Will this Waterfront project stall like the rest?

With last week’s announcement of yet another Delaware River waterfront project, many residents and business owners are asking the same question — is this actually going to happen?

The current project is strikingly similar to the waterfront plans of years passed: Cover I-95 and build on top of it. Connect Old City with the waterfront. Create a more interactive Delaware River experience. (Check the photo gallery for updated plans.)

But while these waterfront plans have brought lots of hope, they failed to deliver the majestic, dynamic waterfront they’ve promised.

But the leaders involved say things will be different this time around. The current project is more feasible, they say and there’s plenty of momentum behind it.

Tom Corcoran, president of the Delaware River Waterfront Corp., didn’t mince words about how serious the organization is about seeing this project through.

“We’re determined as a board and as a staff that we don’t want this plan to be sitting on the shelf four years from now,” he said. “We’re determined to do everything we can to make sure it happens in a short time frame.”

The current plan does have some striking differences: The capping of I-95 has been scaled down. While some previous plans called for covering it from Market Street to South Street, the current plan would cover the highway for just one city block — Chestnut to Walnut. Also, previous plans called for that I-95 covering to be strong enough to support high-rise buildings, said Corcoran. The current plan calls for a public park on top.

“We’re trying to be modest but impactful by limiting the deck to one block,” said Corcoran. “And that’s exactly right block to connect to Old City.”

Another big difference from previous projects is the lack of commercial retail space in the new plan. Old plans counted on it (remember the DisneyQuest plan from the late 1990s?) Of course, plan organizers are hoping that the building of a vast, modern public space will lead to private investment in the area, but it’s not built into the most recent plan.

The big question remains: How is the city going to pay for it? Corcoran says he has a plan, although he won’t reveal cost estimates and financial details until late January — the same time that Hargreaves Associates (the city's landscape architecture and planning firm) produces its updated plan.

Harris M. Steinberg, founding executive director of PennPraxis, the applied research arm of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, acknowledges that getting federal dollars will be a challenge — especially in this strictly divided Congress.

“In this Congress, there's no common ground found on anything, let along infrastructure,” Steinberg said.

He acknowledged that a changing local political landscape could also stall the project.

“With two years left in the Nutter administration, there’s not a lot of time to put a deal together,” he said.

Another roadblock of the project is its sheer complexity. How often do you see cities cover a highway and build on top of it?

But Corcoran said there’s also more momentum this time around. Neighborhoods adjacent to the waterfront like Northern Liberties, Fishtown and others have seen an influx of young, involved people and property values have soared. Increased interest from people in those neighborhoods could give the project an added push.

The DRWC hopes to do the entire project at once, so the structures look and age consistently, but Corcoran said the organization would be open to doing portions of the project at separate times if needed.

“If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results,” said Corcoran, “we’d end up in the same place awaiting a long, agonizing, painful demise.”

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal