The park I studied in Philadelphia evolved from a project of the 1960s. Its goal was to encourage recreational visitors to the city’s most notable maritime point of commerce and trade in the Delaware River for the past three centuries. Its transformation- into a park. Hence, the precursor was named “Penn’s Landing” to pay tribute to Philadelphia’s 1682 founder. Can you guess what it is?
Spruce Street Harbor Park in many ways is the most popular place that pays homage to Philadelphia’s old and new. Indicated from its 30,000+ Instagram followers and a feature from HuffPost as one of seven of the world’s greatest urban beaches, the park was planned to be a powerful symbiosis of honoring the past and building anew. The designers from the company Groundswell themselves remarked that the space was to depend on “using the natural resources to embellish the space, rather than starting from scratch”.
At the edge of the historic small neighborhood of Old City, the cornerstone of American freedom that boasts landmarks from the colonial era such as Independence Hall, the Betsy Ross House, and the Liberty Bell, Spruce Street Harbor Park exists at the very line between traditional and modern. One of the most pertinent ways someone can note the edges of the place is by noticing when you see the cobblestone streets androw houses and start to fade away, and at the park they certainly do.
Despite the fact that the traffic in Philadelphia is notoriously bad which was indicated from our studies to have discouraged the cohesion of a community (in whatever ambiguous ways we may define it), the park’s access to water, fresh air, lush greenery, food, and modern features like ambient colorful prismatic lights hanging from trees and floating gardens continues to draw folks in from everywhere and from all walks of life.
This includes the time I ate vegan ice cream from a Caribbean resort inspired pop up shop and sat in an intimate fire pit during my friend’s birthday from New Jersey and when I met my former girlfriend and her girls from the suburbs to walk around the busy boardwalk and eat even more ice cream (from the legendary Old City Franklin Fountain served out of a food truck) and lay in hammocks and on that very same day hung out accidentally with five kids from my high school from another suburb on another side of the state checking out the art market from local vendors on the weekend.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg too for wheelchair accessible and free or affordable festivals, jazz concerts, cinema series, roller rinks, performances from a trope of comedians of color, outdoor games like bocce or giant Jenga, child programming, paddleboard yoga, salsa lessons, ferris wheels, and a recently renovated Oasis with 125+ socially distanced two hour reserved Philly COVID guideline following seats to show views of the waterfront with seasonal bites that utilize building materials that help clean the marina water. Spruce Street Harbor is certainly a node. A lot of local activity and excursion in the neighborhood occurs here, as it allows folks to come in and out as they choose for business, leisure, and whatever they may desire.
In the heart of the most tourist friendly spots of the city, the park is easily walkable from the Constitution Center, able to access from the Market-Frankford Line or SEPTA buses nearby, and drivable from parking lots slightly South of the harbor on the same street. These aspects make Old City and Spruce Street some of the most appealing public spaces. However, in some ways, it can be the cherry on top of an exclusive and isolating experience of Philadelphia.
For starters, the area is fancy, and in my experience heavily white. While maybe the park is accessible to all, the affordability of the hip housing and grand penthouses are definitely not. Expensive restaurants and boujee boutiques are abundant in Old City. But even more expansively, the influx of white wealth seems to be a testament to the very dream of what the park embellished on: colonial domination, American imperialism, and erasure of anyone in this space who isn’t of European descent, particularly Natives and African Americans.
The very name of the street that runs through this area of town is Christopher Columbus Boulevard, and the landmarks of Old City are at worst cutting relics, reminders, and proud memorials of the empty declarations of liberty and justice from the founders of the United States. At its best, the Irish and Scottish immigrant memorials champion the false narrative of “we are all immigrants here” to a select population, despite the maltreatment of nonwhite immigrants, ignorant to our settler status on Native land and the presence of enslaved people. The Vietnam Veteran and Korean War Memorials play up the irony of national heroism and American democracy while we meddle in affairs of other countries - typically for our own resource extraction or the glaring imposition of our celebrated capitalism and therefore white supremacy.
At its most exclusive, as Nathaniel Popkin, a writer on urban landscaping, put it, Spruce Street has definitely “built into the elements here, rather than obliterate them.” And maybe this is not something to celebrate at all, as the elements themselves are in desperate need of obliteration. “Thus, Venturi Scott Brown’s Columbus Memorial sculpture, the 106 foot phallus installed to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the explorer’s “discovery” of America (really Italian influence on the cultural and economic life of this city) has become, as any sculpture would at the center of a piazza, the focal point for tables and chairs. Suddenly, the sculpture, placeless for 22 years, has been given a sense of purpose, and with lights strung (in a Baroque display), a sense of playfulness the post-modern design has always demanded.”
https://hiddencityphila.org/2014/06/how-spruce-street-harbor-park-succeeds/ (2014)