PlanPhilly: Planning Philadelphia's Future

Porn films are everywhere these days. On the Internet. On television screens. In hotel rooms. At bachelor parties. (And probably at bachelorette events, too.) The one place you don't expect to find hard-core flicks anymore is at a movie theater, especially one in a blossoming Center City residential district.

This is the building that marked a turning point in 20th-century architecture? Its walls are made from concrete block the color of wet cardboard, and the mortar that holds them together seems to have been squeezed straight from a tube. You won't see a single window when you arrive at the Trenton Bath House, never mind a conventional front door.

Everyone knows that falling in love with real estate is dangerous. So keep your fingers crossed: Gov. Rendell remains committed to acquiring a parking lot at 15th and Arch Streets for a new Family Court, despite the bad smells that continue to waft from the property.

The 1976 Bicentennial is generally regarded as a big bust for Philadelphia. The hoped-for crowds never arrived, scared off by an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease early in the summer. Having invested heavily in architectural attractions, the city found itself stuck with a collection of history-themed white elephants.

Just when it seemed that the cliff wall of the fast-rising Convention Center addition would define North Broad Street's new image, along comes the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with a plan for a cozy, yet ambitious, plaza that promises to serve as the escape route from that overbearing government enterprise.

In a narrow alley, just steps from Market Street's luxurious Loews Hotel, stands a nearly windowless building that is Philadelphia's own house of misery. The official name is Domestic Relations Court, and it is the broken heart of the city's Family Court system.

West Philadelphia's big institutions worked for decades to cleanse their streets of any trace of indigenous urban life - and they very nearly succeeded. Along Market, Chestnut, and Walnut Streets, block after block fell to a generic, corporate style of architecture that favored block-long facades, daunting setbacks, and inscrutable, windowless walls. It was a scary place, indeed.

The Benjamin Franklin Parkway was run through Philadelphia's immutable grid a century ago, yet it often feels as if the city is only beginning to reap the benefits of that bold civic project. But clearly the pace of change has quickened since the Barnes Foundation broke ground on the boulevard this spring.

Philadelphia architects will have an outsize presence this year at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards, having taken the top prizes in both the architecture and landscape design categories.

Now that the FBI has taken on the task of unraveling the Family Court debacle, its investigators are keen to figure out who knew that Center City power lawyer Jeff Rotwitt was moonlighting as the project's developer while enjoying a cushy gig as the Supreme Court's real estate adviser.

The tales of glorious old movie palaces that have been effectively buried alive are starting to form a distinctive genre of their own. Forsaken by their owners, these theaters are left to rot until - one day! - they are rediscovered by a band of pure-of-heart film buffs who recognize their true beauty beneath the dust and bad renovations.

Changing Skyline:It took two years for the Spectrum to go from a gleam in the eye of sports mogul Jerry Wolman to America's showplace. Creating its replacement is taking considerably longer.

Inga Saffron: The complex fate of the old Family Court building. F1.

I owe the architects at EwingCole an apology for trashing their Family Court building, planned for an empty lot across from JFK Plaza, at 15th and Arch Streets.

Philadelphia spends less on parks than almost any big city in the nation, so it's not surprising that even Center City's jewel, Rittenhouse Square, is increasingly dependent on the kindness of friends. Without those $50 checks from park lovers, not a single impatiens would be planted in the square's borders, the grass would grow to our calves, and the benches would become heaps of broken slats.

CHANGING SKYLINE Beauty and the Beast Pa. Academy of the Fine Arts plaza could bring life to Broad Street. F1.

In Philadelphia, zoning is all about horse-trading. The city gives a developer an extra piece of sky. The public gets a piece of earth in return, usually in the form of a plaza or pocket park. Light, air, and civility are preserved in the bargain. That's the theory, anyway.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of empty acres under and alongside the highways that slice up Philadelphia's urban grid, but only one of those spaces gets transformed, Cinderella-like, into an art gallery on the first Sunday in May. Like the storybook character, this waste ground has but a few fleeting hours to enjoy its finery. Then, poof, it all vanishes into the mists of I-95 exhaust.

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown designed their sprightly office building at 36th and Market Streets to be flexible. That's one reason they called it a "decorated shed." It was a "dumb," "generic" box, they boasted, with 101 possible uses.

Mayor Nutter came into office promising to be the city's designer-in-chief. But this week's approval of a stunningly second-rate design for the new Family Court building on JFK Plaza suggests that, when it comes to public architecture, the forces of mediocrity still rule Philadelphia.