Big Mews and Little Walkways

Let's Look at Some Streets Without Cars

English Village.

A little while ago I wrote a story about the mews to be found in the area around Philadelphia's Fitler square. These are narrow service alleys that provide pedestrian access to the rear or side of a line of houses. 

In due course, a friend pointed out that there are larger mews in the area, more like the ones to be found in London. And indeed there are. While the little mews are designed to provide rear access, the bigger mews are designed to provide an unusual form of front access -- a street designed for pedestrians, and from which cars and other motor vehicles are ordinarily excluded.

Above we have the English Village, which lies off of 22nd street just south of Walnut. As you can see, this mews is actually wide enough to accommodate cars, but they are clearly discouraged, and I have never seen a car parked on these pavers.

Below we have a smaller mews; this one is clearly unable to accommodate cars, but what a remarkably pleasant brick pathway to your front door! It runs east-west between South Croskey Street and 23rd just south of Pine. 

There are also two developments east of Broad street that call themselves mews. Say hello to the Washington Mews at 1110 Lombard street. The gates to this mews are locked, but I find the views available from the outside utterly charming. 

The Lombard Mews at 812 Lombard don't provide meaningful interior views from the street, so here's a picture of the front facade. It strikes me as a trifle fortress-like, but well done. 

Walkways

The area east of Broad street also has a bunch of something that is extremely rare west of Broad: walkways. Two of these creatures sit just a block east of Broad, in the 1200 block of Waverly and the 1200 block of Addison (both just south of Pine). Here's Addison Walk:

And here's Waverly Walk:

Try to imagine a sunken living room on a street with cars. I've tried, and I can't do it. I think this living room speaks to the relationship that a building can have with a street when the street is for people. (I took this picture several years ago; some details have changed since then.)

There are a bunch more walkways further east, in Society Hill. The grand-daddy of them all is a walkway that starts in the south at Pine street, by St. Peter's church and the Thaddeus Kosciuszko House. At this point it is called St. Peter's Way. It then heads north through Three Bears Park, and, north of Spruce, becomes St. Joseph's Way, terminating at Old St. Joseph's church. 

St. Peter's Way, south of Three Bears park.

I confess I had never, after four decades of walking around Center City, quite figured this all out. But once you see how everything fits together, it's one of those Oh, duh moments. And what a great way to walk around the heart of Society Hill. Too bad there are no coffee shops in this area.

St. Peter's Way, north of Three Bears park.

As an added bonus, if you walk out to Fourth street at Old St. Joseph's and cross Walnut into Independence National Historical Park, you can then follow various walkways up to Market street, where current construction is improving pedestrian connections all the way to the Independence Visitor Center. 

St. Joseph's Way at Bell's Court.

So, to turn around and go the other way, you can head south from Independence Visitor Center all the way to St. Peter's on pedestrian walkways. You do need to cross streets with cars, but there are no cars on the walkways.

Who knew? Add a few signs to let people know it's there, and maybe we really can get from being a walkable city to being a walking city.

By the way, I did eventually find one walkway west of Broad. It's called South Beechwood. It starts in the 2100 block of Sansom, runs south for a bit, then turns hard left and runs to Van Pelt. I was wondering why I had never noticed it before. Here's what I've come up with. This part of Sansom is visually dominated by a surface parking lot just to the left of the nice brick walkway in the picture. The walkway could announce itself better by having a formal gateway - without a gate - and I'd recommend also building a reasonably tall wall or fence to hide the cars and provide a sense of closure to the walkway space. The English Village is less than two blocks away. Go have a look at how it's done right. 

South Beechwood.

Two Malls

As a bonus I thought I'd throw in two streets I call malls: St. Albans Place and Madison Square. Merriam-Webster provides this definition of a mall: "a usually paved or grassy strip between two roadways." And I think that fits what we're looking at. (The use of the word mall for a suburban shopping center didn't come along until there were suburban shopping centers.) 

St. Albans Place.

Like the word mews, the word mall comes to us from London, where there is a street called Pall Mall. It's a stylish address, and has been for centuries. The name comes from a game similar to croquet that was very popular in times gone by; it derives from the Italian name for the game, pallamaglio, which in turn derives from the words for ball and mallet, the two basic tools of the game. 

People used to play pall-mall on this street, and the street soon had the same name. (The Mall in front of Buckingham Palace, which the Queen uses to ride her horse-drawn carriage to Parliament, also gets its name from a pall-mall alley once located in this space. Oops! They have a king now.)

Madison Square.

Our two malls are located a few blocks south of South street, just east of Grays Ferry and Naval Square. St. Albans runs for one block (2300), Madison for two (2200-2300). They're also near Ultimo coffee at 22nd and Catharine, my home away from home when I'm in this neighborhood. 

St. Albans became semi-famous for a while when it played a part in the 1999 movie The Sixth Sense, which starred Bruce Willis. 

The cartographers of Google call these malls St. Albans Place and Madison Square. Okay. But inside my head I will call them malls. 

(Hidden City has a nice article on pedestrian streets in Philadelphia. To see it, click here.)  

See also Permeable Blocks, Second and Chestnut, My New Favorite Alley, Come for the Sights, Musing on Mews.