Steering the Ruderal Garden
19 May 2011 | Share:
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.”
photos courtesy of ViaductGreene