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A weekly series of foulmouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other development and design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at philaphilia.blogspot.com.
On the Delaware Waterfront between Market and Chestnut Streets: Philadelphia's mighty waterfront surface lot.
This shitbird empty lot is even more useless than everyone thinks. This piece of land isn't even supposed to be here, and, as if the fake land knows this, has the unlimited power to stop any project that gets proposed for it. It's a disaster of the Triple-P variety: Piss-Poor Planning.
This lot started as … water. This was the location where ferries from Camden and elsewhere would arrive at Market Street. Once I-95 was stupidly planned to crush, kill and destroy the entire Center City Delaware Riverfront and countless historical sites, a huge extension of landfill crept out into the Delaware, halfway to the long-lost Smith and Windmill islands. They shouldn't call it Penn's Landing, they should call it Penn's Sailing!
The empty lot in 1910. It was more developed as water than it ever was as land. Pic from Phillyhistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.
Empty Lot under construction.
Once built, even the original plan for its development fell through like a motherfucker. The next four decades would be filled with proposal after proposal that would get more bold and more dead every time. If I wrote about each individual one, this article would reach Caprica.
This early plan for the Lot of Doom included a much larger cap over I-95. It also includes a highway down South Street, so I guess it's OK that this didn't happen.
From the get-go, Penn's Landing's ultimate failure was immediately secured. To some visitors to the city, the Penn's Landing Lot of Doom was the first thing to be seen, and the first thing to disappoint the fuck out of them about Philadelphia. Even the Queen of England had the unfortunate experience of this famous empty lot.
1976. You can see disappoint on her face. Pic from Phillyhistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.
The boldest project that came along over the next three decades was a super-humongous entertainment complex that was to go all the way up and down the Center City Riverfront. The developer, Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group, just couldn't get their shit in a pile fast enough to get it going. They got the contract in 1997 to build a $329 million, 600,000-square-foot mega-super-plex. It was gonna have a super-huge AMC Theater, a Barnes & Noble, an FAO Schwarz, a Versace, a Cheesecake Factory, a Circa and something called Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. On top of all that, the incredibly stupid Skylink Aerial Tramway was planned by the city and state as part of the deal. For this bold plan, The Please Touch Museum was slated to move to the Penn's Landing Lot of Doom. 
The Please Touch Museum in the Lot of Doom. A primordial version of the Skylink Aerial Tramway can be seen in the background.
From the river side. A huge parking garage on the riverfront … yeah, great idea.
Delay after delay hit the project, with Simon making stupid excuses for it every time. First they said that retailers didn't want to be there because there was no highway interchange; years later they blamed September 11. What a bunch of bullshit. To this day, the lot bears the scars from this Dead-Ass Super-Proposal, in the form of the giant, $15 million Pi that has stood on the lot since December of 2000.
The future of the lot still remains uncertain. So many renderings and visions have come and gone that it's hard to figure out which one is right. The latest plan, which calls for a top-to-bottom makeover of the entire Philadelphia riverfront, puts some unknown buildings on the lot next to a great lawn that would replace the shitbag Great Plaza.
The current plan. The Lot of Doom is on the right.
Even with that plan (sort of) in motion, fantasy and visionary plans are still being made. The latest Edmund Bacon design contest winners, University of Toronto students Clara Romero and René Biberstein, submitted a plan for the Lot of Doom, this one capping over I-95 and creating a grand stairway down to the river. It's kind of cool, but reminds me too much of the crappy 1980s Great Plaza, which has been slated for demolition since 1998. 
Kinda neat, I guess. The newsprint sailboat is being chased by newsprint sharks.
This fuckbucket of an empty lot has been sitting in ugliness and despair for the last 50 years, scarring this city and tarnishing its image to anyone who visits. Penn's Landing is supposed to be a tourist attraction but its just ended up being a fuckist distraction. The hell with it. Someone needs to build some shit there already.
Way to go Gro... This is a sad place made even sadder by all the proposals that never happen. See my book, "Philadelphia's Lost Waterfront" (History Press, 2011) for more on I-95 and Penn's Landing, and how it all came to be...— cchali- Gotta say that a "shitbird empty lot" sounds better than a "$329 million, 600,000-square-foot mega-super-plex," even with a Cheesecake Factory. Probably makes no sense to the green eye shade types, but I'd like to see an old time amusement area similar to Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens with a carousel, ferris wheel, performing arts and cafes.— Holly Moore
- My favorite thing about the last rendering is the building by Louis Sullivan on the left. About time he got a new comission.— Bill Greene
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