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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
