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2 July 09: Friendly reminder
Greetings from West Philadelphia, where we're always high on life and high on the skyline.
After a couple of inquiries, I, Robert Bradley Maule, alias B Love, alias
beelove, one time alias Giovanni Sasso -- but you can call me Brad -- wish to issue a reminder statement that neither I nor this web site's affiliates have anything to do
with the 'phillyskyline' user leaving comments on large media web sites. This person has a tendency to leave thoughtful comments without references to things like "the animals
out of their cage" or "sheepish libs and their cokehead messiah", but for the record, he or she has no affiliation whatsoever with myself nor the Philly Skyline brand. Any
resemblance is strictly coincidental.
Thank you.
–B Love
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2 July 09: Rittenhouse recession bustin' brothers from another mother
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Was a little bummed yesterday to learn that yr Skyline's new The Skinny feature in the Metro had been bumped this week. (Though I certainly understand that if a newspaper has a
full-page advertiser, there are greater priorities than a handful of blurbs about stuff.) With that in mind, the readers of this web site are owed a July update of the
two ongoing highrise construction projects left in town, the Rittenhouses.
Above, 10 Rittenhouse Square chugs along, peering down at 18th Street sans crane. The crane-y thing sticking up in the background is the support of the two hoists that are
still mounted to the Sansom Street side of the building.
A lot of people have wondered if 10 Ritt has stopped construction, as its granite-clad penthouse has been boarded up in plywood in the months since it topped off. Not at all --
what's happened is that the 33rd floor penthouse has been sold (for an undisclosed sum that I suppose is none of our business), and the buyer has raised the ceilings, requiring
an all new outfitting of the windows on the top three floors.
Otherwise, 10 Ritt is right on schedule, with Barney's already open on Walnut Street and the first residents scheduled to move in in September.
* * *
One thousand, six hundred ninety-six Rittenhouses away, 1706 has pretty well secured its place on the skyline, with a few more stories to go. And dare I say it, it's grown on
me.
The view below, from the front steps of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel at 18th & Spruce, struts Cope Linder's glassy sides, and the higher it gets, the more slender it looks. And
that's a good thing for this otherwise straightforward condo tower. It's currently on the 28th of its 31 floors, with a topping off party tentatively scheduled for some time in
August.
The building's web site, HERE, is one of those Amazingly Awesome Flash Web Sites That Everyone Loves So, playing music
at you before you decide if you'd like music played at you. It now (and maybe for some time has?) has an animated demonstration of how the robotic parking system works. It's
under Luxury → Parking. Click "Hide" next to "Only One" to maximize the animation's effectiveness.
Seriously, architects/developers/builders . . . will you please stop with the Flash web sites? You can still have all the bells and whistles and features you need, but
on real web pages with real links. Hey Bee Love, how's that Wordpress installation coming along, where your bells and whistles and posts have real web pages with real
links?
DOO DOO DOO.
–B Love
PS: This post is dedicated to my main man Jesse down in G-Ho. Good luck with the move to the burbs, homie. The city will miss you.
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2 July 09: Greenberger's Country Towne
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Some time in the past two days while my nose was buried in piles of info and tons of photos of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, big Skyline news was dropping all around us.
First, Septa went and -- lo and behold! -- embraced this newfangled teckmology called "Google Maps" . . . yet it's only good for one trip, i.e. you can't "add destinations"
like you can with driving/walking directions. Ergo, Steve, Steve, Chris and I can't accurately trace our Independence Pass routes, which might prove helpful in explaining our
photos.
Speaking of Septastic teckmology, it sounds like our favorite transit agency is, surprisingly, still
pretty far off from rolling out the smart cards that would relieve the need for columns in 2009 about just how
serious Septa is about (not making) change.
I'd insert a we're getting there joke here . . . if only it wasn't so miserably worn out
already.
* * *
Next up, hopping off Septa's elevated train that runs underground, we'll turn the corner from 2nd & Market to 3rd & Chestnut, where the National Park Service and American
Revolution Center announced
yesterday the latter was relocating after years of stalemate at Valley Forge. This is . . . interesting, to say the least.
Seventy-eight is a lot of acres for the ARC to have to give up in order to move onto a crammed site in a crammed city. The ARC, whose swooping plan at Valley Forge was designed
by Robert A.M. Stern (Comcast Center, 10 Rittenhouse), will now be located on the site of what is
currently the Living History Center.
It's an interesting choice because that building has been a stepchild of Independence National Historical Park for ages. After a long fight with preservationists in the 50s and
60s, the Park Service was given the go-ahead by a stakeholding judge to demolish the Jayne and Penn Mutual Buildings, historic in their own rights -- historic for the 19th
century, not for the 18th century that was the mission of the new National Park. The brick building built in its place served as a visitors center for less than 30 years
before the Independence Visitors Center opened at 6th & Market. Now the Living History Center, it's low man on the historical totem pole that also includes Independence Hall,
the Liberty Bell Center, Constitution Center, Carpenters Hall, Franklin Court, Congress Hall, City Tavern, and the Second National Bank portrait gallery. Significant, but not
significant enough.
* * *
Finally, props are due to my man Alan Greenberger. In the wake of Andy Altman's departure for the UK, Mayor Mike Nutter had some big shoes to fill at a top level cabinet
position. So on Tuesday, the Mayor made official what many suspected, that Greenberger would, in addition to his role as executive director of the Planning Commission,
serve his city as Acting Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development and Commerce Director. Acting is an important operative there -- it's an interim position,
not unlike how Gary Jastrzab served as Greenberger's predecessor at the Planning Commission, but it carries no less weight than the full-time position.
Greenberger's promotion, temporary though it may be, signals back to the Mayor's pledge to re-prioritize planning in the city's march to the future. While the Sugar House Thing
sticks out like a violent sore thumb in this process, the overall riverfront planning, the pedestrian and bicycle plan, the Market East plan, the Germantown-Nicetown
transit-oriented plan, and GreenPlan Philadelphia are among the initiatives to keep us grounded in the greater good.
Congrats, Alan. GIT-R-DUN.
–B Love
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1 July 09: Calendar Companion: Philadelphia Museum of Art
As Philly Skyline, The Calendar: 2009 turns the page into the second half, we find ourselves at a gem, one of the greatest museums in the world.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has gotten a lot of play on yr Skyline lately, and for good reason. The Skyscrapers exhibition is a must-see, the landscaping improvements to the cliffside paths (including the total
rebuild of the Rustic Pavilion), the in-ground parking garage is now open and the sculpture garden on its green roof is being built, and the fantastic Cézanne & Beyond
show just ended. Just Monday, the museum announced the successor to the director (and CEO)
position Anne d'Harnoncourt mastered for so long before her unexpected and untimely death a year ago. Timothy Rub comes to the PMA by way of Cleveland, where he oversaw the
expansion of that city's museum, the East Wing by Rafael Viñoly.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art's story began in 1876, when a young Fairmount Park hosted the Centennial Exposition. Its centerpiece was Memorial Hall, home of the expo's art
gallery, and after the Centennial it would become the home of the Museum of Art and Industry, as chartered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Included with it was the
Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, whose students and classes were where Hahnemann Hospital is now on North Broad Street, and later at Broad & Pine. The textile part
of the school became independent in 1949 and moved to East Falls as the Philadelphia Textile Institute, now Philadelphia University. The remaining school combined in 1964 with
the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts to form the University of the Arts we recognize today on South Broad Street.
The museum itself at Memorial Hall grew steadily to a point of needing a much larger space. With the City Beautiful movement already in full swing, a monumental museum was
planned for the terminus of the forthcoming Fairmount (Ben Franklin) Parkway between City Hall and Fairmount Park, on the site of the former reservoir that served the water
pumped from the Waterworks. The art museum was part and parcel of the Parkway plan, its elevated location intentionally meant to serve as the gateway between the city and the
park. Horace Trumbauer, Clarence Zantzinger and Paul Cret conducted the planning study for the Fairmount Park Art Association to align the Parkway, and Zantzinger's partner
Charles Borie is credited with creating an acropolis-like structure for the museum. Trumbauer's firm (with assistance from Zantzinger, Borie and their partner Milton Medary)
assumed the treatment of the museum, its design piloted by the young Julian Abele.
Construction began in 1919 and continued over the next nine years until the first gallery opened in 1928. Zantzinger, Borie and Medary's Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company
opened one block off the new Parkway around the same time; it is now the Perelman Building, the first phase of the PMA's $500M expansion. Cret's Rodin Museum, now under the
auspices of the PMA, opened just down the Parkway the following year. Fiske Kimball was the director during this formative period, overseeing the museum's growth in the new
facility and its perseverance during the Depression.
In the decades since, the museum has amassed a collection of nearly 250,000 works, its holdings a who's-who of the preeminent greats such as El Greco, Cézanne, Manet,
Van Gogh, Renoir, Seurat, Picasso, Dalí, and Philadelphia's own Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt and Andrew Wyeth. Feature exhibitions, especially those under d'Harnoncourt's
direction, have included the likes of last year's Frida Kahlo organized to celebrate her (Kahlo's) 100th birthday, an Ansel Adams retrospective from the museum's
permanent collection, and Alexander Calder's jewelry. A feature exhibition called Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris opens next spring and centers on that artist's
most creative period.
Calder is, of course, the third in the lineage of the first family of the Parkway, and in a sense, Philadelphia's art history. His mobile sculpture Ghost hangs in the
Great Stair Hall of the museum on a perfect axis with his father's Swann Fountain at Logan Circle and his grandfather's many many sculptures adorning City Hall. The youngest
Calder's stabile Jerusalem was, for a time, installed on the museum's main plaza, and the Calder Garden served as a temporary stand-in for a full-on Calder Museum that
seems less and less likely, closing abruptly in April. (1 April 09, Sad day on the Parkway)
In the Hall of the Mobile King: Calder's Ghost above, Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Diana straight ahead.
* * *
The pseudo Greek temple is the pinnacle of a 10 acre plot of land. The golden stone exterior is made of dolomite quarried in Minnesota, and the glazed tiled roof is accentuated
by polychrome finials and bronze griffins that serve as the PMA's symbol. A griffin is on all their literature, and it's on the pin you get when you pay your admission.
Sculptor Paul Jennewein composed the scene of Greek gods and goddesses in the tympanum of the pediment on the north wing, visible from the main plaza.
From that plaza, one is afforded a view that, at least before the 1980s' skyscraper boom, was most famous of all the Philly Skyline views in town. (See Philly Skyline vs Penny Postcards.) The massive sculpture in the foreground of that view is Rudolf
Siemering's Washington Monument. Completed in 1897, before there was either a Philadelphia Museum of Art or a Ben
Franklin Parkway in which for it to stand, it welcomed visitors to Fairmount Park from Green Street, then one of the main entrances of the park. The complex work features
General Washington atop his horse, several American Indian figures and animals, and allegorical references to the Delaware, Hudson, Potomac and Mississippi Rivers. It was moved to its
current location in 1928, and the traffic oval around it has been reconfigured a number of times since.
Try as one may, it's nigh impossible to tell a narrative of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's history without mentioning Rocky. "Gonna Fly Now" was undeniably this city's anthem
-- during its dark and dirty 70s -- the struggling-but-trying-real-hard boxer as metaphor for the struggling-but-kinda-sorta-trying city, finishing up his training regimen
(which, along with the meat-punching bit, Joe Frazier claims was lifted from
him without credit) by running up those steps. Then running them again. And again. And again. We all remember the fight between the PMA and the city when the sixth title in the
film's series, Rocky Balboa, opened in 2006 and Sylvester Stallone wanted to permanently place the statue of himself at the top of those steps. (The marker in the ground
with the footprints of his Chuck Taylors was not enough?) A compromise led to its current placement at the foot of the steps.
* * *
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has over 200 galleries, a number that will greatly increase when its Frank Gehry-penned expansion comes to light. New gallery space will be
constructed under the plaza, behind the steps. Gehry himself was even the subject of a recent exhibition.
Admission to the museum was recently raised to $16, but hey, it's the Art Museum. If that's too much for you, go on Sundays when it's free you may pay what
you wish. That fare includes entry to the Perelman Building. The Rodin Museum -- whose most famous sculpture, The Thinker, is temporarily going to be displayed at the
PMA's Great Stair Hall while the museum is renovated and the grounds re-landscaped -- is always pay what you wish, but a $5 donation is suggested.
The museum is one of Philadelphia's greatest and most historic assets, the crown of our city's culture. (Plus Rocky . . . ZING.)
July 2009: The Philadelphia Museum of Art.
–B Love
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