2004-08-12 - 8:51 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Something", Beatles

I went on another of those "revitalization" architecture walks last night. I went to another one in East Falls a couple months ago with which was kinda boring in comparison to my first walk, the one over the Ben Franklin bridge and into Camden that I was over the moon about. I liked this one a bit better.

What I like about this particular series of walks is that it takes you into places that have not been completely revitalized yet, but are trying. You get to see both the crumbling ruins and the restorations and new development, and see the progress that is being made. It always feels good to know people have faith in my beloved city and are working to bring more people here.

Although to be perfectly honest, what I really like is the crumbling ruins. This is why I like (which has photos today of a nifty old place just over the city line, if you're interested) and Shaun O'Boyle's photos so much. But I don't feel comfortable driving or walking in crumbling neighborhoods by myself, since they are usually devoid of other people, so these walks are an excellent compromise.

Originally the city of Philadelphia was a small sliver between the two rivers and from Vine to South streets -- what is called "Center City" today. The rest of it was Philadelphia County. In the mid-1800s they annexed Philadelphia County and made it all part of the city, thus incorporating dozens of small towns and farms into the city. This is part of why Philadelphia is called a "City of Neighborhoods" and why each neighborhood has such a different flavor and character from the others.

Last night's walk was in a neighborhood called Northern Liberties. It is just north of the old Philadelphia city line, on the eastern side. It was originally a bunch of farms, and later became a very industrial area, with lots of factories whose buildings still exist today. Back then, there was no separatist "pod" zoning, so the manager's house could be located right next to the factory:

That factory, like so many others in the city, has been refurbished into residential lofts.

The tour leader mentioned that the layout of the neighborhood seemed to have been planned by "a bunch of drunken farmers." When William Penn designed Center City, he had a nice neat plan with evenly spaced blocks and 90-degree corners. Up in Northern Liberties, however, nobody seemed to care much about that whole 90-degree thing and made their corners any old angle they pleased. As a result, once people started building with brick, it became problematic because bricks only fit together nicely at 90-degree angles. Rather than constantly be making custom-angled bricks in a town where every corner needs a different angle, people in the area started using rounded bricks for corners. It's one of the distinguishing features of the neighborhood:

Diagonally across the street from this building is a Russian Orthodox church, and check out the bright mural a few houses north:

Part of the tour included a presentation at Tower Investments, a company that is redeveloping a huge portion of the northern end of Northern Liberties, near 2nd and Girard. They are building on land that has been abandoned for years, that used to be the Schmidt's brewery. While I like the mixed-use aspect of their redevelopment plan (apartments, townhomes, offices, live/work spaces, restaurants, and various retail/service uses), I'm more than a little disappointed by the aesthetics:

I suppose I'll reserve judgment until they've finished, and see how it looks once the retailers have moved in. All but one the retail spaces in this particular section (only one small part of the whole project) have already been leased. They were able to get away with "standout" architecture (rather than trying to fit the mood of the rest of the neighborhood) because the site is at the eastern edge of the neighborhood, butts up against I-95, and has been abandoned and empty for so long.

On the last leg of the tour, we walked past the stables, and two horses were being led down the street, one by a man in what appears to be a tricorn hat:

There are a fair number of horses in Philadelphia -- they are used by the police and for the horse-and-carriage rides in the Independence Park area, for starters. I didn't realize that their stables were right there in the city, so I was pretty tickled to see it. The funny thing was, I saw the white fence around the stable property before I saw the stable or horses, and I thought, "That looks like something you'd see at a horsey place," and the next thing I saw were the horses crossing the street. I took a picture of the stables but there were so many fences and leaves in the way that you can't make anything out.

I took a few photos of some interesting houses -- there are dozens in this neighborhood -- but this one was by far the best:

The house is actually only 20-30 years old. The city of Philadelphia has an old law against building wooden houses (because of fires), so the few that exist predate the law and are hard to find. But the people who built this apparently found some sort of loophole because logs don't catch fire as easily as boards. I just love it when people do out-of-the-ordinary things like this, and in the city no less.

previous index next