PlanPhilly: Planning Philadelphia's Future

HISTORIC BUILDINGS

FRISCO LANDMARK: The Ferry Building
Too often grand old historic structures look great on the outside but are dead on the inside, stuffed with a boring museum or dying market. Not so in San Francisco, where the 1896 Ferry Building serves to anchor the waterfront redevelopment area where a highway once ran. It’s a grade A symbol for the area, stuffed with fine restaurants, a wine bar, a tea house, and at least two stores specializing in olive oil. It works brilliantly here because thousands of hungry San Franciscans work in the downtown office district, which is just across Embarcadero Blvd. Would such a development work in Philadelphia, whose office core is remote from the waterfront? Not a chance. What, then, can be learned?

PHILLY LESSON: Don’t wait: Save the PECO Power Station now. Because its location is distant from downtown, this rusting, hulking 1920s power plant next to Penn Treaty Park may never be a gourmet market. It may not end up a museum to the work of Alexander Calder, as activist Hilary Regan has proposed. And it may sit empty for another 40 years before we figure out what to do with it. But by god the city must preserve it: Slap some paint on those corroding smokestacks. Fix the concrete spawling that’s exposed the rebar. The example of San Francisco, and that of London, Paris and New York, teaches us that romance has a role to play in urban redevelopment, and the mighty Peco Plant has romance in spades.