Hot development is leaving streets a mess in some
neighborhoods as the city struggles to keep up with the work.
At the corner of 4th and Brown Streets, an orchestra of
hammers, nail guns and power saws commands the air as contractors ready a trio
of four-story, 3,750-square-foot rowhomes for sale.
The same overture can be heard all around Northern
Liberties, but this music of progress is often disrupted by another set of
noises: the thump of wheels dropping into ditches, undercarriages scraping on
asphalt and the cries of frustrated neighbors.
"It's almost like we're building up the neighborhood
and we're kind of destroying it at the same time," said resident Sal
Acerba.
Standing near a series of poorly-maintained construction
ditches, the 48-year-old graphics company vice president is fed up with the
state of the streets in his neighborhood.
"It's a safety issue. Everyone rides a bike around
here. I can see someone landing headfirst into one of these holes," Acerba
said. "And my car ... I already replaced two tires."
A byproduct of the continually accelerating development
boom, contractors and utilities cut into the streets to run water, sewer and
other lines — buried several feet under the surface — into new homes rising
nearby.
The rectangular ditches are meant to be temporary, but
often hang around for months and are not properly repaired by workers,
neighbors complain. Add other street defects like sinkholes and potholes and
the streets more closely resemble a minefield than a thoroughfare.
"I'll drive by and I'll say 'Oh they filled that in'
and then in a week or two, it's bigger than it was," the man said.
NBC10 found 10 ditches miring streets in a one city block
area between 4th and 5th Streets, Brown Street and Fairmount Avenue. Two of the
largest partially-filled holes could be found on the 400 block of Olive Street,
which cuts through the center of the block.
"The roads all over this neighborhood are
treacherous," said Nancy Nagle before driving her silver Hyundai sedan
onto the curb to avoid a ditch nearly the width of the street.
"I just moved my business from South Street over to
Liberties Walk hoping that people would be able to get to it and people aren't
able to get to it because there's so much construction, there's so many holes,"
she said. "It's a challenge for people to navigate this little area."
Nagle and her neighbors aren't suffering alone. The
Philadelphia Streets Department estimates there are roughly 1,700 open ditches
across the city.
Source: NBC10.com
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