Philadelphia spent the last decade working out a single,
knotty planning problem: How should the old industrial spaces on the Delaware
waterfront evolve? The consensus was that vacant land would be developed to
resemble the rest of the city, with walkable streets, a mix of uses, and lively
ground floors. No one was naive enough to think such projects could be realized
without parking garages, but the expectation was that the structures would not
dominate the river.
It's a shame the conversation was never extended to the
city's other riverfront, the Schuylkill, which has come alive since a trail
park pushed into Center City.
Like the Delaware, the Schuylkill is dotted with tracts of
empty land crying out for housing, offices, and retail. But while little new
has been built on the city's big river - save for the suburban-style SugarHouse
Casino - the Schuylkill is now sizzling with likely projects.
Predictably, each of the three proposals would front the
river with a large, unsightly garage. They range from One Riverside's modest,
one-story garage at Locust Street to NP International's multilevel,
mega-development at Cherry Street. If built as designed, they would turn the
bustling Schuylkill waterfront into Philadelphia's own Great Wall of Parking.
It's hard to believe the Planning Commission and Schuylkill
Development Corp. didn't see this coming, but there is still time to limit the
damage. Plans for the largest of these projects - a new research campus for
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - will be presented Tuesday at the
commission's Civic Design Review board.
The deeply flawed design includes a cluster of towers set on
a garage podium so vast, it would eventually stretch the equivalent of four
city blocks, from South Street to Christian Street, dividing the vibrant
rowhouse neighborhood on its border from the river. At 2 million square feet,
the hospital campus is a massive undertaking - bigger than Comcast's planned
Norman Foster tower, but without extensive transit to funnel in workers. What
happens on this key site will set the template for all future design on the
Schuylkill.
Civic Design Review is a recent innovation, an outgrowth of
the city's zoning overhaul, and it's meant to address the quality-of-life
issues that fall through the cracks of planning and zoning. While the board
can't mandate changes, it can use its moral authority to persuade developers
such as Children's Hospital to do the right thing for the city.
You only have to cross to the hospital district on the west
side of the Schuylkill to get a scary preview of what's in store for the
neighborhood if the current design goes ahead unchanged. The district has
devolved into a Dallas-style tangle of vanity buildings, separated by driveways
and garages. Occasional green spaces exist, purely for decoration, it seems.
Children's Hospital seems intent on replicating these
conditions on the east bank, even while it insists that it is doing something
innovative. The east campus - designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli; Ballinger; and
Cooper Robertson & Partners - is meant to have a cool vibe to help lure top
researchers. But what's cool about a bland, 375-foot-tall, glass tower on a
fortified garage podium?
The design does include several promising features,
including an elevated promenade overlooking the river and a small plaza off the
South Street bridge at the entrance to the first office tower. Lavish
landscaping is proposed for the neighborhood side, along Schuylkill Avenue.
How friendly will these three public spaces be? It's hard to
say because Children's Hospital hasn't shared detailed renderings during the 18
months of "outreach" meetings with neighborhood residents. The new
campus is a complex undertaking, comprising multiple levels that step down from
the South Street bridge to the riverbank. Despite the absence of an
architectural model to help residents visualize how the parts fit together,
hospital officials pat themselves on the back for their transparency.
Yet, because of the lack of street-level views of the
project, officials from the local civic group, the South of South Street
Neighborhood Association, say they only just learned that the garage facing the
rowhouses on 27th Street and Schuylkill Avenue will form a solid blank wall, 17
to 38 feet high. No amount of lavish landscaping can put lipstick on this pig.
There are, however, tried-and-true architectural solutions.
Both the civic association and the Design Advocacy Group, a nonprofit that
champions good development, want the hospital to wrap the garage along
Schuylkill Avenue with rowhouses or storefronts - much like the camouflage
created for the Edgewater Apartments' garage, located a few blocks upriver from
the hospital site, at Arch Street. Such mixed use would help integrate the
enormous office complex into the domestic scale of the rowhouse neighborhood.
Children's Hospital, like all of Philadelphia's medical
institutions, is a major force in the local economy. But that doesn't mean the
city should overlook the problems with the hospital's overall design. You can
see the impact the garage will have on the river simply by walking the
Schuylkill trail past existing garages at Walnut, Chestnut and Market Streets.
Even though a rail line parallels the river, the Schuylkill's east bank is the
only one of the city's three riverbanks not blocked by a highway.
Children's Hospital, which requires only one zoning variance
for the project, says it wants to break ground in June - a fast turnaround for
the city's permitting agencies.
The city needs to send Children's Hospital back to the
drawing board. What happens now on the river, stays on the river forever.
Source: Philly.com
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