Read an Excerpt
Within Walking Distance
Creating Livable Communities for All
By Philip Langdon ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Philip Langdon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-771-1
CHAPTER 1
Big City, Intimate Settings: Center City Philadelphia
I became fascinated by Philadelphia long ago for the simplest of reasons: in my youth, I was a Pennsylvanian to the core. I was enthusiastic about the state's beautiful topography, proud of its industrial accomplishments, and eager to learn its history. I grew up in the opposite corner of Pennsylvania from Philadelphia, first in Greenville, a manufacturing and college town where my father was city editor of the local newspaper, and then, after he died at age forty-seven, in the Erie area when my mother remarried and we moved in with her new husband. I remained in northwestern Pennsylvania through graduation from Allegheny College in June 1969. Five days later, I started my first full-time job, as a reporter for the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, 250 miles to the southeast.
Philadelphia, then the fourth-most-populous city in the nation (it is now fifth), lay only 100 miles farther east. So, on one of my first weekends off, I headed for the city that had been home to Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, and other history-making figures. In the years since, I have returned countless times.
My first impression of Philadelphia was that everything was crammed together. The city's 142 square miles were densely filled with buildings of all kinds, but especially with rowhouses: attached dwellings two, three, and sometimes four stories high. Philadelphians erected their first rowhouses near the banks of the Delaware less than a decade after William Penn's 1682 founding of the commonwealth, and they never stopped building them. There was block after block after block of rowhouses, confining in their narrowness, I thought at the time, yet economical, efficient, and comforting in their own way. In a rowhouse neighborhood, many of the things a person needs are within walking distance.
In Center City Philadelphia — the business and historic hub between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers — the typical rowhouse is 12 to 16 feet wide. The most luxurious, called townhouses, are 18 to 22 feet wide. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the rows of attached houses come within 6 to 10 feet of the street, as if part of their job is to keep watch over the public realm. The streets themselves are compact, some so narrow that they accommodate only one lane of moving vehicles.
For a long time, I wondered how a city so densely populated — at its peak in 1950, Philadelphia had more than 2 million inhabitants — could function with streets so minuscule. The street network seemed antique, and traffic often moved slowly. I had spent the first 22 years of my life in the northwestern part of the state, however, where things were more spread out and people took it for granted that you would have an automobile. Perhaps I needed to start viewing things from a different perspective.
Eventually, I realized that judging a big city like Philadelphia — indeed, any city — by the speed at which motor vehicles cruise the streets made little sense. In Philadelphia, people got around on foot and in Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) buses, subways, streetcars, and commuter trains, not solely in automobiles. Today they continue to use all those modes of transportation, except now many of them also bike. In a well-functioning city, the automobile is just one means of transportation, and it is not the best.
I learned that narrow streets and continuous rows of buildings can give a neighborhood intimacy. In most of the central neighborhoods, stores, cafes, and parks are within walking distance. People circulate on foot, which helps them make friends with people nearby. Compactness helps breed tight-knit neighborhoods.
When population density is high enough, a neighborhood can support commercial enterprises within walking distance, such as coffee places, cafes, taverns, dry cleaners, and convenience stores. Some are likely to be franchises, but Center City has many locally owned businesses that reflect the proprietor's personality. One evening, a friend and I dined at a little restaurant in Washington Square West. It was a BYOB establishment with no liquor license, so I stopped beforehand at a corner store that packed a large variety of beers into a very small space and took some to the restaurant. The idiosyncrasies of the neighborhood made it fun. It was a far cry from the experience of driving along a suburban roadside and choosing from the same chain restaurants you have seen in a hundred other locales.
In cities and towns that were laid out for automobiles, distances dull the experience and make it unlikely you will see someone on the street and launch a conversation then and there. Center City, by contrast, fits everyday activities into walking trips along streets where you can meet people. Because of its human scale, Center City attracts a growing number of people who are tired of cars and the car-dependent lifestyle. Ivelisse Cruz, in her midtwenties, moved to Southwest Center City because, she said, "I got a job at the University of Pennsylvania and I wanted to walk to work. I didn't want to deal with the frustrations of traffic. Walking, it's about 25 to 35 minutes to my office on the western edge of UPenn. I have a car, but I use it once a week, if that."
Jason Duckworth, president of Arcadia Land Company, a real estate developer, moved from Narbeth, a century-old railroad suburb in Montgomery County, northwest of Philadelphia, to the Logan Square section of Center City because he and his wife wanted to be in an urban setting, wanted to walk, and thought the move would benefit their school-age daughters, who are both now enrolled at Masterman, a public magnet school they reach on foot. "These city middle-schoolers know how to ride SEPTA, where to find the best chocolate chip cookie, where to hang out with a friend over a slice of pizza," Duckworth said. "They get to have more independence than was possible in Narbeth, though Narbeth is pretty darn good as far as suburbs go.
"It was especially important for us," he said, "that they live with people different from them — different races, different economic situations, different religions — and, through that, perhaps be more empathetic and more open to experience. It reminds me of the famous Louis Kahn line about kids and cities: 'A city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do with his whole life.'"
Some gravitate to walkable neighborhoods even when their jobs are miles away. Ajinkya Joglekar, who works in Wilmington, Delaware, and his wife, Joanna, who works in a northwest Philadelphia suburb, bought a newly built three-story rowhouse in Southwest Center City because they could travel by train and end each day in a friendly, compact place where neighbors know one another. "It's great being able to step out the front door and walk two blocks for a beer and burger," said Ajinkya Joglekar, who is in his early thirties. "At the Grays Ferry Triangle [on South Street], 5 minutes away, we've met a lot of people." Joanna Joglekar regards walking to the Thirtieth Street Station as "my built-in exercise" and likes shopping in walkable places. "We shop more small business than big box. I feel the quality of products is better," she said.
The city's core has a few wide thoroughfares. Broad Street, which runs north and south from City Hall, and Market Street, which crosses Broad at City Hall, are 100 feet wide from building face to building face; those two streets would feel daunting if they did not have buildings several stories high — buildings tall enough to give the street a sense of enclosure — facing them. Still, most streets — even lively commercial ones — are fairly narrow, making them easy to cross. Street corners are very tight; they are not the sweeping curves that have become commonplace — and dangerous — in modern suburbs. Intersections with hardly any curve force vehicles to slow down before they turn, which is better for pedestrians. Traditional urban features — narrow streets; tight, right-angled intersections; short blocks; frequent doorways; lots of human-size windows; and a mix of uses within walking distance — persuade people to travel on foot or by bicycle, bus, or trolley to stores, restaurants, offices, cultural events, and all sorts of destinations.
What happened? Why did Center City deteriorate? And how did it get its groove back?
How Center City Declined and Revived
In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Philadelphia was a city of diverse and thriving industries. Civic boosters called it the Workshop of the World. At the time of its industrial peak in 1953, roughly 395,000 Philadelphians — 45 percent of the labor force — made their living in manufacturing. In the decades that followed, however, industry contracted radically. By 2011, fewer than 30,000 industrial jobs remained, amounting to a mere 5 percent of the city's employment. Areas that depended on factory jobs, especially in North Philadelphia, decayed.
In the 1960s and 1970s, crime exploded and racial tension deepened, conditions that, when combined with the disappearance of industrial jobs, prompted hundreds of thousands of white people to move out of the city. The early 1990s was another tough period, with a crack cocaine epidemic near its height. Drug abuse plus turf wars among the suppliers triggered a wave of violent crime. Buzz Bissinger's book A Prayer for the City ably chronicles the desperation of Philadelphia in that period. Against that backdrop, the recovery of Center City since then is nothing less than astonishing. Philadelphia's central business district went from severe distress in 1990 to good condition in 2010, by which time it had amassed the third-largest residential population of any business center in the United States. Center City Philly ranks behind only two business districts — Midtown Manhattan and Downtown Manhattan — in number of residents. The city's core gained population even while areas like North Philadelphia remained depressed.
There are three main reasons for Center City's resurgence, First, Center City and some of its peripheral areas abound with jobs in two booming sectors of the US economy: medicine and higher education. Education and health care institutions have become the backbone of Philadelphia's economy, providing 36 percent of the city's jobs. Nearly 60 percent of the region's education and health care employment is in the city, with much of it clustered in Center City, University City (the area west of the Schuylkill that is home to the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and hospitals), and North Philadelphia (the base of Temple University).
Second, Center City's compactness and intermixing of uses were never fatally undone by urban renewal. "Philadelphia has a certain genius for not doing things," said urban historian and former Philadelphian Robert Fishman. "A lot of wonderful stuff would have been knocked down in the 1950s and 1960s as part of urban renewal or just the general corporatization of downtown. Some of that happened, such as Penn Center, the worst of the Rockefeller Center wannabes, or Market East. But a whole lot, like the South Street Expressway, never happened. Enough survived to be the basis for revival in the 1970s and afterwards."
Third, crime and disorder have been dealt with energetically and often intelligently. In Center City, serious crimes declined 52 percent from 1991 to 2015.
The heart of Philadelphia has fared so well that the boundaries of Center City have pushed outward. In the 1960s, Center City — the downtown plus a number of neighborhoods nearby — ended around Vine Street on the north and around South Street on the south. In general, the areas beyond Vine or South lay outside the orbit of Center City. By the mid-1970s, however, many people in peripheral neighborhoods like Northern Liberties and parts of South Philadelphia wanted to be associated with the city's center. Real estate pages in the city's newspapers started identifying houses north of Vine or south of South as Center City properties, and over the next four decades, those neighborhoods became increasingly integrated into the city's core.
Clean and Safe
James Wentling, an architect with an office near City Hall, recalled Center City in the 1980s: "There was a very high amount of panhandling, begging, people lying in the streets." Then the situation began to change. A publicity-shy real estate developer, Ronald Rubin, whose family company controlled more property than anyone else downtown, started a drive in 1990 to establish a business improvement district, paid for by property owners. It would be called the Center City District and would focus at first on two goals: making the downtown clean and making it safe. The Center City District (CCD) began operation in the spring of 1991 with a $6.5 million budget and with programs and services defined by a board of directors entirely from the private sector. The CCD hired workers to clean the sidewalks and employed "safety ambassadors," employees who helped the public, watched for threatening activities, and called the police when necessary. As time went on, the CCD set about marketing Center City and improving the streetscape. For businesspeople like Rubin, the CCD was a means of making a languishing, unkempt Center City appealing and competitive, thus generating tenants and profits for real estate interests while also benefiting institutions, city government, and the residents themselves, many of whom were troubled by how far conditions had degenerated.
This clean and safe campaign went a long way toward steadying the downtown's atmosphere. In two decades, serious crime was cut by half, and quality-of-life offenses were reduced by three-quarters. Paul Levy, executive director of the CCD since its inception, sees the district as "a textbook case of how to nudge a place over the tipping point."
Along with a stable and safer downtown, Philadelphia needed better leadership in government than in the past. It got it from Edward Rendell, a gravelly voiced former district attorney who in 1991 was elected to the first of two four-year terms as mayor. Rendell told me, "I wanted to bring back the city in general. We had to start with downtown. We had to reclaim our streets downtown." To that end, he increased patrols in Center City's two police districts, with guidance from the CCD's safety ambassadors. One Rendell tactic involved having the police maintain a safe walking corridor between the convention center and the downtown hotels. As time went by, an expanding area benefited from this policy.
In the 1990s, homelessness and panhandling had become chronic in urban centers across the nation. Rendell responded with a measured policy: moving homeless individuals off the streets and nudging them toward a way of living that would be better for themselves and for the city. Many of the homeless "are mentally ill and afraid to go into homeless shelters," Rendell said. "I told the police: Move them, put them in your car, but don't arrest them." Officers transported homeless individuals to shelters. Some of them agreed to enter the shelters. "Eventually," said Rendell, "they stopped panhandling." Also, the public had to be persuaded to stop behaving in ways that fostered begging and other negative activity. "These well-meaning groups from the suburbs would feed [homeless individuals] on the streets," Rendell noted. "I said I don't want you feeding them on the street any more. We have good soup kitchens, etc. ... I got them to back off. The problem in the feeding is that they litter and they also go to the bathroom on the outside. We used food as a hook to get them into drug treatment and job training."
Levy credits Rendell, whose successes in Philadelphia propelled him to eight years as governor, with rethinking how government agencies spend money to help the needy. Philadelphia, Levy said, upped its spending on services connected with homelessness from $42 million a year to $108 million a year. The city shifted toward a more extended network of help, including drug and alcohol treatment, and brought a higher level of coordination to the services. "Special teams were funded for the police," Levy noted. They would tell people, "You can't lie here, you can't sleep here. Here's a way of getting help." As a result, he said, "We went from 400 sleeping on the streets to 100 sleeping on the streets." The "continuum of care" approach has worked well, he said, for just about everyone except those with severe mental illinesses, such as paranoid schizophrenia. In 2008, an organization known as Pathways to Housing PA instituted a "Housing First" approach, which offers apartments to those with psychiatric disabilities, and supplements it with treatment services covering mental and physical health, substance abuse, education, and employment. The strategy seems to have worked. Some of Philadelphia's recent mayors have not been as attentive to problems like panhandling and sleeping in public places as Rendell was, but the conditions they faced were much better than in the early 1990s.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Within Walking Distance by Philip Langdon. Copyright © 2017 Philip Langdon. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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