The Invitation

Christ Church Park, An Underperforming Asset

The corner of Second and Market. No gate.

So maybe we should ask people to come into the park. Just a thought. It's a nice park - I've often admired it walking by, on either Market or Second, on my way to somewhere else. I've hardly ever gone inside the park, and when I have I wasn't quite sure what to do there.

Let's face it: I've been coddled by Rittenhouse Square, where there are benches, other people, yadayada. Oh, yes, and there are ways into Rittenhouse Square.

How do you get into Christ Church Park? It's almost a secret. Is there an entrance at or near the corner of Second and Market? No. Think about Rittenhouse Square and the corner of 18th and Walnut, with massive quantities of pedestrian commuters in the morning and evening rush, bike messengers hanging out all day, socializing and waiting for their next call, various solicitors for religious, political, and other causes. The occasional odor of marijuana. Nothing like this happens at Second and Market. There's no gate there, you know.

Gate on Market Street, recessed in midblock.

There are two entrances to Christ Church Park, and frankly they're almost hidden. There's one on Market in the midblock, at the southwest corner of the park. The other one is at the northwest corner of the park, near the entrance to Christ Church. The two gates are connected by a brick walkway, the only path in the park.

The Market Street gate and the walkway.

Gate on Church Street.

Urbanist Jan Gehl likes to talk about the invitation. If you want people to come into your park, you need to invite them in. (See Jan Gehl, Cities for People, 2010, pp. 15, 17, 21, 236-237.)

View from Church Street gate, Christ Church across the street.

Okay, so let's assume you're in Christ Church park. What do you do then? Good question.

I'm a simple guy. My main park activity is hanging out. I don't need rope courses or zip lines. A place to sit would be nice. The park currently has five stone benches strung along the walkway. They do not have backs or armrests, but they are backed by a brick wall. Here's a picture.

Four of the five stone benches. The walkway. The brick wall.

Behind the brick wall, by the way, is a parking lot. It is virtually invisible. I wish all the parking lots in Philadelphia were as demure as this.

This parking lot is on line with American Street. 

Given the configuration of the park as essentially a pilgrim's path to the church, it is perhaps not surprising that park utilization leaves something to be desired. Dog-owners walk their dogs here, and even that has its ins and outs. This is a National Park Service park, and the Park Service requires dogs to be on-leash at all times. It's in the Code of Federal Regulations:  36 CFR Chapter 1, Section 2.15(a)(2).

Reimagining the Park
I picked up these tidbits at a July 18 meeting in Christ Church's Neighborhood House, next door to the church itself. On the fourth floor, in an auditorium that used to be a gym (there are still basketball-court markings on the floor), I watched and listened as various speakers discussed various aspects of the park.

All this gabbing was in service of a project sponsored by the Old City District: Reimagining the park at Second and Market Street.

Ideas? Yes, I Have a Few
Here are a couple of ideas off the top of my head.

My top priority. Figure out how to get little kids and their moms and dads into the park. You definitely want them in the mix of park users. They bring a whole new and very positive vibe.

Just look at the statue of Billy the Goat in Rittenhouse Square. The goat is the center of a seating area largely but not exclusively occupied by small children and their parents. This place is so popular with kids that, after a century, a literally worn-down Billy is retiring to a nice pasture across the street in the Philadelphia City Institute Library. He will be replaced by Billy Jr., an exact replica.

Second idea. Plan for a mix of uses. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (pp. 96-97), Jane Jacobs explains the secret of Rittenhouse Square's success. Because it borders a residential district and a commercial district, the park draws different people at different times of day. Aside from small children and their parents, and the old people who like to sit on benches and watch them, you have pale-faced office workers who come to get some sun and exercise while walking on the park's ring path. The benches welcome people eating takeout lunches.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

So here are some physical changes that would undoubtedly make Christ Church Park more popular.

- More gates, better placed.

- Diagonal paths. These would encourage people to shortcut through the park. A valid use to my mind (I certainly do it a lot myself), and some of the people passing through may sit down for a few minutes, rest their feet, and look around.

- A water feature. Philly has lots of great water features, none better in my estimation than the two at Sister Cities Park by Logan Square (talk about child magnets). I personally think the water feature at Christ Church should include a watering trough for horses.

- Interpretive plaques. And here's why we should have a horse trough. Somebody needs to step up and educate tourists and locals about the history of the nineteenth-century city they are standing in the middle of. Explaining to people what a horse trough is could be a good place to start.

Why All the Low-Hanging Fruit?
As I learned at the information session, Christ Church Park is a child of the 1960s. The Park Service wanted to create a view shed for the church, so it pulled down the buildings where the park now is and created a very pretty space that would allow tourists to stand at Market Street, where the sidewalk has been widened and a raised planting bed with low walls appropriate for seating has been provided. (These walls currently sport a don't-sit-on-me rail running along the top.) Tourists could view Christ Church from a distance and then possibly walk on the walkway at the west side of the park to view the church exterior close-up and possibly even go inside the front door, just a few feet from the park's northern gate. Any other uses by pedestrians do not seem to have been in the program.

That's simply how people were thinking then. Take Mies van der Rohe's iconic Seagram Building, on Park Avenue in Manhattan. A product of the 1950s, it stands in magnificent isolation behind a very effective view-shed plaza. Later on, people did get the idea that maybe there should be, you know, people in the plazas, but in the beginning it was definitely look but don't touch. It might be a step too far to say that the only pedestrians welcome were architectural photographers. Or it might not be a step too far.

The view of Christ Church from Market could actually be improved by lowering the fence. New York City's parks department has a program called Parks Without Borders; it does advocate in certain situations for taking down fences entirely. I wouldn't do that here because I think the moms and dads will want some perimeter definition to help keep their little ones from wandering out into the middle of Market Street.

Learning from Love Park
Part of Old City District's reimagining process will be looking at ways to further civilize the streets adjacent to the park.

I watched this mission civilisatrice (as the French would call it) fail at Love Park. I love the new Love Park itself, but nothing was done about the surrounding streets despite promises and hints.

I'm still angry about Love Park, but I'm working resolutely to set that anger aside and focus on the opportunities presented by Christ Church Park. I think, with a little help from well-meaning people, the park could raise its game significantly without spending a lot of money.

There's an open design workshop at the park Wednesday, August 8, from 2 to 7 p.m. The workshop will be at the farmer's market, which is next to the church.

There is naturally a page on the Old City District's website. Linked from the page are a survey and the slide deck from the July 18 presentation. Click here to view.

See Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets? Also Road Diet by Love Park - a Natural Experiment.

Which Side Are You On?

Sometimes It Comes Down to This

2100 block of South Street.

I'm on the left. And I hope you are too. Call it eye candy. Call it visual interest. My eye goes to the facade on the left. There's something to look at. The one on the right looks like it's basically trying to disappear, and it's doing a pretty good job.

As urban guru Jan Gehl puts it, "If ground floor facades are rich in variation and detail, our city walks will be equally rich in experience." (See his book Cities for People, p. 41.) Gehl goes on to suggest that thriving commercial streets all over the world tend to have a new shop or booth every 16-20 feet, which means that someone strolling along will see something new every five seconds or so (p. 77).

Stretches of certain Philadelphia streets do pretty well at this test - Walnut and Chestnut of course, parts of South Street, both east and west, East Passyunk. There are others.

Residential Streets
But what about residential streets? Are we doing enough to keep the walk interesting? I'd say yes and no. Some blocks in Center City are so beautiful that I don't mind a certain sameness. Take the 1800 block of Delancey, with its facing rows of gorgeous Georgians. Even here, though, not all the buildings are in the Georgian style, and if you look a second time you'll notice that the Georgians are not all identical. There is a pleasing variation in the details of the facades. And it doesn't hurt to have a Frank Furness building plopped at each end of the block. Two very different buildings, both very different from the Georgians.

Other blocks can be more diverse and still read as a coherent and pleasing whole, with buildings of different size and use and age finding a way to meld together. It's a balancing act, but to my mind a touch of chaos is preferable to dead conformity.

As Jane Jacobs notes, this is the way cities lived before the clear-cutting of urban renewal: "A successful city district becomes a kind of ever-normal granary as far as construction is concerned. Some of the old buildings, year by year, are replaced by new ones - or are rehabilitated to a degree equivalent to replacement. Over the years there is, therefore, constantly a mixture of buildings of many ages and types. This is, of course, a dynamic process, with what was once new in the mixture eventually becoming what is old in the mixture." (See The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 189.)

If you're looking for an example of what a street like this can look like, take a stroll down the 1900 block of Panama.

And if the architects are having trouble getting the mix right, we can always bring in the artists. A blind wall can bring life to a whole street with the help of a mural (walk by 17th and Waverly), or a mosaic by Isaiah Zagar (see this story on the 800 block of Pemberton).

Or street furniture like trash cans and utility boxes can become accent points: Send in the Mural Arts Program or students from the University of the Arts. (See What Should We Do With the Humble Dumpster?)

I have one more idea. Let's take a cue from the abstract expressionists and try some color field painting.

Yellow Houses
Oops. It looks like we're already doing this. Have a look below. Without the yellow facade, this would probably be a car ad. With the yellow, architecture wrests back primacy from the automobile.

And, as an added treat, just this once, the building owns the street down to its toes. Normally, parked cars drown the bottom half of the ground floor. I think this state of affairs does untold damage to the pedestrian experience, and I think we're so used to it we don't even notice what we don't have.

11th Street at Waverly.

As Jan Gehl notes, the ground floor is overwhelmingly what pedestrians look at. But they do look up occasionally; Gehl suggests the person on the street can relate pretty well to the first five floors of a building (p. 40). Think about the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which is 68 feet above the ground. People can see it just fine. Michelangelo made sure of that.

So our new corps of color field painters should treat the whole facade as their canvas. Let's pull back a bit from this building and see what it looks like from Waverly.

The whole building.

Now let's pull a bit more back up Waverly, even though it's trash day. An accent point can pull together a whole lot more than itself.

From Waverly near Jessup.

Here's another yellow building. I've been passing it for years, and a few days ago, for the first time that I know of, the parking spot in front of the building was empty. And I had my camera with me.

2100 block of Locust.

And here's another.

2000 block of Waverly.

One more. You'll notice that the street trees can be much more than bit players, if you can see them.

25th at Panama.

Let's look at some other colors.

Other Colors
Blue, for instance. This one is across the street from Frank Furness's Thomas Hockley house. (For more on Frank Furness in the Rittenhouse area, click here.)

21st Street south of Walnut.

I call this one the Jolly Green Giant.

Naudain at 24th Street.

I really like this one. It's a little hard to find. Addison Street in this block is a stub that doesn't open onto either 10th or 11th. You need to walk down Waverly and then turn onto a little north-south stub called Alder, and a few steps will take you to Addison.

1000 block of Addison.

Plenty of Painted Buildings
At the risk of stating the obvious, there are plenty of painted buildings in Philadelphia. Very few of them look like the house on Addison Street above. I'm trying to make the case for a bolder use of color. And the good news is that I can do it by walking around and taking pictures of stuff that's already there.

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of lovely pastels around town - two of the yellow houses above are pastels. I particularly like them when they use features like doors, windows, and the cornice as accent points.

Red: A Special Case
Years ago S. Weir Mitchell wrote a novel about Philadelphia called The Red City. It's still red. We've got plenty of red brick buildings, including the new Museum of the American Revolution.

So why would you paint a red brick building with brick red paint? Do you really think we don't notice the difference?

Painting red bricks red displays, to my mind, a certain lack of imagination. I understand the desire to fit in, and I understand that the paint may be covering a myriad of flaws, and I'm not opposed to painting brick. But really, that color? You're not fooling anyone. The facade lacks the texture of brick and the variety that comes with the contrasting color of the mortar. Next time, have a look at chrome yellow.

Plaque remembering S. Weir Mitchell, 1500 block of Walnut.

See also City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street, Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor, Putting Some Park into Old Parking Lots, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?