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A weekly series of foulmouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other development and design phenomena in Phladelphia. Find more stories like this at philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Northwest Corner of Broad and Race Streets
This right here is an empty lot that didn't start getting much attention until fairly recently. This undeveloped hole used to be able to hide and be unnoticed before the Convention Center Expansion, but now has come back into full fucking exposure.
In the years before the Convention Center Expansion, a large gaping empty lot existed on North Broad Street between Cherry and Race for nearly 60 years. Anyone walking or driving up North Broad would be reviled by that shitbag of a lot and not even notice the Hahnemann Mural Lot ... especially before it had that mural on it.
This photo from 2007 shows the massive empty lot that used to scar North Broad. The Hahnemann Mural Lot is in the upper left. Image from Google.
Now that the big-ass Convention Center Expansion is complete, the Hahnemann Mural Lot has become the largest gap between buildings on Broad between City Hall and the Vine Street Expressway (if you don't count that shitbird Thomas Paine Plaza).
The site of this lot has been continuously developed since at least 1832. Only in fairly recent history has this corner been so bare. However, no building that has even been on this lot has breached four stories. For most of its life, the corner section of the lot was inhabited by small commercial buildings. If any of them were demolished, they just ended up getting replaced by a similarly sized structure with more or less the same purpose.
Examples of those old commercial buildings. Images from the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.
The western end of the lot was home to an old Philadelphia tradition: the Northwest School, one of the first schools in the city. It was so old that when it started, the 1400 block of Race Street was the northwestern border of development in the city — hence the name. The original small school building was replaced in 1900 by a much larger one. That building got demolished in the 1950s.
The Northwest School in 1906. Pic from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.
The exact date the lot was created is not clear, but those small commercial buildings were still rocking the corner of Broad and Race up into the early 1980s. Round about 2004, even the Arts and Culture Committee of the Philadelphia Mayor's Commission on Disabilities was getting tired of this shitty empty lot. They decided to get the Mural Arts Program to draw up a design for a 75-foot-by-150-foot mural that would grace the huge blank wall that faced it.
Artist Donald Glaser put together an image called Independence Starts Here. The people seen in the image are all real Philadelphians with disabilities that contribute to the community of their particular disability. The hands doing American Sign Language are spelling out "independence". The effort to create this mural was massive and took three and a half years from start to finish...
... which is kind of a problem. After so much time, money, and effort goes into a mural that is, in the end, quite beautiful, what will people say when this lot is developed? In 2008, while the Convention Center Expansion was in site prep, the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau executive vice president Jack Ferguson started talking about how 2,500 new hotel rooms would be needed in the city by 2013. The best spot to put 600 to 800 of those rooms? The northwest corner of Broad and Race, a.k.a. the Hahnemann Mural Lot.
Therefore, if and when this 600-to-800 room hotel is built, NIMBYs will be dropping from the rafters and diving in front of the bulldozers and shit in order to save the massive mural (even though Hahnemann has plenty of other exposed walls it could be repainted on). This will get interesting, to say the least. Unfortunately, the turdish economy has stopped Marriott and other hotel companies that expressed interest in the location before they could even make a rendering that I could use for a "Dead-Ass Proposal" article.
This asphalt asshole of a lot needs to get developed in order to keep the ball rolling on North Broad's so-far-underwhelming renaissance. Make sure to go there and enjoy Independence Starts Here now so that you won't lose your shit when it inevitably gets covered by a building.
You can see the corner that became the Hahnemann Mural Lot way in the back there in this photo from 1922. The building at the corner stood all the way until the lot was cleared. Pic from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records
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