25 July 08: Happy trail



"I had no prior knowledge that the city was going to match funding," Center City District president Paul Levy says of Mayor Nutter's announcement regarding his organization's proposed bike trail along the Delaware Riverfront at the well attended, well covered June 26 Penn Praxis roll-out of the 10 point, 10 year plan. "It was a delightful surprise."

It's especially delightful because this has been such a long time coming for Levy personally. Before Mayor Nutter's announcement that the city would match the funding CCD and the William Penn Foundation have raised, before Mayor Street's executive order for a central Delaware Riverfront master plan, even before all of the failed plans to extensively develop Penn's Landing, a younger Levy was riding his bike along the Delaware -- Expressway.

When I-95 cut its path of destruction/construction through Philadelphia in the 1970s, Levy was living in Queen Village. Before the sound barriers (which he lobbied for) were added, people could carry their bikes down the embankment to the unopened highway and ride unimpeded by traffic (let alone that going 80 mph) from Old City to South Philly, about where the Walt Whitman Bridge is now. When 95 opened, that obviously went away, and Delaware Avenue was even less attractive to cyclists than it is now.

Delaware Avenue ("Columbus Boulevard" if you're Italian) now has "bike lanes". They're there, like they are city on streets where they work better, for instance Spring Garden and the Parkway, but Delaware Ave's bike lanes are treacherous. They cross hundreds of drainage grates (which are horrible for street bike tires and unpleasant to cross), they're always interrupted by double parked vehicles at the Comfort Inn, Piers 3 & 5, Dave & Buster's and the like, and oh yeah, there's traffic whizzing by like it's a highway.

Believe it or not, it is a highway. Though it carries no state route number, Delaware Avenue falls under PennDOT's jurisdiction as a state highway, primarily for redundancy for I-95 in case of emergency (or cracked support column). It's for that reason that PennDOT has rejected the sacrifice of a single lane of traffic for construction of the bike trail. That rejection forced a little more creativity onto the trail plan.

Fortunately, a good bit of the earliest of the early action plan -- from the lower end of Pier 70 (Wal-Mart, Home Depot) to Penn's Landing -- is close enough to the river that it doesn't need to rely on Delaware Ave, and where it does, the sidewalks are both wide and relatively little used.

The illustration at right, commissioned by CCD to Wallace Roberts Todd, shows one possibility at the foot of Christian Street where the former municipal piers 38 and 40 are now storage. (Tugboat Annie's breakfast shack would be just to the right of the purple bar.) Take note of the yellow cones. Those, along with used jersey barriers and old shipping/trucking containers (for bike rentals), are part of a genuine green initiative (they're all recycled), as though a new bicycle trail in and of itself is not a green initiative. CCD's full conceptual presentation is archived as a PDF on Plan Philly HERE, first published there in Isaac Steinberg's story HERE.

South of the Coast Guard station (at the foot of Washington Ave), the bike trail would utilize the edge of three large parcels -- the Sheet Metal Workers Local 19, the Pier 70 shopping complex, and between them? Foxwoods.

"As planned, the casinos do not fit the vision of the Central Riverfront," Penn Praxis director Harris Steinberg told his audience in June. Mayor Nutter echoed that sentiment, much to the delight of a large part of the audience (but not all of it). Foxwoods, which just laid off over 100 workers at its Connecticut casino, has no obligation to play nice right now. On the other hand, if Foxwoods truly believes it will build in South Philly, it should do what it can to get in good graces with The Other Side by granting use of its riverfront land (which it plans on keeping public and accessible anyway) for a bike trail that, if the Schuylkill is any indication, would be an instant success.

Foxwoods, Pier 70 and the Sheet Metal Workers (whose land wraps behind the Comcast customer service center) would all have to grant easement to the city and deal with liability issues. But those are things that can happen.

"When we met," Levy says of a meeting between CCD, WRT and these land owners, "we had a conceptual agreement." (I.e., they were open to the idea but no papers were signed.) "But we're technically on hold now, yes."


Tales from the Dockside: Paul Levy looks off into the future -- "six to nine months" -- toward a bona fide bike trail on Delaware Avenue.

At the Delaware Ave side of the South Street pedestrian bridge over I-95, Levy points up the river toward the Ben Franklin Bridge. His bike trail would have direct access to the hike/bike part of the bridge via a trail spur along Race and Florist Streets, directly to the bridge's pedestrian entrance; on the other side of the bridge, it would connect to Camden's riverfront trail, which already exists and which takes the rider from the BFB all the way to the Battleship New Jersey. Then he points further up the river toward Girard & Susquehanna. It's here that one of three of the bike containers would be stationed for rentals, the others being at the soon-to-be-renovated Pier 11 and at Pier 70.

Just past William King's iconic 1995 sculpture Stroll, where South Street meets Delaware Avenue via a steep staircase into a parking lot, Levy tells of another creative vision, this one out of a planning studio he held in 2003 with Penn students. It sees the enormous parking lot there at South Street transformed -- while making for even more parking. The students foresaw a long, narrow parking garage with room for more cars, but more importantly with retail along Delaware Avenue, opposite the area between Chart House restaurant and Dockside Apartments. And on the river side -- nay, in the river -- they foresaw what might be the best tribute to the river yet, an aquatic park with swimming and other water activities.

It sounds pretty amazing. But for the time being, we'll all settle for a bike trail.

–B Love



SUMMER OF THE DELAWARE ARCHIVES:

• 18 July 08: Seeking the source
• 14 July 08: All this is mine
• 27 June 08: Welcome to the Summer of the Delaware

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