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.