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PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: Penn Park Parking Lot
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PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: Penn Park Parking Lot
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.
3000 Lower Level Walnut St. -- OK, so this empty lot is not THAT big of a deal ... or at least it seems like it. I mean, Penn Park is awesome, right? Why should I be mad that it comes with a huge surface parking lot? It reduced a 10+ acre surface lot into this comparatively small one. What's the big deal? Well ... let me tell ya.
First, some history. Before 1854, this plot of land was not even part of Philadelphia. Part of it wasn't even solid land. In the olden days, when today's West Philadelphia was too far west of the city core to be called West Philadelphia, it was known as the village of Hamilton. Though the street grid from what is now Center City (sort of) extended into Hamilton, the street names were all different. Back then, this lot (once the swampy river-edged part of it was filled in) would be described as being on Andrew (Walnut) Street, between Westmoreland (31st) and Bridgewater (30th) Streets.
For the majority of its lifetime, this site has been a No-Man's Land. Once the area actually became developed past a swamp infill, it became an industrial zone, like most riverfront areas of cities in the 1800s.
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| The lot as seen from the northwest in 1888, from a series of images taken right before the construction of the first Walnut Street Bridge. Image from PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Department of Records. |
For many decades, the lot was a coal yard that passed between many different owners. In the 1920s, when 30th Street Station and the Main Post Office (now IRS) were being planned, this part of the Schuylkill riverfront and points south became Pennsylvania Railroad property. The land was cleared to make way for new rail lines and construction proposals so dead that I can't even write Dead-Ass Proposal posts about them.
The site of the lot stayed a weedy shitbag dirtpile for decades thereafter. Then, in the middle of the 20th Century, the Main Post Office was being forced to change with the times. Though it was adjacent to the region's busiest train station and the city's busiest subway, by the 1950s workers were driving in from the suburbs and had nowhere to park. The post office acquired some of the PRR land and turned it into a bigass motherfucking surface parking lot. The site of the current lot became a vehicle maintenance facility.
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| Aerial view from 2004. |
In 2007, the University of Pennsylvania bought the old post office and all of its associated land for $50.6 million. On the same day, they sold the building to Brandywine Realty Group and kept the land for the construction of Penn Park. Last September, Penn Park opened and this week's Empty Lot was born.
From the day it opened, I kept thinking about it: Why add a surface parking lot to Penn Park? Is there a lack of parking on the Penn campus? Are the FOUR already-extant parking garages nearby not enough? Are the scores of street parking spaces on and near the Walnut Street Bridge not enough? Well, I finally found my answer. This lot may just be a placeholder for a building!!
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| There it is, along with a bunch of other crap that never happened. Check out that cable-stay pedestrian bridge on the left. |
In Penn's 2006 Master Plan, a tall unnamed building is placed on the site of this lot. Yes, it takes up way more space than the surface lot, but it's there nonetheless. Since many things from the 2006 plan never happened (though a lot of others did), I pretty much wrote that building off as some fantasy market-driven development that Penn had posited but never came to fruition -- until I observed the rendering of the current Penn Master Plan, which is a sequel to the 2006 one.
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| AAaaaaaahhhhaaaaaaaaaaa!!! |
The rendering lists this unknown building, which takes up the surface lot, as "Walnut South Mixed-Use". I'ts not mentioned as occurring in Phase 2 (2011-2015), so I must assume that it is set for Phase 3 (2016-2030). Ya know what? Fuck that placeholder name. Until something more definitive comes along, the project shall be known as the GroJLart on the Park. I assume that it's a future market-driven development like it was in the 2006 plan, so it may never happen ... but, it gives hope that one day this crappy surface lot on that beautiful park will one day be eliminated.
So there you have it... that's why it sucks that this surface lot exists on Penn Park. Hopefully, if Cira South ever gets its glassy ass out of the ground, it will spur a real estate frenzy in the area large enough to get GroJLart on the Park built.
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