Book online: Citizenship in Philadelphia (1919)
It's out of print and apparently in the public domain now, but I found an online copy of many chapters of Citizenship in Philadelphia (1919 by J. Lynn Barnard, Ph.D. and Jessie C. Evans. A. M.). Chapter 10 gives a fascinating overview of Philadelphia's city planning in 1919.
Here's an excerpt of Chapter 10:
Quote:
Traffic Circuit and Radial Averages —Philadelphia's area is very large in proportion to its population, and a great part of the people spread out over its 129½ square miles want to go into the middle of the city every day. So City Hall becomes the center of many great streams of traffic. Recent years have seen an enormous increase in motor traffic, both of automobiles and of delivery trucks. The Superintendent of Police estimated in 1918 that 50,000 motor cars entered the central part of the city every day. Thus our old-fashioned narrow streets are in some places becoming so crowded as to be almost impassable.
It is fortunate that our two chief streets, Broad Street and Market Street, were made fairly wide in the beginning. Fortunately too, Philadelphia has a few radial avenues, such as Ridge, Baltimore, and Passyunk Avenues. We have these, not because they were planned, but because they were originally country roads leading out from the little city to surrounding villages. They are always crowded with wagons and automobiles, for they offer shorter cuts to many places than the regular streets.
It is planned to improve these existing avenues, open others, and join them to a central traffic circuit. This would mean the widening of four streets so as to form a large rectangle in the center of the city—Seventh, Locust, Nineteenth, and Vine Streets. With this arrangement some of the east and west traffic could be shifted from Market Street to Locust and Vine Streets, and some of the north and south traffic from Broad Street to Seventh and Nineteenth Streets. Thus the delay and crowding around City Hall would be relieved. These wide thoroughfares would connect the four central squares, Washington, Rittenhouse, Logan, and Franklin. The district enclosed in this rectangle is the natural business center of the city. It is filling rapidly with great hotels, banks, and stores. Traffic into it and out from it is bound to increase very rapidly.
Then there are to be radial avenues, branching off at the corners of the rectangle, which would shorten the time necessary to make trips from the outlying parts of the city to the center, and relieve crowding in the narrow streets. From Franklin Square we should have Ridge Avenue running across the city in a northwesterly direction, skirting the Schuylkill to Manayunk. Another radial avenue has been planned from the same point in a northeasterly direction to the Delaware. This is called the Richmond-Aramingo route. From Rittenhouse Square we should have a diagonal street leading in a southwesterly direction, if we cut through Gray's Ferry Road from South Street to Locust. Finally, from Logan Square we should have our finest diagonal street of all, the Parkway. This runs from City Hall to Fairmount Park in a northwesterly direction, and is rapidly being completed. Unlike the other radial avenues, which will be chiefly business streets, the Parkway is to be the civic center of Philadelphia, lined with trees and magnificent public buildings.
When the Parkway and its buildings are completed, we shall be able to stand at the northwest corner of City Hall and look across the open Plaza, along the Parkway to the tall trees in Logan Square. On the left will be the new Pennsylvania Railroad Station probably moved back beyond Fifteenth Street, leaving the space where it now stands as a part of the open Plaza. Then will come the Bell Telephone Building, and beyond that the Wills Hospital and the Academy of Natural Sciences. On the right will be the buildings of the United Gas Improvement Company, the Young Men's Christian Association, and possibly a new building for one of the departments of the municipal government.
If on that future day, we walk to Eighteenth Street we shall find the Parkway cut through Logan Square and the square much enlarged by the addition of land on the south. In the center of the square the driveway will divide, making a great circle about a central monument. Beyond the square the Parkway widens out from 140 to 250 feet, and from there we may look between the double rows of trees bordering the wide avenue to the great white marble Art Gallery with its pillared porches in the Greek style, crowning the hill called "Fairmount," which blocks the end of the Parkway. On the right at Logan Square we shall see the Roman Catholic Cathedral, while at Nineteenth Street will stand the magnificent Public Library. At Twenty-first Street there will probably be a large Convention Hall where national gatherings may meet, and at Twenty-third Street the new Episcopal Cathedral. On the left, beyond Logan Square, will be seen the "Palace of Justice" to house the city courts, and the new home of the Franklin Institute, one of the city's famous scientific societies. Possibly the Commercial Museum will have a place there also.
It is hoped that all of these new buildings will be of light stone or marble, in the classic style, and that they will be set at a distance from each other with trees and grass between. When the Parkway is completed it will be one of the great streets of the world.
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Cheers,
Jayfar
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“I am indeed well aware of the history of Conventional (sic) Hall, both globally and locally, and can assure you that we are carefully exploring avenues for its future.” -- Penn President Amy Gutmann 5 days before demolition began.
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03-27-2005, 09:36 AM
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