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PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: South Broad Street Shitjungle
PHILAPHILIA Empty Lot of the Week: South Broad Street Shitjungle
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.
Northeast corner of Broad and South streets -- This lot has always pissed me off. I remember noting it with disgust before I even lived in Philadelphia. A 19,000-square-foot wasteland on what should be one of our nicest intersections, this piece of shit has sat empty for waaaaay too long. Thankfully, it will soon be coming to an end despite NIMBY attempts to preserve it. This pile of wild vegetation is also known as the Garden of the Arts. As I've stated before, you know an empty lot is bad when you're not the first one to name it.
The first piece of development to hit this site was something you would find almost anywhere on Broad Street in the early to mid 19th century: a coal yard. Essentially, the empty lot started out as an empty lot (full of coal). In the 1870s, this part of Broad started to become home to the mansions of New Money -- yet this site was ignored. While massive, beautifully designed mega-houses were being built across the street and to the north and south, the site of this lot didn't get any of them. The only effect it showed from this tycoon-residence-building boom was the construction of a small bank building at 537 S. Broad St., the Dime Savings Fund and Trust Company of Philadelphia.
That great period for the immediate neighborhood didn't last very long. By the end of the 19th century, those mansions were either sold off or abandoned for new mega-houses in the country or in the far more fashionable New Money neighborhood, North Broad Street. The only surviving vestige of this short-lived era in this hood is J. Dundas Lippencott's mansion at 507 S. Broad St., now part of the Philadelphia Senior Center.
By this point, the site of this empty lot had FINALLY lost its coal yard, and some rowhouses and mini-commercial structures filled the block, the kind you would see in any other part of the city, surrounding the old Dime Bank. The block would stay active through the early 20th century, becoming a small auto sales and repair district, sort of a branch to the much larger district on the lower parts of North Broad in the same era.
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South side of the site of the now-empty lot. The Dime Bank building is the fancy-looking one on the left. |
Though many tenants and owners came and went, one was notable. The Essie Marie Studio, a revolutionary performance and exhibition space for black visual and performing artists, rented space in one of the buildings on this little block.
The beginning of the end came in 1960, when the Hawthorne Square (later MLK Plaza) public housing project was built a few blocks away. Close proximity to one of the worst housing projects ever conceived was detrimental to the Broad/South corner. The buildings on the lot, along with others in the neighborhood, came into various states of disrepair and abandonment. Eventually, the Broad Street side of the lot was cleared of buildings and was paved over. By the time the early 1990s rolled around, the lot had become so unused that vegetation, crime, graffiti and garbage had overtaken the ugly lot. In the late 1990s, a senior assisted-living center called Villa Farnese was proposed for the space, but never happened.
In 2000, the Philadelphia Authority of Industrial Development took ownership of the space and destroyed the remaining derelict buildings facing South Street. Nearby neighbors and the Washington West Civic Association then cleaned up the lot and turned it into the South Street Community Garden (later Garden of the Arts). Over the next decade, the garden was continuously improved with landscaping and public art. This, along with the destruction and grand renewal of the MLK housing, brought the neighborhood back to life.
In 2007, the nonprofit Friends of the Garden of the Arts teamed up with the Urban Green Partnership and proposed something called the Big Green Building, an eight-story, 80,000-square-foot, mixed-use structure that would be so green that your pubic hair would turn to grass when entering the front door.
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What's an empty lot without Dead-Ass Proposals? |
This was going to be a huge project for the city, and its announcement made national news. The earliest reports stated it would be built as soon as late 2008. Of course, this thing never happened, and it's really not clear why. Occam's Razor suggests that it must have been the real estate crash or just a simple lack of funding.
In early 2011, the beginning of the end of this horrendous empty lot came. Dranoff Properties proposed Southstar Lofts, an 80-unit apartment building for the space -- large, but still much smaller than the Big Green Building. That didn't stop NIMBYs from jumping all over the proposal, getting petitions against it and making their opinions known in planning meetings.
Dranoff gave in and altered the design to be more neighbor-friendly. The final design was recently approved, and this shitbag empty lot should be coming to an end later this year. Though the building is kind of boring, even a giant statue dedicated to the human taint would be better than a shitty empty lot with a garden in it.
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The rendering by the folks doing the public art out front looks better than the official rendering. |
There are still some NIMBYs out there that think they can stop this, but I doubt that's gonna happen. Though community gardens are great, this was not the place for one: the Broad/South subway station is right there. The creators of the garden were aware that it was a placeholder for development from the get-go, so I don't see what the big deal is. I suggest they attempt to create a new community garden in one of the many empty lots in the hood owned by a certain shitbird slumlord that shall remain unnamed. There -- problem solved.
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