Go to the Light

Simple Rules for a Postmodern City

Emerging from the deep at Dilworth Park.

One afternoon recently my wife and I took the train back from New York, and we found ourselves standing in the great hall at 30th Street Station, and neither one of us felt like standing in the cab line. So we walked across 30th Street and down the SEPTA rabbit hole. We'd been intending to take the trolley, but I managed to lead us down the stairs to the track for the Market-Frankford Line.

I have a habit of making wrong turns underground. I don't think I'm alone, but I've lived long enough to know that the occasional wrong turn can be an invitation to discovery. So we decided to take the MFL to 15th Street.

I'm glad we did. We got off at 15th Street right next to the stairs that go up and east to Dilworth Park. And there, still standing on the MFL platform, we looked up the stairs and saw the light. It was reaching down from Dilworth Park, and beckoning to us.

Here's a rule. When people are underground, show them where the light is. It makes them less anxious. And if you can cap it with a grand entrance into a truly fabulous public square, that would be nice.

The designers at Dilworth Park didn't invent the idea of orienting on light, and they didn't invent the grand entrance. But they pulled both ideas off, bigtime. I'm grateful.

One level of circulation? Or two? Or three?
Many Americans prefer to travel on ground level. Is this preference intrinsic to human nature, or is it simply the comfort of the familiar, which opens up the possibility that people can be lured underground with good design and decent maintenance?

I hadn't reviewed my thinking about multi-level circulation around City Hall in a while, so I took a few walks and snapped a few pics. Overall, I'd say I have more good news than bad news, and also I just have news - things I hadn't thought about before.

Claes Oldenburg, Clothespin, 1976.

Clothespin Forever!
Before the new entrances in Dilworth Park, I'm going to guess that everybody's favorite door to the underground was the one that wraps around Claes Oldenburg's clothespin. It's a wonderful piece of sculpture, and the space fits it like a glove. The space is basically a hexagonal pit with a staircase that hugs the perimeter; the bottom of the hexagon functions as a kind of traffic roundabout, sending pedestrians off on a variety of vectors. After the new guys across the street, the space at the foot of the clothespin feels a bit cramped, but I think I may just have to get over it.

Escalator to What?
The clothespin is west of 15th Street, just south of Market. To the north of Market, midway to JFK, lies another entrance that I find more problematic.

To its credit, this is an older example of daylighting the trip upstairs. And there is an escalator.

Yes, but why here?

But why is it here? The midblock location means most people will walk past convenient entrances at the corner of Market or JFK, and when you get downstairs you confront a T intersection. If you walk straight forward you walk into a pretzel shop. To the left and to the right there's quite a lot of transit. There's decent signage, but still it's a midblock location downstairs as well as upstairs. Don't get me wrong; it's functional. But it is a bit clunky.

Desire Lines
Over in Rittenhouse Square a few years back a new footpath was born. Originally it was a dirt path - quite muddy in the wet weather.

As Market Street West kept building new office buildings, the number of people walking from the PATCO train on Locust Street through Rittenhouse Square increased - and guess what? They cut the corner on 18th Street, walking over grass from an east gate to a north gate. I watched this happen on my own walks to and from work.

This is called a desire line. Eventually it was paved.

Do the escalators over on 15th lie on anyone's desire line? I don't think so.

Light Boxes
So why are the escalators there? I think I know. They're located in one of several light boxes (or light wells) that dot the neighborhood. These are big square holes in the ground, with glass walls that let light permeate sideways into the concourse (there are three levels of pedestrian circulation in this area: ground level, concourse, and train platform).

The light they provide is welcome, even though it is insufficient. As I understand the history, these boxes are remnants of Ed Bacon's proposal for this area, which was much more ambitious about connecting the ground level and the underground, both visually and physically.

Time for some history. The redevelopment of Penn Center, or Market Street West, came about when the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to demolish a railroad viaduct that ran through the area. And Ed Bacon decided to kibitz on the redevelopment plans. According to my old friend Ken Halpern, "Conceptually, Bacon thought that rather than just clear the site, the railroad should actually excavate to one level below ground. A sunken garden with flowers and fountains could then let light and air down to commuters using the subway, trolley, and commuter rail complex located below grade at this spot, later to be called Penn Center." Office towers would be oriented north-south to maximize light to the street and the lower level. (Kenneth Halpern, Downtown USA, 1978, p. 107.)

The railroad decided to go in a different direction: "The final solution for Penn Center placed the towers in the east-west direction, with a concrete deck instead of a sunken plaza. Bacon did manage to get the railroad to provide three sunken gardens." (Halpern, p. 107, caption 159.)

At any rate, the escalators are located in one of the light boxes, and another one has an elevator. Why not? The light boxes were already doomed to failure. Why not get some moving stairs and even an elevator in there and claim a victory for modern technology, if not for modern architecture?

The Big Fail
The escalators aren't terrible. Here's what is. Readers of this blog may recall a previous discussion of the underground entrance to the Love Park garage.

This is an extremely convenient underground connection between an 810-car parking garage and City Hall, the Municipal Services Building - basically the entire City Hall district. Say it's raining and you're late for lunch at the Bellevue. No problem. Take the concourse down South Broad to Walnut. Exit at the famous hotel's front door.

I do think the design and current physical state of this garage entrance leave something to be desired. It's not like the Love Park designers don't know how to do a garage entrance. Here's what they did up on the surface.

One Win, One Question Mark
Further west there are two newer buildings that have done interesting things with their connections to the concourse.

The Mellon Bank building, which runs from Market to JFK along 18th Street, has a nice, fairly understated doorway that connects to the Suburban Station concourse. A nondescript corridor leads from the door to the building elevators.

As you're walking to the elevators, if you look to your left, you will see this.

This is a really pretty space. What is it for? I don't know. The stairs do lead to doors that take you to the outside world. As you can see, there doesn't seem to be a lot of through traffic.

I called the building manager, CBRE, and spoke with Tom Flach, who told me the space was originally intended to be a restaurant. That concept didn't gain traction, so now it's used from time to time for tenant events. I told him how much I loved the structure, and he mentioned the child's toy K'NEX. I think he's right. I'm channeling my inner child when I gaze at this wonderful little glass house, homesteading among a gaggle of truly enormous office towers.

The entrance way to the Comcast building, across the street, is similarly understated, but even before you go in you can see people at the cafe tables in the food court. Upstairs from the food court, at ground level, there is a large plaza in front of the building, populated by an outdoor cafe and lots of bicycle parking. Every time I go there it seems they've added more racks. In the large lobby there is the famous 87-foot video wall that has become a significant tourist attraction.

As Inga Saffron wrote shortly before the building officially opened in 2008, "It's still early, but Comcast's plaza cafe and concourse mall promise to become a bustling urban nexus." And that's what happened.

But that's not all that happened. The concourse mall leads to a large, pleasant corridor that takes the visitor all the way to Arch Street, where (gasp) there is a midblock crossing (installed in 2015) that takes you on a lovely midblock ramble through a plaza next to a large fountain and delivers you to Logan Square. You can also go to the Wawa on the north side of Arch Street.

Recently my friend John Friedman and I were exploring and we found the corridor that leads to the new Comcast building. It's open to the public and very nice, but long and serpentine. We asked a young man who was walking near us if we were headed the right way, and he said yes and then made sure we got to the escalator that takes you up through the lobby to a very nice coffee shop on the mezzanine. After you do this once, the navigation is easy. Another win, in my opinion, supplemented by yet another midblock crossing on 18th if you prefer being outside.

So it does seem that we're getting better at this underground circulation stuff. From Dilworth Park to the Comcast building, we have good examples of cutting edge urban design. In between we have some older efforts that fall short. I'm hoping that somewhere there is a constituency for going back and fixing some of the mistakes. I'd start with the underground door to the Love Park garage.

Remember the rules: use daylight to reduce anxiety and provide orientation; find the desire lines and use them; and build entrances that are an invitation and not a threat.

See also Road Diet by Love Park - a Natural Experiment; Love Park Garage: Close the 15th Street Exit.

A Larger Story Coming On

Rescuing the West Side of Philadelphia's City Hall

Pedestrians not cowering behind the parapet. No parapet.

I feel a larger story coming on, but let me steal my own thunder and sketch it out here.

People are complaining about the new Love Park, and still complaining about the new Dilworth Park, and not complaining at all about the old plaza around the Municipal Services Building, and its defensive ramparts.

All three of these areas were rebuilt in the years after World War II, and in each case that design was a reaction to the takeover of our streets by motor vehicles. Love Park and Dilworth Park have been rebuilt more recently, and I think the criticisms of these rebuilds may, in certain cases, be overlooking the very serious deficits that have been remedied.

I think the area west of City Hall, in the center of William Penn's 1682 plan for the city, is a Petri dish for what happened to cities after World War II (although things were definitely getting started well before that war).

Basically, planners were trying to figure out how to keep motorists from killing pedestrians. If you think the casualty numbers are bad now, you should have a look at what they were back then, and then remember that the country's population was much smaller than it is now.

So what did planners do west of City Hall? They ceded the streets to motor vehicles. Pedestrians were allowed on sidewalks, and possibly tolerated at crosswalks, as long as they ceded priority to the cars and trucks. Failure to do so could easily result in death, or serious injury.

But what about people gathering in public spaces? This was of course, the civic center of the city of Philadelphia, birthplace of the nation and presumably a place that should value people gathering together and exercising their Constitutional right to free speech. Well, okay, we'll have some places for people to get together, and we'll make sure they won't be run down by an errant drunk in a Ford Model T, or possibly a Mack truck.

So we'll create defensive positions around these public spaces that would make the Wehrmacht proud. Those of you who have seen the movie Saving Private Ryan will probably recall the landing on the beach. Well, those defenses were rather unambitious compared to what we erected on the west side of City Hall, and around Love Park, and up around the Municipal Services Building.

And so that's what they did. And very few motorists seem to have found their way into these spaces (except the north apron of City Hall, which became a parking lot for city officials and frankly, was easy to get into compared to the west side of City Hall).

And the people huddled in their designated gathering areas, presumably grateful that they could do this without getting killed.

As I look at the only remaining piece of this architecture of defense, surrounding the Municipal Services Building, I continue to see what I saw throughout this area - very good machine gun emplacements and rifle pits, and the occasional mortar pit.

I personally don't think that military architecture is a good model for civic architecture, but that's what we had here. And it's going away. And I'm grateful for that.

See also Transportation Should Not Trump Destination.

Citizens of the Planet

University of Pennsylvania, 1984.

Long before the current wave of globalization, there was something called the British Empire. Britannia ruled the waves and also quite a lot of the land - from Australia to India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) and something called Mesopotamia (the Brits called it Messpot; we call it Iraq), through huge swaths of Africa and on to Canada in the western hemisphere (next to the thirteen colonies that got away).

Inside this rather capacious grab-bag of an empire, people got used to moving around. And it wasn't just upper-class Englishmen who had this global mobility. Mohandas Gandhi, born and raised in western India, studied law at the Inner Temple in London and worked as a lawyer in South Africa for 21 years before he went home and became known the world over as Mahatma.

Fast-forward to Groundhog Day 2017, Dilworth Park, Philadelphia. There I was, standing with a couple of thousand mostly young people, mostly Comcast tech employees. And they were from all over the planet. They were a cheerful bunch, actually, but they weren't very happy about the first Muslim ban, which had hit a few days before. And I said to myself, I think Donald has just organized a whole new political constituency, and it's not on his side.

It wasn't just the recent arrivals who blew me away. There was a young man who said he was Irish-American; his family had come here generations ago, and his grandfather had fought in Normandy in World War II, to protect our freedoms. And he suggested that it was now time for all of us here today to fight to protect those same freedoms.

Closing the country down is an interesting proposition when just about everybody in the country came from somewhere else.

The people I was standing with weren't the typical immigrants that Americans are used to. The classic view of migration is the movement of poor people to a new area of greater opportunity - the huddled masses and wretched refuse trope, as encapsulated in the Emma Lazarus inscription at the Statue of Liberty. The people I was standing with are well educated, affluent, connected, and not accustomed to being treated like dirt.

This is what Steve Bannon ran into at the nation's airports when he started treating people with valid papers like dirt. And he didn't know it was coming. Shame on him for being ignorant. It seems he's like his boss in that regard.

But let's get back to what I occasionally call the globally mobile business class. I admire them, but I'm not like them. The biggest move I ever made was from New York City to Philadelphia. The idea of moving to another country is, I confess, something I have never considered seriously.

The globally mobile are just that - globally mobile. Migration for them is not a one-way trip to a fixed destination. An Indian computer programmer may go to the United States to work. She may wind up settling permanently in the United States. Or she may return to India, where her experience could make her a good candidate for a management job and increasing levels of responsibility. Or she might decide to relocate to Hong Kong. Or, during the course of her career, she may do all three.

Their mental map spans the globe. Mine, frankly, does not.

My father was actually better at this moving-around stuff than I am. He was born in southern Alabama before World War I and moved to New York City to go to medical school. And there he stayed, put down roots, and had a family, including, in due course, me.

Dad wasn't exactly globally mobile. But he did go home quite often. Sometimes all of us would go. Sometimes he would go by himself. He maintained those connections.

Here's a word of advice to Donald and his aspiring thugs. If you want to be a popular president, don't tell a young man he can't go visit his mother.

College Hall, University of Pennsylvania, 1985.

I'm reliably informed that the Greek inscription on the 1878 Ivy Day stone above may be translated as "Not to live, but to live well." Thanks to Ashley Opalka and Emily Marston.

See also Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil and Life on the Farm.

Extend the Diagonal

Just after dark today I walked over to the Free Library for a meeting about the redesign of Love Park.  It was a cool, windy night, but clear, and as I was passing through Logan Circle I stopped for a moment to admire the view.

First I admired the statues in the fountain, beautifully lit and quite romantic.  Then I turned and looked up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, or Museum Mile as some people call it.  In the distance, clear as a bell and sitting up on its hill, ablaze with light, was the Art Museum.  Then I turned the other way and looked at City Hall, also quite spiffy in its bath of light.

This has to be one of the best urban vistas in the United States.  And I know if you walk up the Art Museum steps, you can get another version of the same thing, looking back to City Hall.  And if you go to Love Park and stand in front of the Love Statue, you can see to the Art Museum.

But the vista business stops there, at the Love Statue.  If you turn around and face City Hall, the great diagonal vanishes and is replaced by William Penn's street grid.  City Hall is physically isolated from Love Park by way too many lanes of traffic.   But it is also visually isolated. 

The park's gate actually diverts you to 15th Street, and offers up the Municipal Services Building as a sight of interest.  And there's a cacophony of street furniture that fritters away any thought of the diagonal axis, so vibrant for so long, and stopping at our shoulder blades.

I hope the redesign of Love Park will do what it can to continue the great diagonal, at least visually, all the way to City Hall.

And I hope City Hall will reciprocate.  You can actually see the Art Museum from the ground in front of City Hall.  Go to the Jose Garces sandwich shop and walk east, past the bollards.  Stop before you get to the statue of General McClellan.  Turn around.  Look carefully.  There's a lot of clutter, but there is a sight line.

Dilworth Park already has several slightly elevated seating areas.  Perhaps another one should go in at this viewing point.  What a great place to sit out in fine weather and drink a cup of coffee, or perhaps a Pernod.

What a Fabulous Ice Skating Rink

Last Friday I walked by Dilworth Park after work.  The ice rink was jammed with happy skaters, and the lit facade of City Hall made a wonderful backdrop.  Then I turned around and saw the buildings across 15th Street, lit for a movie premiere, and the Clothespin picked out with special lights.


All in all, the space was a spectacular bowl of light.  During the day, the sense of containment is less because of the open spaces to the north, but at night it makes for a very nice town square.

Now we just need a few more tourist restaurants claiming the plaza space on the west side of 15th Street.  Rockefeller Center?  Piazza Navona?  Maybe not yet, but watch out.