Becoming Philadelphia

How an Old American City Made Itself New Again

Inga Saffron

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978800656
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Once dismissed as a rusting industrial has-been—the "Next Detroit"—Philadelphia has enjoyed an astonishing comeback in the 21st century. Over the past two decades, Inga Saffron has served as the premier chronicler of the city's physical transformation as it emerged from a half century of decline. Through her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns on architecture and urbanism in the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has tracked the city's revival on a weekly basis. Becoming Philadelphia collects the best of Saffron's work, plus a new introduction reflecting on the stunning changes the city has undergone. A fearless crusader who is also a seasoned reporter, Saffron ranges beyond the usual boundaries of architectural criticism to explore how big money and politics intersect with design, profoundly shaping our everyday experience of city life. Even as she celebrates Philadelphia's resurgence, she considers how it finds itself grappling with the problems of success: gentrification, poverty, privatization, and the unequal distribution of public services.What emerges in these 80 pieces is a remarkable narrative of a remarkable time. The proverbial first draft of history, these columns tell the story of how a great city shape-shifted before our very eyes.

1 ▶ SUBURBANIZING THE CITY

A SCAR ON CENTER CITY MAKES WAY FOR NEW LIFE

November 23, 1999

For the moment, the two buildings still sit side by side on the same block of South Penn Square, united by the same tragic history, offering a striking glimpse of Philadelphia past and Philadelphia future.

At One Meridian Plaza, denuded steel beams poke up from a sooty, one-story granite base like the remnants of a buried civilization. Next door, the freshly scrubbed marble of the former Girard Trust building dazzles with the whiteness of a blank sheet of paper.

While one building is being renewed to become a swank Ritz-Carlton hotel, the other is at long last being removed.

When the whole sorry saga of One Meridian Plaza is finally over sometime next month, the whole city should feel free to shout, “Good riddance!”

It has been eight years and nine months since a carelessly discarded, solvent-soaked rag ignited one of the most devastating skyscraper fires in American history. Yet only now is the building that cast a long, dark shadow over Philadelphia, sullying its reputation and sapping its spirit, almost gone.

One Meridian Plaza after the fire in 1991. (Credit: Gerald S. Williams)

By mid-December at the latest, when the last scorched remains of the Meridian office tower are carted off to landfills, the burned tower should finally be reduced to ground level. After being encircled with a chain-link security fence, the vacant site will become just another piece of valuable downtown real estate offered up for sale. Let us hope that Philadelphians will not have to stare at the fence for another decade.

The good news is that the dealmaking to determine what takes One Meridian Plaza’s place is already underway. Whether the successor to Vincent Kling’s 1971 tower is another corporate tower or a mixed-use urban shopping mall, two likely options, it is crucial that whatever is built not be dominated by a parking garage. Not only must the future occupant of the site respect its position next to City Hall, but it must serve as a bridge between Chestnut Street’s reviving retail district and Market Street’s office zone.

The 2,000-degree blaze that destroyed One Meridian Plaza not only left three firefighters dead, but it killed a piece of the city. Around the corner on Chestnut Street, virtually every major store closed, creating a black hole in the city’s retail core. Several of Meridian’s corporate tenants fled the city. If that were not bad enough, the city became infamous for the downtown slum when the camera circled over the wreckage in the opening scene of the movie Philadelphia.

As the object of a tangle of lawsuits, the thirty-eight-story ruin of One Meridian Plaza was left standing next to City Hall for most the ’90s, a constant reproach through the final year of former mayor Wilson Goode’s term, through Mayor Rendell’s entire administration, and through the victory of mayor-elect John Street. The city’s inability to rid Philadelphia of the eyesore became a metaphor for its lassitude and limitations.

“No one could have dreamed [in 1991] that it would take so long” to tear the building down, said Jeffrey B. Rotwitt, the attorney for One Meridian’s owner, E/R Associates, which includes the Equitable Life Assurance Society, a Dutch pension fund, and Center City developer Richard I. Rubin & Co. On the day that One Meridian Plaza burned, the United States had just launched its first ground attack against Iraq.

Although Rendell once threatened to have the building condemned, the city could never afford to make good on the threat. Unable to pay compensation to the owners, the city had to leave the boarded-up shell standing across from City Hall, which itself became increasingly sorry looking. Only after the One Meridian Plaza owners settled a claim with their insurance company in 1997, receiving about $300 million, could the tower come down.

Because the building was situated in the densest quadrant of Center City, it would not go easily. Instead of being imploded, it had to be dismantled floor by floor, an arduous eighteen-month process that cost $23 million.

The completion of the job now comes just as Philadelphia is ending a roller-coaster decade of bust and boom. When the twenty-second floor of the Meridian tower erupted in flames on the evening of February 23, 1991, the city was already on the cusp of a deep recession that produced a glut of office space. Today Center City is on the rebound, its prime office space fully leased for the first time since the mid-’80s.

This situation makes Rotwitt hopeful that the property will soon be sold. “This site has the most potential of any in the city for new, ground-up office construction,” he said. “[Philadelphia’s] office rents are approaching the level where they can support new construction.”

Several office developers have expressed interest in the One Meridian site, including Willard G. Rouse III’s Liberty Property Trust, which built Liberty Place in the mid-’80s.

The city Planning Commission, however, has a different vision for the property.

In a report prepared for the Avenue of the Arts, planners advocated some form of urban shopping mall, supported by a large garage and some outdoor public space, that would strengthen Chestnut Street’s retail potential as it recovers from years as a carless “Transitway.” The report suggests that a small office or residential tower could be built on top of the mall.

While it is hard to argue against more retail space on Chestnut Street, the commission’s proposals assume that the project will include a chunk of real estate from the north side of Chestnut’s 1400 block. In essence, the commission is advocating the demolition of the row of early twentieth-century buildings that suffered most from the aftermath of the One Meridian fire. Taking the hint, the properties’ owner, Berwind Financial Group, has already started the process of acquiring a demolition permit.

Right now, with Philadelphia flush with development opportunities, many people are all too eager to demolish Center City’s old fabric, even while the city is also trying to market its historic ambience to tourists.

Tearing down a block of Chestnut Street must not be done casually. The public needs to know what the city would gain, and whether the trade-off would be justified. On a fragile retail street such as Chestnut, an interior mall could do more harm than good, siphoning potential customers from the few remaining shops.

Now that City Hall is overshadowed by a parade of shiny towers, it is easy to forget what a significant building One Meridian Plaza was when it opened in 1971. The thirty-eight-story tower, originally known as the Fidelity Mutual Life Building, was the tallest building in Philadelphia of its day, and trustees in its top-floor corporate dining room could look almost eyeball to eyeball with William Penn atop City Hall. Liberty Place and other Market Street high-rises now tower above the statue, with views that look far past that symbol of Philadelphia toward the region beyond.

The Meridian building was designed by Kling, a Philadelphia architect who was responsible for so many postwar towers around City Hall that the area was dubbed “the Klingdom.” Faced in a granite that was sympathetic to City Hall’s coloring, One Meridian Plaza stylistically put its corporate tenants on equal footing with those influential public servants across the way.

Yet for all its civic-corporate attire, the building’s interior systems proved inadequate to modern corporate life. Built without sprinklers, as the law of the time permitted, it had no defenses against the fast-moving fire that began after workers left a container of linseed oil behind. A series of other lapses, including inadequate water pressure in a standpipe, enabled the fire to burn out of control.

Three firefighters—David Holcombe, James A. Chappell, and Phyllis McAllister—perished when their oxygen tanks ran out of air and they became disoriented. The fire, which was the fifteenth-most-costly in American history, helped inspire cities across the country to mandate sprinklers in high-rises.

After the fire, the Meridian’s owners briefly considered renovating the building, but the tower had been made toxic by the release of dangerous chemicals. The nearby Girard Trust building also was put out of business by the fire. The elegant building, designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1923, will finally return to life this spring when it opens as a hotel.

One Meridian Plaza was an eyesore in the city for so long that some people grew used to it, just as they have become accustomed to unsightly surface parking lots, derelict downtown buildings, and a highway separating the city from its waterfront. “Every time you’d come into town down the Parkway, you’d turn right on Fifteenth Street and see it there,” historian Kenneth Finkel of the Atwater Kent Museum recalled.

Now, with the Meridian tower reduced almost to ground level, there are signs of returning life. In the past year, the Prince Music Theater and a luxury apartment building have opened around the corner.

Most interesting, the demolition of One Meridian Plaza has opened up new views of the city. When you walk down Fifteenth Street these days and see it flooded with sunlight, or gaze for the first time at that vertical version of a French chateau, the American Baptist Publishing Society building, the possibilities for this little piece of downtown again seem limitless.

TURNING A PARKING LOT INTO … A PARKING LOT

February 7, 2000

Let us imagine a thriving Philadelphia neighborhood—a place with blocks and blocks of sturdy, middle-class rowhouses, some trendy restaurants, and an offbeat cultural attraction. Now let’s suppose that right in the center of this desirable residential neighborhood is a block-sized vacant lot, a sprawling eyesore that has been owned by the school district for decades and used freely for parking cars.

If your local civic group were finally able to wrest control of the property, would you want it to:

(a) Turn it into a genteel urban park like Fitler Square, a public garden, a community playground, or some other kind of open space?

(b) Find a developer to build new rowhouses?

(c) Cover the block with asphalt, install a six-foot-high iron fence, and lease the site as a commercial parking lot?

If you’ve recently passed the great sea of blacktop next to the historic Eastern State Penitentiary, at Fairmount Avenue and Twenty-Second Street, then you already know that, unfortunately, this is no hypothetical exercise.

Having acquired the block in a deal with the Philadelphia School District, the Spring Garden Community Development Corp. last week celebrated the opening of a two-acre, fenced-in, pay parking lot in the heart of the residential Fairmount neighborhood. The new lot, far bigger than ones you’ll find in Center City, has been expensively dressed up with Victorian lights and redbrick pavers, but it remains what it has been for years: an ugly scar on the neighborhood.

The civic group that promoted the project—against the wishes of many Fairmount residents—boasts that it beautified a block of land that had long ago become a de facto parking lot. Its president, Patricia Freeland, even praises the block’s new look as a “cross between Rittenhouse Square and a parking lot,” which is a little like calling it a cross between a Lexus and a flat tire. Perhaps Freeland doesn’t realize that Rittenhouse Square is used by people.

Freeland’s group has compounded a thirty-year-old tragedy of urban renewal. The site was razed for a school that was never built. For reasons no one at the school district offices can explain, the blasted block was allowed to lie fallow for three decades.

If the neighborhood ever hoped to redeem that sorry history and repair the gaping wound in its midst, now was the time to do it. The economy was hot. The Fairmount neighborhood was hot. Because the block was still zoned for rowhouses, a developer could have built forty or fifty homes without a zoning variance.

Enter the Spring Garden Community Development Corp., the nonprofit group run by Freeland, an aide to powerful State Senator Vincent Fumo. Thanks to Fumo, her group has received more than $1 million in state funds since 1998. It offered the school district $250,000 for the Fairmount block. Instead of bothering with competitive bidding, the district simply nodded yes.

Freeland’s group still needed a variance before it could fulfill its dream of building a parking lot. Even the normally...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Suburbanizing the City
• 2. The Architecture of Revival
• 3. Sweating the Small Stuff
• 4. Age of the Megaprojects
• 5. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
• 6. Rebuilding
• 7. The Spaces between the Buildings
• 8. Building the Equitable City
• 9. Getting around Town
• 10. Success and Its Discontents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author