January 10-13, 2008
phila., penna.
I’ve always loved the old, non-standard state abbreviations. Since they were somewhat arbitrary, I remember –though I couldn’t pinpoint it to a year– when the Postal Service mandated the current and horribly bland two letter abbreviations. What with zip codes being the parts that really matter, I don’t understand why they cared anyway.
In any case, the abbreviation Penna for Pennsylvania was always my favorite, precisely because it made no sense. Abbreviating Illinois as Ill, for example, made intuitive sense. But Penna was just silly.
I first became aware of Penna’s power during the consumerist act of shopping, Mandrake. Every Friday night as a young child, my dad and I went grocery shopping for the week. I would often read labels to amuse myself. Many labels, especially those for canned goods, featured the text Reg. Penna. Dept. Agr. which was short for Registered with Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. Just like the Free Masons and the Post Office, Pennsylvania seemed to exert a disproportionate pull on the world. It must be due to the influence of Ben Franklin –a noted Pennsylvanian, Postmaster, and Free Mason.
I’ve never been to Philadelphia so I jumped at the chance to go. Lodging was mostly taken care of, so all I had to pay was airfare and food. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance check out outlying residential Philadelphia nor did I ride the subway. And there were places that I wanted to get to but didn’t get the chance. That’s OK; I feel like I will definitely be back here. I like this town thus far.
Most unfortunately, though, I have had exactly two songs stuck in my head the whole time here. The first is the theme to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the second is Boys To Men’s Motownphilly. A little more fortunately on the pop culture front, I keep thinking about Trading Places, the finest Eddie Murphy movie this side of Coming to America and a most excellent Eddie Murphy, Dan Akroyd, and Jamie Lee Curtis vehicle. I had to fight back urges to corner the frozen concentrated orange juice market.
Kate was the first to notice that there weren’t any walk signals. We later found a few at the really wide intersections. However, most of the streets around Center City are very narrow and few of them have walk signals. People wait on a red when there are cars and walk on a green. They also cross against a red when it is safe to do so. No cop hassles any pedestrian, as they like to do in various Seattle neighborhoods. Seattle could use more of a Phila. Penna. sensibility.
It seems that any city that really wants to promote walking –as the signs around Philadelphia seems to indicate– would give pedestrians the benefit of the doubt. Pedestrians can fend for themselves; they don’t need to be herded by cops who only walk infrequently, and only as part of their jobs at that. I imagine that drivers on the East Coast may just fear pedestrians, actually. A driver would hit a pedestrian only to have him/her stand up, pick up their detached limb, chase the driver down, and start beating on him/her with the dismembered appendage. The driver would then offer to take the injured pedestrian to the hospital just to stop the beating.
Aside from the oppressive weight of national history, much of the city center is like an architectural museum. The row houses, tall skinny buildings squeezed together, are positively charming. Along several blocks, they are commercial buildings with top chain retailers squeezed into relatively narrow storefronts. It’s a very refreshing sight, actually. At times, the upper floors are part of the store; at other times they are small offices or even residences. This is mixed use as it should be. It seems to be a great partnership of historic preservation and contemporary use.
My only complaint here is that the city seems to shit on its waterfronts. (Note that these are only my quick “windshield survey” observations.) At-grade highways hug both the Schuykill and Delaware rivers. Penn’s Landing attempts to make cursory overtones at engaging the waterfront but it seems to be a highly contrived and regulated space. It seems more of a semi-private commercial space than a true public space.
There are certainly plenty of docks and I’d hate to see much of the “working waterfront” go away. There is always a tension when it comes to recreational versus working waterfronts and far too many times non-working waterfront goes the way of private, luxury waterfront development. It’s sad that many cities can’t seem to find a balance of public recreational, private residential, and working commercial uses. On the other hand, a wholesale “publification” as Chicago did in the early 20th century isn’t so bad.
Of course, one thing that would have to happen is that industry would have to stop shitting in the water. The waterfront areas just outside the city are highly industrialized and the landscape, near the airport say, is pretty bleak. I have no doubt that much of the coloration and appearance of the water here is mere siltation and maybe tidal activity (as well as the time of year, perhaps) but I also have no doubt that it is polluted as well.
Regardless, I never felt connected to any water here in any local sense. I mean, I felt that, yes, I was on the East Coast and the Atlantic Seaboard –I love that phrase. However, the only connection to water that I felt was regional.
Next time that I am out here, though, I will have to test these biases and very preliminary observations. I’ll definitely ride the subway and I will check out areas beyond the city. After all, the Chesapeake and the ocean are nearby. I will also have to check out the universities and the neighborhoods. From the air, it looked as if the city had densely-packed residential areas. They were packed even closer than Chicago’s narrow lots, which is something I figure is about right for the East Coast.
I’ll definitely be back, though. I don’t know what it is but something about this place struck me quite unexpectedly. I really like this town. Maybe it is because, after having been in Chicago a week earlier, I felt I was once again in a big city. For an appreciable amount of time, I really didn’t want to go back to Seattle with its lack of meaningful transit choices, laughably paltry regional commuter rail, and stultifying insistence on consensus.
Of course, I don’t care much for Philadelphia’s very East Coast use of horns and surliness of some customer service staff. On the other hand, at brunch on Sunday we saw a fabulously Hot Chick wearing a thin and flimsy fuschia dress, wild hair that had Angela Davis aspirations, and facial hair that results from an irregular and less than meticulous shaving schedule. It was empowering to see that one can “make it work”, to quote Tim Gunn, quite well regardless of facial primping. That’s a kind of East Coast in-your-facedness that I can get behind.
[ jump to photographs ]
tears, dust, rubble, and the future in georgetown
We hope this isn’t a growing trend. From the Croc to the Sunset Bowl to all of Seattle’s bars, it seems as though any place of which beer is an integral component is endangered with stifling regulation or closure or even the wrecking ball. The very latest, of course, is a portion of the old Georgetown brewery just a scant few days after the 104th anniversary of Georgetownian incorporation.
Of course we’re sad to see the Stock House go but you can’t argue with an uncooperative foundation that’s sinking below you. We’re happy the rest of the complex is staying, though Sabey really needs to get on with fixing the place up –see the bricks above and focus before it’s too late. Still, a lesson to all: perhaps cold storage is not the best adaptive reuse for a historic building.
Not all preservationists are unanimous on this issue but we’re glad the facade is tumbling with the rest of the building, if tumbling is going to be a building’s fate. We hate facadism and facadectomy. That some new building will go up in the Stock House’s place is a foregone conclusion and we’d rather it be something entirely different, though complementary, than something ultra-new partially hiding behind an old, skin-deep, context-free facade. Do we really want something like this?
But Sabey shouldn’t escape unscathed. Their demolition, rather than deconstruction, has looked a little rushed. While the exterior is nice to look at, for sure, it is the interior that is at least as, if not more, compelling. Check out This empty world’s as well as Scott Engelhardt’s gorgeous photographs of the gems inside the complex. We wonder how much of that can be and will be re-used. Judging by the way the demo was proceeding the other night, it did not look like much although Sabey has stated:
We’ve seen buildings painstakingly disassembled brick by brick, which would have been altogether fitting for a building of this vintage given that it resulted from hand-crafted, brick by brick, construction over a century ago. We feel for old buildings when they are taken down so destructively because we’re romantics and we think about the workers who originally built it with sweat, mortar, and more than a few expletives. Over the years, structures are given lives by the people within them and the activities that go on inside. Aside from mere aesthetics, this is why architecture still moves people. Judging by the crowds these last few days, the flowers stuck in the fence, and the all that has been written about them, it seems we aren’t the only romantics.
With the Stock House gone, we’d like to remind Sabey, and those who would poke, prod, and oversee them, that the remaining brewery buildings seem to have gone a long time without some basic repair. Might we suggest some repointing before you need to spend more money and social capital on demolition of the remaining buildings?
It would be nice to recycle some of the old materials in the new design but there is a limit with respect to how a new building should look. The Georgetown Community Council seems to want brick and classical design elements. Great… replace neo-classical Romanesque architecture with… um… neo-neo-Classical rounded Roman arches? JVA at MidBeaconHill blog and several of her commenters have it right: mixing faux-old brick and details with genuinely old brick is a terribly gauche. We like their idea of cladding it in metal or a mix of old and new materials. At the same time, we understand the GCC’s fright: the last thing Georgetown, or all of Seattle, needs is yet another piece of crap clad in remnant bits of mismatched metal siding (what is it with developers and their love of this stultifying style, anyway?) that lacks any visual coherence and unity.
Of course, now the Great Wall of Georgetown has been breached, allowing the filthy freeway to pierce and pollute the neighborhood’s once-pristine solitude and air. All ribbing aside, it is true. In those moments between the haunting and entirely romantic, albeit LOUD, bursts of train horns or prattling airplane engines, Georgetown has a remarkable, refreshing, and almost eerie silence. Airport Way can feel post-apocalyptically deserted at High Noon sometimes. Part of this solitude lies in its isolated location and the other part lies in its contrasts. Unlike other neighborhoods, the aural landscape here is not a constant drone. Rather, its silence is punctuated by the echoes of a distant truck rumbling along 4th Ave S, for example, or the sounds of industry. It remains to be seen how this development along Airport Way changes things.
Developers wield immense power in the definition of neighborhoods and their resultant quality of life. Like their influence, their responsibility extends beyond private property lines. Let us slay the sacred cow of private property right now and make steak from some of its fundamental, sacrosanct principles. Nothing exists in a vacuum; private property exists within complex urban zoning which exists within larger civic and social constructs. Developers are, therefore, morally bound to examine the impacts their work will have on communities and partially abide by them.
We’ve often felt that this intersection of Airport Way S and S Vale Street is the real heart of Georgetown. There are plenty of examples of ruined intersections in this town. It’s not very often that people lay memorials for buildings. Yet the Stock House even made burly dudes with tats and inserted metal weave flowers into the chain-link fence surrounding the demolition site. Sabey especially and Georgetown now have the civic obligation to do right by this crossroads.
photo courtesy of Greg Phipps in the Seattlest Flickr pool.
additional photos
[ night demolition ]
[demolition revisited]
[earlier photographs]