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6 October 06: On 13xx South Street
Have you been to 1300 South Street recently? This is like Dante's Inferno, what with the noise and pollution of construction; it's also the best and worst of
times and a terrific example of a visionless government incapable of even the least slightest effort. It suggests, too, how City Hall undermines the best interests of
the city at (almost) every step. And another thing it is: it's ghetto and gentro all at once, it's an urge to prettify and cosmopolitanize struck dumb by low-life
developers, death by parochial neighborhood groups, and a government that thinks it doesn't matter.
Well, you know the basics: a block from the Subway and truly a kind of gateway for many people to South Street and much of southeast Center City, including the historic
stuff. The fine looking 1352 Lofts, with the right instincts, scale, and ambition for the spot. Its execution, too, is really pretty good. It does itself well
despite
not being on the corner of Broad and South, which it desperately wants. The opposite corner: the Art Garden, which is haphazard in its execution. Nice use, wrong
place. But that could be mitigated and the presence of A GARDEN in such a critical corner of the city turned into an obvious asset. Nearby, a pair of twin Tel Aviv
houses, as I call them, contemporary to the core, recently completed, but with garages. I'll take those and excuse the garages mostly because they're on a side street
facing west. One or two lovely renovations. A handful of vacant lots. About a dozen of the poorest new construction row houses recently installed, with the worst
materials, garages, and most magnificent fuck you to city life one could imagine, all by themselves, for the little shits that they are obliterating any hope of making
this an actual functioning city of the 21st century. Four more of these under construction now, with ambivalent structures (could be storefronts, could be garages),
but
you get the idea.
The green lamp-posts you and I paid for are torn and tattered, some moved from their original placement to accommodate garages, the sidewalk is nearly untraversable
(though it has improved in recent years), the subway station left to dangle like some relic from the Lenni Lenapes.
Here was an urge to light the sidewalk, to improve the pedestrian *experience* being faced down by vinyl garage doors, curb cuts on a retail street: here is the
government wasting your money because it can't communicate what it knows is right. Here too is that subway station: what a stop it could be, if you think about it, and
the entire enterprise of energy and transportation policy being faced down, again, by those damn garages. How does a city, with an ailing transit system, justify
undermining that system so transparently by encouraging the use of the private automobile within a single block of a subway station? And then there's the failure of
vision altogether. Think Broad and South. Think what those two streets represent in the cultural cadence of contemporary (and historic) Philadelphia. Transfer that
intersection to a half dozen or so other cities and you get the point. Opportunity lost. Major opportunity lost. No wonder the Arts Bank, 13 years later, still looks
as forlorn as it did in 1993 or whenever it opened.
There is hope, though I believe it is slim. The site of the Arts Garden is right on the corner. Now imagine what that corner ought to be: 7-8 stories, residential,
commercial, perhaps including a multi-plex, and an expanded subway station. Here's where the garden is simply not justifiable. It does more damage to the cause of
livability than any other use there because of its location. It's like a black hole. Move Isaiah's mosaic stuff and all the carbon-eating trees somewhere else (how
about to Broad and Fitzwater which I have a feeling will never happen) and resurrect the hope of the big city. Leave it and Philadelphia remains an odd sort of always
the bridesmaid never the bride.
–Nathaniel Popkin |
POPKIN ARCHIVES:
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