Quote:
Originally Posted by br323206
I don't hate it. People said the Highline was a stupid idea and look at it now. I could actually see this becoming an attraction.
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Comparing this to the High Line is (sort of) like comparing Cira Green to the High Line. Nothing wrong with Cira Green (well built, nice views, innovative use of otherwise useless space), but they are fundamentally different products. Cira Green is a single standalone space mostly out of sight and mostly isolated from other pedestrian destinations. The High Line is a highly visible park passing through some of the most visually and architecturally striking neighborhoods in the world, with occasional views of the river and the rush of Manhattan traffic. It has many entrances and exits, can be seen from hundreds of street locations, and provides pedestrians a way to navigate between major destinations. There are lots of reasons to walk under, near, or along the High Line, and millions of people do it every month.
This "village" is much more comparable to Cira Green than the High Line, and no amount of high quality tenants or finishes will change the fundamentals of that. The village has a single entrance (at a currently non descript corner of 13th and Washington), cannot be seen from the street, doesn't connect you to anywhere, and won't offer views beyond the tower above it. I'll admit it is theoretically on the way to things being at this major intersection, and I don't doubt the immediate success of a grocery, Target, and other daily-life-serving tenants at ground level, but I'm failing to imagine strong demand for luxury items, meals, or other trinkets fifty feet in the air.
I'd like to think that 1,000 units plus the nearby neighborhoods would give this the necessary foot traffic to work, but foot traffic on Broad and on Washington is so scarce around here, with several blocks of little to nothing between this and the next node of activity, that there's really just no way it works. There are 500 units above the Piazza's businesses, and an exploding neighborhood all around it, and the Piazza's businesses are meagerly used at best at any given hour of the day. Some of this is management and picking a smart mix of tenants for the sizes of the spaces and the surrounding demographics, but some of it is that the Piazza remains cut off from Fishtown to the north by surface lots, and is removed enough from the rapidly improving 2nd Street scene that it feels out of the way to people out and about in the neighborhood.
Fundamentally, my objection to the village is one grounded in the idea that Blatstein is fundamentally misunderstanding Philadelphia, and has gotten it wrong pretty much every time. This corner can and should be a lively connecting point between Point Breeze, GHo, Bella Vista/Hawthorne, and Passyunk Square, and with regard to the project's visibility, density, and scale, it certainly manages to assert itself as an anchor and a node, which I appreciate. The village supports this idea on paper, but what it would do in practice (if it were successful) is pull energy off of the streets which need energy desperately. I'd be much more inclined to walk the 1300 block of Washington if six of these would-be village tenants had storefronts breaking up the facade at street level, taking little blocks of space behind which the mega tenants would be hiding (this is a very common way to stack tenants in urban big box projects). This way the block gets a more typical neighborhood scale row of shops AND the urban large-format retailer, all on one level. Walking an entire city block's worth of semi-transparent grocery or Target windows is far less appealing, and knowing that I could grab a La Colombe on the roof would be unlikely to sway me.