10 February 2012 | Philadelphia Inquirer
It’s like a scene from an experimental Czech novel: Pass through a secret door and there’s a ghost street grid, handsome buildings from a grand era just out of reach, empty warehouses as big as tankers, and ships as grand as castles.
3 November 2011 | Hidden City Daily
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.
21 October 2011 | Philadelphia Inquirer
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.
20 October 2011 | Hidden City Daily
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.
19 July 2011
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.