by Nathaniel Popkin
January 29, 2008
At a party this past weekend, an acquaintance was telling me about her house in Wash West. "Of, course a lot has changed there since we moved in [a few years ago],"
she said.
"Well, the neighborhood was bombed out when they moved in," chimed in her mother-in-law, who isn't from Philadelphia.
I didn't respond, only smiled and nodded politely, but I found her comment telling, nonetheless. There is a tendency to disguise a lack of understanding about a place
by simplifying its trajectory, often assuming things have only recently begun to improve (or decline). That's risky business, of course, but it's a conceit so tempting
to devise.
The conceit -- that today is day zero -- has installed itself at City Hall, encouraged in no small part by our expectations of the new administration. The Mayor
himself, who hasn't made a false move yet, seems to revel in the sui generis moment. "What kind of city do we want to be?" he asked in his Thursday casino press
conference, no doubt aware that he was speaking a kind of rational language that most of the men whose portraits hung on the walls around him wouldn't have understood.
But the Mayor isn't the only one asking. It's a moment reminiscent of 1992, when young Clinton staffers colonized the White House. Fresh faces, with overflowing
inboxes but as of yet no business cards, have already set to work reinventing the Mayor's Action Center in City Hall. A veteran lawyer from the Law Department, newly
energized and having just filed against Sugar House, saunters down a fourth floor hall. A new member of City Council puts a stop to the automatic issuance of L&I
demolition permits in her district. Hold on! You can't do that anymore. It's a new day! Up on the seventh floor meanwhile, Department of Public Property
officials berate a Verizon crew, the message simply, We're calling the shots now.
There isn't a thing wrong with a fiery and determined desire to remake the city. After all, Philadelphia allows us this conceit; these guys are only running with it.
Let them run and run.
But it's worth reminding ourselves that every idea, every step forward, every novel policy approach, every solution, reform, plan, every brilliant maneuver, is derived
from and responds to complex and dynamic forces. The possibility of a reform mayor itself is a product of Nutter's own determined stance as a member of Council, of Sam
Katz's campaigns, of Philadelphia's mid-Twentieth Century role as the Mecca of municipal reform.
There is precedent for a strong Planning Commission, for careful fiscal management, for lowering taxes, for major education reform, for celebrating parks and art and
culture. Philadelphians have been hard at work trying (in vain, perhaps) to make this city great for three centuries and a quarter. I was reminded of this today when
I spoke with Penny Balkin Bach, who heads up the Fairmount Park Art Association (FPAA), the progressive body formed in 1872 that curates and manages much of
Philadelphia's public art (in true Philadelphia form this responsibility is shared by several agencies, including the Public Art Program). Bach says that every project
the FPAA undertakes is guided by precedent. Her 1980s project, "Form and Function," for example, which sought to redefine public art in America, had its antecedent in
the FPAA's own 1950s installation along the Schuylkill River.
Bach was flipping through the book of proposals from Form and Function, when she stopped on an idea that came from the artist Robert Irwin. Irwin proposed a
"Philadelphia stoop" for the center of City Hall's courtyard, really a plinth of terraced seats in a square formation with a tree growing in the middle. This was a
radical idea at the time (1982): not only was the skirt of Centre Square used then for parking, but the interior courtyard too. Irwin's site photo shows four parked
buses used by the sheriff to transport prisoners for court as well as a handful of other vehicles. Of course, my
proposal of a year ago to enliven the public spaces in and around City Hall was an oblivious recasting of Irwin's idea. I suggested a Franklinia tree in the
center of the courtyard surrounded by a circle of benches.
Irwin's idea, as are many that come from artists, was merely avant-garde. It came from the future. Now we've caught up. But the act of catching up is itself the act
of moving forward, looking back, and dreaming all at once. It may be that parts of Philadelphia have disintegrated so much that there is nowhere to go but up. (If our
salvation is this very demise, it's also worth positing that the demise of so many places across the US has been seeded these past ten years by the real estate boom
itself.) As Inga Saffron noted
recently, this is the case in South Kensington. Tim McDonald, whose firm Onion Flats is finding the vacant land in Kensington, the
Northern Liberties, and Fishtown to his liking, might agree. Out of newly bulldozed lots a new city is born. Perhaps, but then we'd better give some credit to John
Street and NTI. But then we'd also better realize that the same was said of much of South Street, Society Hill, Center City, Old City, and University City two
generations ago. Weren't those "bombed out places?" Just look at them now.
–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com
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