15 January 09: A Calder service



Just a quick photo post here. The Inquirer reported on Monday that a series of banners designed by Alexander Calder for Centre Square's atrium was discovered in that building's storage.

The two-tower Centre Square complex is connected by an enormous, five story enclosure with a hexagonal glass ceiling and direct access to the el and the pedestrian concourse below. In summer 2007, it got a makeover by Daroff Design, which extended out onto the Clothespin plaza. Iconic as it is, Claes Oldenburg's landmark sculpture was actually just one of a superstar triple shot for the young percent-for-art program. Jean Dubuffet's Milord la Chamarre, hidden in a nook on Market Street behind the overpowering American flags, and Calder's banners were also included in the 1975 art installation.

The recently rediscovered banners were officially unveiled at the Central Branch of the Free Library on Tuesday, convenient enough for attendees of the Great Poe Debate (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, Philadelphia won with a slight hometown edge). They'll be on display at the Library until some time in the spring. Considering the Calder Museum two blocks up the Parkway fell through (but the Garden remains, despite the removal of its central mobile), the banners are a nice consolation.



–B Love


14 January 09: Look up. Tel Aviv Skyline



GREETINGS FROM ISRAEL

A longtime friend of Philly Skyline, Son of Eli, sends his regards from Tel Aviv.
Thanks for checking in. I've made it to Israel without too much trouble, though the turbulence b/w Philly and Paris (over the Atlantic) was absolutely insane.

[T]his whole extravaganza will consist mostly of photos . . . which means mostly photos of food . . . which means mostly photos of hummus.

See you all at the Super Bowl parties.

Go Birds!
That's the spirit. SOE sends his love to the city that loves him back, as he carries out his mission to dance away the terror . . . and eat lots of hummus! He's keeping a blog of his Tel Aviv travels -- mostly hummus, but some skyline, and some day-to-day, and some Switchblade -- at Mostly Hummus.

Stay safe over there pal, and keep those delicious photos coming.



–B Love

14 January 09: Burning the Village May Not Save Us;
Reviews of Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City and The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War



by Nathaniel Popkin
January 14, 2009

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.


Saint Louis, Missouri, day of the northeast blackout, 2003. Photo by B Love.

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.


View Larger Map

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.

–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com

For Nathaniel Popkin archives, please see HERE, or visit his web site HERE.
For The Possible City, please see HERE.



13 January 09: New year skyline critique



Hey now, according to my calculations, the last round of Skyline Inspections was done during the historic Fightin' Phils 2008 championship run. (Speaking of, the official Phillies Skyline 2009 offseason report is in the mail.) Since that posting, there've been a number of skyline spottings around town, so it makes sense to start with those same WFC Phillies.

Before the dvd was even finished, MLB had all the Phillies championship gear ready to roll off the line and promo'd it with a video on phillies.com. The link has been lost, but the skyline lives on. Though City Hall was 'shopped out in the end and the American Commerce Center rendering looks strikingly like the World Series Trophy (as long as Selig is the commissioner, I will never, ever, ever call it the Commissioner's Trophy), the Phillies' graphics team did a fine job, not only getting Comcast Center and a completed Residences at the Ritz-Carlton in their skyline, but it's the appropriate view from Citizens Bank Park.

Well played, just like the 2008 season, Philadelphia Phillies!

* * *

You know who else played the Philadelphia Phillies well all through 2008?



The official television station of our Major League Baseball team, of course! Between the broadcasts almost nightly in the summer, Post Game Live with Barkann, Mitch and Ricky Bo, and a redesigned web site with the newish blog by John Finger seen above, Comcast SportsNet also receives high marks for attention to detail. It did take them a while to include the building its parent company occupied, but most of the station's graphics now have Comcast Center. (Off the top of my head, I think Daily News Live still has an old shot from South Street Bridge.)

But Center City, CSN's bon mot blog has a nice, clean skyline with the West Philly view, even if Two Liberty's pointy top is a little jacked up. Let's say Center City's Center City gets an A-.

* * *



Stepping up to the plate next is Philadelphia Futures, the non-profit now in its 20th year of helping high school students from less fortunate neighborhoods make it to college. In the 2008-09 handbook, they're as technologically together as they should be, including Comcast Center in a simple and sharp interpretive depiction of the skyline. I can dig it, and I hope those college bound high school kids can, too.

* * *



This particular blast from the past comes courtesy of Paul in University City. Right after the last round of Skyline Inspections, Paul sent a link to weather.com's online video forecast . . . with the skyline image so old, it's almost too good to be true. That image, SSB-view from roughly 1988 (with only One Liberty Place and One Commerce Square finished and the Blue Cross Tower visibly under construction), has made its way into Philly Skyline conversation a number of times. It's the sort of skyline image a stock agency based in, say, Spokane Washington would see and not think twice about selling for use in an ad or, say, online video weather forecast.

But it's over 20 years old, and not only does the skyline not look even remotely close to that now, but the evening lights atop One Liberty (where your eyes go to in the image) don't even look the same now.

At least weather.com tried a little harder with the image on the right . . . but not that hard. The image -- an overcast day, used by a weather channel who could probably could have found something a little more dramatic -- has the 80s/90s round of skyscrapers, but not the 00s. No Comcast Center for you, online meteorologist guy. Oh well, at least we get a skyline shot; poor Paducah's so stock-photo-free that its name flashes in front of the same clouds "Your Local Forecast" does.

* * *



You know what's worse than a Spokane-based stock photo agency using a 20 year old photo of the Philly Skyline? How about a Philly-based screen printing company using the very same image?

Port Richmond's JP Tees has been producing high quality printed sportswear since 1986, and ain't nobody gonna take that away from them. It's worth noting, though, that one of the large prints they've produced is the billboard sitting on the roof of their building at 2930 Richmond Street, which looks directly onto I-95. Killer billboard location location location, for sure, but the skyline image is doing them no favors . . . unless they're going for the 1986 look as an homage to their inception, in which case, not bad.

Have to wonder, though, since their web site also has an SSB-view skyline, but that one's from about . . . 2000 or so. Any time after '92 but before '07, when Comcast and Murano changed it up.

* * *



Know what though? It always feels like 1986 at the Gallery. And just wait till Foxwoods never comes . . . Atlantic City's finest imitation soap opera furnishings will have you listening to the Bangles on purpose. Fortunately, this snaz-tastic banner graphic that's buried between the 8th Street el station and the Cinnabon whose waft stays with you for at least five blocks after leaving the mall touts the Gallery's e-newsletter. E-awesome!

This fancy ad has its heart in the right place: it starts with a base SSB-view skyline, adds in some creative Comcast Center and Cira Centre, then finishes it off with some pointy and irregular buildings that don't exist, as well as some PA-system bullhorn looking thing just west of where Murano would be. Ehh, let's give em a C for concept.

* * *



Finally, we'll take a look at an ad for a condo building actually in the SSB-view skyline. Locust Point, one of the two handsome former factories at the Locust Street access point of the Schuylkill River/Banks Trail/Park, has been running this ad in the weeklies, this one from the most recent PW. The image accompanying the sales sheet not only has an up-to-date view with Comcast Center and Murano, and it's not only a good photo in that the tall part of the skyline is in the shade while the riverfront buildings (including the featured Locust Point) are in the sun; it also photoshops out the other rooftop-sign-that's-too-large, its competitor Locust on the Park. While I wouldn't mind seeing both of those signs gone, the effect in this ad is A+, and A+ can't be beat so that's how we're gonna send this SSB-happy edition of Skyline Inspections on home.

* * *

Wait, no! It's Philly Skyline tradition to at least roll out one of our own Philly Skylines for equal parts critique. So here it is, the rooftop view from PSHQ, cold cold cold. Brrr.



–B Love




12 January 09: Into the wild



I've hiked on the Appalachian Trail before. I've hiked in the snow before. I've underestimated the mileage between two drop points before. But I've never done a combination of the above, nor with an inch of solid ice underneath for good measure.

Knowing a nice 10-12 miler was planned on the AT in the Delaware Water Gap for Saturday, I watched the weather forecast like a five year old watches for Santa. "Winter storm warning for Monroe County . . ." SWEET.

The trip from Fishtown to Delaware Water Gap looked like a war zone, with the carnage of war waged by maniacal drivers and their unlucky collateral damage on the sides of 95, 76 and the Northeast Extension -- upside down pickup trucks, SUVs spun back to face oncoming traffic, cars with their front bumpers missing. (How can you drive that fast in that weather? Idiots.) It took a little longer than usual to get to the Water Gap, but after dropping the first car at Wind Gap, we anchored the second at the pull-off spot in Delaware Water Gap on Waring Street, named for the bandleader Fred Waring (Tyrone PA reprazent!), whose music publishing company for decades inhabited the Castle Inn, the last building you see in DWG before leaving civilization onto the AT.

I'll tell ya, though, that for all the scenery cut out from the mountains over millions of years by the same river that a hundred-some miles downstream caused reason for the city we call home, it takes a while to escape that civilization. Interstate 80 treads the gorge the Delaware River forms through the Kittatinny Mountain range, curving with the river below the 1400' inclines on either side, sending its echoing yowl high over the mountaintops. The resonant whir of the anonymous traffic lingers for at least the first two and a half miles south in Pennsylvania's AT, before the Indian drums of the cars passing over the joints on I-80 bridge (over which the pedestrian AT passes) hush to a welcome silence. Funny, then, that the noisy sound of traffic would never be as welcome as it would at the end of the same day.

As soon as I-80 was out of range, the winter storm warning started delivering on a steady, dry snow powder after a night of freezing rain. Surely this fresh gnar was welcomed with great joy at the ten Poconos ski resorts within two hours' drive. Here on the Trail, the powder prettied up the pines, laurels and dry brown deciduous trees that already bent over from the weight. The ice on the trees made the Trail more a Tunnel in some parts, where the ice on the rocks below made for a fragmented dancefloor.

What could have seemed treacherous was at least softened by the snow cover; the problem there was that the really rocky portions of the Trail, the rock outcrops and formations, are marked by blazes on the rocks themselves. Can't see blazes when they're covered by ice and snow; even the ones on the trees (like the one at right) were camouflaged from the snow. But these were all fun obstacles in the wintry wonderland, little molehills compared to the mountain that came to the mountain: darkness.

You ever been in the woods after dark? Having the hike mapped out in advance, I didn't anticipate any need for a headlamp or flashlight, so none was packed. In all my years of hiking, I've ended up in the woods exactly once after dark, and that was on an un-blazed trail back near Shippensburg. I was just proud as a peacock for being so prepared as to have waterproof gear for sliding down snowy hills without a sled and staying dry through miles of virgin snow; I was less proud of the preparation that estimated those miles at 12 when they were closer to 16, and for estimating six hours that were closer to nine.

When you're in the woods, the world moves at your pace; it's really up to you how fast you go on foot and how fast you go in mind. There's a lot to think about; there's nothing to think about. There are songs that get stuck in your head; they're blown away on a breeze, or on the sound of a passing jet. When those get to be too much, you measure your breathing with your steps; in-in, out-out, in-in, out-out.

When it gets dark, really dark, and you're unsure how close you are to your destination, those fleeting thoughts disappear and The Fear starts to wrestle with your reason. "Aw shucks" becomes "Ohh Fuck", camaraderie becomes every man for himself, and little aches from the day become steady pains to the end. The end keeps you going; the words "grueling" and "cruel" and "brutal" flash through your mind like a dream sequence. In the snow, "hypothermia" and "rescue efforts" join them. But without the snow, the darkness is all dark, all black; thank god for the snow.

A well planned day-hike usually ends with the sound of cars passing the parking area you started at, growing louder until you reach it, satisfied and ready to kick back in a comfortable chair with a cold beer. On Saturday, thanks to the Appalachian Trail's orientation on a ridge above PA Route 512 between Wind Gap, Pen Argyl and Bangor, the sound of cars passing accompanied the darkness for at least two and a half hours, dragging the torture out that much farther away from what should have been familiar. When the street lights of Wind Gap at last graciously drew near, there was still the final, steep descent out of the woods to contend with. At this point, two and a half hours into the darkness, there were no blazes on the trees nor icy rocks under foot; there was only down. Where I could, I hit the snow covered turf and rode my butt as far as it would take me or until a rock or tree said to stop. Thank god for the snow.

At the bottom of the mountain, out of the woods, stood the car my boys and I were aiming for, the car with the heat and the gas to get us home. Next to it was the road with the passing cars whose resonant whir was the most melodic thing I'd heard all day.

And when we all sat in our comfortable chairs with our cold beers, we all laughed at how we'd cursed the mountain, how we wondered who the bear would get first, and how we'd remember this hike for a long time -- especially when it's time to plan the next one.



–B Love


9 January 09: Poe boy blues

Howdy friends, just thought I'd take a minute to remind everyone that one full week has passed in 2009, and time's a-wasting to buy a current Philly Skyline, The Calendar: 2009. Betsy Ross, Charlie Manuel and Ed Rendell have all already celebrated birthdays, but if you act quickly, you'll make it in time to celebrate Ben Franklin's birthday, and perhaps more importantly this year, Edgar Allan Poe's.

Poe's spirit turns a spry 200 on Monday, January 19th (which is also George Bush's last day in office, so we'll already be celebrating). Leading up to the Poe Bicentennial, pipe-smoking local scholar Ed Pettit has led the charge in the Poe War -- the war of who Poe 'belongs to', or if nothing else, who he identifies most with. Everyone knows that Poe is buried in Baltimore; their football team is named for Poe's most famous poem, after all. (Assuming they beat the Titans this weekend, and they will, it's a shame that the Ravens will lose to the Steelers in the AFC Championship the day before Poe's 200th birthday. Tragic, really.)

Some of Poe's other home cities -- Boston, New York and Richmond -- have weighed in on the issue as well. The Poe War, which has raged in the pages of City Paper, the Baltimore Sun, the New York Times and elsewhere, takes physical form this Tuesday at the Central Library with the Great Poe Debate. Pettit, Baltimore's Jeff Jerome (curator of the Poe House and Museum in that city) and Boston's Paul Lewis (who's written books and essays on gothic fiction, dark humor and American literature) take the stage at 7:30 for the debate to be moderated by Grover Silcox, who himself has performed a one-man show called Edgar Allan Poe and the Flip Side of Comedy.

Meanwhile, you might have noticed our Poe House at 7th & Spring Garden has been closed for the past month. That's because they've been sprucing the place up and preparing new exhibits for the Bicentennial. The official reopening is next Saturday, January 17, at 2pm. The night prior, the Friends of Poe is hosting its official Poe 200th birthday party just down the block at the German Society. The Park Service has a whole series of events planned for 2009 for Poe, details HERE.

If it hasn't been obvious, Philly Skyline's favorite Poe piece is Morning on the Wissahiccon, an essay accounting the physical beauty of the Wissahickon written in 1843 and published in 1844. In it, he not only celebrates the stream and valley that is our beloved modern park, but he criticizes the industry that had taken to its banks and the tourists who visited it but stayed on the beaten path, while romanticizing a time past:
[T]he "good old days" when the Demon of the Engine was not, when picnics were undreamed of, when "water privileges" were neither bought nor sold, and when the red man trod alone, with the elk, upon the ridges that now towered above."
Edgar Allan Poe, def poet.

–B Love




8 January 09: Frankford Alive, the photo essay



Every time I see the Globe Dye Works sign, I get the song "The Globe" by Big Audio Dynamite stuck in my head. It is without question the most popular/catchy Clash-affiliated post-Clash song, and it samples one of that band's most popular/catchy songs to boot. In the video, Mick Jones' late 80s/early 90s band performs on a rooftop with a round neon sign, not unlike the one on top of the Globe Dye Works building. That sign is being restored, and you can see its progress in this photo essay from a morning in Frankford. Soon enough, you'll see it glowing red again over Amtrak, Septa and I-95.

I've always been curious about Frankford. As Nathaniel Popkin mentioned in his essay yesterday, it's one of the oldest parts of the city, but it didn't have the early breadth and buildup that other First Suburbs like Southwark and the Northern Liberties did. Its heyday, I think it's fair to say, was in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The El was built to it.

From the El and from the ground, it can indeed feel like that heyday was a century ago. You always hear how Frankford's not the same, that it's dangerous; seeing it on the news for the wrong reasons certainly doesn't help.

But it's still there, still breathing. People still live and work there; the El still goes to it.

Nathaniel's passing mention of the two warrant officers pounding on a door with barking dogs in the back yard was not fiction. That's one of the first things we encountered after meeting under the Church Street station. Still, it didn't hang anything weird and uneasy over our walking tour, which was better spent taking note of colonialesque homes and the sturdy old bones of the workshop of the world, still on display if you choose to search it out. Matt Pappajohn and his friends have, and what they have made for themselves in Frankford is incredible. I'm sure there are others like them; I'm further sure that there are longtime residents of the neighborhood who do still take pride in Frankford, who prefer to associate it with the avenue once traveled by William Penn and George Washington, with the El that rides above it, with the one time NFL champion Yellow Jackets (the almost, but not quite, ancestor to the Eagles), with the day to day life that quietly goes on there than with the pushers, prostitutes and death that scream for attention, and sadly, get it.

A lot of people might not realize it, but Frankford is breathing, and the 185 trains that pass both directions every day under Market Street in Center City all end up at or start out in Frankford, every single one of them.

This particular set of photos was from a morning walk; I know it doesn't represent the entire neighborhood of Frankford, which can loosely be defined as the Frankford/Torresdale/Kensington crossroads to the Frankford Transportation Center, and Roosevelt Boulevard to the Amtrak railroad line. These photos were taken east of Frankford Ave and the El to Torresdale Ave/Worth Street, between Church Street and the El Terminal. There are dedicated stops at the Riehl Mill complex with Matt Pappajohn and his woodworking company, and at Globe Dye Works, where he and his partners are developing a fantastic work/live space.

GO TO PHOTOS.

–B Love


7 January 09: The Possible City
Slow Moving, City Alive
Slow, Moving City, Alive
Slow Moving City, Alive



by Nathaniel Popkin
January 7, 2009

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.

* * *



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.

* * *

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."

–Nathaniel Popkin

nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com

For more on The Possible City, please see HERE.
For Nathaniel Popkin archives, please see HERE, or visit his web site HERE.



ED. NOTE:
A companion photo essay to this written essay will be posted momentarily.


6 January 09: Palomar's a pal o' mine



A hoy hoy, old chums, and pardon the tardin' this week. I've got more things open on my desktop right now than my RAM (and perhaps my brain) can handle.

This here is a look at the ongoing conversion of the former Architects Building into the Hotel Palomar, the first of three planned hotels by Kimpton in Philadelphia. While the other two are seemingly dependent upon a healthy economy, this one is in full swing.

The 24 story, 313' building was designed, appropriately, by a committee of architects to serve the architecture community of 1929. It opened in 1931 and was most recently known for the AIA Bookstore, which moved last year to 1218 Arch Street. That space will be a restaurant upon the new hotel's opening.

Interior designers Floss Barber occupied the 24th floor penthouse before relocating to the Academy House. Kimpton is turning that space into a hotel ballroom, restoring the ceiling's original molding. Kimpton hasn't confirmed it, but rumors say the ballroom includes a new stairway and terrace where the 245' communication tower was recently dismantled.

Design of the renovation and new rooms, restaurant and ballroom is being handled by LA's Dayna Lee, who also did the Bridge cinema in West Philly. The 234 room hotel, allegedly Philadelphia's first boutique, is expected to open by the end of this year.

Kimpton's two other plans for Philadelphia may have to wait a while. Inga's first blog post of the new year reports that ARCWheeler postponed closing on the real estate transaction that would pave the way for the renovation of the Boyd Theatre and see the construction of a new 28 story, curving Hotel Monaco designed by Martinez & Johnson. It wouldn't be Wheeler and Kimpton's first collaboration -- their Hotel Monaco Baltimore, in the former headquarters of the B&O Railroad, opens on May 19 of this year.

Over at 17th & Arch, the wonderfully gothic 14 story former Robert Morris Hotel, designed by longtime Philadelphia firm Ballinger in 1914, is tentatively lined up for a hotel rebirth after years as an office building (and Wawa). The building, directly across the street from Comcast Center, was purchased by 801 Capital. The hotel detail will come from Agoos-Lovera. There is no recent news on this project, but AD Amorosi reported in November for the City Paper that it would be called Hotel Flacon.

And that's news you can use!

FILE PHOTO: a/k/a comcast_uc1722.jpg, July 2007.

–B Love


1-2 January 09: Calendar Companion:
Liftoff



Ed. note: I began writing this long before USC's dismantling of Penn State yesterday, so the narrative is that of New Year's Day.

By the way, did everyone catch the PECO Building's countdown on Wednesday night? It made its normal announcements right up to 11:59, flashed that time, 11:59, then counted it down with changing (as opposed to scrolling) numbers: 10. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1. POOF. Before you could even wonder if they'd flash anything else -- "BYE!", "SEE YOU IN JULY", "PECO RULES" -- fireworks across all horizons took your attention.

* * *

Greetings, salutations and a happy happy new year, yo. That scent all up in yr nose is two and a half pounds of pork, with a bag of sauerkraut and a bottle of Straub's, sprinkled with some caraway and celery seed and a couple granny smith apples, wedged. Slow cook on high for four hours, on low for two more, then serve over mashed potatoes with an ice cold Straub lager.

This here is the first ever Philly Skyline, The Calendar companion piece -- a companion for our favorite people in the world, that is: our customers! On this first day of the new year, as the comics, fancies and string bands strut up Broad Street, we're gonna hang a little lower south with the Mummers Parade's sponsor, Southwest Airlines, and all their friends down at Philadelphia International Airport.

JANUARY 2009: PHL.

This month's photo finds us at the airport's US Airways core. The sunset view looks out across the facelift applied to Terminals B & C in 1998 by DPK&A Architects. The $140 improvement project consolidated curb, ticketing, check-in and baggage facilities for US Airways, and connected the two terminals via the Philadelphia Marketplace. The 207' ramp control tower just behind it, designed by Pierce Goodwin Alexander & Linville, was completed in 2002.

Though the glassy Terminal B/C façade is indeed emblematic of the growth the airport has made in the past decade -- growth that also includes new terminals altogether for international flights (Terminal A-West) and regional/commuter options (Terminal F) and the addition of Southwest Airlines -- it's really just an updated look for the original International Airport Terminal. While its interior has modernized with all the technology it serves, the view of the same building from the runway looks comparatively similar to its opening in 1953.



Pardon a brief Philly Skyline vs Penny Postcards interlude. In this postcard, published in 1963 by Art Color Card Distributors of Camden, we see the Air Terminal Building, designed by Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen (whose Youth Study Center is under demolition now to make way to the impending move of the Barnes Foundation to the Parkway; they also collaborated on the State Office Building and Byrne-Green Federal Courthouse, among other government and institutional contracts during their run from 1946-1973). I do aim for the highest accuracy in these postcard comparisons, but as you can imagine, doing so at a security restricted facility like the airport is impossible, so they're as close as they can be. For a Philly Skyline vs Penny Postcard before-and-after comparison of the Philadelphia International Airport Terminal, please click
HERE.

* * *

At the turn of the 20th century, there was no Philadelphia Airport, international, municipal or otherwise. The southernmost tip of the city was little else but marsh, mosquitoes, and muddy islands. One of these, Mud Island, was the site of Fort Mifflin, the quiet-but-active military post on the riverbank that kept guard for Philadelphia during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. After President Woodrow Wilson won re-election in 1916 on the "he kept us out of war" slogan, he spent early 1917 building support for war against Germany, and in April of that year Congress declared it. In order to bolster the United States naval artillery, which was outmatched for war in the European theater, Wilson's administration formed an Emergency Fleet Corporation and assigned outposts in three parts of the country to build shipyards and ships, and fast. One of these was at Hog Island, the muddy, marshy island next to Fort Mifflin. Though it promised to create thousands of permanent jobs and make Philadelphia the preeminent shipyard in the world, it was ultimately a failure thanks to haphazard management by the shadowy "American International Corporation", which won the Philly contract. The first ship didn't roll out to sea until after the war had ended, and when Hog Island closed four years later, it had fallen far short of Wilson's goal of "at least 200" ships. Chris Dougherty wrote a great two-part essay on Hog Island with archival photos for Philly History HERE and HERE, and followed it up with a contextual essay with his own contemporary photos HERE.

In 1925, the city donated a 125 acres adjacent to Hog Island to the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, Philadelphia's first official foray into air travel. The land was in use by the Aero Service Company, a small company whose primary operation was transporting wealthy weekend passengers. One of their pilots, an English-born, Canadian WWI veteran named Victor Dallin, suggested they add photography to their repertoire. They did, but Dallin saw opportunity and left Aero to form his own company, the Dallin Aerial Survey Company, in Clementon NJ. In 1926, as Philadelphia's airport was establishing itself, he moved the company there, where it would watch -- and document -- its growth with a firsthand, bird's eye view.


1929: airfield to airport. Note the piers of the short-lived Hog Island Shipyard on the far left. The city would purchase the derelict facility in 1930 for expansion of the airport.

The Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington obtained a collection of the Dallin Aerial Survey Company's work, 23,000 prints and 13,000 glass plate negatives deep. Over 6,000 of these images are hosted in a permanent online exhibit titled A Bird's Eye View of the Delaware Valley; the amount of work that went into producing it (scanning, editing and resizing photos; building a database and web pages) is mind blowing. The collection has thousands of aerial photos of Philadelphia from 1924 to 1941, and thousands more of other regional places and events like the 1939 World's Fair in New York and the arrival of the Hindenburg.

It also has the earliest history of the Philadelphia airport on record, from the little Aero Services airfield to the construction of the first administrative building, which served as a provisional terminal until a proper one was commissioned a decade later. After its completion, Dallin sold an aerial image of it in its airport context to Lynn H Boyer, a postcard maker whose name we've seen a few times on Philly Skyline. Boyer's white-border linen postcard of Philadelphia Municipal Airport was one of the most circulated Philly cards of the 1940s.



About that name, Philadelphia Municipal Airport. Though it was not formally dedicated as such until 1940, when the administrative building opened and the four operating airlines (American, Eastern, TWA, and United) officially moved from Camden to Philadelphia, it was informally called that from its earliest days, including in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of Saint Louis there on a post-transatlantic tour. The next-to-last stop on a three-month tour of all 48 states, Lindbergh was received by thousands at Municipal Stadium. (Again, Dallin Aerial Survey Company.) While he was here, he raised an American flag in salute to the Philadelphia Municipal Airport. Lindbergh Avenue, one of Southwest Philadelphia's primary arteries, was named in his honor; it runs from Bartram's Garden, past the new USPS facility, to the John Heinz Wildlife Refuge, where it peters out less than a mile from the airport.

Philadelphia Municipal Airport became Philadelphia International Airport in 1945, when the first American Overseas Airlines flight departed for Europe. In post-WWII America, air travel was more within reach than ever, and to accommodate, the city commissioned a $15M new terminal building. Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen's landmark began construction in 1950 and opened on December 15, 1953. The count after the first year as Municipal, 1940, totaled 40,000 passengers through the airport. The 1953 terminal was built to support one million passengers per year. The future was here.

That facility's 350,000 sq ft of floor space accounts for less than 15% of Philadelphia International Airport's current 2.4 million sq ft. In the 55 years since then, a sampling of Philadelphia International Airport benchmarks looks something like . . .
• December 1972: added a 10,500' all-weather runway and high-speed taxiway
• April 1973: opening of the Overseas Terminal, the first dedicated international terminal
• Spring 1977: initiated a $300M improvement project that saw the construction of four separate terminals (now B/C/D/E) and two parking garages
• December 1981: dedicated new $6.5M FAA air traffic control tower
• April 1985: Septa's R1 service begins to and from Center City
• December 1985: I-95 is finally completed through Philadelphia, its last four-mile segment being that around the airport
• March 1991: Terminal A opens; parking garages expanded
• Summer 1995: 419-room Philadelphia Airport Marriott, the only hotel on airport property, opens
• June 1998: Terminal B/C reopens, connected by the Philadelphia Marketplace and new people movers
• December 1999: new 5,000' runway for regional flights opens
• June 2001: Terminal F, designed by the Sheward Partnership, opens; parking garages expanded
• May 2003: Terminal A-West, designed by Kohn Pederson Fox, opens
• May 2004: Southwest Airlines begins service, an enormous boost to low fare travel options
. . . and so on.

The airport's 2006 tally saw over 31.7 million passengers, making it one of the world's busiest airports. Much like the "world's tallest buildings" are measured variously by roof height, architectural height (e.g. spires), structural height (e.g. antennas) and highest occupiable floor, the "world's busiest airports" are ranked by passenger traffic, landings and takeoffs, and cargo movement. That in mind, the Airports Council International reports this 31.7M passengers figure to be 28th most in the world. According to the likes of the FAA, Wikipedia, About.com, airport fan sites, and PHL's own web site, Philadelphia International is 9th busiest, 10th busiest, 12th busiest, 15th busiest, and/or 30th busiest. Take your pick.

PHL also claims two of the more dubious distinctions an airport might have. It's the largest airport in the world without an in-ground fueling system, so all planes are loaded by fuel trucks which can clog up the runways and lead to delays. And, it's the largest airport in the US without direct flights to Asia. US Airways announced two years ago that it would begin nonstop flights to Beijing in March of this year, but it recently asked the FAA to postpone that service to 2010.

When that finally happens, it will be another date added to the benchmark list above. Others will be notched along the way, as the airport refines and moves toward its master plan. I word it that way because the master plan is not clearly defined and has multiple objectives. There is the Capacity Enhancement Program, specifically to deal with the reduction of delays. There is the Runway 17-35 Extension project, which will lengthen the north-south (main) runway by over 1,000 feet. There are multiple renovations planned, including an ongoing one at Terminals D & E. There's even an environmental stewardship program committed to protecting wildlife at the nearby Heinz Refuge, conserving energy, promoting sustainability, and reducing emissions and noise among a list of other things.

How well these things play out is anyone's guess, but for an airport with a Philly reputation, and an industry with one of the worst impacts on the environment, they're a start. Let's see if they can toss a Starbucks into the Marketplace as part of the improvement.

* * *

Philly Skyline, The Calendar: January 2009. Philadelphia International Airport.



NOTES & SOURCES:
• "International Airport" postcard published by Art Color Card Distributors, Camden NJ. Postmarked, 1 October 1964. Text on the back of the postcard reads:
Completed in 1954 [sic], at a cost of over $15,000,000. The AIR TERMINAL BUILDING is one of the largest and most modern in the word, with over 350,000 square feet of floor space.
• Contemporary photo taken by B Love, 22 October 2008 (en route to Tampa Bay to watch the Phillies' first World Series game in 15 years).

• "Philadelphia Municipal Airport" postcard published by Lynn H Boyer, Philadelphia PA and Wildwood NJ. Postcard not mailed.

* * *

PHL.org: History of Philadelphia International Airport
PHL.org: airport master plan
PHL.org: environmental stewardship plan
Phila.gov: City Department of Commerce, Aviation Division
PAB: Philadelphia International Airport Terminal (Carroll, Grisdale & Van Alen building)
Dallin Aerial Survey Exhibit: search results for 'Philadelphia Airport'
Workshop of the World: Philadelphia Airport
Library of Congress: photos of TWA hangar construction, 1956
American Association of Airport Executives: 2009 conference to be held at PHL
Phillyroads.com: historical overview of I-95
CDoc: "From Shipways to Runways: the Transformation of Hog Island"
CDoc: "The Making of 'From Shipways to Runways: the Transformation of Hog Island'"
Airliners.net: photos of PHL and aircraft from the largest aviation internet fan site
Wikipedia: Philadelphia International Airport


2009 is here . . . let's do this.

–B Love










LINKS | ABOUT | CONTACT | FAQ | PRESS | LEGAL