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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: First Version of Station Square
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PHILAPHILIA Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week: First Version of Station Square
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.
This proposal isn't exactly dead--it was just executed in a very shoddy and half-assed way. The little area between 30th Street Station and the old post office/current IRS Building has always been a pile of shit. There's not much that could be done with it--the entire section is a gigantic bridge deck with railroads running underneath. This made it a giant ugly concrete and asphalt pad that greeted rail-arrived visitors to the city for more than seven decades.
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| What it used to look like. Cars! Cars everywhere! |
In 2005, a proposal came along that would turn the pedestrian-killing area into a beautified square like others found in the city. It would be called Station Square. Brick pavers and public art would dominate the block, turning it from auto-based to everything-based. The new design would act as an inviting and attractive area for the thousands of people going in and out of 30th Street Station each day. The original proposal was set to be completed by 2008. Needless to say, it didn't happen.
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| Early concept. |
In early 2008, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission got the firm of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson to come up with a detailed planning study for the Station Square project. After a few tweaks, the design was finalized in June of that year and officially presented in November.
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson kicked the project's ass. They came up with a plaza that the whole city could be proud of. The car-dominated areas adjacent to the station and IRS would be turned into brick-paved paths with trees and goofy-looking canopies. The Market Street roadway would be slimmed down with a grassy median in the middle. A gigantic piece of lit-up public art by Kenneth Snelson, one of his "Tensegrity Sculptures", would give the square a distinctive and attractive force.
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| Look at all that shit. |
The improvements were set for completion in 2010, to coincide with the planned completion of the Post Office renovation/IRS building. Then ... the market went to shit. The project got shelved, and the Bohlin Cywinski Jackson design was eventually trashed.
In 2010, the University City District took the lead and made this project their baby. They piggybacked off a $50.9 million PennDOT project to repair all the underground infrastructure along the west bank of the Schuylkill River. They created a huge public/private partnership that put together a new plan for Station Square that would attempt to get the same effect with a much less drastic change in the streetscape.
They got landscape architects LSRAstudios to come up with a super-cheap, super-easy-to-construct plan for Station Square that would just take the asphalt roadways next to 30th Street Station and create a 50-foot-wide concrete pad with planters and umbrellas all over the place.
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| Rendering of the bargain basement design that got built. |
The new design keeps the Market Street roadway as-is, totally eliminating the pedestrian-focused gains of the original plan. The brick-paved paths are gone. No signature public art piece. Crap. This version of the plan would cost only $275,000 to build and was executed over a matter of months this last fall. UCD thought the thing was so cool that they held a contest to name the new plaza. From 500 entries, they chose the underwhelming name "The Porch at 30th Street Station."
To UCD's credit, their reworking of the block has been a huge success. Despite the incredible amount of auto noise and concreteness in all directions, the Porch has been heavily utilized by pedestrians and has hosted several small events. In their literature, the UCD says that the Porch's elements are fully removable and that the current configuration is just the first phase of the project.
Nonetheless, its safe to say that the Bohlin Cywinski Jackson version of Station Square will never happen. The way it all turned out isn't even half-assed... it's like one-tenth-assed. Though the original design probably would have cost tens of millions of dollars and years to execute, it would have been a much more effective. People seem to love the current configuration of the Porch ... just imagine how people would have gone apeshit over the 2008 configuration.
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Good luck to the UCD in its further improvements to the Porch. They recently received a $500,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation -- almost double what the thing originally cost. Perhaps the full build of Station Square will happen one day. Don't fucking count on it.
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