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December 5-11, 2002 cityspace Cutting Corners
Why intersections matter. Corners matter. Vital components of the urban context, they are crossroads that signal arrival, change and opportunity. Corners are essential nodes, links and connectors between places, people and context within the hierarchy of the street grid. Traditional city-making understood this intuitively, for corners are the end of the run where we literally turn the corner in the urban fabric. It is at the corner where the great variety, density and energy in a metropolis coalesce -- small alleys flow into larger streets which run to boulevards, squares and avenues. Consider some celebrated corners in Philadelphia: Broad and Chestnut streets with the gleaming neo-classical temple of banking, the former Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank (1905-1908, Furness, Evans & Co. and McKim, Mead & White) juxtaposed with the soaring verticality of the Land Title Building (1897-1898, Daniel H. Burnham & Company); the gracious entrance to Rittenhouse Square at 18th and Walnut streets (1913, Paul Phillipe Cret); the democratic void at the center of City Hall (1871-1901, John McArthur Jr.) -- the actual crossing of Broad and Market streets; and the triumphant Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1872-1876, Furness & Hewitt) at the intersection of Broad and Cherry streets. Memorable and dynamic, these strong urban corners are backdrops to the grand drama of urban life. Then there are the secondary corners in the composition of the city -- corners such as Fourth and South streets where the eclectic vitality of South Street reaches a crescendo; the intersection of Ninth and Washington in the Italian Market where the compact cheek-and-jowl atmosphere of the market meets the wide expanse of Washington Avenue; and the recently redesigned corner plaza at 36th and Walnut streets at the bookstore of the University of Pennsylvania, a place where outdoor café tables and chairs create a vest-pocket urban oasis such as is found in the great cities of Europe. Neighborhood corners play a critical role in the physical hierarchy of the city as well. It is at the corner where we hang out, get the bus, mail a letter, buy a paper, have a cup of coffee and meet friends. Two recent corner developments in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Mt. Airy offer textbook case studies on corners and the making of good urbanism. Phebe Commons sits on the site of the former Wagon Wheel Tavern, the aging descendant of a colonial-era watering hole at the intersection of Germantown Avenue and Phil-Elena Street. By the late 1980s, the tavern had become a nuisance bar rife with drug-dealing and prostitution; determined neighbors helped shutter the bar and purchase the land and building. Mt. Airy, USA, the local community development corporation, worked for more than a decade to acquire adjacent land and funding to create a new retail and office building on the site. Working with Cecil Baker Architects, the resulting building and site development is a sensitive and thoughtful addition to this historic street (full disclosure: the author was a member of the building committee for Mt. Airy, USA). Anchoring its site with a chamfered and abstracted tower form at the corner, the building deftly navigates the transition in scale from the commercial and institutional buildings along Germantown Avenue to the houses on Phil-Elena Street. Parking is respectfully located at the rear of the building and the brick façades along Germantown Avenue complement the fine materials employed in the classic buildings that line this great street. The new CVS Pharmacy, at the corner of Lincoln Drive and Mt. Pleasant Avenue, is another matter. Occupying a key gateway site in this vibrant middle-class community, the CVS ignores the design cues that the site offered. Instead, what has been built is the typical corporate CVS package -- an ugly, synthetic brick and stucco box without any relationship to the urban context. Plopped onto the site as an abstraction, the corporate architects and planners committed their worst sin by placing parking at the corner. While the site could easily have been configured with the building at the corner and parking at the rear, the inflexible corporate standard yet again predominated. Instead of a key marker in the urban landscape, yet another parking lot further erodes the edges of civility that characterize our better urban impulses. These two developments are urban polar opposites. Phebe Commons firmly attests to the enduring qualities of good urbanism, adroitly negotiating its complex and conflicting building and site requirements. The CVS is anything but a good neighbor. Heavy-handed and clunky, it is ultimately a destructive intrusion into the urban context. By cutting corners in the design and planning phases of the project, CVS has contributed yet another tear in the urban fabric. We need to ask how many of these we can afford before we tip the scales and tend toward the anonymous scalelessness of recent suburban developments. Corners matter. Harris M. Steinberg is an architect in Philadelphia and a member of the Design Advocacy Group. 
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