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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Penn's Landing Atlantis
The plan included at least 15 restaurants, a bowling alley, a 300,000-square-foot food court, a maritime museum, a 20-screen movie theater, and an enclosed water feature with canoe rides, all topped off with a residential/commercial tower shaped like a sail, Dubai style.
PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: Penn's Landing Atlantis
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena around Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Penn's Landing... is it cursed? No matter what the proposal for its redevelopment is, practical or impractical, kick-ass looking or silly-looking, none of it ever happens... ever. This city has been trying to get this little spot on the waterfront developed since the 1950s and has either failed miserably or only gotten the initial pre-phases built every time. I wonder if it has something to do with that gigantic interstate highway running alongside?
Penn's Landing's Dead-Ass Proposals are so numerous that you have to separate them into small stages on the timeline just to figure them all out. One particularly crazy stage was in the early 21st Century. In 2003, right after Simon Properties' decade-long Penn's Landing development debacle of the 1990s (which itself followed the Rouse debacle of the late '80s), the city made a call for new proposals for the city's most Development Kryptonite-laden spot. A series of public forums organized by the Inquirer and Penn Praxis invited the community to submit all their own whacky ideas of what our sad waterfront should become. Lots of excitement came with it... Penn's Landing would finally prosper! Finally!!!
Four developers submitted outrageous super-plans for the waterfront, each more crazy than the next. Among these, the most insane was Penn's Landing Atlantis.
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| HOOOOOly fucking dogshit!!! |
OK, so it looks nice in a rendering, but once you find out what its all about, the whole plan is hilariously impractical. The developer was the Harry Eng's Atlantis New York. In fact, this beast of a complex was based on a Dead-Ass Proposal for NYC. This $3 billion project (that's BILLION with a B) would include a huge amphitheater, an art gallery, enclosed year-round gardens, a cap over I-95, at least 15 restaurants, a bowling alley, a 300,000-square-foot food court, a maritime museum, a 20-screen movie theater, and an enclosed water feature with canoe rides and aquatic shows ... all topped off with a residential/commercial tower shaped like a sail, Dubai style. Despite having so much shit in one place, the developer claimed that the complex would have more outdoor space than Penn's Landing currently has, empty lots and all. It was designed by the San Fransisco-based firm Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz.
When the renderings for this and the other three plans were put on public display on Sept. 10, 2003, people went fucking apeshit over them, forgetting all the previous decades of failed waterfront proposals. Atlantis, however, took a lot of heat. It was seen as non-compliant with the demands made in the public forums earlier in the year: instead of connecting the city to the waterfront, it seemed to wall it off even more. It would have competing attractions with Center City and was perceived as having the potential to fail even worse than the 1990s plan.
The only big advantage seen within this project was that it was set to be completely privately funded, while the three other proposals were all asking for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of milk from the public teat. After the city had recently wasted over $50 million of public funds on the failed Aerial Tramway and Disney Quest plans, Philadelphians were wary of new projects that wanted their tax monies.
In the beginning of February 2004, only a few months after releasing renderings to the public, the city decided to narrow the competition for the waterfront's development from four proposals to two. Atlantis was one of the two getting axed. The reason given? Simple impracticability. Just look at it... it's HUGE!!! The other two proposals would get nixed in October 2004. The reason given? The two remainders wanted too much public money and one of them was involved in that whole FBI wiretap scandal related to the "Mayor" we had at the time.
Though Atlantis was an outright illogical proposal, there's a pretty good chance that it would have improved the waterfront if even partially built. Maybe they would have gotten the cap over 95 and part of the complex done before the economy tanked. Oh well, it doesn't matter now: all those proposals are DEAD. The current Master Plan for the waterfront is less actual plan and more of a suggestion; maybe that's the best way to finally get our shitty waterfront developed. Bah.
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