Back in June, I bid farewell to my beloved G-Ho, South Street and surrounds, specifically Fitler Square and its great neighbors like Doobies and the fancy farmgirl and the man behind the coolest building in the neighborhood, Ed Bronstein. Ed's home is a corrugated metal structure of color and angles that could only be the product of a seasoned architect who knew how to work his stodgy neighborhood association. (For proof of this stodginess, walk around the corner and look at the utter shit that was built on the north side of the 2400 block of South Street -- it's used as an example of what NOT to do (page 29) in the Center City Residents Association's neighborhood master plan.) But that's just the outside.

The inside features airy ceilings, a metal walkway, and an upstairs living space which leads outside to a deck which leads back downstairs to his idyllic, multi-leveled backyard with a fountain and frogs and birds and, at least occasionally, a black snake or two. It's also sort of the stamp that Ed gave himself to say, "okay, I've done what I'm going to do with architecture, now I'm going to try something different."

It's not that he retired from architecture, it's that he's non-practicing. His work lives on in Chicago and San Francisco and here, in AIA's Philadelphia offices and Frog Commissary and private homes and and the Greene Towne School, which Inga Saffron described as "one of the most artful and inventive new buildings to show up in Center City in the last few years." He's also been an adjunct professor of Interior Design and Architecture at Drexel since 1983.

In 1989, his focus shifted. Seeing his daughter fall in love with art -- painting, especially -- Ed decided to try his hand at it and dove in head first at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Nearly twenty years later, it's what he does, his livelihood. He paints people on the street, scenes down-the-shore, traffic in intersections, emptiness in abandoned structures.

And he creates paintings of Bartram's Garden, and at Bartram's Garden, and near Bartram's Garden. These all have been going on for about seven years, and beginning tomorrow, he's sharing the results at . . . Bartram's Garden.

In June of this year, Ed was one of a cast of members (which also included Jane Steinberg and Robert Venturi) who contributed to the Art By Architects exhibit at the Garden. Now, he's doing his own thing, and it's kicking back to the Garden: 25% of proceeds go straight to Bartram's Garden.

"I love the idea of an art and garden connection," Ed says over a peculiarly aromatic cup of coffee. "Especially here, in such a nutshell of Philadelphia." That nutshell is Bartram's Garden and its surroundings: The flowers and trees and birds and bees. The oil and gas industry of the Schuylkill River. The Southwest Philly housing projects just beyond the Garden's wooden fence. The skyline view on the meadow made possible by the skyline view -- the meadow is made of a landfill, a landfill of the dirt excavated at Liberty Place in the 1980s.



Ed Bronstein's work has been shown at the Woodmere Art Museum, the Pennsylvania State Museum and several galleries across the region, and he's had residencies at Old City's Rosenfeld Gallery, and in Vermont and in Ireland. Two years ago, he appeared in American Artist magazine.

Tomorrow, his work can be seen at Bartram's Garden. If you live in Philadelphia and have never been there . . . well, you need to go. It's okay, you don't need to tell anyone you haven't been there. After all, it's been there just 270 years, and John Bartram's son Wiliam only hosted garden parties for his friends Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson . . . easy to have missed, right?

But no more: tomorrow is First Friday, and Ed's throwing a party at the Garden. Forty-three of his paintings will be on display from tomorrow until the 23rd of this month, and conveniently, the Schuylkill River Development Corporation is running Sunday cruises from Walnut Street to Bartram's Garden all month.

For more on Ed Bronstein, check out his web site HERE. For more on the show, click the graphic below.

–B Love