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Archive: September, 2012
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.
1001 S. Broad St.
Broad and Washington -- what a shitty corner. The largest set of empty lots near the city core, this pitiful corner is the subject of more Dead-Ass Proposals than any other. Here, we're gonna talk about the one that came the closest to happening -- a gigantic super-out-of-scale monster of a project that's probably better off dead.
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Opponents are set to rally this Thursday as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court opens hearings on the state's controversial voter ID law.
“While we continue to fight this confusing, unnecessary and utterly disgraceful new law, it’s crucial that voters are made aware of their rights so that they are ready for Election Day,” state Sen. Hardy Williams said in an announcement.
As we reported this spring, Eastwick residents showed up in force at City Council to protest a trio of bills that would clear the way for a 722-apartment Korman development on 35 acres, while alotting 79 acres to the expanding Philly airport. Though Korman's stake in the land dated back to 1961 — when Korman was granted development rights to 500 acres as part of a massive redevelopment project — the current deal came about through a more recent settlement with the city. But now, area residents have their own ideas, and they'll be meeting tomorrow to get organized.
Debbie Beer, a member of the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition, says neighbors plan to put together a counterproposal — one that relies on sustainable development principles, encourages infill in other vacant areas within Eastwick and encourages the preservation of green space around the Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, which lies adjacent to the property that's in play. At a meeting, tomorrow at Pepper Middle School from 9 a.m. to noon, they'll be working to collect community input and formalize a plan that's focused on environmental impacts of dense new development — particularly stormwater management in an area that's already prone to frequent flooding. "The stormwater infrastructure is already inadequate. Now imagine the burden on that infrastructure of adding 722 apartments. And mot of that 35 acres will be paved over, so where's that stormwater going to go?" Beer believes that the cost of putting in the necessary stormwater management infrastructure will far exceed the economic benefit of the development to the city, given that Korman has access to the land at 1961 prices and will also receive a 10-year tax abatement on any new development.
View galleryFor the past 15 years or so, the gardeners on Thompson and Leopard streets in Fishtown have been keeping up and gardening on a semi-forgotten plot of land — the parking lot of an old dairy — that was fenced in with chain link and barbed wire and filled to the brim with scrap and trash. They got access with the owner's permission and help from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and they cleared out six or seven dumpsters full of trash to make way for the Leopard Street Garden, a fenced-in garden at 14-22 W. Thompson St., plus lots fronting Leopard and Lee streets, maintained by various gardeners who used the space for free. The agreement with property owner Dave Andrews always was, says Kristie Landry, one of the gardeners, that "we'll let you use it until we're ready to use it ourselves." But no one expected things to end abruptly as they did.
That is, one day she saw surveyors. The next, she spotted a prospective buyer on the property, and he wasn't just looking around. "He kicked in the gate on the garden fence! I walked over and said, 'Would you want me to unlock the padlock?' And he said, 'Well, obviously the padlock is no good because I just kicked it in.'" Not long afterward, a backhoe from came by and tore up the gardens and a brick pathway the gardeners had laid down.
Last week, newspaper publishers around Philly received invoices for their annual honor-box license fees from the city License Issuance Unit — and contained within the envelope was something of a rude awakening. The jolt: The fees had gone up by 400 percent, from $10 apiece to $50. So a publication with, say, 250 boxes, saw its bill go from $2,500 to $12,500, with not much notice: The new, higher bills are due at the end of September.
Perhaps they shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, the invoice explained, the annual fee was increased by Bill No. 090712 — legislation that passed, with little discussion, back in 2009. It had been introduced by former Councilman Frank DiCicco, then chair of the Committee on Streets and Services. The bill drew support from the Center City District (CCD), which had successfully pushed to “corral” many boxes downtown, and opposition from … no one.
CCD chief executive Paul Levy explains that CCD had been working for years to clean up the boxes, which it saw as eyesores. "We were accused of trying to stamp out the freedom of speech and press and we accused all the publishers of being messy snobs," he recalls. Ahead of the 2009 legislation, he says, “There was some frustration with the maintenance and cleanliness of the boxes, and L&I didn’t have any resources to survey them. So we said the cost of the permit should cover the cost of enforcement.”
L&I spokeswoman Maura Kennedy says licensing fees aren’t revenue-producers; they’re based on administrative costs — as they must be, according to various First Amendment-based court decisions on newsrack pricing and regulation disputes. (And, she argues, CP should clean up its boxes before questioning the price. “You guys are the top violators,” she says. “There’s whole blogs set up in the city dedicated to how poorly you guys maintain your honor boxes.”)
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The front porch is one of the great privately-held public goods of city life. It provides the security of what Jane Jacobs calls “eyes on the street,” and fosters community. But the front porch, especially on hot summer nights, can also bring unexpected Philadelphia street life to your doorstep.
Such was the case on a recent evening, one of the last blazing-hot nights of summer. This reporter was enjoying a beverage on a friend’s West Philly porch, when a man appeared, wordlessly, and stood behind a young woman who lived at the house. Everyone in the group at first assumed he must have known someone there. But he just stood there. And his smile got weird. He looked high, or disturbed. Or like he was so far out that he had actually been kicked out of a Phish concert.
Upon being asked to leave, he started to laugh, and said something hard to understand, in an eerie voice. This reporter (in what seemed, at the time, like an appropriate response) grabbed a whiskey bottle ― which, in what turned out to be one friend’s greatest concern, was not yet empty ― and walked toward him. He darted out into the street. I followed, along with a friend and the whiskey bottle, and asked him, again, to leave. He kept hiding behind cars and then sprinting back toward the house.
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In the new issue of Harper's magazine, writer David Sirota makes a broadly compelling argument: as more cities become single-newspaper towns, the super-rich owners of surviving publications are all the more able, and likely, to abuse their monopoly news power in a self-interested manner.
But Sirota force-fits the story of Philadelphia's two dailies into the role of supporting actor in the service of a larger narrative of malicious corporate control. [FYI: The online version of the article is only available to Harper's magazine subscribers, God bless their pulpy souls.]
Sirota's Philadelphia story begins in 2006: Republican PR heavyweight Brian Tierney takes over The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com, removing any “internal friction between existing business structure and larger political goals,” he writes. “The professional influence industry simply swallowed the local newspaper monopoly in a single gulp.”
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.
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