by Nathaniel Popkin
May 25, 2007
Front and Chestnut went up in flames for a few minutes yesterday when the wreaking ball encountered live juice. The traffic cops were spooning themselves
cookies and cream ice cream from Chinese food containers by the time I arrived on the scene and the world's tallest shower head was pouring 80 pounds per
inch pure Delaware onto the smoldering remains of the maritime trade.
Another demolition in this city of rubble and loss: it hardly seems worth reporting. Now three stories down, the best parts of this corner -- the Palladian
window arches and the Mexican yellow paint on the stone pediments -- are still there, if only to live through one more cool night of this spectacular spring.
Tomorrow -- there is no tomorrow for the invincible walls built four and five courses thick.
How should we feel? There is a God-like power in all of this destruction, a rage, an anger. It feels good to knock things over: ask any one-year-old. It's
a joyful act, a release, for us Philadelphians a way to condemn our ancestors for not being good enough. These buildings were, after all, a pair of
plain
four-story buildings, essentially unadorned, built to manufacture money. Never very special. Used up and out of time.
On the north side of the Art Museum, where bulldozers these days are busy removing an artificial hill (the one on brilliant winter evenings where we used to
sled) to build a parking structure, it's engraved, "From earth are all things, and to earth all things return." So perhaps this act of constant demolition
is something akin to the pattern of nature. We build or grow, we demolish or shrink and die, and then we start again. Perhaps we're merely helping,
hastening nature's own process.
Thinking proudly, we might interpret the demolition of the maritime buildings at Front and Chestnut as faith in our own ideas and vision for the city. While
the water rained down this afternoon and the restaurateurs along Chestnut mingled, smiling in the precious, serene air, the trades were busy finishing 101
Walnut and 22 Front. There is much good to say about these two projects as well as the completed Moravian and Beaumont Condos on the same block. Yet I was
struck by how little -- in a sea of macadam hemmed in by a highway and a hidden river -- these new buildings have altered the feeling of our first street.
It's still an unpleasant, unarticulated stretch, a backside in other words, and not a front. If it's true we're constantly negotiating with the past, then
we Philadelphians seem doubly burdened by the future. So uncertain are we of our own values, we're making hesitant, half-attempts to mark our time here.
Front and Chestnut will stand vacant a while, maybe years, as Inga Saffron noted a few weeks ago. What will grow there? What should?
Demolition, I suppose, is simply honesty. Nothing lasts. The fire was out and the firefighters were putting away their armaments when the hardhats up the
block hit the head and went on home. Standing in the middle of Front Street, I wondered if they had been watching the demolition, if from the sixty-foot
perch of glass and steel they noted the thickness of the brick walls, the heft of the joists. Now just a pile of rubble down below.
–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com
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