Philly Plein Air

Dejeuner sur le Tarmac

Rittenhouse Square, east side.

There is in fact a revolution taking place on Philadelphia's streets, and it has to do with food. Let me put this up front: I think restaurants have fractured the hegemony that the private automobile has held over our streets for a century.

We had a false dawn five years ago when Pope Francis visited Philadelphia, and the streets of Center City were closed to private automobiles (with a very few exceptions). In a lovely essay in the Inquirer, Katie Monroe evokes the quietly magical aura felt by so many: "Just to be able to stand in the middle of the street and take a photograph of City Hall from a new angle is exciting. To be able to walk around, talking to my mom on the phone, without getting interrupted by a driver cutting me off in the crosswalk where I have the right of way." (To see the full story, click here.)

Unfortunately, when the pope left town, he took the carless streets and the magical aura with him, and the everyday grind of trying to reform the city's streets snapped back to the status quo ante.

And stayed there. Tangible progress was made, but resistance to change proved highly effective, and progress was glacial, and there were repeated calls to rip out existing bicycle lanes.

Then, in November 2017, 24-year-old Emily Fredricks was killed by a garbage truck while she was riding in the old Spruce Street bike lane. I think this was a turning point. A project to rebuild the Pine and Spruce bike lanes had been mired for quite some time. Suddenly it came to life. 

And in time the City showed itself willing to pursue a range of innovative projects. For instance, the Chestnut Street bus lane had long been a joke. Delivery truck drivers regularly parked in the lane, tying traffic into knots. The City decided to expand the loading zones in the parking lane on the other side of the street, and, just like magic, conditions in the bus lane improved. Imagine - fiddling with one lane can help fix an entirely different lane. 

So it's not like we weren't going anywhere. But I was entirely unprepared for what happened this year. 

It got started in Old City when Second Street was closed to motor vehicles between Market and Chestnut for the weekend of July 17-19, and the local restaurants set up outdoor dining rooms in the middle of the street, where the cars and trucks suddenly were not.

This initial one-weekend experiment proved very successful, and soon streets were closing and outdoor dining rooms were popping up like mushrooms after a rain.

I'm gong to take a closer look at two of these alfresco dining clusters - one centered on 18th Street near Rittenhouse Square, and the other centered on 13th Street south of Chestnut, and branching out onto Drury, Juniper, and Sansom to form a rectangle of streets devoted to dining.

The picture at the beginning of this story shows 18th Street by Rittenhouse Square, where Parc, Devon, and Rouge occupy the full width of the cartway, normally populated with cars and trucks. There is a wide sidewalk next to the park that allows for comfortable pedestrian circulation. 

If we go north of Chestnut, we see a slightly different arrangement, with dining areas flanking a central fire lane that, again, provides for pedestrian circulation.

Below is a shot of Bar BomBon at Moravian.

Down Moravian we confront an innovative solution to hiding dumpsters - a theatrical scrim decorated with a fanciful streetscape. I expect this works even better at night.

Here's what Moravian usually looks like.

A little further on we have Dandelion and a reminder that restaurants are still doing home delivery.

The restaurants around 18th Street have recently expanded their street-closure dining hours, which now run from 4 pm on Wednesday to 10 pm on Sunday.

On our way to 13th Street, on Sansom, we discover this entrance to the bike room at 123 South Broad.

And here, on 13th Street, we see the fire-lane configuration again.

Here's the fire lane with people in it.

And here we are on Drury, where people are watching football and having a good time outside McGillin's Old Ale House.

Next to McGillin's is a well-hidden corral chock-full of dumpsters. I can't tell you how happy I was when I saw this. For a long time Drury Street had been blighted by a plague of dumpsters randomly strewn at odd angles on the sidewalks and the street, like so many cows in a pasture. 

Somebody convinced the merchants and restaurateurs on Drury to cooperate like good neighbors and put their dumpsters in this corral. I have no idea how this came to be. Maybe someone can do a lot of reporting and figure out what happened here. (I'm not that person, but I do know that discussions about cleaning up Drury Street go back quite a few years. For Jon Geeting's 2015 article in PlanPhilly, click here.)

Tucked behind the corral is a lovely, quiet beer garden. A sheltered oasis - really a little world by itself.

I find it hard to describe how transformative these street closures are. Not just moving cars but parked cars - supposedly a third rail of municipal politics - vanish, at least for a time. As we can see on Moravian and again on Drury, even the dumpsters have been moved to the background.

What's left? A place for people.

For a brief moment I had to ask myself if I was jealous of the restaurateurs. They have come so far, so fast. But I found that I'm not jealous - I'm thrilled. The restaurants have set a new mark for achievement and speed. 

I just hope that some of the positive energy the restaurants have generated flows over into the other reforms we so desperately need on our streets.

See also It's the Road Design Stupid, Reimagining Our Streets.