Funding for a large new waterfront park at Penn’s Landing
will be tucked into Mayor Jim Kenney’s budget address this Thursday.
The mayor plans to announce a $90 million city commitment
to capping I-95 and building an 11-acre expanse of greenery between Walnut and
Chestnut streets. The project is meant to connect Center City with the
waterfront. The administration expects this public project—estimated at $225
million—to spur adjacent private investment on a far larger scale.
“We have never met our potential when it comes to
waterfront development,” said Mayor Kenney in an interview with PlanPhilly. “A
lot of it has to do with a lot of the waterfront parcels being privately owned.
But just concentrating on the central waterfront that we control, we’ve never
maximized our potential. This will go a long way in doing that.”
The 2007 Civic Vision for the Central Delaware, a process
led by PennPraxis*, was a first step toward that goal. It envisioned a new
public park at Penn’s Landing and the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation
(DRWC) fleshed out the idea in the Master Plan for the Central Delaware,
adopted by the city in 2012. An intensive public engagement process and an
initial engineering study refined the design, developed by the landscape
architecture firm Hargreaves and Associates and were released in 2014.
The $90 million that Kenney is committing to the project
will be doled out over six years. The rest of the $225 million—down from $250
million in earlier projections—is expected to come from the state and from
philanthropic donors.
The mayor expects to make an announcement naming more
specific sources soon. He describes Governor Tom Wolf and Secretary of
Transportation Leslie Richards as being deeply committed to the project.
Kenney framed the I-95 cap, and the new park sloping down
to the river, as part of his larger equity agenda. In other words, this
centrally located mega-project would be a companion to the Rebuild Initiative,
rather than a counterpoint.
“Growing up my parents would take us to the Jersey Shore
for a week,” said Kenney. “Some of these young people and families don’t have
an opportunity to leave the city at all. Their shore is the shoreline of the
Delaware River, where you can cool off a bit, buy a pretzel for your kid, and
enjoy for free what people want to do with their children.”
The city’s Director of Planning and Development, Anne
Fadullon, emphasized how much private investment they expect the project to
leverage. In 25 years after completion, she anticipates $1.6 billion in
economic return for the city and 2,400 permanent jobs.
Fadullon did not commit to an exact timeline for the
park’s construction.
“Right now, the project is in design and engineering so
it will be a little bit of time before anybody sees anything happening
specifically with the cap project,” said Fadullon. “But there’s a lot of things
happening in anticipation. To prepare for it, you’re about to see the scissor
ramps come down. There is a new elevator and stairway under construction right
now.”
The mayor emphasized that much of the underutilized land
along the Delaware riverfront is privately held. According to DRWC, only 10
percent of it is in public hands. The largest area by far is Penn’s Landing,
which extends 28 acres.
The capping and park project thus offers an opportunity
to use one of the city’s main leverage points on the waterfront. Kenney
contrasted the project with past proposals to cap all of I-95, which he
described as being unrealistically ambitious.
In recent years, there’s been more activity on the
waterfront around Penn’s Landing, in an effort to raise the area’s profile as a
public space and recast perceptions of the waterfront.
“For the last five years we’ve been working on projects
north and south of Penn’s Landing to create a sense of momentum,” said DRWC
president Tom Corcoran, citing the Spruce Street Harbor Park and the Race
Street Pier as examples.
Kenney used his commitment to the park at Penn’s Landing
to critique the highway construction and urban renewal policies of the mid-20th
century. The mayor said that if he could have controlled those investments, he
would have spent most of the public money used to expand the federal highway
system on mass transit instead.
“I grew up in a neighborhood where literally thousands of
homes were taken to build I-95,” said Kenney.
“Thousands of families displaced and houses torn down. It was a very traumatic experience. We lost a
whole segment of our history that we’ll never get back, for a superstructure
that will never go away. It’s time to mitigate that intrusion and to cap it.”
95I
Source: Plan
Philly
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