the home of 19th century novelist Owen Wister and a tiny park named for the early portraitist Gilbert Stuart. There are vintage 1940s storefront signs and there’s the crumbling mill of the Samson Pattern Company. A store advertises imported Muslim oils and another, Islamic books. Men—every one of them African-American—wear beards and calf-length robes. Women have covered themselves in black headscarves and long dresses. A block later, we come to Freedom Square; here, in 1688 Daniel Pastorius and other German Quakers, who had sought in William Penn’s colony religious freedom, declared their opposition to slavery. In 1992, hoping to catalyze economic development, the Germantown Housing Development Corporation turned the corner into a strip mall, Freedom Square. Today, it feels lifeless and dangerous. As we walk through the large parking lot, Sugrue observes, “Even the beer distributor is closed. The screen is down on the windows. This is sad.”
When I return, alone, a few weeks later, this lower section of Germantown Avenue is being reconstructed. A new street bed will be laid, new trolley tracks, curbs, and cobblestones. Construction workers, union employees of a local contractor, swarm the street. Not one, of perhaps 20-25 in all, is African-American. It is a bewildering scene, tension palpable. But Sugrue is my steady, and relentless, companion here.
From Origins:
Ten years after the onset of the national civil rights movement, and eight years after Michigan passed a statewide Fair Employment Practices act, blacks remained effectively shut out of well-paying, skilled, and unionized jobs in the construction trades.
That was 1963, Detroit. This is Philadelphia, 2009. “You can’t help but feel the force of segregation, notice it at every level,” observes Sugrue. “At least let’s be honest about it.”
“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 Street, two of the most handsome structures on the Delaware. Painted bright white and marine blue, they’re luminous proof of our lack of imagination. They glow like the whitewashed and blue-trimmed houses of a Mediterranean cliffside village. Pier 38 is a warehouse used by the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority; Pier 40 houses a private self-storage and truck rental business.
What’s more, and unlike much of the waterfront, the grid nearly reaches here. Only minor reinforcements are needed.
I had long thought Pier 40 would make a fine “Museum of the American Polyglot,” a living monument to the slow accumulation of the American soul. The river, call it what you will — Lenapewihittuck, Zuydt Revier, Svenske, South River, Delaware — is its source. They came — first Algonquians and their descendents the Lenni Lenape, the Susquehannock, brothers of the Iroquois, and before 1640, Dutch and English and Swedish ships filled with Scots and Poles, Germans and Fins, and of course, Dutch and English and Swedes. A century later, there were more languages spoken on the wharves and in the workshops of this waterfront than probably anywhere else in the world. More foreign ships, more religions practiced, more shades of skin.
The ever-widening gene-pool is one of the great American stories, and Philadelphia’s consistent role in that story is undertold, but a museum may be unrealistic and feel dogmatic. It also may not be the kind of active use the site — and the waterfront — requires. Similar Montreal piers, though larger, combine retail and commercial uses. It’s not that hard to imagine a pleasant combination of a café, a restaurant or two, a bar, each with tables open to the water, and an IMAX theater. Assuming a bike/walking path is assembled, a bike share station could be added. This sort of investment would put some amenities at the physical scale of biker/runner/pedestrian (in comparison, for example, to the massive scale of a casino). Amazingly, they would be among the first of their kind on the waterfront.
Still, the ideas don’t seem to resound, do they? Perhaps then it’s because the piers themselves are so striking they remain so underutilized. No one can imagine a use quite commensurate with their beauty. So we leave it to “Dredging=Jobs.” But Altman’s point is that we have to start trying things. We already own these lovely structures. Without much sweat — the Port hates to give up control of real estate, but this is insignificant in comparison to its Southport expansion plans — Piers 38 and 40, like Pier 11, can be made available for the pleasure, interest, and joy of people. So what should it be? The busy Atwater Market marks a similar location in Montreal, but I’m not sure this site can handle a waterfront Reading Terminal.
I’d like to hear your ideas. Perhaps we can collect them, photoshop/render the best, and effectively make the case for these two piers. Until then, I suppose they remain a rather significant missing piece.
I’ve been reading D.T. Max’s profile of the late novelist David Foster Wallace, which appeared in last week’s New Yorker. Wallace apparently struggled — in his writing and in his life — to come to terms with what felt to him like an increasingly vapid and seemingly inane American way of life. He searched for and examined the space between society’s manic noise (Gabriel Winant’s Salon.com encounter with CNBC, “Why is Jim Cramer Shouting at Me?“ is an awfully succinct example) and the human heart. His point, as Max notes, is that “America was at once over-entertained and sad.” Wallace’s final, unfinished The Pale King, part of which will be published next year, is about IRS agents who are forced to master intense tedium. He hoped, Max thinks, that it “would show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life.”
Max had access to Wallace’s notebooks. In one of them, a plot for The Pale King emerges: an evil cell inside the IRS wants to steal the secrets of another IRS agent who has great powers of concentration. Here in Philadelphia — not so much over-entertained and sad as over-medicated, under-educated, and angry — something similar might be happening right now. I think a rogue cell in a hidden corridor of 1234 Market Street is plotting to take down the agency.
A couple of weeks ago, my good friend Peter Siskind was over for bagels and lox. “Check this out,” he said. He pulled out of his wallet his son Leo’s March “city-only” monthly pass, the one that costs $78. (Leo, 8, may be Septa’s most appreciative and knowledgeable rider. At 5, he had memorized the entire Septa system. You could call him from any location to find the best route to your next destination.)
It might be useful to remind ourselves of a few things before we have a look at Leo’s pass. Septa monthly passes usually promote annual events, non-profits, cultural and education institutions, museum shows, etc. The implied message: “You can get there on Septa.” It has the effect of reinforcing an urban dynamism. By advertising Temple’s Fox School of Business, my March “zone 1” ($84) monthly pass falls a little short of this cosmopolitan ideal.
It costs about a billion dollars to run the system (fares and passes cover two-fifths of the cost), and though Septa has secured increased and more consistent government support, by necessity it also has more aggressively pursued other sources of income. In this fiscal climate, every dollar counts; and despite the failure of the “free market,” public agencies are still wed to private sector management theories. So Septa chases every revenue source it can, among them, retail rent, parking rent, advertising, and the sale of scrap metal. All this amounted to almost $30 million in FY 2008. Revenue generated by the sides and backs of buses, the ceilings of trains, the walls of subway cars, and on weekly and monthly — and event — passes counts toward this $30 million (but exactly how much so is not revealed in the agency’s annual budget).
Septa over the years has survived strikes and economic downturns, the unending restructuring and decentralization of the region’s economy, and the uncertainty of public funding. Dedicated funding from the Commonwealth only came last year. But it’s seemingly always threatened by the possibility of accident, injury, and the death of passengers — there are 2.54 accidents, for example, per 100,000 miles traveled by city buses — and also by rampant unsupported claims of injury. Interning in Septa’s executive office during the summer of 1989, I remember when a call came in to the woman in the cubicle next to mine: a four-year-old’s head had gotten stuck in a subway turnstile. He was badly hurt — and I recall how seriously the event was taken, not just as a matter of safeguarding corporate liability but out of pure human empathy and care. That summer marked the final end of the 1980s real estate boom, and a recession was beginning. To long-time Septa veterans, it meant that the office would most certainly see an increase in false claims. There was easy money in suing Septa for whiplash.
In FY2008, Septa spent $39.7 million on injuries and damage claims, up from $34 million in FY2007; the agency also spent over $5 million on legal work related to litigation. (Source.)
So it can only be that a rogue cell operating in Septa’s entrepreneurial revenue department substituted the intended, community-supportive monthly pass art with this:
Septa Monthly Transpass
I will say that “Personal Injury” is only one of many categories of law this firm pursues. Wadud Ahmad and Joseph Zaffarese are both former assistant District Attorneys, and despite occasional trouble with a bloody homonym — they’ve “one countless cases,” for example — are “winning” lawyers who seem to be active participants in the civic life of the city. There is no reason to believe they are ambulance chasers employed by an evil group who has infiltrated Septa’s business office.
Ads like this do appear on buses and subways — the 47 this morning announced the legal services of “Your Harvard Lawyer” — among various offers of products and services.
But the pass — that ticket to ride — symbolizes everything, making this feel profoundly, achingly, hilariously, numbing. The flag propped up yet again to prop up someone, and pixelated to meaningless oblivion . . . the aggressive stance, the certain claims, the exhaustive pandering. They might have simply sold the ad space to a car dealership.
This, I guess, is something like a world of infinite jest; the harder you think about it, the sicker you feel.
Max Page is the scholarly observer of New York’s destruction, its gleeful and energetic documentarian. In his first book, Creative Destruction (1999), he set out to understand the process by which, in the words of author Jerome Charyn, “New York…reproduces itself according to the ideals of each generation.” Now, in the wonderfully illustrated The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction, he examines the fictional destructions of New York, those in art, film, and fiction.
This is a carefully researched, artful, and insightful book that belongs on the shelf with other contemporary projects of urban historical exploration, such as Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map (2006) and the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s 2003 memoir, Istanbul. Each book confronts a city’s experience with loss and uncertainty. As in Johnson’s narrative unraveling of London’s 1854 cholera epidemic, Page uses the specter of calamity as a way to appreciate why, in this suburban nation, cities are so important:
All this life explains why we continue to destroy New York in books, on canvas, on movie screens, and on computer monitors: because it is so unimaginable for us, in reality, not to have this city. We have played out our worst fears on the screen and in our pulp fiction because, as the city’s oracle, E.B. White, wrote in the shadow of the atomic bomb: “If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.”
An associate professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Page guides us through a century and a half of such imaginings. Here are icons of popular culture like King Kong and H.G. Wells’s—and Orson Welles’s—War of the World and Superman, but also other fictions more remote, like the poet Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Metropolitan Nightmare,” the novelist George Allan England’s Darkness and Dawn, Joaquin Miller’s Destruction of Gotham, and artist Louis Lozowick’s Storm Clouds Over Manhattan. Here, in text and film, is the likes of Invasion, USA and more recent Hollywood fantasies like The Day After Tomorrow.
Page begins his exploration near the turn of the 20th century, when New York’s economic predominance is at last secure. A story called “Tilting Island” “played on the flip side of the city’s remarkable economic and physical boom in the second half of the nineteenth century. The invincibility of the city’s banks and manufacturing base, its enormous size, its magnificent stone and steel building—all of these only seemed to invite the question: when will it all collapse?”
But it didn’t, of course; rather New York kept growing, and from the seed of its own insensate destruction. As Charyn, in Metropolis, notes, “New York was practical and insane…It decided to grow along a grid, ignoring bumps, ditches, and heights, and the particular bend of its rivers. It would be a phantom grid of 2028 blocks, where anything that was built upon them could be removed at will. So we have the Empire State Building dug into the old cradle of the Waldorf-Astoria. And the Waldorf is shoved into another grid. It reappears uptown, caters to circuses and rodeos, the Rangers and the Knicks, becomes a parking lot, and the Garden is born again over the new Penn Station. It’s an ugly glass tank, but who cares?”
Who cares, indeed. W.E. B. Du Bois, in a little known story from the early 1920s, “The Comet,” wiped out all but two New Yorkers, a black messenger named Jim and the white daughter of an insurance executive, Julia. Here, New York’s demise is used to test and expose intractable racism. Later it would be employed as nativist polemic against immigrants, as fodder for evangelicals fearful of the American Babylon, and by Cold Warriors who saw in decentralized suburbs American salvation and safety from Soviet missiles. (Page links the flight to the suburbs to the fear that big crowded cities like New York were easy targets for nuclear bombs, an assertion that has been underdeveloped in the literature on post-War cities.)
“And yet,” observes the author, “something else is going on here. Percolating through these endless and often aesthetically striking fantasies of New York’s end was something quite different from fear: a new appreciation of the city itself.” So Page turns his narrative toward homeward, tightens his prose, and confronts the disturbing visual and psychological impact of 9/11.
Here Page betrays a New York insecurity by spending too much time reminding the reader of the city’s dominance. He might have instead enriched the project with just a little global context, backward to gothic narratives like “Devil Bug’s Dream,” the Philadelphia writer George Lippard’s 1845 fantasy of that city’s destruction, and forward to contemporary and emerging targets like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Sao Paulo.
Instead, Page writes: “If New York is no longer the setting of our worst fears,” he imagines, “then it may no longer be the home of our greatest hopes. And that would be the beginning of the city’s end.”
It’s a possibility that he quite understandably doesn’t want to believe. But in the midst of an epic Wall Street meltdown and coincident rise of other financial capitals and mega-cities, for this moment, at least, New York’s presence is waning. That alone may not be catastrophic, but rather a recalibration of what it means to be such a “mischievous and marvelous monument.”
The City’s End, by Max Page
Yale University Press, 2008 (hardcover)
Of all the skyline images in Philadelphia, perhaps the one that hangs on the second floor of the Rosenbach Museum is most achingly familiar — and not because the tallest building is a slick, bulky glass tower that rises above a wide plaza. This isn’t the contemporary city, but rather the skyline of memory: Maurice Sendak’s interpretation of his mother’s pantry, the dreamscape city of In the Night Kitchen.
Sendak’s skyline, which itself is seared into the childhood of so many, is a view to the fluid mind of a child, who so joyously, and sometimes melancholically, conflates forms, names, sounds, and memories. “What interests me,” says Sendak, “is what children do at a particular moment in their lives when there are no rules, no laws, when emotionally they don’t know what is expected of them.” Then, milk bottles become glistening towers, salt shakers Victorian palaces.
This is Sendak’s territory, a place of a child’s “ungovernable emotion,” where the urban form is tangible, alive, still another wild thing. No other children’s author quite gets this intersection of childhood and place without mythologizing the moment; Sendak’s Brooklyn of the 1940s was brilliant and frightening, loose and strict, maddeningly social and terrifyingly lonely.
Now, thanks to a long-evolving relationship between the author and the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Sendak feels as much part of Philadelphia as New York. His life’s work is here, for 10 more weeks on display in the sprawling and intimate There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak. Here’s the human scale of Brooklyn in Pierre and The Sign on Rosie’s Door; Little Lorie’s Manhattan, Mickey and Max and Kenny; the war-time Prague of Brundibar. Here too is Sendak’s original drawing of the languid streetscape of an Italian village in Philadelphia author Frank Stockton’s The Griffin and the Minor Canon. In that book, Sendak makes a Victorian fairy tale about a medieval town resonant. The fearful villagers grasp for but don’t seem to be able to control their future.
...
This is certainly the case for the original people of Philadelphia, decimated by European disease beginning in the late 16th century. They couldn’t control their future, but what’s extraordinary is that they predicted it. The Lenape “Prophesy of the Four Crows” imagines the genocide of illness, the movement into hiding, and a hopeful realignment with nature. Broadly speaking, the Lenape, a people whose history may extend back 30,000 years, were peacemakers (in particular contrast to the more warrior-like Iroquois, who lived in present-day New York), hunters and gatherers, fishers and planters who lived in various settlements along the creeks and tributaries of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers.
Conventional history says that the Lenape were pushed west in the 18th century, to Western Pennsylvania and Ohio, and later out into the American frontier. But that schematic misses those who managed to stay, some of whom married German immigrant settlers and outwardly assimilated. There are at present about 300 Lenape in the region (larger and more politically powerful tribal groups of “Delawares” live in Oklahoma). In Fulfilling a Prophecy: The Past and Present of the Lenape in Pennsylvania, an exhibit at the Penn Museum, on display until September, 2010, this story is told for the first time.
“This project is a gigantic step in a lot of ways,” says Abigail Seldin, the Penn senior who co-curated the exhibit with members of the local Lenape community. “It’s a coming out,” she explains, for those who don’t openly acknowledge their heritage. It’s also groundbreaking anthropology, the unusual instance that a major institution has allowed a native group to tell their own story.
That story—its iconography, creation narrative, prophesy, and spirits — has been orally passed down along the lines of generations with great care, impossibly and fiercely protected. The Lenape language, too, survives (though it is endangered), a sound, an intonation, a system of thinking still more than fading memory. Now the Penn Museum, so long guilty of cultural imperialism, has given new voice to these original people. In so doing, they are also expanding the particular Philadelphia perspective, exploring ever more honestly and also hopefully, about what this city means in the year 2009.
Late Saturday morning, the sun is long and low and the snow is melting. On Castor Avenue near Napfle Street a pair of painters are finishing the doorway of a new restaurant, this to serve something called Peruvian-Portuguese cuisine. The restaurant is ochre; it glows.
On a cold morning not long before, a skinny man in work clothes, and carrying a box of tools, stands before the open doorway of a row house at 10th and Lombard. He looks up and then climbs the steep and narrow staircase. There’s a day of carpentry before him.
A few days later, another man driving a late model pickup, a load of lumber in the bed, pulls up to the corner of Chew and Locust in East Germantown. He jumps out. “You workin’?” a woman calls out from the corner. There is pride, perhaps also wariness and jealousy in her voice. She’s not really waiting for an answer.
“Yeah, I’m on a job,” the man responds. His voice betrays confidence, status. His movements are careful and he is quick, into the old-school hardware store across the way and back out in minutes. Then he’s gone.
These are but disappearing scenes in the nervous city. Contractors, who haven’t been without work for a decade, are sitting at home. Some, behind the Tundra’s wheel, roam the city. There are bargains at the supply house but there’s no reason to buy. There are laborers on the early bus with nowhere to go. There are signs of devolution: a half-bricked wall, a façade of new window openings fitted with plywood, a temporary work light dangling, still illuminated, like a mourner’s candle.
According to a January survey of Philadelphians conducted by the Pew Trusts’ Philadelphia Research Initiative, city residents are feeling optimistic about the future. The city is getting better, say 68 percent of those polled in January. I wonder how much of that hopefulness is a result of the near constant presence of cranes in the air, of scaffolds and contractor vans, of construction fences and dumpsters, of the whir of the table saw and the snap of the nail gun.
Perhaps very little. A survey made two years ago, at the height of the construction boom, revealed great pessimism about the future. So Pew analysts assign the hopefulness to recent political change. Despite early fumbles managing community participation in the budget crisis, the reform-minded Mayor Nutter is still popular with voters.
Yet I’m inclined to associate fixing up with feeling good, doubly important in a city that’s really only a step or two from falling apart. Ten years of renovation — just how many rotted, wooden, single pane windows have been thrown in the dumpster since 1999? — have given certain neighborhoods a newfound sense of possibility, or maybe just a generalized feeling of stability.
Inaction, then, feels like disaster, not only because it stifles our creative energy — the immeasurable, pluralistic act of urban adaptation and reinvention — but because it means extensive disintegration of the housing stock, as well as retail streets and the final collapse of the mostly forgotten industrial landscape. Stop fixing roofs and replacing waste pipes and, well, even hearty optimism can be flushed away.
Philadelphia’s homeowners are disproportionately old, and therefore less capable of keeping their homes in good working order. And many of those buildings are quite large and very old. It’s like a terrible, inchoate riddle, only there’s no cute pun that will solve it.
One likely hope is to make home renovation the city’s leading green policy tactic (weatherization as vast civic project); tie that to a more generalized notion of historic preservation — the preservation of neighborhood form (and not necessarily style) — and several goals might be achieved at once, a necessity in a time of limited resources. The goal ought to be to keep the saws grinding. Silence is unbearable.
The third floor factory window frames the view, the restive city in the side-glance of the winter sun. Here’s a swollen plume of white smoke and the granite-colored river, and the Betsy Ross Bridge in the muted but improbable green invented by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Amtrak flies past. Gulls float above a scrap metal yard that faces funny little twin houses with gingerbread details along the roof line.
Downstairs, among the used car dealers, whose flags crack somberly in the wind, there are side yard body shops and women whose carved faces betray hunger and addiction. There are cemeteries too in this part of Frankford and magnolia trees replete with thick, fuzzy buds, and stone walls and dormer windows and street names—Orchard, Cloud, Pear—as old and evocative as anything in Society Hill.
This variegated, ancient streetscape compels newcomers, among them a handful of visionary renovators who are drawn by a beauty here they say they can’t find elsewhere. They see the neighborhood as a lush hope, and they wonder constantly, obsessively, how it fits into a city yet reinventing itself. I stand before the window with one of them, Charlie Abdo, who has put his careful stamp on buildings across Philadelphia. He’d never thought much about Frankford before. Now a funny little Victorian house on Church Street dances before his eyes. “We came here a bunch of times, by the eighth time I was sold,” he says. These days he spends his time in the frigid labyrinthine skeleton of the Globe Dye Works, carving space, stepping gingerly forward.
Across the cement factory floor, the window gazes back toward Frankford Avenue; only the London plane trees are tall enough to profit from the low morning light. They reach over the two-story row houses, over the workshops, over the silence just now pierced by the flash of the El. It comes every five minutes, hour after hour, its bellow insistent, its presence persistent.
The El is the fastest and most efficient means of transportation in Philadelphia; it carries more people than any other line by far, and it connects otherwise disparate places. Once, about 100 years ago, planners envisioned a dozen such lines, but only the El and the Broad Street Subway would emerge. The rest of the sprawling architecture of a cosmopolitan city was lost to small thinking, infighting, and corruption.
It’s taken almost three decades to rebuild the El, a process so immense, slow, and managed so poorly that it put countless stores out of businesses. In Frankford, the project started in the middle of a substantial suburban exodus. SEPTA came along as a bloated undertaker, to bury the avenue once and forever. The lackluster Frankford Terminal, completed in 2003, only reinforced the sense of urban defeat.
Now the faces on Frankford Avenue are circumspect, and many storefronts are empty. Otherwise, there are numerous African braiding salons, a pair of soul food restaurants, a store that sells parakeets and other domestic birds—a rarity in Philadelphia—and an antiques dealer who specializes in mid-century modern. Thanks to the recently revived Special Services District, the sidewalks are clean; there are bright blue trash cans at every corner.
And there is the El. With three stops, Frankford is among the most connected, accessible places in Philadelphia. It moves. What’s felt for so long like a disadvantage—the light-blocking hulk that drove business and people away—is now perhaps Frankford’s greatest asset. That’s what Abdo and his partners and nearly everyone else I spoke with say. They point to Frankford Avenue and explain, we have this. Says Jim McCarthy, who heads up the Special Services District, “When gas prices start to go up again—Well,” nothing beats it. A dollar fifty you go anywhere you want to go.”
On a winter’s morning, with a thick sky and snow falling, everywhere is northern light, and all the colors are true. A mother waits with her son for the 60 bus; deliveries arrive at Johnny B’s pizza. A bulldozer beside a small hole in a massive asphalt parking lot is still, lonely as the adjustable basketball hoop in the side yard on Memphis Street.
Across the way, Northeastern Hospital, too, waits, its fragile financial state a matter of a national health-care system in crisis, its fate in the hands of a Temple University hospital “task force,” names unrevealed, documents sealed. “I think they have no idea what they’re doing,” says state Rep. John Taylor (R-177) last Tuesday night to a bristling group of community activists, union organizers, doctors and nurses in the basement of the Samuel Recreation Center on Gaul Street in Port Richmond. “Only they feel like they have to do something drastic.” Rumors have been circulating for a month that Temple will close the hospital or cut the number of beds from 231 to 40 or 50, or the O.R. and/or the maternity ward will be shuttered.
Northeastern, a restrained piece of neoclassical civic architecture with the look of a small city’s high school, was erected while many doctors and nurses were in Europe treating the victims of World War I. In 1918, as the American war effort decisively expanded, workers completed a third floor addition. It was just in time and not nearly enough. By October, the flu that had made eight million Spaniards sick had migrated to Philadelphia. On October 10, a week into the influenza epidemic, there were 5,531 new cases of the flu, 361 deaths; doctors prescribed whiskey and hospitals like Northeastern overflowed. With 12,191 deaths and almost 50,000 reported cases, Philadelphia would be hit the hardest of any city in the U.S.
Influenza traveled particularly efficiently through Philadelphia’s intimate alleys and working-class streets. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Indeed, Philadelphia was designed as an act of public health. To avoid fire and epidemic disease Penn’s original city provided space for generous squares and side gardens. A century later, a much more crowded and dirty city was thought (wrongly) to be the cause of a widespread epidemic, yellow fever. Prodded by the outspoken and willful physician Benjamin Rush, the civic response was forceful. A hospital was created for victims; a Board of Health was formed. Still, yellow fever claimed nearly one-tenth of the city’s population.
The present public-health crisis that threatens Northeastern isn’t an epidemic. The worry isn’t the city’s capacity to respond to disease. Rather, it’s the opposite: the prophylactic care of pregnant women and newborn babies. In 2008, doctors at Northeastern delivered 1,753 babies, nearly one in 10 born in Philadelphia. Since 1997, 12 neighborhood hospitals or maternity wards have closed, leaving Northeastern as the last community hospital in Philadelphia to provide maternity care.
It’s a “disaster waiting to happen,” says Albert Pizzica, the outspoken director of Northeastern’s newborn nursery. Pizzica, who also runs five pediatric practices in the city, is a latter-day Benjamin Rush, who sees a medical emergency in the abandonment of maternity care. “This community needs obstetrics,” he says, explaining that when Temple closed the maternity wards at Episcopal Hospital (in 2001) and Jeanes Hospital (in 2007), they claimed the university’s main hospital on Broad Street would absorb them. It didn’t; those families went to Northeastern, where Pizzica says births have tripled since 2003. (Attempts to reach Northeastern’s CEO John Buckley were deflected to a public relations specialist who had not returned a phone call by press time.)
“I’m very, very concerned,” says City Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez, “we’re a community with only one hospital.” Though the hospital is located in Councilman Frank DiCicco’s district, many of Northeastern’s patients live in Quiñones-Sánchez’s 7th District. “This is very important,” she says, in part because her district’s population is growing.
“It’s a public-health question that needs to be answered by Temple,” says Pizzica. “If Northeastern closes, where are deliveries going to go? Who is going to take public-health responsibility?”
The answer, left to a patchwork of medical centers and teaching hospitals, private insurers and government programs, is that maternity care doesn’t rate. (Einstein Medical Center says it loses $2,000 per birth.) “We’re coming up short at the state level paying for the delivery of babies,” says Taylor.
Indeed, reimbursements are poor compared to other specialties, explains Letty Thall, public policy director for the Maternity Care Coalition, a group formed in the 1980s in response to Philadelphia’s high infant mortality rate. The Coalition runs the “MOMobile” service for low-income women.
Thall says the Northeastern crisis is only part of a larger health care landscape that favors technological intervention over well care. Philadelphia lacks maternal-including prenatal services; there are no nonhospital birthing centers, for example, even though 70 to 80 percent of births are low risk. “There’s an assumption that babies should always be delivered in hospitals. Really, it should be a wellness service,” says Thall.
But Northeastern’s patients are disproportionately poor and therefore less likely to have accessed prenatal care. A high percentage of obstetric patients end up in the operating room. Some, according to Pizzica, wouldn’t make it to a hospital far away.
Temple, which receives state and federal funding for serving a low-income population (so-called “disproportionate share” allowances, worth $120 million to Temple since 2004), has an obligation to the community, according to Jerry Silberman, whose union, the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), represents the nurses of the Temple health system. Silberman, who has run two “save Northeastern” strategy meetings, including the one last Tuesday in Port Richmond, explains that despite Northeastern’s fragile financial state, Temple has received enough extra funding to turn a net, subsidy-enhanced profit eight years straight, about $19 million a year. He carefully notes their investment in new corporate offices and other nonpatient projects. And he reminds community members that when Temple wanted to purchase adjacent land in 2005 to expand Northeastern, they gave their support. Now, he says, “We want respect — a seat on the task force, transparency and for Northeastern to remain a full-service hospital.”
“We have a chance to drag Temple into something that’s for their own good,” he proclaims, meaning that if given the chance, doctors and nurses, community members and advocates like the Maternity Care Coalition who are currently shut out of the discussion, can help improve the hospital’s financial standing.
In 1918, as influenza spread down Allegheny Avenue and nearly every-where else in Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer questioned the atmosphere of fear and panic. They recoiled against the public-health regulations prohibiting crowding into streetcars and gathering in unventilated rooms. To Philadelphians they wrote, “Do not even discuss influenza. ... Worry is useless. Talk of cheerful things instead of disease.” To Silberman and the other organizers of the campaign to save Northeastern, Temple’s posture is just that: Don’t worry — and anyway, stay out of our business.
Pizzica, the neonatalogist, says that makes this the time for the city to assert its native concern for public health. He points to the city’s Department of Public Health, the bureaucratic descendent of Benjamin Rush’s Board of Health, and addresses his “friend” Donald Schwarz, Philadelphia’s public health commissioner. “Why aren’t you saying what Al Pizzica is saying? What are you doing, creating Calcutta here? This is not bullshit anymore. This is people’s lives.”
Mapping Decline (2008, University of Pennsylvania Press), by Colin Gordon
The Angel of Grozny (2008, Basic Books), by Åsne Seierstad, translated by Nadia Christensen
On a weekend of anticipation — for a snow that never comes, an Eagles’ win that does — the 90 foot crane stands motionless and quiet. Its bright red paint blurs in the haze and stains the dull, ochre sky. The crane looms. A security guard circles the block.
Cold air drifts across the pale branches of the London Plane trees that stand in front of the Youth Study Center. The building’s dull sandstone façade shrinks against the coming storm. Despite the hush, already demolition is underway. Machines have forced a large opening in the 12 foot fortress wall. Brick cladding on Pennsylvania Avenue is gone, exposing a row of jail cells. The entrance has been blown away. What’s left is slender carcass: mean, frozen, and dirty.
In 1953, YSC was astringent, institutional modernism. Now it merely looks post-Soviet. The Russian tri-color flickers across the Parkway.
*
The YSC — a detention center and also a school for youth offenders — emerged from a habit of idealistic modernism, the product of a city that would perfect itself. It was a particular moment — a flash of post-war urban optimism. America’s largest and most densely populated cities had swelled during the war, surpassing population thresholds last met 20 years before. These cities, Philadelphia among them, expected to continue to grow.
That they didn’t and, instead, began a precipitous decline “is arguably the most important and persistent domestic issue of the modern era,” exerts Colin Gordon, professor of history at the University of Iowa, in the introduction to Mapping Decline. “Not only,” he continues, “is the ‘urban crisis’ important in its own right but troubled cities hosted, shaped, and overlaid with a peculiar spatial logic so much else that was going on.”
Gordon’s project is one of the first of its kind in urban studies to give sustained attention to the “peculiar spatial logic” of urban decline, suburban advancement, and attempts at renewal. He does so by employing geographic information systems (GIS), the contemporary mapping technology that allows data to be described spatially. Good maps clarify history. But Gordon’s — with several factors laid out across time and territory — do the talking. Visuals make the case — how the “seemingly iron law of urban decay” was really the product of institutionalized racism, political fragmentation, suburban zoning, and policy that devalued urban land to make it attractive, in ways that makes text seem not merely insufficient, but incapable.
Gordon deftly uses GIS to show how and why population groups move across the metro region, how and where private sector money is invested, and to explain the spatial mismatch between poverty and social injustice and the public sector response. Mapping in effect enhances our understanding of the now formulaic story of urban decline. Mapping Decline is thus an indispensable addition to the urban studies syllabus.
Among the most straightforward (and therefore least dynamic) but effecting illustrations is a gray map of the City of St. Louis reflecting the impact of race on the city’s spatial development. In Gordon’s maps, St. Louis is shaped like the bulb of a white onion, stalk rising from the top. A street grid decorates the onion skin. Here, in a city hell-bent on setting up restrictive covenants, blocks colored red are those “in Which Negroes May Thereafter Take Up Residence.” This turns out to be quite a pure, white onion — there are very, very few red spots. It was 1916. “The plot of this story,” says the author, “in St. Louis and elsewhere, is irretrievably racial in its logic and in its consequences.”
Of the ten largest American cities in 1950, St. Louis with a population of 850,000 was ranked eighth. The present city contains 350,000 people. At 41% of its peak size, and after a half century of inchoate, bedraggled reformation, much of the city is literally gone. Gordon rightly says this makes it a most emblematic case study. Some of Philadelphia’s story is certainly here, as is Baltimore’s and Cleveland’s, Chicago’s, Pittsburgh’s, and Detroit’s.
But there’s something missing in this account that keeps Mapping Decline from being a great work. Gordon has given us St. Louis, St. Louis County, the suburbs. It’s all here, the jarring shifts of time in one single flagrant, vulgar, small-minded place. But he’s forgotten to tell us what was beautiful, inventive, sticky, and memorable, in short why St. Louis — or any city — matters (curious, since a sub-chapter is headed “So What?: Losing St. Louis”).
He’s aware of the short-coming, I think, and in an attempt to ascribe meaning to his narrative, he hopes to observe the changes at one address, 4635 North Market Street, in the Greater Ville. It isn’t enough; only a few architectural details are provided, the lot dimensions, various names of owners. There are few details about the life of the neighborhood. But I need them just to care. Synthesis doesn’t move me.
4635 North Market is today, finally, a vacant lot.
In thirty years, 1970-2000, the census tract in which the lot is located lost 75% of its population. Decline is painful, frightening. When St. Louis politicians set out to rebuild “the tax base,” explains Gordon, “their favorite short-term strategy was to dismantle it — the equivalent, in local public policy terms, of burning the village to save it.” It turns out a city neighborhood burns slowly, and so too its people. Dreams at first merely cloud. Then they fill with uncertainty. Soon, coldness, a bitter detachment, settles in.
*
About a year ago, Bruce Schimmel, founder and former publisher of the City Paper, invited me to observe and take part in a radio project he was conducting with some of the students in the Youth Study Center’s school. We met in a second floor room — at present open to the wind — filled with computers and fairly average looking young Philadelphians. Most of them were repeat offenders.
Schimmel wanted to give the inmates a chance to write their own stories. Then, those willing would sit with him in the YSC library to record an interview. A particularly compelling, articulate young person might be asked to recite her prose, or poetry. I was asked to be a resource for the young writers and I floated around the room until someone felt ready for critique.
Ultimately, I spent the bulk of my time with a boy about 16 and a girl a little older. As they wrote, I read, questioned, listened. The boy, whose crimes and misdemeanors were hidden from me, was calm, reflective, intent. He didn’t smile. He chose an elaborate typeface, and wrote about the evil inside him.
Sitting at the next table, the other, bright and beautiful, wrote to her mother, hints of compassion, crinkled desire. She’d been raped from an early age, sent out by an abusive grandfather to sell her body, and left for lost. Her writing was direct, at times suffocating. Conducting the radio interview, my questions felt like stabs in a vast, jumbled darkness. She shined, vulnerable and also impenetrable; we laughed. The city, still burning, the flame: what more damage could it do?
I stopped thinking about those kids until I encountered them a second time, this time while driving through Logan Square a few months later. A woman, the Norwegian writer Åsne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul, was on the radio being interviewed by Marty Moss-Coane. And here, using the words of the two children from the YSC, she was describing them, a boy who was aware of but couldn’t control the evil inside him, a girl who had been raped repeatedly by a relative, who couldn’t stop stealing. It was a stunningly accurate psychological profile.
Only their names were Timur and Liana, Chechen orphans of the Russian war in Grozny, victims not of the slow dissolution of North Philadelphia, but of internecine war, of a different city of rot and hopelessness. Then, listening, I was struck by the precise similarity of the language, here from the text of Seierstad’s masterful Angel of Grozny:
Timur was the person who changed most during the time I lived in the children’s home. When I first met him, he did his best to be an exemplary child. Now he torpedoed that effort. It was as if he did everything he could to make people dislike him.
One day I sat down next to him on the porch steps.
“Why do you do all these things?” I asked.
He turned to me. His eyes narrowed.
“I’m evil.”
“Evil how?”
“Inside me.”
He pointed.
“Inside me, in my heart, it’s full of evil. I’m very evil.”
“But you can choose whether you want to be evil or not, can’t you?”
“No, everything inside me makes me be bad. I’m mean and wicked.”
Here, in a lovingly crafted, profoundly intelligent book about a war of mindless aggression and intolerance half a world away, we can find the fate of the American city, the gash in our own psyche that yet threatens to push us apart.
Seierstad began covering the war in Chechnya while pursuing a post-college longing for the Russian soul. That was 1994. The war was begun on a political whim by Boris Yeltsin. Vladimir Putin extended it and made it more brutal. This is a book, therefore, of loss, of children without parents, of mothers without children, of soldiers without eyes and teeth, of a city whose buildings are only painted facades. It is heartbreaking, relentless, made readable not by any perceptible hope for a better life but by the author’s own humanity. When she is most careful, and steps out of the way, The Angel of Grozny sings, the sound of the most terrifying madness and melancholy.
Zaira’s sister had already told me that it was Mariam who took her brother’s death the hardest. She became silent and withdrawn. The turquoise and pink clothes were put away, she no longer left the house unless she was swathed from head to toe in a long dark skirt and cloak and a think head covering. The gold-blonde locks that before had hung loosely disappeared under a tight headscarf. Where once there had been a curly fringe, now not a single strand of hair was visible. Her headscarf crept down on her forehead. The pale peach skin and rosy cheeks disappeared further inside the scarf. In the end Cleopatra’s [she’d been described as looking like Elizabeth Taylor] eyebrows were hidden too . . .
“We never thought . . .”
The woman barely manages to get out the words.
“We’d always let her do as she wished . . . She was so kind and respectful, so strong and wise. Of all our children she was the most helpful. Not so good at school, but the very best when it came to cooking, sewing and helping with the animals . . .”
“Then she changed. She stopped going out, started to study the Koran, to pray five times a day . . . We hoped that she would eventually recover from the sorrow of her brother’s death, and that the happy girl would return.”
Seierstad allows us to watch the woman change, become distant, numb. Take away too much, insult and maim and humiliate people too often and if they don’t snap, they retreat. They stop feeling, become killers. Put weapons in their hands and they kill. Mariam did, and she herself was killed.
Last year, some 300 Philadelphians did, and so we’re still narrating this city’s long decline.
One day, three weeks ago, this website’s publisher, Brad Maule, and I stood on a third floor balcony of the modern (1928) section of the Globe Dye Works, in Frankford. The balcony faces Worth Street, a road that being parallel to train tracks, feels as if it is at the edge of a small town, and out past a scrap yard, the R7/Amtrak rail line, and the Aramingo interchange of I-95. It’s a linear, aluminous landscape punctured now and again by smokestacks and water towers and draped by the dull white noise of the highway. The Betsy Ross Bridge hangs low in the distance. In the immediate foreground, on Worth Street, stand a set of plain, squat twin houses, some with awnings on the windows, some with original decorative woodwork along the A-frame roof line.
As we stood there observing this landscape that feels at once immense and also mutable, I noticed a shirtless man standing in the doorway of one of the houses, his torso framed by the opening of the screen door. The day was finely gray and chilly; there had been snowflakes earlier in the morning and so, at once, I had the feeling of an overheated room, and of silence, loneliness, a swelling sadness. The picture of a person gazing out a window — separate, hidden, and unsure — might be relied on to deliver melancholy, but the scene before us — brick houses, the rails, a spray of bare trees — had the particular zeitgeist of a calloused mill town, of truncated, and provincial, Pennsylvania. (Just an hour before, as Brad and I walked along Tackawanna Street, he was reminded of his hometown, Tyrone, in the hills of Central PA.)
Perhaps it was our perch — on the balcony of a factory being transformed into a “creative compound” — that gave me the feeling of eyeing a place left behind. The quiet reclamation going on inside the labyrinthine mill, one of the longest operating textile mills in Philadelphia (having survived until 2005), comes with some of highest and most finely-tuned expectations of the contemporary city. When completely adapted, it’s a complex that will support the production and celebration of art and craft industry, an unpretentious savoring of evocative industrial remains. “Move here and prosper,” summons the sales brochure, as if to mock Frankford’s fortunes this last half century of urban decline.
One of the things that’s interesting about the adaptive reuse of the Globe Dye Works, whose iconic mid-century sign beckons auto and rail travelers along the northeast corridor, is the expectation of its developers, a team of Charlie Abdo, brothers Matt and Ian Pappajohn, and Pete Kelly. They’re pitching the project not just to Philadelphia artists and craftsmen, but to creative people everywhere. And indeed, according to Abdo, half of the tenant inquiries are coming from Brooklyn. Matt Pappajohn backs up the claim.
The Pappajohns, professional cabinetmakers since 1996, moved their shop from Kensington into the former Henry Riehl loom factory on Orchard Street in Frankford in 2003. In that compound, which includes a renovated 18th century mill used as live-work space, are entrepreneurially-minded artists and designers from Rhode Island, New York, and Los Angeles. “Frankford hasn’t been a challenge,” says Matt Pappajohn, who speaks with an unusual combination of thoughtfulness, sincerity, and blunt intensity, “it’s been great for us. If you squint your eyes, it’s like 1950s America. Just ignore the pushers.”
A mill town dating to the late 17th century, Frankford grew slowly for its first century and a half. Of Philadelphia’s satellites — those adjacent towns and cities that would in 1854 consolidate into one Philadelphia — Frankford was always to be the least economically robust. Unlike Spring Garden or Southwark or the Northern Liberties, it was never one of the new nation’s largest cities. In fact, it didn’t grow significantly until the 1850s, and by then it was no longer an independent town. But, as Philadelphia became the nation’s largest and most diversified textile manufacturer, Frankford firms seized water power — Globe Dye was fueled by the Little Tacony Creek, buried to create Torresdale Avenue — to produce yarns, woolens, calico prints, and carpets, among other industrial products.
Unsquint your eyes and the Frankford that appears probably won’t meet your preconception. “It’s really old, which we didn’t realize [before we came],” says Pappajohn, noting the 1781 Quaker meetinghouse outside the window of his Orchard Street Mill. “I thought it was the end of the world,” reveals the reticent and soft spoken Abdo, who moved to Philadelphia in the late 1960s from Brooklyn, and who ever since has been renovating buildings in the Northern Liberties, Fairmount, and Kensington. “Now I’ve had a whole kind of change of attitude.”
This Frankford — the remains of small mills and workshops, two and three-storey rowhouses made of stone and stucco with little porches and gardens, and tiny Victorians right out of Tom and Jerry and church bells and December cherry blossoms, hand-painted signs, black Santas, and long, heavy beams and iron doors and towering maple trees, work aprons and tools, and streets named Cloud, Unity, Pear — so well served by the El, and so diverse, calls out. This Frankford feels not harsh, but inviting, not failed and miserable and lonely, but rather like a quiet charm.
Squint and unsquint again and the picture clouds. At about 34,000 people, Frankford’s population has held steady for 20 years. But residents here are poorer than even the city average, and rates of education are pitifully low. More than a quarter of adults have no high school degree; fewer than one in ten have completed college. There were 13 homicides in the neighborhood last year, up slightly from 2007.
There are pushers and prostitutes; there is hell and desperation. You can feel it while standing in line for a slice of pizza at Leandro’s, or walking down Church Street past a forty-something woman with hallow cheeks, a 16 year old with a muted face, a cigarette, and a stroller, or turning onto Tackawanna mid-morning to the sound of yelping dogs and two warrant officers pounding on a door. Jim McCarthy, who has renovated dozens of neighborhood properties, including live-work spaces for artists and musicians, and whose wife, Joan Oliveto, opened and then closed a New Orleans-style restaurant, Mosaic, at Frankford Avenue and Gillingham Street, in 2007, says that sometimes at night “it’s a little scary.”
Gilbert Pons is a slim, neatly dressed man in his forties. Along with his brother Ricardo, he owns Gilbert’s Upholstery on Frankford Avenue. Inside the Pons’ workshop, a team of four employees refinishes and reupholsters furniture, with a particular eye for what’s considered “mid-century modern,” elegant, low slung smooth wooden chairs, tables, and cabinets. Gilbert Pons admits the neighborhood feels “stagnant.” This was not his hope a few years ago, when his highly calibrated antique shop was joined by other dealers, a specialist in lampshades, a café, an art galley named Revival. Pons sits in the warmly painted showroom filled with futuristic furniture of the 1950s and 60s — a Styrofoam chair, a sky blue ’59 recliner, the “Niagra” — and waits. “I think it will get better,” he laments.
*
o *
The Frankford Elevated, completed in 1922 and rebuilt in the 1980s and 90s, is the neighborhood’s curving spine. It, and the Avenue itself, the neighborhood’s primary shopping street, are in part what give this neighborhood such good “bones,” and the hope for a more urbane and prosperous future. Sit in the Pons’ showroom, and there, right above, is the El; stand looking out the restored factory windows of what will be a painter’s studio at Globe Dye, and there’s the El; play Frisbee in Womrath Park and the El rises above, a flash of speed and efficiency that connects Frankford to Kensington, Fishtown, Northern Liberties, Center City, and on to West Philly. “The El is our friend,” says Pappajohn, who also serves on the Board of the Fishtown Neighbors Association, “15 minutes to 5th and Market.”
In 2006, then interim City Councilman Dan Savage established a Special Services District along Frankford Avenue, an entity that wasn’t favored by some businesses along the Avenue (its funding comes from a relatively small, special surcharge levied on building owners) and which was slow in getting started. Also that year, the City Planning Commission completed a plan by the firm Wallace Roberts and Todd, which called for an emphasis on high-density mixed-use nodes at each of the three neighborhood El stations, Church, Margaret-Orthodox, and the Frankford Transportation Center. The plan, really not much more than a generic urban design template, followed the much more rigorous and community focused Frankford Plan of the mid-1990s.
“It’s been planned out,” comments the present Frankford Councilwoman, Maria Quiñones-Sánchez, whose large 7th district covers much of the Barrio and the river wards. “What we don’t get is a plan of action.”
But Quiñones-Sánchez, who speaks with a mixture of warmth and urgency, is worried that the Frankford leaders lack the capacity to implement changes. “We can move this forward, but I’m not going to spin my wheels,” she says. So she’s giving the Special Services District and the Frankford Community Development Corporation, two entities who in the recent past have had difficulty working together (a matter of longstanding personal differences, according to Quiñones-Sánchez), additional time to build consensus and institutional capacity. “It’s a lot more difficult than just talking together.”
Like many inside the administration of Mayor Michael Nutter and several of those on City Council, Quiñones-Sánchez is reconsidering the effectiveness of a community development program that’s rigidly neighborhood-focused. Pure bottom-up planning and local control hasn’t stemmed urban decline; instead it’s led to fragmented community development and inefficiency. At worst, it puts taxpayer money in the hands of those ill-equipped to manage redevelopment and the provision of social services. Top-down planning has the advantage of rational decision-making. “I want to deal with data,” notes Quiñones-Sánchez.
She’d like to imagine, therefore, that she can put into place a district-wide or even city-wide plan to clean and manage primary retail streets, to coordinate capital improvements, to build new housing that responds to a global aspiration for the city’s future. But as we’ve seen Mayor Nutter struggle recently to eliminate 11 library branches without neighborhood consultation, a top-down approach may be simply inconsistent with the broad and intransient power of ward and neighborhood-based politics.
It also risks alienating those who work the hardest to improve the city. “Some of the most talented work under the radar,” explains Quiñones-Sánchez. That’s why she hopes to compel Frankford’s four leading community-based organizations — the SSD and CDC as well as the Civic Association and the Frankford Business and Professional Association — to come together under a shared agenda. If that doesn’t work, she tells me, “Guys, new rules.”
The developer Jim McCarthy, whose brother Jack heads up the Frankford Historical Society, has been renovating buildings in Frankford for a half-dozen years or so. He’s a lanky fifty-something with an easy-going, fair, and honest manner. He was one of the first these last two decades to start purchasing and fixing-up properties along the Avenue. This year, after his wife’s restaurant closed, he’s been instrumental in resurrecting the Special Services District, which installed bright blue trash receptacles and concrete planters below the El. He also hired a new cleaning service. The result of all of this is a retail district — one of the longest and most vital neighborhood shopping streets in Philadelphia — that’s cleaner and less grim than it has been in recent memory (the lack of pedestrian lighting notwithstanding).
The Councilwoman notes rightly that “a clean corridor is just a first step.” It’s also one that’s been hard to achieve — and not only because of a lack of neighborhood capacity or judgment but also because of shortcomings of City Hall. If a new balance between top-down and bottom-up planning is to be rectified, then City Hall is going to have to make it easier for small builders, developers, and community activists to make improvements in their neighborhoods.
I raise this possibility with McCarthy as I watch him work inside one of the live-work spaces he carved from an old factory on Gillingham Street. He’s reconverted the space as an extension of Frankford Friends School. Having outgrown its campus, the school has temporarily shifted middle school classrooms here. But because the space is used as a school, McCarthy has been required to make numerous changes — like heating the vestibule — some which seem rational, some which appear designed to drive him crazy. An inspector from the department of Licenses and Inspections has already made several visits. Each time he appears there’s a new requirement.
But aren’t these kinds of things improving? Wasn’t that one of the promises of a Nutter administration? McCarthy, who is trying to get a fire-safe door to close properly, looks up and smiles. He sighs. “No, things are better,” he says. Permitting is easier, service in the basement of the Municipal Services Building is friendlier. “They even have chocolate at the desk . . . and it’s good chocolate!”
Then McCarthy pauses. “Remember the Army-Navy across the street?” He’s referring to a two-storey corner retail building with a lovely curved wall and the feel of 1933. McCarthy walked me through the building, the “Roxy,” a few years before. Then it was filled with junk. Walls and floors had caved in. In the meantime, he’d invested about $150,000 into the Roxy, with the hopes of turning it into a café.
He’d rebuilt the walls and replaced the joists to form the second floor when the L&I inspector made his expected visit. “‘Are your joists wrapped in plastic?’, he asked me,” recounted McCarthy. “‘No, my joists aren’t wrapped in plastic. I’ve been doing this for thirty years, I’ve never heard of wrapping your joists in plastic’.”
“‘I have to shut you down. Your joists have to be wrapped in plastic.’”
“I was out of my mind with anger,” says McCarthy. That was it, and many months ago. The building sits empty.
“No one has ever told me to wrap my joists in plastic . . . Later that same inspector came here. I said, ‘You remember me?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, you know I had just seen that rule in a book right before I came to inspect your property. I’d never known about it before.’”
McCarthy puts down his tools. “I don’t know the solution to this,” he says and grimaces, and turns away.
*
o *
It’s a bright July day when I visit Diane Richardson at the far end of Frankford, on Bridge Street. Just the day before Amissi Ndukumassabo and Bintou Soumare, well-regarded immigrants from Mali and residents of Oxford Street not ten blocks away, were shot and killed in their store, Urban Wear, on Wyoming Avenue. The couple had worked their way up from owning a vendor cart on Front Street.
It’s here at this end of Frankford, especially in the blocks around the Frankford Transportation Center, that one is reminded of the violence and possibility of the neighborhood’s urban potential. It isn’t a mill town or a village; the busy El terminal amplifies the openness, as does the presence of immigrants.
The flip side of openness — anyone’s territory — is that no one can control who enters. There are no walls, no monitors. As stark metaphor: an open field, a “dumping ground.” This is just how some characterize Frankford, a victim of social service agencies, halfway houses, and drug treatment clinics that seek low rent and proximity to transportation. They’re drawn to a void and their presence feels disproportionate.
“It’s a problem going on 30 years,” says Councilwoman Quiñones-Sánchez, a matter of state policy and poor zoning. Gilbert Pons observes that “the huge number of ex-cons on the street is hard on the people who are trying to make money here.”
But some in Frankford are making money by catering to the less fortunate. It’s a growth industry where there are otherwise few avenues for employment. “Well right now I am an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur in the inner-city,” says Diane Richardson, a former practicing attorney who in 2002 founded an assisted living home for seniors, aged 50-62. Her clients, all men, are unable to live on their own. “I’m into my men,” she says.
Richardson is a small woman in her fifties with an open face and a bright, incessant smile. Having grown up at 26th and Somerset in North Philadelphia, she was the 1971 Simon Gratz senior class president. She attended Penn State University — “polka-dot city.” She says there were 3,300 white students and 700 African-Americans. “It was the best experience I could have.”
As I meet with Richardson at the kitchen table of her 5-person, licensed care facility at Bridge and Mulberry, workers are finishing a 16-room addition in the adjacent lot. The house is clad in cream-colored vinyl, with green shutters, and wooden tulips along the fence. A garden connects the two buildings. Inside, residents are given home-cooked meals, provided health care, laundry, and taken out to go shopping. They live independently if they can. Richardson says because her staff is so well trained — she offers training on site to employees — she has a waiting list; the VA keeps calling.
“And there’s room to expand,” she quips, relishing her own impact on the neighborhood. “This is someplace that could use some uplifting. To me, this was like Beirut.” There were shootings, a drug house. But “I’ve come here to make it better, to clean up. The neighbors love me.”
“Where life is just beginning,” is the Richardson Group’s corporate motto. It strikes me as not all that dissimilar from the Globe Development Group’s “Come here and prosper,” strange, perhaps unexpected, signs of a city alive. I’m walking out of the Henry Riehl building with Matt and Ian Pappajohn when Matt wonders aloud if he and his partners are having an impact on Frankford. “Are we working in a vacuum?” He isn’t waiting for a specific answer, but merely pondering. Then he speaks, a reminder. “It’s never going to be Bella Vista, Society Hill, Fishtown. It’s Frankford, that’s good enough.”
We’re to look around these days for small gifts, for tokens.
Coming down from the Ben Franklin Bridge the winter city greets us, a night scene rarely so jeweled. The colored balls high in the perimeter trees of Franklin Square, not quite cliché some ten years after being introduced in Rittenhouse Square, enervate the foreground; and far, far beyond a single chimney’s wisp of smoke dangles from the roof of the Comcast Center. The smoke is as languid and sweet to the eye as that which dances from the brush of Pissarro, or Gustave Caillebotte, as restful as the front paw and foreleg of the moose below the Washington Monument on Eakins’ Oval.
The late 19th century scene behind the Art Museum is never better than in December. Our eyes are drawn out, beyond the construction, to Lemon Hill, to the dim burgundy and slate skyline of Powelton Village, a vernacular of scale and proportion only reinforced by Erdy McHenry’s spinning tower rising above; there is train trestle and chimney again. There is river and Fairmount’s rosette, and in the grainy, yellowing light there is the searing red of Mark di Suvero’s Iroquois. Santa feels unnecessary.
And yet he’s delivered, a week or so early, almost eight years since so many of us, collectively, wrote. Dear Santa, Dear Dick Cheney, Dear Senator Specter, Dear CEO of Halliburton and of Johnson Controls and of Wackenhut, Dear Incompetent and Hateful and anti-Government Bureaucracy . . . The barricades that have since 9/11 truncated the Statehouse Garden (Independence Square), that for a time made it illegal to walk below the garden on Sixth Street, that for summers on end have held up limpid and vulgar bunting, that have effectively separated us from our great symbol of courage and liberty, are now gone. The effect, even as witnessed tonight in darkness, is profound.
There is still an unnecessary security layer between us and Independence Hall — tickets, alone, would control access to the building — but the visual and emotional presence of that layer is restrained. Even the “keep out” signs are elegant and respectful in their wording: “No Entry,” they read, “at this Point.” The Statehouse Garden almost feels as it did before; we can stand now at Commodore Barry’s back or under the London Plane tree below the bell tower and measu
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