By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic
Developer Willard G. Rouse 3d made his name by building
Philadelphia's tallest office tower, but he made his money dotting the region's suburbs with low-rise office parks. Now his company, Liberty Property Trust, has announced plans to construct that quintessential suburban genre in the city, and the question is, should we celebrate or lament the milestone?
The devil is in the details. Liberty Property Trust beat 10 other firms for the right to develop a 70-acre tract at the city-owned Navy Base, the once-bustling shipyard at the southern end of Broad Street. Liberty's rendering of the proposed office park, produced by Robert A.M. Stern Architects in New York, shows a gauzy, monumental arrangement of buildings that looks a little too much like Stalin's Moscow.
Architectural renderings are often misleading, and this one fails to convey the admirable ambition of Liberty Property's vision for the 1,100-acre Navy Base, a Delaware River site that is roughly half the size of Center City and Philadelphia's largest piece of undeveloped land. For all the attention lavished on the 13 measly acres at Penn's Landing, this spectacular waterfront property may turn out to be more crucial to Philadelphia's future.
When the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. first asked
developers to submit ideas for the base, it expected to receive plans for a by-the-numbers office park. That was one of the options suggested in a 1994 plan, prepared after the U.S. Navy decided to close the base.
Liberty's proposal gave the agency more than it bargained for. By involving a big-name architect like Stern, Liberty signaled that the buildings and site planning would be of a high caliber. There is a circular drive linking the offices to Broad Street, and a diagonal boulevard establishing a visual connection between the offices and the river. Stern, who laid out Celebration, Fla., based the boulevard on La Rambla in Barcelona, Spain.
These are more than flourishes. The plan is denser and more urban than the other proposals, and includes parking garages, shops and restaurants to serve the new white-collar workers who are expected to occupy the offices.
Liberty didn't stop there. Once its executives began to think
about formal boulevards and restaurants, it wasn't long before they started wondering whether there would really be enough people to support the shops and restaurants.
600 acres
Soon they were asking Stern to draw some housing next to the
offices. And the next thing they knew, they were talking about a New Urbanist, mixed-use development occupying 600 acres and not just a high-end, 70-acre office park.
PIDC hadn't expected such big ideas. For the eastern part of the yard, the agency was thinking along the lines of a horse racetrack, which has been proposed as a private venture by Manuel Stamatakis.
Besides being chairman of the Delaware River Port Authority, Stamatakis is a friend of Gov. Rendell, and the governor is currently pushing to legalize slot machines at racetracks. (Caution: politics ahead.)
To PIDC's credit, it recognized that Liberty's ideas were worth
considering. The agency hired a team that includes Stern and Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners, an innovative British architect, to determine whether Liberty's ideas are feasible. Liberty is paying about half the cost of the $2 million study.
John Grady, the PIDC executive in charge of the Navy Base,
cautions that there are many obstacles to developing the land as a New Urbanist community. For starters, there is a deed restriction imposed by the Navy that forbids residential uses. The Navy still uses parts of the site to make and test noisy turbine engines, and doesn't want residents complaining. There may also be environmental contamination at the site, which would be expensive to remove.
Plenty of space
Putting housing at the Navy Base would make it more difficult to use the land for industrial purposes. But the lovely waterfront could help attract middle- class residents, which Philadelphia could certainly use. Unlike Penn's Landing, there's plenty of space at the Navy Base.
Liberty began to consider the Navy Base in a new, more urban way because of its experiences in the suburbs, explained John Gattuso, the Liberty executive in charge of the project. His company had built enough office parks to understand how the form wastefully consumes land and contributes to sprawl.
Yet the company also knows that certain kinds of tenants, such as drug manufacturers and biotech firms, require large, low-rise structures to house their production lines. They want these low-rise buildings to be in parklike settings that have plenty of parking and security, and that are located near highways.
Because Philadelphia lacks such office parks, it has lost a lot of companies to the suburbs. Not only does the city need to woo back those companies, it needs their employees to live here, too. In comparison with such advantages, the revenue from slot machines looks narrowly short-term.
Liberty's conceptual plan will need serious scrutiny, of course, and not just on financial and marketing questions. How well will the development be linked into the city's street grid? What will be the transit options? Will the water's edge be kept public?
That last question brings us once again to an issue the Street
administration has been reluctant to confront: waterfront planning.
The administration has been hard at work to find a developer for Penn's Landing, but the real task is to develop a comprehensive waterfront policy to guide development and public access along the entire length of the Delaware and Schuylkill waterfronts.
Liberty's grand plan for the Navy Base is a reminder of how far
the city must go to catch up.
Contact architecture critic Inga Saffron at 215-854-2213 or
isaffron@phillynews.com.
* 2003 Philadelphia Inquirer and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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