Down along a winding stretch of the Schuylkill, there’s a point about a mile-and-a-half south of Market Street where worlds collide.
No fewer than six bridges and overpasses weave around or near each other, each one a product of its own era and ideal about getting around — among them, a major highway, a four-lane drawbridge, a railroad trestle, and the artery that started it all, the Schuylkill.
Graffitied on a concrete pier holding up I-76, an anonymous poet nails the vibe:
This city
screams
inside
of me;
like a heart
beat.
i couldn’t
stop it
if
i tried.
This urban node was pretty much a no man’s land until the opening of a 650-foot pedestrian bridge this past May. The soaring new harplike structure not only dominates the area visually — its two white towers top out at 165 or so feet above the river — but it also makes important connections at ground level.
It links two sections of the leisurely esplanade known as Schuylkill Banks, knitting together neighborhoods by creating an uninterrupted green path from deep South Philadelphia along the river to Center City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and points upstream.
But what’s also been made clear by the thousands using the expanded trail this summer is how, rather quietly in phases over decades, the entire area has grown into an unlikely success story.
Out of the slivers of found industrial and commercial land, has sprung one of the city’s great civic spaces. Built through an impressive government-private partnership with considerable help from the William Penn Foundation — which has given more than $12 million in grants over three decades — the trail and its attractions are connecting people everyday from different parts of the city on a large scale, and more is planned.
Particularly gratifying is the authenticity. There’s nothing Disney-fied about this experience. Schuylkill Development Corporation, which has developed and operates this part of the trail along with the city, hosts movie nights, tours and other events. But for the most part, it’s a self-guided adventure through the sylvan and not-so-sylvan.
Along the way, the city’s past and the future play against each other in a jangling fugue.
Philadelphia’s industrial heritage contrasts with eds and meds — coal cars on one side of the river, proton therapy on the other, and, as always, the eager tendrils of nature ready to take over when humankind falters or decides to move on to the next idea.
The new pedestrian bridge is near another span, the University Avenue Bridge, and together they tell the ever-changing story of human aspiration — a stripped-classicism structure built nearly a century ago to usher in the age of automobile dominance, and a modern walkway built, in essence, to help usher it out.
No, car culture isn’t disappearing anytime soon, but the future is about other, healthier modes of transportation, even as the University Avenue Bridge remains important for vehicular access. It connects to I-76, and links South and West Philadelphia.
What’s not so easy to appreciate by car is how elegant the bridge is, and how badly neglected it has been. An expression of the City Beautiful movement, it was a collaboration of engineer Stephen H. Noyes and renowned architect Paul Philippe Cret, the French-born Penn professor who left his imprint on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Rodin Museum, Barnes Foundation in Merion, and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.
Today the span is debris-strewn, and its architectural features are in need of restoration. At 35 miles an hour, the eye misses the details like the seahorse motifs on the bronze lanterns on the west side of the bridge.
Windows are broken, mortar is missing.
The two stone structures on the east side look a bit like places you’d run into Quasimodo, but they are not bell towers. Topped with reliefs of stylized porpoises, these are the operator’s houses from which bridge personnel would once regularly direct the deck to lift so ships could pass. They are now derelict, collecting trash. Their ornate cast bronze doors were stolen last year, according to PennDot.
(What, by the way, are the circumstances in which someone decides that the best place for an obsolete refrigeration unit is on a bridge?)
A PennDot spokesperson says that the agency makes “rehab and replacement decisions based on structural conditions and funding available,” and that while the University Avenue Bridge is “on our radar,” no work is planned at the moment. A complete restoration is estimated at $50 million.
As far as its architectural details go, the bridge appears in essentially no better shape than it was when architect Thomas Clayton Jester, a Penn historic preservation student, argued for its rehabilitation in a painstaking 476-page master’s thesis. That was in 1991.
The illustration of a man carrying a picture frame (Albert Barnes?) that’s graffitied on the West Philadelphia end of the bridge is whimsical and beautifully done. Better still would be no graffiti at all and allowing Cret’s work to shine as it was originally intended.
Some quick and inexpensive fixes are easy to imagine: removing the graffiti; scraping the invasive species from mortar joints before they damage the limestone; and, if we’re going to keep those operator’s houses open with no door (as it the case with one of them), how about recruiting some group to put up temporary interpretive boards inside illustrating the history of the river and bridge?
A likely candidate for intervention is Penn, which might have a vested interest in making the University Avenue Bridge more presentable since Cret taught at the school for more than three decades. It’s also useful to note that GPS has turned the bridge into the campus gateway for many families driving in with prospective college students.
There’s a fresh reason for attention to the University Avenue Bridge. The latest Schuylkill Banks expansion brings a footpath up to the bridge, and so heavier pedestrian and bike use seems likely. Sometime in the next few months a new swing bridge under construction is expected to open, bringing pedestrians and cyclists across the river to Bartram’s Garden and Southwest Philadelphia.
Another larger urban planning context: Schuylkill Banks connects with the Circuit Trails — essentially a superhighway of trails in the area that covers hundreds of miles.
All of this connectivity promotes both human density, and it has been cathartic. The pandemic isolated us from each other and social media and cultural schisms continue to divide us — forces that have given the togetherness of the Schuylkill Banks this summer an almost utopian feel.
I’ve run or strolled the path more than 50 times in the past three months, and some evenings the entire city seems to be out, setting up a magic-hour tableau.
Anglers fish, runners run, young families with babies spread a blanket on the grassy banks of the river.
If once in a while the low rumble of a slow-passing train is heard, it might be the ambient reminder of previous generations who also thought they had bent to their will an unglamorous urban river once and for all.