Reading Viaduct ‘another opportunity lost’
Aug. 28, 2009
By Thomas J. Walsh
For PlanPhilly
Lost in all the recent talk about the Reading Viaduct – the elevated, abandoned railroad bed that slices through the city from Vine Street northeast to Fairmount Avenue – is that if things had gone a certain way a decade ago, the City of Philadelphia would already own the property.
What’s more, Reading International Inc., the California-based movie theater and real estate company that is the ancestor of the Reading Railroad, wanted to give the city between $2 million and $3 million to take the property off its hands, say veteran economic development professionals who were with the city’s Commerce Department at the time.
…Meanwhile, the highly touted, highly publicized High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood has already served two big roles for Philadelphia’s own version of a possible elevated park in the sky.
Planning chief Alan Greenberger
Aug. 25, 2009
By Thomas J. Walsh
For PlanPhilly
With the dog days of summer upon us and no August monthly meeting of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, PlanPhilly sat down last Friday, August 21, with Executive Director Alan Greenberger to catch up on some of the issues he’s dealt with during what will soon be a year on the job.
Springtime for Spring Garden Street
2-part series
Aug. 4 & 6, 2009
By Thomas J. Walsh
For PlanPhilly
Two improvement projects targeting Spring Garden Street – one local and one citywide – could transform the wide avenue in the coming years into a model of reclaimed asphalt, a leafy, environmentally healthy boulevard that accommodates pedestrians, bicycles, cars and mass transit, focusing on safety, redevelopment, ease of use, and flow.
The local, short-term effort is being led by the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association, has a fair amount of funding in place and is set to be implemented in 2010. It seeks to beautify and green the expanse of Spring Garden from Delaware Avenue to 2nd Street, including the cleanup and re-lighting of the street’s ghastly El stop and underpass.
The citywide project is only in its initial planning stages, and funding is nowhere in sight. But its goals are highly ambitious: to turn Spring Garden Street, river to river, into the official connector for the national East Coast Greenway initiative, which seeks to link Maine to Florida via one seamless green trail. To do this, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and other groups would be undertaking nothing less than a complete re-engineering of Spring Garden for its entire length, creating a multipurpose path that would be unlike anything else in the city.
… read whole articles on Aug. 4, 2009 and on Aug. 6.
