PlanPhilly: Planning Philadelphia's Future

ATLANTIC CITY — It’s showtime for Revel.Friday marked the $2.4 billion mega-casino’s grand opening, with most of its amenities now operational. Revel opened its glass doors facing the ocean April 2 for an eight-week, "soft opening" preview to work out kinks and phase in half its restaurants, most of its hotel rooms, and a 32,000-square-foot spa. Friday’s grand opening culminated that effort, just in time for one of the Shore resort’s busiest weekends.

Police charged a 41-year-old Tacony woman Friday with murdering her 18-month-old twin children, an act police sources said was apparently brought on by learning that her husband was having an affair with one of her close relatives.Stacey Smalls, a former corrections officer who most recently worked at a nursing home in the Northeast, suffocated her children and also drowned her daughter Thursday, police said. She also is expected to face charges for attempting to kill her 4-year-old daughter by giving her a poisoned drink, said Philadelphia Capt. James Clark of the homicide unit. But the girl became suspicious and stopped drinking it. "She’s apparently an extremely bright little girl," Clark said Friday. "It didn’t taste right to her."

Nine-year-old Bella Troilo’s lunch with Mayor Nutter Friday was nearly four months coming. He had to cancel his original visit to Sharswood Elementary, where she is in third grade, but she was determined to hold the elected official to his word — and did just that.Waiting patiently in the South Philadelphia school’s library, Bella sat with her parents, drinking lemonade and eating chicken nuggets, when the mayor walked into the room. Nutter greeted teachers and the students anticipating his arrival, but he was sure to immediately apologize to Bella for his March no-show. The mayor had planned to read a Dr. Seuss book to students at the school as part of Read Across America, as coordinated by nonprofit Philadelphia READS, but had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict.

Cisco Systems Inc. said on Friday it will stop investing in its business tablet device called Cius. The San Jose company made the announcement in a blog post, saying it would still offer a form of the Cius to some customers in a limited fashion but it is essentially killing the product off. Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) rolled out the Cius almost two years ago as a business competitor to Apple Inc.'s iPad. At the time it was the first one to use Google Inc.'s Android operating system in a tablet aimed at...

The holiday flight to the Shore commenced this afternoon with families streaming to the beaches to beat the onset of the summer swelter.Traffic, however, was not cooperating with plans for a quick escape. In Pennsylvania, a tractor-trailer was on fire about 5 p.m. on the Blue Route in Radnor Township forcing state police to shut down all southbound lanes from the Mid-County Interchange and creating major delays.

Two separate traffic stops by Pine Hill police earlier this week resulted in drug arrests.On Tuesday, Richard C. Bryant, 24, of Bryce Road, Berlin Borough, was charged with possession of heroin, crack cocaine, and marijuana after he was stopped while driving on Berlin-Clementon Road. Authorities said officers discovered an unspecified amount of the drugs "packaged consistent with distribution" in the car. Bryant, who was also charged with operating a vehicle with a suspended driver’s license, is being held in the Camden County Jail in lieu of $16,000 bail. On Monday, police stopped a 17-year-old from Sicklerville at the back of the Chalet Garden Apartments on West Branch Avenue. According to the police report, officers smelled "the odor of raw marijuana coming from the vehicle." As the driver left the car, police said, he assaulted one of the officers. He was subdued and arrested.

The Philadelphia School Reform Commission on Friday renewed operating agreements with two city charter schools and approved additional students for those two and a third charter.And in a special session otherwise devoted to charter-school issues, the SRC assured parents from Creighton Elementary that the five-member panel will vote next week on whether the school’s teachers will be given permission to try to turn it around. "We have to take a vote that resolves the Creighton issue by the end of next week," SRC Chairman Pedro Ramos said.

Temple University Health System's proposed $318.2 million bond offering received mixed reviews from credit ratings agencies. Standard & Poor's kept the health system at its lowest investment grade, "BBB-," while Moody's knocked it down one notch, to its highest "junk" rating, "Ba1." A third agency, Fitch, also kept the Temple health system at investment grade, said Temple Health's chief executive Larry Kaiser. Temple's primary impetus for tapping the bond market was its planned takeover of Fox Chase Cancer Center, which involves the retirement of $84 million in debt and other financial instruments. The rest of the money will be used to refinance older debt, build a parking garage, and integrate Fox Chase with Temple's neighboring Jeanes Hospital. Moody's attributed the downgrade to a history of operating losses despite supplemental state funding designed to make up for Temple's heavy reliance on Medicaid, which does not pay all the costs of care. Kaiser said he was not happy about the Moody's downgrade, but did not expect it to last long. "I would expect to be back to investment grade within a year," he said. Harold Brubaker

A 22-year-old E. Greenville, Montgomery County, man who was at the wheel of a Pontiac Sunbird early April 29 when it became airborne and landed upside-down in the Perkiomen Creek in Douglass Township, killing the passenger, was arrested Friday on charges of homicide by vehicle while under the influence.Howard Arthur Christy, II, of the 500 block of Blaker Drive, was driving without an operator’s license at the time of the accident on Paper Mill Road in Barto, said District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman and Douglass Township Police Chief Barry L. Templin. Etinye Usoro, 21, also of East Greenville, was still wearing his seat belt when pulled from the vehicle at 10:45 a.m. after being discovered by hikers. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The cause of death was drowning, the Montgomery County Coroner’s office ruled.

Facebook’s share price climbed more than a dollar Thursday, rising above $33, but the sharp drop since last week’s high-profile initial public offering continued to cause headaches for the social-networking company, its Wall Street underwriters, and investors.

Yahoo Inc. said on Friday that it is shutting down Livestand months after rolling out the iPad news reader app that it hoped would be a challenge to Flipboard. The Sunnyvale Internet content hub said earlier this month that it would shut down about 50 properties as it refocuses on core business models. Livestand is one of the first casualties. The company said in a blog announcing the move, "While we received great feedback on Livestand's design and it earned a 4-star rating in the App Store,...

Logan Square, one of William Penn’s original city parks, hasn’t been a true square since the early 20th century, when the city began plowing the Ben Franklin Parkway through Center City’s northwest quadrant. The heart of the square was turned into one of the world’s most elegant traffic circles, home to Alexander Stirling Calder’s Swann Fountain, while the remaining pieces were cast adrift, an archipelago of mournful traffic islands, uninhabited and bleak. The Center City District has made a mission out of reclaiming those pieces, starting a few years ago on the west side with the scooped trapezoid called Aviator Park, opposite the Franklin Institute. Now, working its way east, it has just rescued the orphan outside the chocolate-colored Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, a space that goes by the name of Sister Cities Park. The transformation of this tiny shard of land amounts to a small miracle.

Back in 1993, Philadelphia committed a radical act. It opened a new downtown convention center without a single public parking space. Despite the modest inconvenience, the city’s hospitality industry exploded. Suburbanites flocked in for the popular flower show and other special events, often choosing to take the train instead of driving. Since then, the city’s fortunes have picked up and more cultural attractions have opened, yet the city’s resolve to limit parking has weakened. Both the Kimmel Center and the National Constitution Center included garages in their buildings, although they smartly took pains to hide them underground. But increasingly, aboveground garages are being built close to these venues, and recently a 530-car behemoth was sanctioned for next door to the Convention Center — one block from City Hall.

When the letter arrived in 2007 inviting Tod Williams and Billie Tsien to enter a select competition to design a new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the husband-and-wife architectural team were momentarily stumped. Yes, they were well known among the cognoscenti, who admired their artisanal devotion to their projects. Yes, their new Folk Art Museum in Manhattan had just opened to rave reviews, raising their profile. And, yes, they had just made a good impression in Philadelphia with their elegant design for a small engineering building at the University of Pennsylvania.

While there are many moments of breathtaking refinement, the result is sadly a long way from being a successful addition to the city.

Would you live in a house made of dirt? The answer, I'm guessing, is no. As a building material, dirt has an image problem. Mud dwellings are practically synonymous with third-world poverty. At best, an earth structure is something you expect to encounter in an old hippie compound. Yet some of the world's most magnificent structures are made of little more than dirt and water, from New Mexico's pueblos to the great Djinguereber mosque in Timbuktu.

BOSTON - This city's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum may be as close in spirit as any institution can get to Philadelphia's celebrated Barnes Foundation. While Gardner was a Brahmin socialite who favored Renaissance art and Albert C. Barnes was a perennial outsider drawn to the avant-garde impressionists, both infused their collections with a deeply personal, convention-be-damned sensibility.

The Nutter administration loves to plan stuff. It has probably turned out more master plans in the last four years than the previous two administrations combined. And yet there's one part of the city that it has steadfastly refused to discuss: the I-95 corridor.

Powelton Village has every reason to top the list of Philadelphia's most desirable neighborhoods. Let's start with location. As the first residential area west of Center City, it is a brisk 15-minute walk from downtown. It boasts some of the best transit connections in town, a rich stock of Italianate villas and Victorian twins, and postcard views of the skyline. Geographically, it occupies the same urban niche as Georgetown and Cambridge.

A building that runs on half the usual amount of energy? How ho-hum. These days, most new construction in Philadelphia can do that without even trying, simply by adhering to the U.S. Green Building Council's basic LEED standards. What would be really interesting is if someone put up a major building that consumed no energy at all.