4 December 07: The Possible City:
A Junction that ought to be



by Nathaniel Popkin
December 2, 2007

As I see it, the Winter King tree proves there is fierce life in death. No more really needs to be said on the subject. The day I saw a group of them, they were nestled at the edge of the park where it gives off to the highway on one side and city on the other. There are three wonderful things about that tree, a Hawthorn variety: its pale gray bark now leafless, its goblet shape, and its fiery berries. The first two -- the bark and the shape -- form a composition as moving as an olive tree in a Sicilian field (minus the blue of the Mediterranean); the third is the glory: clusters of red berries as certain of life as the first cherry blossoms of spring.

"I love these trees," says Majeddah Rashid, the Chief Operating Officer of the Nicetown Community Development Corporation. Rashid comes across immediately as a person to trust. She is open and honest about the neighborhood's prospects and at the same time it's impossible not to recognize her enthusiasm. Her eyes burn as brightly as the sun trapped inside the Hawthorn berries. Her certainty is convincing.

I've asked Rashid to show me around her neighborhood that is divided twice -- by Germantown Avenue and the Roosevelt Expressway -- and otherwise hemmed in by CSX and Norfolk Southern and Septa's regional rail tracks (Nicetown is bounded by track on the west, Hunting Park Avenue on the south, Belfield Avenue to the north, and Broad Street). The CDC was started in 1999 and Rashid was hired in 2002 in part to stitch it back together. The Boulevard, particularly, has left a tear in the urban fabric. "When I started here, I looked on old maps," she says as we walked below the highway. "These were all streets. Cayuga ran right there." Since then, the CDC has commissioned three planning studies; now Septa will spend $20 million to restore the Wayne Junction regional rail station on the neighborhood's western edge. And that project has Rashid thinking not only about stitching her own neighborhood together, but the power the restoration project will have to sew Nicetown to Germantown -- and the entire area to Center City. Right now the station is a barrier. "Our people don't even use it -- they're afraid," she told me while we spoke in a conference room on the second floor of the CDC's offices on Germantown Avenue.

The potential to leverage Septa's investment hasn't been lost on the City Planning Commission. District planner Jennifer Barr, who community members call one of the City's most capable, has begun a massive transit oriented development (TOD) study for all of Germantown. TOD refers to tools a city can use to encourage density and pedestrian uses -- in other words to capture transit and its related foot traffic as an asset instead of the usual liability. It's old-fashioned land use for the age of melting ice caps. The City's plan will be to reorganize the uses around the station to make it a more attractive place to live, encouraging retailers and other employers to group around the station.



It couldn't be a better time -- or a better place. Philadelphia needs to overcome a pair of post-industrial obstacles. One of them is to find ways to better integrate existing transit infrastructure into the flow of the contemporary city. The other is to stabilize and grow poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Wayne Junction just might be the best example of Philadelphia's potential in this regard. Regional Rail routes R1, R2, R3, R5, R7, and R8 all run through the station, though not all trains stop. Enough do, however, to make this one of the few Regional Rail stations to be able to operate something like a subway, where the rider doesn't have to depend on a schedule, especially if heading south, toward Center City. Septa trains in both directions stop here 188 times a day; that's somewhat less the 271 Broad Street Subway trains that stop at Hunting Park Station, on the east edge of Nicetown. A Regional Rail train from Wayne Junction arrives in at Market East in just 12 minutes, however, slightly faster than the subway from Hunting Park to City Hall. Septa has the choice to increase service to the station; doing so would obviously enhance its role as a hub. Critically, the 23 bus, the city's busiest, stops in front of the station; two others stop here too, the 53 and the 75, which traverses Wyoming Avenue, connecting Wayne Junction to the Broad Street Subway and the Market-Frankford Line.

What's at stake isn't just to make the most of a Regional Rail system that by definition -- heavy rail -- is clumsy and hard to use as rapid transit (a subject for another day), but to realign existing neighborhood assets for the benefit of the city as a whole. Germantown, which begins on the west side of the station, is a relatively stable place. It's therefore feasible to imagine careful public sector investments paying off. LaSalle University, in the part of Germantown just to the north of Nicetown, has pledged to invest there (if LaSalle is serious, this too is a subject for another day). Successful TOD around the station would therefore leverage these strengths, potentially filling a hole in another Philadelphia donut, that the stretch of Germantown Avenue between Logan Street and Hunting Park Avenue.

"We have to keep it real," Rashid cautions me. "Our first priority is to stabilize the commercial area." Rashid talks with her hands -- and to illustrate she's pushing them gently down, as if to say "a little at a time, a little at a time." She's wise enough to realize it's impossible to reverse 60 years of deindustrialization with smart ideas. Rashid is also careful to traverse the political field. It's clear she's had some success with Mayor Street, whose curfew program the Nicetown organization has made it into a beacon of community trust. "We love it -- it's absolutely working," she tells me, especially because it has fertilized positive relationships among adults, youth, and the police. But she's overjoyed with prospect of Michael Nutter as mayor. "He's something else," she says and smiles with glee.

The Nicetown CDC will build a four-story, 37-apartment unit complex on Germantown Avenue, one block from the station. The complex will have three retail spaces -- for a Laundromat, cleaners, and the Paradise Café, and a community center. The design will meet some green goals. The funding for the project is much is place. "I'm telling you, it's going to be the catalyst," says Rashid. Now I see the visionary, who understands so well how and why cities work -- and who knows that it's incumbent upon her organization and the others in the community to leverage the renovation of the station. Thus her Germantown Avenue plan runs through Nicetown, under the train trestle, and up to Berkley Avenue on the other side.

What about the 4400 block of Germantown? That's the block between the Nicetown CDC project and the station -- perhaps the most critical to connecting the community to the station. Rashid explains to me that her organization and other members of the community are hoping to work with the City to develop the block. Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller has brought the developer Herb Vederman to build on the land NTI cleared the year before. The fear is that Vederman has a formula for inner-city locations like this one -- tight profit margins! -- that don't involve community input. Still, she tells me the councilwoman has been a partner, and receptive to her organization's plans, especially recently. Having been in her shoes once before I can hear the sound of vision being squeezed. Vederman is Governor Rendell's former Deputy Mayor for Economic Development; his son Jay runs the business; Councilwoman Miller, hoping to get things rolling on the Avenue, wants a deal.

The Philadelphia squeeze aside, Rashid is a capable consensus-builder. Nicetown Park, with the iconic contemporary sculpture on Germantown Avenue, is the neighborhood's central public space. A few years ago she moved the August Nicetown Festival there; now the Community Design Collaborative, lauded by Rashid, has produced a pair of plans to improve the park and other neighborhood areas under Roosevelt Expressway.



Her favorite idea -- "a concept so beautiful," she says -- is to build a skate park using the existing highway pylons. When one of the community members originally suggested the idea it wasn't well-received. But he persisted and finally the task force assembled to work the with the Collaborative's design team came to see the skate park as a way for the neighborhood to build on its strengths -- and to turn an obvious liability into a source of pride.

You don't have to look hard around Wayne Junction to find urban assets. As the Planning Commission's Barr explained to B Love, Steve Ives, and me, the station itself, built in 1881 and then rebuilt under Frank Furness' eye in 1900, contained a waiting hall and a baggage room. Both will be restored to their dark-brick, fleur-de-lis ambition. The station, which also includes a 1930s tunnel across freight tracks, is a gem of the bourgeoisie -- as is so much of the area: exotic row houses with in-laid decorative crests, generous porches, front gardens, and lampposts. In our trek around the station, B Love and I found ample row house blocks on both the Nicetown and Germantown side largely intact and brimming with architecture. West of the station, where Wayne Avenue heads into Germantown, are blocks of boxy stick-Victorians -- singles and twins -- and the wonderful Zeralda Street, perhaps the most colorful in Philadelphia.



There are cobblestones and parks -- both Fern Hill Park, cut in two by Roosevelt Expressway, and Stenton Mansion Park provide ample recreation and natural beauty within blocks of the station. Loudoun, the haunted mansion built by merchant Thomas Armatt in 1801 high enough on a bluff that he could see his ships coming into port, stands on several lush acres just above the station. Stabilized after it was hit by lightening in 1993, it's a charming, but empty, piece of early Philadelphia looking for a use. Stenton is the Georgian house built in the 1720s by Philadelphia's first cosmopol, James Logan, Penn's secretary. Stenton, a working house-museum in a park just northeast of the station, is the real deal, with ample ambition to become a major tourist site.

Septa, with the station itself and two enormous shops, is the area's largest landholder. I spoke with Michael Dawkins, the transit agency's assigned community representative. I wondered if Septa had thought about leveraging its station investment. Dawkins, who had just survived the project's first community meeting, told me that the station upgrade was strictly a Septa project, that the project manager had hoped to be more ambitious but that it wasn't likely, that Septa hadn't yet convened representatives from the city or CSX, the freight rail, and was unlikely to upgrade the public areas around its two shops. "The sidewalk on Roberts Avenue," I protested. "It's dangerous."

"I know," he responded, "but . . . I have to get the station clean. They told me it was filthy."

"I heard they were pretty upset about that."

"I've got to get it clean. But I think if we build it they will come," he said, and repeated the mantra several times. Dawkins was patient with my phone questions.

"How about lighting, signage?"

"Oh, yes, of course."

"And integrating the bus lines?"

"We plan to try to turn the 75 bus so that you won't have to cross the street to board."

"But you say it's a multi-modal system."

"Our main objective is to uplift the community by revitalizing the station . . . People see dollar signs . . . It can be a collaboration . . . .We probably need to reach out."

Then he asked if I had any ideas.

Don't laugh -- we're about to waste $20 million in tax dollars unless Septa opens itself to the community, proactively collaborates directly with City agencies, including Streets, the Planning Commission, Commerce, and possibly the RDA. If this remains strictly a Septa project it will fail.

This is why Barr of Planning Commission is pushing hard. She sees just what has to happen -- the junk yard and the gas station just behind the station have to be moved; the storage building just across Windrim Avenue from the entrance should be renovated for mixed-uses. The strip mall at Windrim and Wingohocking should be redeveloped for pedestrians. As a junction the station fails; for the trestles it's now a barrier, as is the Expressway. To overcome this we have to light the underpasses. Christina Weiss, a student I worked with this semester in an industrial design studio at Philadelphia University proposed a solar-powered fiber optic light for Germantown's train trestles. It lights up playfully mimicking the stars above. There's much to do. If I was Septa I'd pledge to keeping a ticket office open all hours, installing a message board indicating the next train, and what track, allowing vending along the station's edge on Windrim Avenue, and I'd experiment with a free transfer from Regional Rail to the 23, 53, and 75 bus. All this requires vision and coordination . . .



I was sitting in the Nicetown CDC conference room with Majeedah Rashid when she told me about the curfew program. The program is a Street initiative implemented by his wife Naomi Post's organization Safe and Sound. It works like this: a child in Nicetown who is out past curfew is picked up by a police officer and brought to the CDC office, where several staff members and volunteers make the child feel welcome. He is processed without being threatened. Problems if they exist -- whether school truancy, mental health, poverty, lack of heat in the house, poor diet, drugs -- are identified and the child is referred to the correct agency. All services are available to the child who because the program is so carefully designed doesn't realize he is being assessed. His parents are called; in the meantime the child is surrounded by community members, mentors, a police officer. He is fed. Rashid calls it a village. It's so effective that parents who arrive angry often come back themselves to volunteer. Now let's imagine that child is a place, a junction that isn't but ought to be. "Let's all get together," says the community leader, "and see about the possibilities."



–Nathaniel Popkin
nathaniel.popkin@gmail.com

POSSIBLE CITY ARCHIVES:

• 6 Nov 07: Around the Mulberry Tree we go
• 29 Oct 07: Wondering about wandering
• 5 Oct 07: No other way
• 21 Sept 07: Here is the Possible City


LINKS | ABOUT | CONTACT | FAQ | PRESS | LEGAL