Find the Pony

Crash Landing: Plans have come and plans have gone. One architect says next time, remember the river. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Big box malls are not the answer to the eternal Penn’s Landing question.

by Harris M. Steinberg

There is an old story about a boy bounding downstairs on Christmas morning only to find the living room brimming over with horse manure. Undaunted, the boy exclaimed, “There must be a pony!” Wrapped within an unfailing youthful optimism, the boy could only see something good in what was an otherwise dire situation. If only we could be so sanguine about that twisted high-speed car crash on the Delaware that we call Penn’s Landing. For I believe that buried deep within the detritus of might-have-been projects, there must be a pony.

The Delaware River defined Philadelphia for most of the past 300-plus years. As a major mercantile and immigration port of entry, goods, people and ideas flowed freely to and from our shores -- quickly establishing Philadelphia as the premier city in the colonies. Indeed, the Philadelphia waterfront remained a bustling economic and social engine well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries as Philadelphia grew to become an industrial powerhouse.

Forces of urban renewal swept Center City clean of its industrial past in the mid-20th century and the warehouses, coal yards and refineries along Delaware Avenue were demolished for the great swath of I-95 that surgically cut through three centuries of Philadelphia's history. What was once a natural progression from shoreline to warehouse to town, left an orphaned civic gesture -- Penn's Landing. Attempts were made to develop this far-flung vestige of our waterfront between Market and Lombard streets -- a festival plaza, a sculpture garden, a boat slip and the disconnected and gangly bridges over the vast abyss of I-95 -- all trying to create a raison d'etre for Penn's Landing. But nothing really worked. Despite magnificent views and cooling river breezes, there was no connection to other places -- it was a dead end.

Successive development teams failed at arriving at a market-driven solution to this site, and our latest suitor, Mel Simon, has finally packed up his toys and cheesecakes and gone back to Indianapolis. And we are so much the better for it. For Simon had proposed nothing short of a leviathan -- a two-block-long, four-story-tall, inward-focused entertainment box smack up against the river. Festooned with grotesque, overwrought advertising iconography, it included an above-ground parking structure topped by a new home for the Please Touch Museum. Philadelphia was being asked to come to the river and stay inside a mall. Where Philadelphians once openly exchanged goods and ideas at the water's edge, Simon was serving up packaged pabulum.

We know a lot more about waterfronts and cities than we did just 20 years ago. Battery Park City on the Hudson in New York, the reclamation of abandoned industrial sites along the Oresund riverfront in Copenhagen and the massive "Big Dig" public works project in Boston are just a few of the many enlightened examples of good city making that we can study. We can heed the recommendations of North Delaware Riverfront: A Long-Term Vision for Renewal and Redevelopment, a recent report prepared for the City of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, which identified the thrilling possibility of reclaiming 3,000 acres of river frontage from the Ben Franklin Bridge north to Torresdale. Daring to imagine the creation of housing, parkland and mixed uses just minutes from Center City, the report uncovered an untapped urban treasure of immeasurable value that can create new forms of urban vitality, contribute to the tax base and "... provide the people of Philadelphia free and generous access to their River."

We can thank Simon for pulling out as he has, for he has given us a wonderful opportunity to completely rethink the relationship between Penn's Landing and the city. We have a chance to make Penn's Landing a real place, one in which people will gracefully be able to flow down to the river, past shops, housing and cafes much like one approaches Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia's quintessential open space. We must conjure the courage to imagine a day when I-95 is completely depressed and covered and Old City and Society Hill are allowed to spill back down to the river's edge. Make Penn's Landing a part of a real city and they will come. Maintain it as a dismembered 19th-century medical oddity and it will wither on the vine. Simon told us so.

There is no need for heroics at Penn's Landing. The river is the event here. We should be thinking about ways to celebrate this majestic river which fostered our development as a great American city, create public land to honor Penn's original intention for the river banks and make a true city edge.

It has been said that design is a conversation across the generations. Consider the River Drives of the Upper Schuylkill, the glory that is Rittenhouse Square and the golden glow of the Art Museum. These great public works communicate volumes about our predecessor's communal ethos towards nature, community and culture. These eloquent communiqués serve to define whom we are as Philadelphians, lend grace and elegance to our urban environment and are distinctly humane manifestations of urban life. We treasure them because they are right. Our ancestors understood this and left us these great gifts. And we were ready to leave our children and grandchildren a gaudy box on the Delaware. Think about it. There must be a pony.

Harris M. Steinberg is a Philadelphia architect and a member of the Design Advocacy Group.

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