They Threw Rocks at Mayor Dilworth

Tuesday Evening Wasn't that Bad. Still, Pretty Bad.

The Acme parking lot, a little after 6 pm yesterday.

"Parking in South Philly was a problem even in 1961, when, as Binzen puts it, 'the mayor proposed requiring residents to pay for overnight parking spaces in front of their houses. The proceeds of the $40-a-year licenses' -- about $320 in today's dollars -- 'were to be earmarked for building off-street parking lots.  Such a plan worked in Milwaukee, but Dilworth's scheme got nowhere. When he confronted his critics at a stormy public meeting, rock throwers targeted the building. A city councilman, Tom Foglietta, was cut by flying glass.'"

There. I'm actually quoting myself, from an article I wrote about Peter Binzen's biography of Richardson Dilworth. (To see the story, click here.)

There were a lot of flashback moments on Tuesday evening. A stretch of 11th Street in South Philadelphia has been redesigned to include a two-way bicycle lane and (gasp!) daylighting of streetcorners. After a lengthy period of consultation with the community, construction has finally begun, and many local residents have at last awoken to the serious threat this redesigned street poses to their special way of life.

Whether they would have awoken if they hadn't been prodded by some television news organizations desperate for viewers in the dog days of August is another issue. But I don't really blame the newsies. The killer bees seem to be asleep, and the sharks have stopped biting people. What's a colorful journalist to do?

So here I was, attending my third public meeting on this topic. South Philly is a special place, but the first two meetings were actually about information. This one, held at the old folks center on Passyunk Avenue near the Acme market, was about yelling.

The meeting was held by the Passyunk Square civic organization, and the city sent four representatives, including Mike Carroll, a professional engineer and the highest ranking transportation official in the city administration.

The guy who owned the show, however, was a bulky man with a florid complexion and eyes that he could, apparently at will, make bulge in an alarming way. He stood in the center of the floor. His modus operandi was simple. He interrupted everybody. Friend or foe, nobody could finish a sentence before he started bellowing. Occasionally he was coherent, and he did at one point summarize his party's position quite well. "Put it back the way it was," he said.

I imagined him as a stock character in the old Italian commedia dell'arte, wearing a silly costume and strutting the boards on a creaky stage in the main square of a small Tuscan hill town in, say, the seventeenth century. Bellowing and making strange faces, frightening the small children and fascinating their parents.

Eventually, Mark Squilla, the local city councilman, escorted this fellow from the room. He went quietly. I'm guessing he was pleased to have been the center of attention for such a long time.

And things got a little bit more orderly, but not a lot. There were many others there who were happy to raise their voices whenever they felt like it, speaking all at once, complaining of lost parking spaces and saying again and again, in many ways, how much they hated bicyclists. There was the usual litany of zombie arguments against bike lanes. One woman said there wasn't enough space left in the motor-vehicle lanes for emergency vehicles to get through. Jeannette Brugger from the city pointed out that the two lanes were ten and eleven feet wide. (This is a two-way street, by the way, which is a bit unusual for this neighborhood. The overall street is quite wide - seventy feet - again an anomaly for the area.)

Towards the end of the meeting, the other side managed to get a few words in edgewise. One woman with small children rose to say how much better she thought the new, daylighted intersections were, and how dangerous and scary the old ones were. And a man stood and said that he was a bicyclist and he thought the redesign of the street was a great improvement and he wanted to thank the city for its work and also the Passyunk Square civic for holding the meeting. (Sarah Anton, Passyunk Square's president, did a heroic job riding herd on this unruly mob.)

The bicyclist then did something unusual. He asked for a round of applause for the city and the Passyunk Square civic. And there was a tremendous amount of clapping. Many, possibly most, of the people in the room were actually in favor of the redesign. They'd been sitting quietly through all the histrionics of the opposition; now it was their turn, and they used it well.

At the end of the meeting, Mike Carroll, the senior city official, did something that made me very happy. I've been writing since 2014 about the parking lot next to the Acme. It's pictured above. He said he'd reach out to the owners to see if something could be done to increase neighbors' access to the lot.

I think such a move would go a long way to alleviate parking issues in this neighborhood. As for the hatred of bicyclists, I don't think that's going away any time soon. They're just a particularly visible symptom of the fact that the neighborhood is changing - this is in fact one of the most heavily biked neighborhoods in the United States.

The downside of change is that things change. And the unilateral control that long-term residents have had over their streets is coming to an end. Personally I think that's a good thing.

See also About that Parking Lot in South Philly, Drunken Episcopal Bishop Kills Bicyclist, Once There Was a Prison.

About that Parking Lot in South Philly

You know, the Acme lot at 9th and Passyunk. I wrote about it last year. The Acme and the 202 space parking lot and a few other things are located on a superblock that was the site of the old Moyamensing Prison. The lot is much too large for the store, but I guess the designers couldn't think of anything else to do with the land.

Anyway, this part of South Philly is famous for its tight parking, particularly at night, so a while ago the Acme quietly started letting people park in the lot overnight. Well, one thing has led to another; when I visited the lot at 10 a.m. this morning, a Sunday, the lot was nearly full, and a very substantial portion of the cars had the above flyer under a windshield wiper. It gently suggests that the freebie only works from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.

You could see this coming a mile away. Free parking spaces attract cars the way a dead horse attracts flies. And the cars are about as good at following instructions as the flies are.

As I argued last year, this should be a paid lot, similar to the one next to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Fairmount.

That's step one. Step two is to redevelop this site along the lines of the Piazza in Northern Liberties -- a series of perimeter buildings around a center square. Build the new Acme first, over on Passyunk where it has always belonged. Then demolish the existing store and complete the redevelopment of the site.

The area above the new store should be given over to parking, just as happens on South Street, over the old SuperFresh (now an Acme) and the Whole Foods next door.

The paid lot, and the follow-on garage, would not attract people looking for free parking, but it would give people who couldn't find free parking a place to go. When you're tired enough, and frustrated enough, you're happy to have even a paid place to park, so you can go home and go to sleep. Also it would be a good resource for the many restaurants in the neighborhood.

See also Once There Was a Prison, Off-Street Parking at the Italian Market - Current Conditions.

Off-Street Parking at the Italian Market - Current Conditions

In my last post (August 3) I looked at the old Moyamensing Prison site at 11th and Reed in South Philly, which is currently occupied by an Acme supermarket and a 202-place parking lot for Acme shoppers only.  I suggested that the lot should be open to the general public, and that this would help relieve the shortage of parking for the Italian Market.

A reader gently suggested that if I was going to write about off-street parking at the Italian Market, I might want to learn about what's already there.  And so I went and educated myself.

First stop was the Internet, where I quickly found a website called Philadelphia 9th Street Italian Market:  http://www.phillyitalianmarket.com/contact/map.htm.  Attached to the site is a map of off-street parking lots:  http://www.phillyitalianmarket.com/contact/9thst.gif.  It lists seven lots with a total of 560 spaces.  Not bad.  Certainly more spaces than I expected.

I'd been aware of several of these lots, but a number of them were new to me, so on August 21, after acupuncture, I walked around, map in hand, and counted spaces.

Instead of seven lots, I found five.  The municipal lot on Ellsworth between 9th and 10th is now Cedars Village (921 Ellsworth).  The website says it's for older people, and construction was completed in April 2014.   Nice apartment building.  Parking lot had been listed as having 47 spots.

The lot on the north side of Carpenter between 9th and 10th has also disappeared.  There is new construction on the spot, which had been listed with 75 parking places.

On the same block of Carpenter, on the south side, there's a lot listed with 65 spaces.  I counted 53.

The lot on the south side of Washington between 9th and 10th is listed with 120 spots.  I counted 82.

It's true that I'd just come from acupuncture, it was a warm day, and I was hungry.  My counts may be off by one or two, but they're not off by 38.

The only lot where my count agreed with the map was the lot on the south side of Washington between 8th and 9th:  43 spaces.

An Improvement Opportunity
This lot is, to my mind, an interesting improvement opportunity.  As you're walking on 9th Street below Washington, there's a lengthy plywood barricade on the east side.  Behind it is a dead zone of uneven land where presumably there were once buildings.  And behind that is the parking lot, occupying perhaps half of the vacant land.  Philadelphians, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your dead wasteland in the center of the bustling Italian Market.

At the very least we should be able to add 50 places and have an attractive frontage on 9th Street.

The municipal lot on the north side of Washington between 8th and Passyunk is rated for 120 places and has 74.

Finally, the municipal lot on Christian between 7th and 8th is listed for 90 spots but only has 27, plus four spots reserved for Zipcars.

This last lot is adjacent to the lot for the Fleisher Art Memorial.  Perhaps at one time all of this was one lot, but that's not the way it is today.

So, as I noted above, the map totals 560 spaces.  I counted 279, a little less than half of 560.

Those 202 spots down by the Acme are starting to look pretty good about now, aren't they?

Especially since off-street parking near the Italian Market seems to have declined in recent years.  Remember, the map said seven lots, and I found five.  Minus 112 spots, by the map's shaky count.

Who's Looking After This Mess?
This business of a neighborhood getting new construction, and parking lots being turned into condos, is predictable.  It's happening around the Italian Market, it's happening down by the South Street bridge.  And I think it's a good thing.  But there's an obvious downside.

Tectonic shifts like this call for a coordinated institutional response.  If the area has lost 112 public off-street spots, maybe our city elders should look at the old Moyamensing Prison site and figure out how to add 200 spaces.  I believe the merchants would appreciate our concern, as would the customers.  Me included.

Once There Was a Prison

About a block from my acupuncturist in South Philly is an unusual sight for the area -- a very large open space.  It's a parking lot for an Acme supermarket that's pretending it's in the suburbs, sitting way back from Passyunk Avenue, with its rear facade on Reed Street.  There are 202 parking spaces in this lot by my count.

How did such a thing come to be in a part of town noted for its lack of open space?  Well, there's a plaque.  It says this is the site of the old Moyamensing Prison.  For those of you who have read The Devil in the White City, this is where the serial murderer H.H. Holmes was finally executed.

On the site there's also a senior citizens' center on Passyunk, with a really pretty garden in front, and over on Reed, behind the Acme, a city-owned lot that used to be for police cars but now sports a random selection of battered city vehicles, along with piles of rusting metal junk from road work.

The impression of a hodgepodge is locked home by the Acme store.  It's a refugee from a mall, and it simply does not belong in a densely built-up neighborhood.  The low, rambling building, the vast apron of parking asphalt, and worst of all the back wall of the store on Reed Street.

Across Reed is an old, tall, imposing masonry structure.  The city's fleet management operation has repair shops there, but much of that work is apparently now farmed out to private contractors, and I think we're looking at an incipient high-end condo.

What will the future condo owners look out on?  Well, across Reed Street, the Acme has essentially dropped its trousers and mooned the world.  There are a few grimy loading docks, stretches of blank wall, and odd pieces of ground where the architect apparently gave up.  This being Philly, some of these spaces are now being used, awkwardly, for parking.

This rear service area is standard treatment in the suburbs, but usually you don't see it.  It may back onto a bit of woods.  And there's often a chain link fence to discourage exploring.  Here, it's facing onto a city street that's being treated as an alley.

In terms of urban redevelopment, the Moyamensing Prison site is a disaster.  The structures have no sympathy for their surroundings, and they're wasting a lot of space in a tight neighborhood.  This is particularly true of the parking lot, which is placarded for customers only, with a 90-minute time limit.

Have I mentioned the idea that parking is in short supply in South Philadelphia?  And here is a 202-car lot which, when I pass it, is largely empty.

A Parking Lot for All
So, first things first.  Let's get our head out of the suburbs and turn this parking lot into a real city lot, available to all.  Charge money.  Give Acme shoppers at checkout a voucher for reduced-rate or free parking.

If you're looking for an example of what to do, take a gander at the lot next to the Eastern State Penitentiary on Fairmount Avenue.  Also, many of the parking garages around the Reading Terminal Market accept reduced rate vouchers from the merchants in the Terminal.

Maybe, if Acme was willing, even Pat's and Geno's could offer vouchers.

This brings me to who would benefit from these new spaces.  Complaints about parking are legion in South Philly.  If you listen carefully, I think there are two main issues -- overnight parking and the Italian Market.

There are a lot of cars in South Philly.  Many of them leave in the morning and come back at night with their owners.  There are actually spaces during the day -- except for the Italian Market, which is in my opinion impossible all the time.

Well, the Moyamensing Prison site is a block south of Pat's and Geno's, the beginning of the Italian Market, which then runs up 9th Street to Sarcone's, above Christian Street.  It's a linear market, so walking is built into the experience.  Parking at the Acme would allow you to take a leisurely stroll and look around.  I'm particularly fond of the live chicken place.  If your feet get tired, have an espresso at Anthony's.

And if you live in this part of South Philly and you come home late, and there are no street spots anywhere, the lot will beckon.  Or if you're from Center City and you have a dinner reservation at the Victor Cafe, wouldn't the lot be convenient?

Pie in the Sky
What the Moyamensing Prison site really needs, of course, is a complete do-over.  In Philadelphia, we actually know how to do urban supermarkets.  Go to South Street -- look at SuperFresh, look at Whole Foods.  They don't wear their parking lots as aprons.  They wear them as bonnets.  Store on the ground floor.  Cars on the upper floors.  Been done.

So let's rebuild the Acme as a three-story building with the store on the ground floor and the parking upstairs.

But wait a minute.  Let's have a look at the Piazza up in Northern Liberties.  What would happen if we took the Moyamensing Prison site and ringed it with buildings, and had a large open space in the center?  Then we would have an actual urban open space that, with the right programming, people would flock to.  Open air cafes, a bocce court for the senior citizens, maybe even a big TV screen where we could watch the World Cup. 

This isn't really pie in the sky.  All of it has been done here, in Philly, and all of it works.  What it does require is some imagination, some teamwork -- and some leadership.