Episode 182: The Life and Death of Love Park

I'm also entering sicko mode.

I feel like such a fucking twat doing this with AirPods.

It's fine.

I mean, listen, we've only been doing this, what, 18 years or so?

A million shows.

Yeah, exactly.

I couldn't get the mic to

work with the interface.

It just will not do it.

I assume it's a bad cable, but I don't have a replacement here.

It's fine.

Like, whoa.

So I'm on

Phantom Power.

Like, Phantom Power.

I mean, just AirPods.

AirPod Pros, actually.

That aren't even mine.

Put 40 volts into the AirPods and see what happens.

Oh, yeah, I'll try that.

All right, we should do a sync point.

Gonna do three, two, one, mark.

Everyone, clap.

Three, two,

one,

mark.

Okay, good.

We're podcasting.

We're gonna talk about an exciting subject,

at least to June and I.

Yeah.

Who knows?

Yeah, we work very hard on a 60-plus slide presentation.

Oh, yeah.

Everybody be nice to us.

Did someone send me the

PowerPoint?

It's in the group chat.

Thank you.

It's in the group chat.

I'm on a foreign computer.

Everything's very confusing to me.

I'm sure.

I don't know.

There's a reason to be xenophobic about it.

Like, I was

going to put it in H.

No, no, no.

It's 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene.

I

hate all of you.

Yeah.

Missed you too, buddy.

Hi.

We are actually recording.

You are now in work sites.

Yeah.

You got to put a caution tape around the room.

Yeah, you have to secure the perimeter.

You got to get the

flaggers, you know.

One of the things that I really want to do is to set up

like a red recording light on the outside of a door that I can just hit with a switch on the desk.

Turns out that that's really difficult to do in a rental.

So

that is, you know, I'm just not going to do that.

What I am going to do is get like a little like 599 sliding door sign off of Amazon, stick that to the door and be like, you know, recording in progress.

And if it fucks up, the door, it's not my door.

It's my landlord's door, you know?

Well, hey, go.

Thank you.

Thank you for, thank you.

I'm working.

I'm doing work.

Please, leave me in peace.

Where's the car key?

Upstairs.

William, come back.

Rosa and I are about to torture you.

This is the problem with ever leaving

the city of Philadelphia.

The American Glasgow.

Yeah.

Trees?

Everywhere.

Trees?

So I'm just fucking leaving Philly.

No, November, I was thinking about that.

Like,

Philadelphia is the Naples of America.

don't say no

philadelphia is the venice of america no i mean what glasgow conversely is is wet philadelphia um yes or possibly wet detroit hard to say

interesting yeah uh i i do uh

do we want to get into it if we have i'm sorry does this say uh oh boy 66 slides Yes.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

It's okay.

Some of them are like in place of animations.

I really should have done them as animations.

Yeah.

Anyway, there better be one 60-frame video in here.

Yeah, exactly.

We've got a sort of budget John Boyce thing going on later on.

Who's the guy I like that does

the baseball documentary?

Yeah, John Boyce.

Oh, okay.

Ken Burns, yeah.

I like the John Boyce comparison better because that way, instead of pretty good, it's like best value pretty good, and it's just called okay, a show about stories that are okay, or they're okay, yeah.

So, with that in mind, welcome to Will Air's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak, I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Oh my god,

she him.

You're doing okay there, buddy.

Yeah,

What's up, y'all?

My name's June Armstrong, and my pronouns are she and her.

Why are you here, June?

Why am I here?

Yeah.

Like, existentially?

Oh, no.

So why I'm here is because we were watching that.

Okay, so the Franklin Institute OmniMax Theater that used to exist used to play a short film about Philadelphia back when I was growing up.

And we were watching that on YouTube the other day because that's the kind of shit that Roz and I got up into when we're four.

And we saw a park in the middle of the city that I had forgotten about, which was the beautiful and tragic Love Park, aka John F.

Kennedy Plaza.

Reverse those.

Yes.

What we see on the screen.

The like retracing from the microphone roar was really good.

I really appreciated that.

No,

I don't understand how AirPods work.

Yeah, go ahead.

What we see on the screen here are three shots of the same space, but at different points in time.

You can see a beautiful fountain, very large fountain in a nice basin with the love sculpture on a trapezoidal base.

You can see an overview of JFK Plaza here.

You can see the flying saucer.

You can see the basin, all the nice.

uh you know sort of postmodern um you know hardscape big trees everything else and then you can see it more recently.

Where it looks like dog shit, yeah.

There are none of those things.

They

gentrified it, sort of.

So, this is one of those

what's happening here.

Something has happened here.

It's not supposed to be like that.

It's not supposed to be like that.

A process has occurred to this park.

Yes.

Yes.

And we're going to talk.

First, we're going to talk about how the park was built, how it was good, why it was good, and then why and how they fucked fucked it up and like how this was allowed to happen.

Um, you know, because I have quite fond memories of this park back when I worked for the city.

Um, you know, it was just a nice place, and it kind of isn't

anything comparable now.

And just, and just on that note, um, with what's going on right now, you know, the people who work for Philadelphia Parks and Recreation are incredible.

They do so much with so little.

And this park has many, many, many layers of failures.

But the people who run it do the best fucking job they can.

And that, that, I think, is part of the sadness of this whole thing.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

I'm an expert in landscape and, you know, landscape and urban, you know, parks and things like that

in my professional career, which we'll talk about during the course of the presentation today.

Yes.

Yes.

June's in charge of the other park.

A different one.

Yeah.

Leo Ross and I spent like six hours working on this presentation once, one time, and then like a whole lot.

I, I, my favorite thing that we a question we often get is like, What's your process like?

I'm like, Oh, it's real bad, and people are like,

But no, like, I learned so much, and you guys are so funny and so interesting.

I'm like, Yeah, our process is real bad.

Go look at my Google Drive, yeah.

What's your process?

I wish I knew, anyway.

Before we do that, let's talk about the goddamn news.

Oh, shit.

Excellent.

Excellent news on the SEPTA front, which is nothing is happening.

We know, we know, we know about the

big death bill.

That didn't make it into the news because they wrote this ahead of time.

We'll put it in next time because the news operates on like a six-week delay anyway.

Yeah, exactly.

So,

as of time of recording, the Pennsylvania legislature is still deadlocked on SEPTA public transit funding, you know, for,

you know, our transit system here in Philadelphia.

So the board approved the horrible doomsday budget that like knocks out, you know, a third of all bus

service, half a regional rail.

Lots of stuff is going away.

They're going to stop running the trolleys after 9 p.m.

They're going to stop running most of it after 9 p.m.

Yeah.

I mean, that's, that's going to be fine, though, because anything that does run is going to have to make its way through the heaps of trash.

Yeah, that's true.

The sanitation strike is also happening right now.

It's day four.

I'm becoming an insane British bins guy.

The mayor finally did something, and that something was bad and stupid.

I've been seeing bits and pieces of this.

Is this the opening the like waste disposal centers

that were just open dumpsters?

The thing the mayor did was not reach a deal with sanitation workers, so they went on strike.

this is the first thing she has done

total total support to the sanitation workers who are the bedrock of human civilization yes absolutely without

as as the city of philadelphia is now learning uh is the deluge is the chaos is rat hell yeah we're about you know combined with sanitation strike and uh septa going offline we are probably about i don't know four four weeks from anarchy.

Just complete bad.

South Philly is about six days from it.

Yeah, I think so, actually.

Yeah, a lot of those places have like twice weekly trash pickup.

Yeah, it's going to get it's going to get real bad.

And speaking of, you know, like the trash people, all, all of the parks and rec workers who actually are like full-time maintenance employees.

So all the people actually keep the system running on like, you know, bubblegum and rope.

All of the rodent control people are also DC33.

Like, you know, they really are the lifeblood of the city.

They keep it working.

All the streets crews, all the water department crews,

it's such a shame.

And they do a great job because unlike New York City, here in Philly, we don't have rats.

We have mice, but we don't have rats.

No, we have rats.

That's going to change.

That's going to change very quickly.

We have rats now, Ross.

Just depending on the momentum.

And that's a rats.

That rats down from New York City.

Oh, my God.

It's the fight.

You were worried about the Antifa buses.

Now the rats are coming down.

Oh, yeah.

I think all rats, by definition, are members of Antifa.

I think so.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, everyone's, they got a bus driver.

He's being controlled by the rat in his hat.

Like a rat something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ratatour bus.

Yeah.

Oh, oh, that's it.

So anyway,

this is,

you know,

I

this is a product of, you know, dumbass legislators in Harrisburg who have, you know, too much interest in trying to, you know, just make the liberals miserable, you know, because that's all we do.

That's all we do in politics these days is punish people.

So, you know, this, I, I,

I don't, I still think this will be resolved in some fashion because too many rich main line people are going to be pissed off with the Thorndale line disappearing.

Yeah,

but who knows?

Um,

yeah,

amazing.

Everyone's going to get stuck in traffic, and then they're all going to get

fired for getting late.

It's going to be impossible to employ anyone in Philadelphia, and then we all die if we haven't already died from diseases from garbage not being picked up.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's that's the status of the city.

We're in the

city update.

Bad.

Seems bad.

Bad.

Yeah.

In other news.

Oh, shit.

I have to reload the thing.

girl.

There we go.

It's 11.37 p.m.

Uh, yeah, so I was a little sarcastic.

I'm sorry.

So, uh, so as of today, it is uh majorly illegal under anti-terrorism legislation to be a member of, incite support for, uh, or really make any kind of statement that tends to uh glorify or support a group called Palestine Action,

who legally are now terrorists

for the crime of sabotaging a bunch of like Elbit arms manufacturing facilities and also two RAF refueling planes.

385 to 26, you fucking cowards.

This is one of the dumbest things to have ever happened.

It is in many ways unenforceable.

I mean, there might be some interesting test cases for this, but it was kind of the case that a thinly veiled MI5 was briefing to newspapers that it was kind of

making an impossible circus of their job of enforcing the like prescribed group thing.

But it has now happened.

And Palestine Action, who, again, it is illegal to support in the United Kingdom,

responded to this by changing their name to Yvette Cooper, which is the name of the home secretary who prescribed them and who made it illegal to support them.

So

as far as I know, it's not illegal to be a supporter of Yvette Cooper, so long as you only mean the person and not the group.

And how someone is supposed to tell the difference, I'm not sure.

That's genius.

That's really good.

I like that a lot.

It does not seem to have stopped them.

And I don't, legally, I don't say that with any tone of admiration.

I merely observe and report that it does not seem to to have deterred them at all, which also, I think, maybe makes a mockery of the point of prescribing them in the first place.

I was about to say, plus the name is generic enough that, you know, I guess if they really wanted to, they could really start to go after a lot of people, you know, if they had the resources for it, which they don't because it's Britain and everything's defunded.

You know, just any kind of pro-Palestinian speech, yeah.

Exactly.

If it was America, we now have the $35 billion ICE budget.

You know, they could probably start, I don't know, put people into concentration camps, but Brett and I don't think they can do that.

Well, except for maybe turning the whole country into one big concentration camp.

We are our own alligator Alcatraz in a lot of ways.

Yeah,

you're going children of men pretty quick over there.

Yeah, it really feels like it, yeah.

Every day, there's a new little thing.

This is a kind of the more obvious one, but it's a little stuff of two.

Like, I

checked the news the other day to find out that like trans women are effectively banned from donating blood in the UK now.

Weird.

This one's a weird accidental thing where since they've legally defined trans women as men, that means the blood service has to like test against male ranges.

So they so like if you go in to donate blood, they'll be like, you are deeply, deeply anemic by male standards, and therefore it would not be safe for you to donate blood.

So you can't, right?

But practically, practically that's a sort of ban by accident.

And I think that that too is emblematic.

If this is if Palestine action being banned is the British state acting on purpose, then this is the British state acting by accident.

Um, and somehow they both end up being repressive, which is curious about the sort of purpose and nature of uh you know states and governments.

Um, but yeah, as I say, it would be it would be uh very illegal to support Palestine action in any way.

Um, so how bafflingly stupid.

Well done, yes.

Now, if you dev, if you can just insert like a like a sort of 20-second beep here,

while I say that, like.

I mean, we're Americans.

We can say it.

This is very stupid.

And, you know, I think that

everyone involved in your country's government should do do us a favor face the wall by themselves put a shotgun in

if you're a Republican at this point in your life you should have the decency to do us all a favor look pal you might be able to say it in America but you can't say it on YouTube the world will be a better place without you in it the thing is

yeah thank you

I think

there's an interesting kind of situation which you might actually need legal advice on as to you guys are Americans right you can support palestine action i'm not sure if you can do it on here

and i will still get in trouble even if we do that on the basis that like you might support them i couldn't possibly comment and in fact i don't good point i don't know that might still be illegal i might still get to go to like men's terrorism prison for that so

We

have a lot of confidence in, if I have one thing,

confidence in one thing, it is that we have good First Amendment lawyers.

We might not,

but we can make sure everybody else loses.

You do.

I don't know about me.

And so, yeah, I just

continue to urge people.

I can't possibly comment on it, of course.

I can't possibly comment on this.

What I can do on a completely unrelated basis is say that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

I can say that Israel is committing a genocide.

I can say that it's a sort of like dangerous

like state to like world peace.

And I can urge everyone to continue to support and stand up for Palestinian rights in the face of their continued occupation and genocide.

See, if you do that, you do that in the United States right now.

You wind up with your surrogate, Brad Lander, going on television.

and being accused of not taking anti-Semitism seriously.

He's Jewish.

He's Jewish.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

I don't understand that.

I really don't.

I mean, listen, I understand that I'm not Israeli because I'm not cursed by God.

But I just like, I don't get the like, well, you selfie, shut the fuck up.

Torah points us towards justice, not towards whatever bullshit involves killing Palestinian kids, you dumb motherfucker Nazis.

I hate these fucking people.

I thought I had to share a tent with them in the desert.

I think, I mean, it strikes me as someone who opposes anti-Semitism that it's probably a bad thing to claim that anti-Semitism extends to a bunch of stuff that it transparently doesn't.

I worry about that.

That kind of now

kind of discredits

the term for a lot of people.

And I worry about the sort of like second order consequences of that.

Ah, yeah, something, something stupid might happen in the future.

Yeah.

Alas and alack, we are not in control of these issues yet.

Maybe one day something will happen.

I don't know.

Seeing them try to Corbinize

Mondami has been

just crazy.

I mean,

they're going to try and do it.

And all I can say is I hope it doesn't work this time.

I hope it doesn't work, too.

I mean, this is the same playbook over again.

Yeah.

Corbin is supposedly starting a new party, which is a very funny thing for him to do

the week after we on Trash Future were like, yeah, fuck it.

Roll the dice.

Join the green party.

Yeah.

So

thank you, Jeremy.

Master of timing as always.

Yes.

But yeah, obviously I will be joining his new party, whatever it's called, like day one, unless it's called Palestine Action, because then that would be illegal.

No, that would be illegal then.

That would be illegal.

Well, if you started a new group called Palestine Action, which is distinct from the

interesting

you were doing the kind of Twitter text

circumvention thing where it's like, well, it's called Palestine Action, but the A is the A from the Russian keyboard, so it doesn't trigger the same thing.

There you go.

Yeah.

Grok, is this true?

Well, if you're going to talk to a lawyer or an AI lawyer, you can get the console for free.

I use Grok as my lawyer

as as groc as my witness as grok as my witness

shaking your head as you argue

shaking your head as you erase the sign that says it has been this many days since a lawsuit

anyway i i i'd say british democracy was nice while it lasted it was always a fiction uh never been clearer than it is now It would have been a good idea.

Yep.

We just,

we need to be civilized by force i think that's the only option at this point president xi uh my country the united kingdom yearns for freedom please send j20 strike prices yeah

all right well on that note that was the goddamn news

hey i got it right one time out of three yeah nice Good news, folks.

We only start at the beginning.

The beginning of all things.

Yeah.

Before you can talk about

Philadelphia.

Before you can talk about a specific place in Philadelphia and cover the entire history of that place, you have to cover the entire history of Philadelphia first.

So boss.

I saw a video series about this.

Wasn't it colonized by like Swedes or something?

Yes.

Pretty much.

I remember that video series, too.

No, we can't acknowledge it on this podcast.

Don't hurt his feelings.

A for hot advertisement upon the situation and extent of the city of Philadelphia and the ensuing platform thereof.

Yeah, so a lot of people, especially, you know, Philly has all this like iconography for those of us who are locals, I think.

But like the map of Philadelphia is what most people think of as like the William Penn map.

And it's pretty widely publicized, but it actually has like, it's actually three documents and basically a real estate advertising, right?

It's a timeshare.

Yeah, you're basically, you're, William Penn's basically saying, hey, you should come invest your uh land in my new in my new thing because this is the only way i'll recoup the debt that i'm that my dad was owed um so please

please help yeah please please please help me become rich again um or more rich i'm not really sure which one i it's been a long time since i learned about pen but um

the weird thing about philly is that you know this map is like pretty well known because it's basically the same map now um and william penn you know was one of the first you know, post

Renaissance people to fully plan out, design a city.

And actually, like, again, the weird part is that people actually listen to it.

And probably the most listened to part of William Penn's plan, and it's actually the biggest description on the short advertisement.

So it was the short advertisement, the map, and then a list of the influencers,

the cool people in England who were already subscribed to the William Penn column.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the list of...

All these cool people who bought plots on my land, which, by the way, we should mention was purchased fairly from the Lenny Lenape,

who still say to this time, yeah, Penn was fine.

It was the other white guys who were

a piece of shit.

But the other one was a lot of fun.

Yeah, his sons were also pieces of shit.

Yeah.

The Washington bastards.

Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons that Written House Square wasn't developed until later in the 19th century.

But

like the longest description on this paragraph is the next slide, right?

Yes.

And

most of the paragraph is actually talking about the importance of public squares in Philadelphia.

Public squares are near and dear to my heart and a lot of the other people who, especially in our presentation, were thinking about the city, right?

Yeah.

A square of eight acres to be for the lake youths as the more dash fields in London and eight streets besides the fade high freight that run from front to front and 20 streets besides the broad freight.

Yeah, that run across to the city from five to five.

All these streets are 50-foot breadth.

Yeah, but you missed the important part for our purposes today.

Yeah, I'm sure that I did.

Yes.

Today we're all going to learn about the long S.

We did that in the newspaper episode, the print media episode.

You're a goddamn Nufman.

Yeah, so

squares in each corner of the city have

their own use, which is for this, you know, the Moorfields in London during Penn's time was the original kind of public park.

It was just grass field and walking paths that were tree-lined.

But the square in the center is kind of what we're talking about today.

And instead of being this kind of open, green public space, it's supposed to have all of the public buildings in it, right?

So the public affairs building, meeting house, assembly and state house, market house, schoolhouse, and the other public concerns.

So, the idea really was that over time, Philadelphia would fill out, but all of the, you know, it's that Enlightenment era thinking where all of the ideas would come from the center of the city or all the most important things.

And this was really revolutionary, right?

Because before this, cities grew up as spaghetti.

And who's to say whether that's better than this?

But this at least looks pretty.

Yeah, I mean, it has sort of,

you know, it's from like the Roman, you know, plan for new settlements.

You had the cardo, the decumatus, you have the bath in the middle, you know, all the, all that stuff.

You know, it's very

old-fashioned in that sense, but it's the first one to be done in a while.

It's the first one to be done in a while.

And again, the craziest part is that, you know, unlike a major, most major American downtown cities with some exceptions, the urban renewal here was a lot different than most of the other places.

And it didn't get wholesale veered down the way that a lot of other American cities did.

So it still retains like a weird charm in that regard.

But the important thing is that like weird stuff

you describe Philadelphia.

Yeah, exactly.

And like the ideas were durable.

I don't feel safe unless I don't feel safe.

So if you go to the next slide, like, yeah.

So, so this idea was really durable, but this is it 100 years later, right?

This is the first survey map of Philadelphia.

And

even though like what William Penn shows as his cool, perfect city, like it doesn't get filled in like that, obviously.

And he envisions like orchard houses and like, you know, grand lots.

Everybody moves in right on top of each other, right on the one river where you can actually get in and out of the city.

No one fucking lives here, though, right?

Because how could you?

I mean, this is all still country at this point, right?

As far as I know from really Philadelphia?

Yeah,

the city for the first hundred years.

So that's from 1796.

Like that part of the city isn't

Philadelphia, doesn't extend past Washington and Franklin Squares, Squares, which are over by 6th and 7th Streets.

Right, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And so

right after that,

right around this time, they actually clear-cut the city, which is its own whole story.

And they also start to get rid of the elevations.

So you see how they're indicated on this map with the shading.

They actually flatten the city and they clear cut it and they bring all the streets to the level so that it's easier to traverse here.

Oh, and yeah, those ponds were for brickyards.

And they have like round portable brick kilns underneath them or next to them and that is actually also part of the story of Rittenhouse Square but we're talking about love park today yeah but yeah basically the idea for the center of the city being important like really had legs and so this is in 1796 and about a hundred years later you really start to have like the whole thing is just fucking filled in because Philadelphia goes through a huge explosion of residences and houses and it's just huge huge expansion yeah so yeah I guess we we jump forward about a hundred years here.

This is an exciting document.

I love these.

This is a fire insurance map.

Yeah, this is the Bromley Atlas.

Yeah.

Everything in pink is made of brick.

Everything in yellow is made of wood.

Everything that's gray is made of stone.

This is so they can, you know, when you get assessed for fire insurance, you know, the

assessor can look up and and say, Well, this building is good, but the one next to it might catch fire.

We have to consider that.

Yeah, and these were really measured drawings and documents because they had to assess the insurability.

Really, really durable-looking city in the sense that it's mostly like brick-built, though.

I also really like the extremely prominent Masonic temple.

Oh, yeah, that's that's right there.

Yeah, I like it.

Yeah, and and like,

again, with this, this insurance atlas, like, it's hard to really get a sense for the scale of everything because between 1796 and 1895, when this map is made, like, Philadelphia really does become the workshop of the world.

The Industrial Revolution here.

I'm seething in Glas Wegen.

Well, you know, that's the thing.

And like I was saying earlier.

Philadelphia is the Glasgow of America.

Philadelphia is the Naples of America.

But yeah, so the Philadelphia is the Ankara of America.

Philadelphia is the Zagreb of America.

Sure.

So the really, so if you look at some of these row houses, like you can find this map online in a couple of different places.

The Philadelphia, atlas.phlla.gov has all of these that you can layer on top of each other.

You can zoom in real close and you can see a regular size row house.

And that's the tiny little rectangles and squares in this image because this was the downtown heart of the city.

And again, because the city hall had been moved there and they built the biggest city hall that has ever been.

At one point, the world's tallest building.

At one point, right.

So, but you don't get a sense of the scale of this city.

Yeah, I mean, before we move on, I guess we're going to talk about a couple of areas here, most notably, like, just about around here, but also let's point out we've got the Broad Street station, huge terminal station right up against City Hall, which is here, the public buildings, right?

Um, we're going to talk about this horrible block of buildings here, um, where something very stupid was built.

Yeah, we're going to briefly talk about the Watermaker building here, but it's not that important, and then also, I think that's it.

Well, yeah, the Reading Railroad was also right there.

The Reading Railroad Terminal becomes, you know, this is up here.

This is also a huge building, which is still there, but the trains don't go there anymore.

So anyway, you know, this, this is,

when you look at this, and we're going to show some pictures that look very nice.

We do have to remember this is 1895.

You know, there's no electricity.

There's horse boop everywhere.

Everyone has gas lighting, right?

There's steam trains coming in and out of Broad Street station.

Yeah, until the 1950s, the entire city was just getting bathed on a daily basis with coal soot.

Yeah.

No one cleans these buildings.

No, city wasn't actually clean again.

Glasgow is wet Philadelphia.

Like all of the 19th century Glaswegian tenement buildings and stuff, very, very black

stone until the invention of

the power washer.

And then you realize, oh, wait a second, this is sandstone under here.

And they're actually quite prissy.

Yeah.

Pressure washers destroy that shit too.

So every time you do that, you just trim off a little bit of the top.

Yeah, unless you're very careful.

That's part of my job.

That's the problem with it: you think you can do power washing.

No, it's actually you need scaffolding, water, and soap.

It's a science.

So, yeah.

I think it's a good place to, you know, start to talk about how various events unfolded is, you know, the centerpiece of the city is City Hall.

It's right there

in the middle of town.

It's such a good one, which is exactly where it should be.

Yeah, this was a good idea.

This is the one that

all three of us have worked here.

June, me, Roz.

Yeah, I have not worked in City Hall.

Oh, I thought you had.

So, so June, June, and I need to get jobs in City Hall.

I haven't, yeah, you can't.

My job is municipally adjacent.

This is the building that, if you look at it from the right angle, it looks like William Penn is like holding his dick in his hand, right?

Yeah, he is.

Yeah,

he's pissing all over the Phillies 2025 season.

And all of the Mets.

Yeah.

I will say, I like, I'm fine with whatever the skating rink and all that, but like being like coming out of the

Broad Street station and just like looking up and seeing this building imposing its Second Empire will on me is absolutely stupendous.

And it's one of my favorite things about Philly.

Gigantic statue.

If you like Second Empire, you will like this building.

Why did you put this line in?

Was this simply to taunt me?

I love Second Empire.

City Hall is very important to this story, right?

So City Hall.

Oh,

it takes 30 years to build, 1871 to 1901.

Can't rush perfection.

It started to be occupied before they finished it, right?

Because, you know, it's just such a big building, right?

But even before it was finished, this style of architecture became extremely dated and deeply, deeply unfashionable.

And so everyone wants an excuse to get rid of it for a long time.

Yeah.

And it's hard to, again, like you're in a city where the sidewalk is normal and the tallest, one of the tallest buildings ever built is right next to you.

It's the largest municipal, right?

It's still the largest municipal building ever constructed.

It was the tallest building in the world.

Like it has one of the most

like complete, it has a complete sculpture program with like over 100 or 200, maybe even sculptures.

The whole thing is just lavishly adorned.

And it was, and, and all those windows, those are double story windows.

So they did the thing where they made the building appear smaller than it is.

When you're, when you're, when you're standing in front of it, it's

massive.

Huge, big, really big building.

Very big.

It's so good.

Very, very big building.

Very, very big.

Yeah.

And yeah,

it's really big.

It's hard to describe how big it is.

Colossal, yeah.

Yeah.

Also, I believe it's still the tallest habitable masonry building.

This tower is all well, up to about here, it's all masonry.

And then, you know, that is uh,

underneath that were some wooden pile foundations, which when they went to go build the subway underneath it, they found weren't there anymore.

And they just rotted away.

So,

yeah, building has no foundation, but it's heavy enough it doesn't matter.

Yeah,

more gooder.

Yeah, who gives a fuck?

So,

unless the Tartarians are right and there's another 70 stories buried in the mud underneath.

I don't know.

We don't know what lots of technology.

I don't know.

It's like you're looking at the sort of like top third of this building, right?

Yeah.

Ross and I watched a video of City Hall under construction in a Tartarian architecture YouTube video.

That was my favorite part of the whole thing.

Maybe this is all fake, yeah.

Right.

And in the background, in the background of the City Hall image, again, just for scale so that's broad street station yes and the same it's the same thing broad street station was the largest single span train shed ever constructed it was also a huge building um and if you ginormous it it's ginormous and so it had this big viad the trains came in elevated So it had this huge viaduct that spanned half of a city block going all the way from the river into city hall.

So it covered half of the city, you know,

horizontally.

And so that was, that was, they called it the Chinese Wall because all the crossings looked like you were going to enter the hell death pump.

Like you see those little tiny, teeny verticals there?

Those are guys.

Yeah.

And so this is Broad Street Station.

If you remember from one of our Penn Central episodes, this is where they kept the rifles in the attic.

You know, this is a big, old-fashioned stub-ended terminal.

You know, you got steam trains coming in and out.

You know, and this is sort of something the railroad doesn't like.

It's inefficient.

If you have a train going from New York City to Washington, D.C., it has to come in and has to back out very slowly the whole way to continue its journey.

This is why 30th Street Station was built further across the river in order to, you know, stop that from being necessary, right?

Trains just continue through.

It's a little more inconvenient if you're going to Philly, but it's not that bad, though.

The other thing is they built this building over here, Suburban Station, as offices to replace the offices in the main terminal, Broad Street Station, and they build it for the suburban trains, which were at this point mostly electric.

So those are all in a tunnel underneath.

So, yeah, Broad Street Station hangs around for a while, but it's one of these things the city fathers and the railroad want to get rid of.

And the main thing that they have problems with is, well, 30th Street Station can't really take steam locomotives.

And Suburban Station definitely can't take steam locomotives.

Although Amtrak tried running diesels in there for a while when they ran the Atlantic City trains.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

So

you like fumes?

Yeah.

He thought it could be worse than whatchamacallit, Back Bay Station.

Yep.

Die, motherfucker.

Die.

As a result of this was Broad Street Station hung around for a lot longer than it should have, you know, from a railroad operation standpoint.

By the time Suburban was built, you know, they had realigned most of the tracks to go directly into there.

You still had the big viaduct, the big Chinese wall with all the tracks on it.

They just all jammed down into one track at the end and went on a horrible spur to join the main line

as like a temporary thing where they're like, okay, sometime soon we can finally get rid of this thing.

Yeah.

And oh, and the other thing about the Chinese wall that's important is that, you know, this whole impassable cave that you had to walk through and hope you didn't die under

really separated the neighborhoods north of Market Street and south of Market Street.

I've heard, and I want to believe it, but I don't, I doubt that it's true, even if it's apocryphal, that this is where you get the wrong side of the tracks.

From

the whole neighborhood north of Market on this west side of Broad Street,

Logan Square, really had a lot of heavy industry right next to houses in a really weird way.

We're going to talk about that in a little bit.

Yeah, and this is

Frank Furness's biggest building,

which obviously is why it was demolished because everyone hates him.

Of course.

And

he was dead.

He couldn't shoot you for saying that at this point.

What else?

There was one more thing I wanted to say.

Chinese Wall.

You didn't cover that.

No, well, yeah, the Chinese Wall is back here.

It blocks off development.

Unlike Broad Street Station, the Redding Terminal, which also had a very large train shed, I think the largest extant one in North America,

possibly the entire Western hemisphere.

Instead of having just a wall, a masonry foundation, they built a market underneath.

That's one of the reasons it's still there.

Reading Terminal Market is still very popular.

Yeah.

Oh, and that was another durable idea.

There used to be a market there, and then they built the train station.

Yeah.

So, um, then there's a few other buildings around City Hall, including a very stupid one, the Arcade Building.

Um, this one's so funny.

And the Arcade Building was built sort of speculatively.

Um, another Frank Furness building, um, but I think there was a lot of railroad offices in there.

Essentially, rather than try and purchase the land on that one block,

they just built a very thin building over the sidewalk.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

A spiked building.

Yeah.

So good.

This gives me anxiety.

With the idea of walking under it gives me anxiety as well.

I think it was the point.

Yeah.

Oh, and you could also take a skybridge directly to Broad Street Station.

Yeah, just like one of the weirdo hulking skyscrapers that you had to contend with if you came to Philadelphia in the early

late 19th century.

Hostile architecture, but

writ large.

Right.

And the whole city was like kind of hulking like this, right?

All those Frank Furness buildings were the buildings.

Yes.

Yes.

Come see our buildings.

They're all weird.

Like this also, the John Wanamaker's Grand Depot,

which was a converted early freight depot.

Yeah.

It was a freight station that was converted to a department store.

This disappears shortly before our story really starts going when the parkway gets built.

But it is, I don't know, it's another weird

building.

No, the and Wanamakers was the first department store in the United States, right?

Like,

this whole, all of this stuff is happening all at once right in the heart of the city, but it's all really chaotic.

Like, like that building, that building is hugging row houses.

You know, like

everything's happening all at once right here.

People are still dropping shit on the streets.

You know, there's like dead horses.

There's like live horses pulling horrible you know whatever other more yeah live horses pulling carts of dead horses

people are getting run over by trolleys scarlet fever yellow fever dead gay fever west nile virus uh being constant fires

yeah

don't forget like old-timey diseases too those were rampant

scarlet fever no like i'm thinking like uh like like consumption to possibly yeah yeah consumption that's what i'm talking about yeah exactly so

this, you know, this sort of general congestion leads to a movement I think a lot of people should be familiar with, which is the city beautiful.

And like, well, so how is this applied in Philadelphia?

And the answer to start with is the parkway.

Yeah, this is, this is our major city beautiful project.

Like

it's happening at this moment in American architecture, you know, right after the Columbian Exposition, like the Chicago World's Fair, right?

1893.

All the cities go, oh shit, we got to make all of our buildings look white and beautiful and linear and rigid and axial, like this.

Yes.

But going to be so much light and air, you won't notice the horseboot.

Yeah.

What if we just like cut across this whole grid?

And that's, that's a shortcut from William Penn and with his dick in hand directly to Paris, the city everyone wants to be like.

And so exactly, because in the 1920s, really, Philadelphia did have, or in the 1900s, Philadelphia had Parisian, you know, French-trained architects working and designing all of their public parks and green spaces.

So, people are talking about the parking lot.

La Philadelphia c'est le Paris de

les étai unis.

Trying to explain this with the like thickest Philadelphia accent you've ever heard

to a guy who just got here from Paris in exactly as halting a tone as I did.

So Paul Philippe Cray designed makes these plans for a park, you know, a parkway that leads to the entrance to Fairmount Park, which was another like civil achievement, huge swath of park ground, and then also like the watershed protection mechanism.

All of the park space in Philadelphia is really interesting, especially in this time, because they're acquiring parks.

It's a bunch of real estate guys who are acquiring park.

And so they're not only doing it to like improve their own investments, but they're thinking entrepreneurially like that, which is like, oh, if we put a park here, if we put a really, really good park here, we're going to make a really cool section of the neighborhood that people are like.

I can imagine that.

Yeah,

who could think that actually like well-funded, well-cared for, and beautiful green spaces would be something that people would like and want to live next.

And so this happens alongside the car, but it doesn't really prioritize the car at first.

It really is prioritizing this like boulevard experience for pedestrians who are going to the big park.

And they also propose an art museum at the other end of this boulevard.

It turns out to be exactly one mile long, which is just kind of a weird, cool thing.

The reservoir was obviously up on a hill, so they get to take advantage of that whole Greek temple thing.

Yes, this is

this was the reservoir for the Fairmount Waterworks.

So

the museum is built on top of the Fairmont.

Right.

And

it takes a while for them to build it.

But

this wasn't really designed initially with cars in mind, but very quickly it becomes the road, the car sewer, right?

The notion is how do we open up space and get more air?

into this part of the city.

It's also partly slum clearance because this is the neighborhood where all the the irish catholics lived or sorry just catholics

um

and again it was it was the wrong side of the tracks in like philadelphia parlance

there are also like there's like tanneries up here there's like you know all kinds of nasty stuff i mean you know somewhere right back there was the baldwin locomotive works um what else was up here i'm not super familiar with all the there was a there was an iron kind of that existed.

Yeah.

That's kind of like the oh, come on.

Come down.

The smelly stuff you kept outside the medieval walls.

Right.

Yeah.

In fact, the Chinese wall in this case.

Right.

And all of this is all of the toxic 19th century industry as opposed to the toxic 18th century industry because the Schuylkill River side of Philly only really becomes developed after they figure out that there's coal in the Lehigh Valley that they can ship straight to Philadelphia on the

Just the 19th century kind of hysterical anti-Catholicism as being the wrong side of the tracks, you know, a guy kind of like locking the doors on his carriage because he sees someone with a rosary, like a priest.

Right.

So in the lower, in the lower right hand.

Philadelphia is just Glasgow.

Those people still exist here.

Right.

And this is also like Beaux-Arts architecture, right?

Like the architects who were, Paul Philippe Cray studied at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Like that had been around since 1671, creating these axial designs for buildings, right?

They all form along, like, they're all symmetrical.

They all go along a major corridor, and that really explains and displays how you're supposed to go through the space.

And that kind of that kind of planning continues to be a theme

throughout the 1960s and 70s and 80s in some respects.

Yeah, and some interesting things happen in that, you know, sort of vein, you know, like the free library here and the not yet built in this image family court building were direct copies of two buildings in Paris

fronting a similar square.

They were going

to go for it.

Yeah, sometimes people weren't that creative.

No, they were like, how do we be more like Paris?

Will we simply become Paris?

You just build the buildings.

Yeah, exactly.

That's one for one, dupe.

I love that.

What if Paris, but Xienne?

Exactly.

Exactly.

And

one of the other interesting things about the Parkway is, you know, it was not intended to be quite the way it is today.

I mean, obviously they finish it, right?

It takes a long time to get developed because, you know, there were more like comprehensive visions for this.

This is an early one.

I forget the exact context of this one, but you can see it would have been.

flanked by much taller buildings,

much more imposing, you know, museums, public buildings, so on and so forth.

You got an obelisk in there.

Yeah, you got an obelisk.

Yeah.

You got some kind of museum here where the municipal services building is.

Broad Street Station has been refaced with some classical bullshit.

It's so funny.

They can't quite get rid of the arcade building, apparently.

Oh, and those blocks right behind the arcade building, that little narrow one is Mole Street, and that was like a famous bar block back in the 19 teens.

But yeah, this is a model that

they made for the parkway when they first rolled it out in 1907 or whatever.

And apparently on opening day of the model, people just like went crazy around it, which is a really funny piece of news.

Gnashing of teeth.

Yeah.

Taking psychic damage from this thing.

But yeah, the whole notion wasn't.

Crazy good or crazy bad?

Oh, no, crazy good.

They were all excited for it.

Oh,

I was envisioning a kind of Lovecraftian kind of horror, you know, the model outs of space.

It just started.

They started speaking in tongues.

It's like a Pentecostal service.

Someone gets out a box of snakes, you know?

Oh, yeah.

No, and it's just the whole idea of it was to build a museum district and combine all these like disparate cultural institutions that were spread all over Center City into one area and really do like a totally beautiful, beautifying treatment here.

Not, not a hot, like, not the

idiot, bullshit, nonsense copy of Paris.

Yeah, it's not, it's not, it's not specifically for slum clearance, right?

Like, that's like a, that's like a side goal.

The real goal is to make something that's actually gorgeous and like fills in this kind of whole angle of the city to the greatest park, urban park that had been built to date in one place.

Or, you know, no, no disrespect to Central Park.

I have to be nice to all the parks equally.

They're all my children.

They're all beautiful.

They're all my beautiful children.

So, anyway, they build the damn thing.

You know, you can see here some of the piecemeal construction, you know.

Yeah, you can see the image.

That's an image of it under construction.

They fucked up the alignment at first, so it cost like a couple, 20 extra million dollars than they expected.

You can see right next to that up top, that's an image of the neighborhood before they started to actually demolish all the buildings.

And because they had to realign it, they ended up taking out a shit tons.

Yeah, also

surprising that there's a lot of, you know, you can see some of these are really big single-family houses.

Some of these are apartments, but some of these are like, you know,

rich people live here.

That super fancy one on the bottom middle slide, that was actually the mayor's house.

And like the mayor's house is a funny thing in Philadelphia as a concept, but it's often tied like charismatically to the actions of that existing mayor.

Blankenberg.

We'll talk about that later a bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then, yeah, you can see a church that they actually moved on rails, but that was really rare.

They mostly just tore these buildings down.

So, all right,

we got this parkway, right?

You can drive it.

You can keep it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we can start.

You can park on the

park on the driveway.

Oh, here you can see the horrible spur from the Chinese wall onto the new railroad bridge into 30th Street Station.

Logan Square becomes Logan Circle.

Yeah, like all these other plans, like they finished, they finished the demolition and

then they're like, oh, shit, we don't have any more money.

What the fuck do we do?

Yeah, you'll notice.

Yeah, no buildings here.

This is a vacant lot for development.

This is a vacant lot for development.

This is a vacant lot for development, so on and so forth.

Here, the Rodan Museum's been built already.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then a lot of these remain vacant for 70 years.

Jesus.

Right.

And there's like, you know, again, like the accessory parking lots that they have to demolish or that they just choose to demolish or whatever.

Like it really does, it really does remove a lot of the city and then it's not really replaced until much, much later.

You know, I mean, and Philadelphia like continues to be a manufacturing hub quite successfully, but then it's shit like, you know, when World War I breaks out, they build a giant shipyard down on Hog Island, inadvertently creating the greatest sandwich known to humankind.

Yes.

But, but that's a huge pork spending project.

And then before the shipyard's even done, Hog Island.

Yeah, exactly.

That might be why it's called that, honestly.

But yeah, before they're even done building the shipyard, the war's over and the the city sunk a shit ton of money.

Just really bad financial mismanagement happens over and over again in the city and through the 19th, but like till the 1950s.

Yeah.

But then

that doesn't stop people from wanting to go further, which leads us to some of the other ideas for improving the civic center, namely, let's demolish City Hall.

Right.

These are really early renderings.

These are from 1924.

And

they're both done by Paul Cray, who was the architect of all the Fairmount Park properties at the time.

And he's already thinking, like, again, they have imagine infinite money.

Imagine that people are continuing to move to your city.

Imagine that everything you want ever gets built.

We're going to tear fucking City Hall down.

Nobody likes that thing.

It looks like shit, but we can't really figure out how to tear down the tower.

So I guess we should keep it.

It's just a too basic hill.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's what happens with City Hall.

City Hall is a focal point for the parkway they just built.

Yeah.

Or the City Hall Tower.

So that's why all the proposals kept it.

Right.

But yeah, they want to get rid of the rest of the building and just turn it into a cool traffic circle.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, this is,

you know, and you look here, you can see,

okay, only a couple cars are going to be using this at a time, right?

Traffic's going to flow great.

This is a great idea.

Guys, we should do this.

This is awesome.

Yeah.

Then interestingly enough, we see another square, admittedly, with the parkway going directly through it, has already been marked for clearing out.

Right.

So that was the

Cray calls that like the Parkway Fourcourt.

So, you know, very early on in the development of the whole thing, the idea of really treating this square as special and important is like a, is like a critical part of the design for this park.

And the other funny thing is that, you know, Cray is working in this really interesting time period, right?

He goes on to design the Federal Reserve Bank building, like that very modern-looking one, but it has the classical detailing.

He was like a leading figure in American architecture until the Nazis stole that shit and used it for themselves.

And then you can't build anything that looks like that.

It's got a reverse operation paper clip.

Literally.

Literally.

Take it.

Take it, you Nazi schline.

But yeah, this whole area was given specific attention and it was part of this effort to

beautify and reimagine what the center of the city could and should look like.

In this drawing as well, no one can get rid of the fucking arcade building.

It's still there.

It's stalking November.

Waiting for her to walk under.

Oh my God.

Have we considered that the arcade building might be a mimic?

Possibly, possibly.

They should put it back.

They should just put it back.

Yeah.

People really liked it.

And now we skip directly to the 1960s.

Yeah, oh boy,

buckle up, motherfuckers.

It's time for some architectural theory, yeah.

So, in the 1960s, you produced some of the best and the worst architecture in the contemporary period, right?

Often by the same architects, engineers, and designers.

There's this thought in the post-war era, we could have a different relationship with buildings as urban dwellers, right?

So, you know, for instance, we're not going to live in individual buildings anymore.

We're going to live in some kind of mega structure.

Streets in the sky.

Streets in the sky.

The whatever the fucking Corbusier building is called.

Unité habitation, yeah.

No, and the other, the other funny thing that happens during this time is that architects start planning in section instead of planned.

And so the elevation changes become like a big part of it.

The drama of like movement through space up and down becomes like something they start to consider primarily instead of second.

Yeah, so like this guy down here is a sketch by a guy we'll talk about in a bit, Ed Bacon, for the Market East development, right?

You can see City Hall in the background here.

You can't see if the arcade building is there, but I assume it is.

It's,

you know, and you see like, okay, this is going to be some kind of incredible office building, but then there's going to be a parking deck underneath it.

Might not be offices, might be apartments.

Maybe it's both.

Who knows?

Then underneath that, there's a bus station.

Then, at ground level, there's pedestrian circulation.

Then you can see underneath there is

some kind of what we would call regional rail here.

And then the Market Street subway is over here.

And then you have, you know, malls and public areas over here, right?

And this is all in one building.

building, you know, you, you, you might live like weeks of your life without leaving this building, you know, if it's designed, if it's as big as it is and like, you know, as

yeah, look how, look how long it's supposed to be.

Like, it's supposed to be the whole, the whole side of the entire city.

People are building trying to build essentially arcologies, right?

You know,

it's a win condition, though.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

And yeah,

here's the thing.

You know, we get close.

You know, obviously, here's a picture of the barbican.

That's, that's, that's a, a good example of like the huge scale of structures people are thinking of.

You know, Habitat

67, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Up here in Montreal.

Smaller planned communities like Reston, Virginia up here.

You know, where we've, we were building these modernist row houses above a wonderful market square, no cars whatsoever while they're back there in a parking lot um rest of the the rest of reston was not built this way but the good part was um

no and and and the architects are kind of doing something akin to it like city planning and the city planning is kind of doing something similar to architect you know they they they they flow much more evenly

yeah exactly and you're not you're not necessarily thinking in terms of i'm going to put a building on this lot you're like we're going to radically reshape reshape the city in ways that were not possible without technology.

We have this, and now that we have it, you know, right.

Which I guess, yeah, you move into some of the more aggressive examples like

Lower Manhattan Expressway.

This is a Robert Moses project.

Australia Jesus.

Okay.

Yeah.

A great place to put apartments is on top of a highway.

Everyone can get carbon monoxide poisoning.

The important part is that it looks badass.

It does look badass.

Yeah.

That may literally be the important part.

Yeah.

And then there's Kenzo Tonga's plan for the Tokyo Bay,

which is a hugely scaled project, just rethinking, oh, well, we just don't even need to worry about building on land.

We're going to build a whole

new half of the city.

And these are, yeah, these are all megastructures, like in the same kind of vein.

They're entire self-contained buildings that are cities.

Isn't where the like the Tokyo, the super, the super tall tower project stems from?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Local.

Yeah.

Oceans are now housing developments.

And then you have the fun proposals.

Now you have the fun proposals.

You have the parodies.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's the

Super Studios continuous monument, where they, this is an Italian design collective.

And they're just like, wow, all these buildings are getting really big.

What if we just built a building that was a huge glass building that just encircled the entire earth?

Call me earth.

Make a lot of things simpler, make some more things more complicated, which in many ways is every piece of Italian design.

Well, you know, it seems to inspired the Saudis.

So, yeah, but the Saudis don't have the same kind of vision.

This is, this is, you know.

No, they, yeah, they have whatever their vision is, it's, it's bad, folks.

Yeah.

And what Arkad Graham wanted to do, the walking city.

Yeah, they did a bunch of these fun proposals.

Um, they're really good drawings, and the idea was, yeah, what if you're what if your city was like shaped like a weird little bug guy and it could move around, it could do everything that you wanted it to, and it could go visit.

You guys have seen Star Wars, right?

Which pretty much

the film with the

cities that are mobile and eat other cities?

Um,

what the hell are you talking about?

Not Howell's Moving Castle.

No, no, no.

It was a book first.

Ah, shit.

All right, hold on.

This is going to be a fun Google search.

Cities that eat other cities movie question mark.

This is great.

This is great podcasting.

Are you talking about Mortal?

Is this Mortal Engines?

Is that what you're saying?

Mortal Engines sounds about right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why the fuck not?

Right.

So, so this is the moment really in cities where like

you just have infinite ideas and like all of the guys are ideas guys.

Infinite LSD, which is important.

I mean, that's a critical training tool for

the 1960s.

Those are the young architects.

And creatives back then, yeah.

Right.

But so

not a creative type.

Sorry, old man.

So, you know, the result of this is, okay, we've got lots of new ideas in architecture.

We're We're going to have different ways of relating to buildings, the city in general.

And that's how we go from this to this.

Yeah.

Yeah,

this is Lou Kahn, crazy Uncle Lou Kahn's traffic proposal for the city of Philadelphia.

This is done in the 1950s.

We are going to make the notes on this slide are fucking cold.

Oh, it's so I'm really enjoying the seeming electromagnets he's creating.

Right.

So what he says is that we're going to make Philadelphia pedestrian only in the William Penn part.

We're going to go all the way.

We're going to retavern all the way back and we're going to put canals in too.

And if you want to drive to Philadelphia,

is the Venice of America.

I've always said that.

Exactly.

And if you want to drive into Philadelphia, that's cool.

What you're going to end up at is one of these gigantic spiral-shaped parking garages, and that's where you're going to park your stupid fucking car and keep it out of my face.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

We like electric trams to bring you around, or you can walk everywhere.

I suppose there'd probably be something with the boats.

There are still a few streets on here that seem to be allowing motor traffic, but far, far fewer than there are today.

I guess the Vine Street Expressway gets built too.

Also, the South Street Expressway,

which didn't get built.

But this is damn near close, right?

Yeah, very close.

Yeah.

That was successfully defeated.

But yeah, this is an interesting proposal.

It receives a lot of

there's a lot of artistic significance put on it.

I know that much.

I don't know that much about it, to be honest.

It's a good idea, though.

Yeah,

crazy Uncle Lukon was over here making his crazy drawings and showing it to everybody.

Yeah, they're like, Chris Lecoil's right.

Let's do this.

Right.

They're like, they're like, wow, this is cool.

nobody's ever going to do this but this is cool well they actually did do one of them right ros yes they did build this specific parking garage so that's that's cool we got one parking garage out of the straw yeah yeah exactly um and that's uh that one was supposed to be sort of you were supposed to have direct access from the vine street expressway to that parking garage and then the feds came in and said that's illegal for some esoteric reason.

So they didn't do it.

So you have to drive on surface streets to get there.

But that was one of the parking garage proposed, and it is there.

It's not spiral either.

It's a boring square one.

Which brings us to the subject of parking garages.

My dog's yelling at me to go outside.

So Roz, make your lecture extra long.

Okay.

Let's see what I can do here.

So parking garages are the worst kind of structure.

Number one, because they let people drive cars into cities.

That's true.

Right?

Yeah.

They haven't found a way to make one look good yet, and they've tried.

Some of the early ones, I think, looked good, but that was back when they put windows on them and stuff.

Back when they were the temple of the automobile, and then you would drive in and then die immediately of the fumes.

Yes, exactly.

The most smog inhalation anyone has ever experienced in the history of anything.

But these parking garages, they're generally just bad structures, right?

They're not climate controlled.

So they're subject to, you know, freeze-thaw cycles.

They're not weatherproofed, so they're subject to weathering from precipitation or from road salt, which is another thing most buildings don't have to deal with.

They're subject to these heavy loads in the form of cars, and those cars, those cars move around, right?

They have to be built as cheaply as possible so they make economic sense, right?

Two parking spots is the same floor area as a studio apartment.

Jesus, they usually can't be converted to higher and better uses just due to their sort of construction, you know, ceiling heights, things like that, right?

Also, they're beat to shit by the time you want to convert them.

You know, and despite these parking garages being, you know, the first experience of a place you get when you go to a location, they are stupid ugly.

Like,

it's a bizarre way for this.

This is essentially your foyer to you know any

sort of building or location.

And it's like, no, you have to go into a horrible warehouse for cars to get here, right?

They also tend not to be built correctly, especially the modern pre-cast ones.

There's lots of problems with the grout, lots of problems with the minimal

cast in place concrete that is usually put into them.

They are usually not well maintained, right?

Underground garages have all of these problems as well, but they're not visible to the public and they have additional problems like runoff, right?

You know, so

I can't imagine like a deep underground garage.

Imagine if you had to clean out the sump.

Oh, my God.

I'm back, everybody.

And so did you, did you say, did you hear about the, because you know, automated like parking garages where your car just gets like lifted on a hydraulic thing and stored it.

There have been a couple of those.

There was one in London that ate somebody's car.

And by eight, I don't mean it destroyed the car.

What I mean is it stored it irretrievably.

And

when they sued to be like, I want my car back, it is trapped in your car labyrinth.

You've put it in the fucking car jail from car and or

like got eaten by the car Minotaur or the minute minute minute car

because it requires a series of precise moves to get the thing out.

You have to do basically the plot of the movie Cube to get your car back.

They had to tell that person, yeah, sorry, your car, we can get you your car back in four years' time.

And there's no way to get there ahead of that other than just, I guess, demolishing the entire parking garage to breach in and rescue your car.

Your car is just trapped.

Your car is going through a multi-year experience with this.

Oh, my God.

i mean yeah i i i suppose that makes sense for that kind of garage i mean

it's weird that they had a specific date on that but i suppose that's you know another thing about parking garages is you know because of all these problems they have with them they tend to have very short lifespans right um you know we're talking like 30 40 years tops because they just get beat to shit and they're not necessarily built that well to begin with.

And of course, we're in a situation where everyone's getting electric cars.

And, you know, rather than doing the same thing, which is, oh, maybe we make the cars a bit lighter.

Maybe we, you know, we take advantage of some efficiencies, especially when energy is, you know, likely to be more scarce in the future.

It's like, no, everyone's buying electric SUVs.

So the car parks are put under more strain.

So, you know,

I just have a quick aside.

The thing that really pisses me off about electric cars now is the honking ginormous, like, electric SUVs like the Hummer EV and the Cadillac Escalade EV version that weigh 9,000 fucking pounds and yet can get from zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds.

It's like the F-150 Lightning that the guy used to do the terrorist attack in New Orleans.

I am a firm believer in going fast, recklessly fast.

However, I am not a believer in endangering people besides myself to do it.

I believe that I should be put in charge of the Federal Highway Authority and I will regulate electric cars so that you get 20 horsepower.

Everyone drives an electric to Chevote and the streets are made much safer.

Oh, there you go.

You only need to go 60.

What do you care?

Except for me, I get an exemption.

Because

you're the safer driver.

Yeah.

Yes.

Thank you, November.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

So, yeah, the result of this is these buildings tend to be, need to be replaced relatively frequently compared to a lot of other kinds of buildings, which are climate controlled or,

you know, otherwise have these sorts of,

you know,

they're easier to maintain and they have

less of a shelf or they have more of a, you know, a life to them.

So naturally, if you're going to build a grand civic plaza, you build it on top of an underground parking garage.

Hell yeah.

Yeah, right.

So, you know, we've we've now covered the two main constituent parts of our episode, right?

We accidentally made the giant traffic car sewer, and then we accidentally fucked up and forgot to put a you know place to put all the cars like like Lu Kahn want.

So, oh, crazy Liu Kahn.

Oh, crazy old Uncle Liu Kahn.

So, what happened?

So, slightly before crazy Uncle Liu Khan starts his drawing, um,

in 1948, the the newspapers start to like do the thing where they're like, surely all of the citizens agree that we simply must have more park

legal underground municipal parking garages in Philadelphia.

And back in those days, like we'll talk about in a minute, like the process for getting anything done in Philly had to go through the state legislature.

So in order to legalize the building of underground parking garages, it had to go through that.

Where they originally had planned to site it was right next to that Parkway 4 court area from earlier.

You can see it.

It was always supposed to be kind of like bisected by the road.

This is what was called Rayburn Plaza, and it had a like a municipal bandstand on it.

And later it's called Thomas Payne Plaza because

Thomas Payne allegedly did common sense over it.

But it was always this kind of place of public performance.

And then went on a podcast about Philadelphia sports.

Absolutely.

Big shout out.

Yeah, 10,000 losses.

I feel a little guilty because I told Tom I couldn't record today.

And then Ra got pressed pressed into service

with fucking AirPods today.

Like, cause Raw DMed us last night.

We're like, hey, can we record today?

I was just motherfucking.

I got to get a slop out.

10,000 losses does not pay my bills.

This slop does.

Hello, hogs.

Thank you.

I really like doing this show.

Me too.

I always have a great time.

Oh, man.

Right.

So you were saying, I'm sorry.

No, no, no, no, no.

I'm all.

So, okay.

So they

finally get the legislation passed.

The city takes out a $2 million loan to start the construction of two 900-space parking garages.

That's your return on investment there.

They start to get to work, and about a month later, they decide to pause the plan.

And then a month after that, they just shelve it entirely.

My favorite part is in the one where they finally like, you know, say, okay, we're not going to do this right now.

The second paragraph down here, the city traffic engineer stressed that, but more parking by motorists at such outlying points as all of the transit terminals

would really help because such drivers could board high-speed transit facilities at those locations and get to the center city area as quickly as they could their automobiles.

Like the guys are like,

did you think about taking the train?

Yeah, just take the fucking train.

Just take the center.

So we ran the numbers and I think you just need to take the fucking train.

Yeah,

I mean, it's surprising how, you know, it took so long for the city fathers to become car brained.

It happened eventually, but here it was like, no, no,

put it at 69th Street terminal.

Come on.

What are you doing?

Yeah.

And so like this idea, like all other Philadelphia ideas is like horrifically durable.

Right.

So they actually end up excavating out this building's base in order to make this parking garage thing, but they don't ever get the money authorized to build the actual parking garage thing.

It becomes the big cavern basement of the municipal services building.

Big hole.

Big hole.

Yeah.

Big hole.

I've been in it.

It's a big hole.

It's a crazy space.

You know how the, you know, you look at like the Ottomans, for instance, having the huge like cisterns or whatever under Istanbul, or like any of the kind of like

Japanese like

sort of like stormwater cavern things.

And you go, wow, that's incredible.

They built that.

Do you think future civilizations will be like, oh, they probably just couldn't get the appropriations to put whatever they actually wanted to put in here in?

Yes.

Exactly.

We think this was some kind of storage basement, don't know.

So,

this is the state of the area coming into the 1950s and 60s.

Yeah.

The one thing I just want to add about this is that

this underground parking garage movement thing actually ends up creating the modern Philadelphia NIMBY movement on accident

because they propose one for Rittenhouse Square, but that's a whole nother story.

Yeah.

So we got a big hole in the ground.

We got a parkway, which is now jamming cars into Center City.

We've got City Hall and Broad Street Station.

Broad Street Station, at this point, not necessarily useful.

The arcade building is still there.

Poor November.

Yep.

I'm never going to triumph over this building, you know.

And now we have to introduce our cast of characters.

Yes.

At only an hour or 26.

Yeah.

These are the players of the story.

Yeah.

I don't recognize this tarot deck.

Oh,

Ros and I made this up the other night.

Yeah.

It's really good.

Let's start with the priest.

That's right.

Edmund Bacon.

That's an alarmingly shaped man.

All right.

You want to make your case, Liam?

So from what I understand of him,

he's the intellectualization of what Robert Moses couldn't do.

Ah, see, yes, and no.

Okay, well, again, I don't understand as much as you do.

Urban tendencies on my forte, but I'll kill you, Roz.

Yeah,

stone dead, buddy.

That is a shape of forehead I've never seen before.

Could Eastrogen have saved her?

You have seen that forehead before if you've seen movie films.

Yeah.

Movie films.

Yeah.

Kevin Bacon.

No.

No shit, really.

Yeah,

he's Kevin Bacon's dad.

What the fuck?

The seven degrees of Kevin Bacon applies to urban planning?

Yes, yeah, and so and Kevin Bacon likes to say the only reason he busted his ass being an actor was because his dad worked twice as hard, um, which means that Ed Bacon must have been crazy, as you can probably imagine.

Yeah, I mean, uh, all the people in this, uh, all the people we're discussing today have alarmingly low uh Kevin Bacon numbers.

Um,

But like, so, so Liam, I think the Robert Moses comparison is pretty like fair, right?

In a lot of respects, right?

They're both working with huge, huge swaths of land.

They're able to really wield the concept of redesigning and redeveloping the city.

But that's kind of where it starts and stops.

Because

Bacon, Bacon wasn't an autocrat.

He worked in collaboration with all of the people involved in the city from top to bottom, right?

So that's not only like, you know,

he actually gets kicked out of Flint, Michigan for being accused of being a communist.

So he comes to Philadelphia and not a difficult thing to do in those days.

Of course.

As was the style of the time.

He was in charge of the housing

association there, right?

Trying to get public housing built, but not in like ways that were amenable to real estate.

Yeah, no, I think he was just head of city planning.

Like, he's a, you know, he's a, he was a classic Philadelphia Quaker in all of that conservative, like kind of said type of way.

Um,

we went to the same high school,

just so you know.

Um,

yeah, the big thing about Bacon compared to uh Robert Moses is Ed Bacon is through and through, he's an academic, right?

As opposed to Robert Moses, who got the opposite of an education, which is a PhD in political science from Columbia.

Oh, that's not real.

You know, he knows history, he knows theory, and he's very, very good at it.

Yeah.

And

so

the two things that happen here, like, so Ed Bacon's senior thesis when he's an architecture student at Cornell is to design a civic center for Philadelphia.

Like, he's taking this idea that started in 1907 with the Parkway.

And he's thinking, okay, how do we actually finish this thing so that it becomes something much, much grand?

And look here, Roz, he even just says, let's get rid of fucking City Hall.

Yeah, he's also saying, yeah, we'll get rid of City Hall.

He also draws one of the most phallic plazas that I've actually seen.

And usually, when I think people say, like, the architecture is a dick metaphor thing, I'm like, you're full of shit.

But this, this one's my favorite.

No, just, it's not even a metaphor.

This is just a piece of the map.

So

you see the black dot at the tip of it, right?

That was a fountain.

And the whole point was to be this central, central radiating pivot point from which one would spurt up the Ben Franklin Park.

Oh, spurt up the Ben Franklin Park, yeah, uh-huh, yeah,

um, and and you know, just uh, just create this beautiful uh canal of a public space that goes all the way to the uh, you know, metaphorical art museum A.

Obviously, these these colonnaded arcades down here, these that's the hair on the balls, right?

And that's and that's actually

so it's a common misconception, that's That's actually where the municipal employees are stored in

urban planning.

Civil deference, if you will, yes.

Hi, Bruce.

Sorry.

And so, yeah, like, just Bacon's been working on this whole notion of how do we actually fix Philadelphia for his entire, his entire professional life.

And

he becomes the head of city planning and he's suddenly in a position to actually do it.

Thanks to some of the other characters.

You got anything else for this one, Roz?

Oh, you know, I

mean, we're going to

see this project through in a bit, but yeah, he's, he's able to, he is able to see this project through over a very long period of time, right?

But I think the big, you know, one of the big things is the way he works is very radical in an era of like the prevailing opinion.

in municipal planning is, you know, any building over 40 years old is unsalvageable in a shitbox and it has to be demolished.

Sure.

This is during the contemporaneously to this, the whole city of Denver demolishes itself, right?

Oh, okay.

Just for attention.

There was no city of Denver for like 10 years

because they thought, you know, all we got to do is wipe out these old buildings.

And, you know, private development will come in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Private development will come in and build better buildings.

And then that just just didn't happen um

so you know this the bacon is uh much more like we're gonna come in we're going to you know we're we're going to fix what can be fixed we're going to change what needs to be changed um one of his big inspirations you know if you read his book design of cities which i couldn't find my copy of was um you know the great uh pope slash mayor sixtus the fif yeah future future

No Gods, No Mares episode.

Unless he's already been one and I just have blanked that from memory.

I think you did one who was in the same range of years, but it wasn't Sixtus V.

We've done

a Pope before, certainly.

Sixtus V

plans the renovation of Rome, right?

I'm just got to, this is a big inspiration for Bacon.

And the whole idea are, you know, grand boulevards through the old city, and they're anchored by various monuments.

They're going to be churches, they're going to be obelisks, they're going to be, you know,

visual, visual points, landmarks, the coliseum, so on and so forth, which are going to sort of let you know where you are in the city and how to get around without a map, even.

It's a wayfinding system.

Pretty much.

And

the thing that Bacon does with 6th is the fifth is, well, the thing that he does in Philadelphia is he unites all the parts, right?

The city leaders, the architects, the planners, like the

business leaders, like he figures out how to get them all aligned around a single idea.

And he also gets them to believe

the pithy line that Rome wasn't built in a day, because he walks through in agonizing detail.

Like, okay, Sixtus

cleared out the streets.

And he referred to them as highways, which I think is really interesting.

But he's like,

Sixtus cleared out the streets and put down obelisks.

And then over the next 100 or 200 years, various other architects came in to finish the plan.

And so, you know, connecting it back to this whole notion of like, okay, well, you exist in the context of all that has come before you and all that will, you know, will come to be.

That was very much a part of what he was selling to people and people were buying.

Yeah, it's as opposed to Robert moses who just fell out of the coconut tree yeah exactly yeah

but yeah so he's drawing on much of this old tradition but he's also again very modern we go back to this market east plan this is one of his drawings about like okay we're we're doing something new and radical as well we're doing something that you know is uh uh very much of the 60s very much uh it's it it is uh very much you know of its time it's of you know contemporary architecture architecture.

You know, we're going to have modern rapid transit.

We're going to have shopping centers.

We're going to have offices.

We're going to pedestrianize Chestnut Street, or we're going to put, we're going to make it rapid transit only.

It was only buses for quite a long time.

We're going to have these new kinds of row houses.

We're going to renovate what can be renovated in Society Hill, but also encourage new development, Society Hill towers, things like that.

He plans like all of the great Northeast, um so on and so forth at the northeast section of the city that was still largely undeveloped in the 60s yeah and and society hill was a really it predates this this like intentional city planning process by a little bit but he really did have just like total reign over redesigning the city and he took that responsibility very seriously So like, exactly, Society Hill was one of the first urban redevelopment projects.

And instead of doing the Pruitt, Igo, we knock down three city blocks and we build a mega tower.

It was selective site-by-site demolition of the homes that were actually in true disrepair.

And admittedly, you can see here Society Hill Towers, they did do some really big buildings, but that was the exception, not the rule.

Right.

And that was a centerpiece and that was a wayfinding point.

And that was this, that, the other thing that goes back to these larger notions of how you see a city.

There's also an interesting story here where that was the site of the Dock Street Market, which was the, you know, a market that's set up contemporaneously with like colonial Philadelphia.

And then guys were just driving trucks into it to get their gro, you know, to get their wholesale grocery

fish.

So that was totally crowded and plugged up.

Yes.

And I really love the Society Hill.

He puts a greenway in.

So it's a pedestrianized separate walking path through the city.

And they front up on the buildings.

It's really, really,

you know, different, interesting, eclectic.

It takes you all through Society Hill and it separates you physically as a pedestrian from vehicular traffic in a way that wasn't really in the kind of zeitgeist of urban planning for another 20 or 30 years.

Yeah,

it's very different from a Robert Moses' proposal that would be, I just shove a highway through it.

It'll be fine.

Put some housing towers in.

So that's Bacon.

He's academic.

He takes his responsibility seriously.

He's good at getting people to work together over a very long period of time.

Now we talk about our next guy, the alchemist.

Yeah.

Vincent Kling.

Vincent Kling.

An architect who gets no respect today.

Absolutely none.

And like Frank Furness, almost all of his best works are torn down or modified beyond recognition.

But Kling was...

Kling was equally important to the design of the whole thing.

You know, Bacon doesn't think of himself as a

architect.

He thinks of what like the city planning is, is like the

stuff that puts a city together, you know, that architecture follows.

But Kwing is actually the architect.

So he's given license to actually make these projects around City Hall happen.

Yeah, and you would think, you would think that you would, you know, go to at this time, Philadelphia's greatest living architect, Louis Kahn.

Who I just I just and they do

and he designs whatever this thing is.

It's so fucking good.

Right.

So Lou Kahn actually did mostly speak in riddles.

He would say stuff like the street is a room by agreement.

Or in a small room, one does not say what one would in a large room.

He has a whole monologue about what a brick wants to be versus what you can do with a brick and what how you

of course hoomstamong us, though.

Yeah, but he still puts those big post-tensioned,

you know, slabs through the arch, you know?

So is that brick really being an arch?

I don't know.

So,

you know, he has a big thing about served and served spaces.

Anyway,

the big, the, the big

thing here is that, okay, you know, we, we need some buildings and some serious design for the civic center, which involves things like office buildings, right?

As opposed to, again, whatever this thing is.

And look how serious he looks talking about it.

You can just imagine him being like, this building will change the way that people go to buildings forever and ever and the rest of their lives and i didn't make this in the last 24 hours with kinetics and and and you're looking at him like this man is

the last two or three days

you're looking at this like this man is dangerously insane

there he goes crazy like the low toning

he has made this out of out of straws this is not uh this is not a serious person i i don't i don't feel especially safe around this man let's do it yeah

so so so, you know, Ed Bacon and the planning team are like, okay, let's

go to Archex, please.

Yeah, let's go to a guy who could design a floor plate.

Yeah.

This build, this building is so, is like every

movement.

It's so, so goddamn good, and it's so, so neglected by the people who are entrusted to maintain and provide for it.

I've only been in the municipal services building in one of the

office parts once, and it's got the flavor of fluorescent lighting that just immediately makes you go insane.

The

municipal services building, this is, I think, one of the greatest buildings we got.

I mean,

this is also, this rendering goes really hard.

I love it.

Oh, my God.

Right across the street from City Hall.

Municipal Services is the one that used to have the big Frank Rizzo statue about in front of it.

Anyway, you know,

it's all like board-formed concrete um it has wonderful like nice stone finishes inside uh in all the elevator lobbies in the main lobby gorgeous

the basement is where there's all the uh because they excavated that whole area that's where you go to stand in line to get permits from the city for building stuff or you know and change your water service or more frequently

don't worry you can't do that yeah yeah more frequently you hire someone to stand in line for you because it's not the most efficient system down there.

Just

sit down there, Ross.

It's a fucking labyrinth of a Minotaur that gourts you.

But like, but like this is the entire welcome to MSP.

Welcome to the municipal services building.

Fuck you.

No, and they literally, they literally print you off a piece of receipt paper with your number on it, and it is the waiting room.

It's kind of fun.

if you have nothing to do all day.

But like everything else with this stuff, like the idea of, oh, you simply go to one place to get any kind of permit done or interface with any kind of city department customer service desk, that makes sense.

The execution of it is

hell.

This is the kind of socialism I want and support.

This is actually existing socialism: the basement that could have been full of cars, but is instead full of people waiting for permits.

What kind of permits do you

have?

All of them.

All of them.

You know what else?

You know what else?

The elevators are really fast.

Oh, yeah.

yeah okay

but yeah so i this is um so anyway uh municipal service is a very good building um and yeah so clang is given control over just a huge amount of space um yeah and and again all you all you have to do to do this is not talk in riddles and be capable of designing a building that you can sell space in yeah i i mean that's the thing about clang you know luke was more like you know he gets into more radical architecture early.

Vincent Kling is like, you know, I'm going to go work for SOM for a while and design a couple of buildings and then start my own firm.

And, you know,

that works out for him.

Yeah.

And again, Kling is given full reign of all the parts that Ed Bacon has been like salivating over and trying to like unfoculate.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

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Back to the show.

Hey, look, Roz, what's there?

The arcade building.

The arcade building.

The arcade building is still there.

So, yeah.

Guess what?

Kling is the only man who can do battle with it, and he kills it.

Yes.

All right, this man is my knight errant now.

I'm going to bestow upon him like a favor, like a little ribbon or something out of my hair.

I do.

See, this huge atrium here is on the location of the arcade building hitler dead what new

yeah

no and and so he designs all these giant civic spaces and the buildings that are in between them right so the the clothespin right below that is the that's the way you get into the underground concourse right so it follows this whole thing that ed bacon's been trying to get done where you have these monument obelisk type shapes that that draw you to a specific place if you need wayfinding.

And it's the same thing with the fountain in Love Park.

It's very, very tall because it creates

this point of access between the parkway and the city hall complex.

And, you know, then after that, that's what the artwork is, right?

Then you get to fill the space in with artwork that then sustains itself, like the love sculpture, the clothespin.

My favorite, and it's one of my most mourned pieces of Philadelphia public art, but this sculpture series called Your Move, of all the game.

Oh, yeah, me too.

Yeah.

So

it is an intentional reference to this notion of Rayburn Plaza, that place with the bandstand on it, being a place of performance and play and entertainment.

Like

the specific pieces they have, they have some checkerboards that are supposed to be bandstands.

And it's so much fun.

You know, you have all these giant household trinkets lying around, and it's really beautiful artwork.

And they're really beautiful public plazas that are simply not well maintained as public spaces.

This is one of my favorites here was Dilworth Plaza, big sunken plaza.

You can see it fronts municipal services building.

There's a big waterfall here that drops down a story.

You got some public art.

All these arcades here, these interface with the concourse, which was, you know, sort of a big underground series of pedestrian walkways that linked basically every building,

you know, in the, you know, in the civic area, but also all the way down Market Street for quite a ways.

And it only, they only started to close it up during COVID.

That's the saddest thing.

You used to be able to just walk it.

And again, it's on alignment with municipal services building.

This is

Beaux-Arts architecture.

It's just executed in concrete.

Right.

All of this stuff is about creating a grand axis and grand viewpoints and really highlighting and celebrating parts of your city.

It sounds kind of stupid and it sounds hokey because it's aspirational.

But like, I don't know.

Maybe I just think it's neat.

But I think this is beautiful.

It is.

And, you know,

the game sculptures are kind of whimsical, you know, and I appreciate some whimsy.

Yeah.

So, but at this time, all all of this is, you know, theory, right?

So we have to introduce our next character, Richardson Dilworth.

That's right.

I beg your pardon.

I'm sorry.

It's Richard Dilworth.

No, Richardson Dilworth.

Okay, sure.

Richardson Dilworth.

Certified Richardson Dilworth moment.

The last wasp mayor of Philadelphia.

Certified Dilworth.

Banger.

Banger.

Certified Dilworth bangers were all over the place in the 1950s.

I don't like the sound of that.

No, because

you have the vague two types of mayors in Philadelphia theory that I've been cooking on, where

you have the autocrat, the charismatic leader and cheerleader and guy who gets stuff done.

And then you have

basically like

the fixer and the, you know, the technocrat, right?

Somebody who's trying to figure out how to fix all these things.

and just keep things going.

And then, you know, unfortunately, like Jim Kenney, sometimes you just get burned out and never want to be mayor ever again so sad sometimes

so sad sometimes

but yeah so so dilworth really so you know roz you should talk about the city charter part but dilworth was always at the ribbon cutting he was always making new big projects happen and you know all these all these civic leaders in the 1950s were all you know full-throated gung-ho support of each other so they weren't they weren't like having these kind of intra group disputes They were all on the same page and they all worked with each other to make these

didn't hurt that there was a lot of money for these projects available.

Oh, a ton of money.

And the city could still borrow shit tons of money.

One of the things that helped that was something strange that happened in 1951, which was the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter.

Right.

And this essentially got rid of the British yoke.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

The British in this case lived in Harrisburg.

Brits out of Philadelphia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is

Essentially, what the Home Rule Charter does is it changes the legal status of the city,

a city government from, you know, you can only do what the Commonwealth explicitly allows to the converse of that.

You can do anything the Commonwealth doesn't explicitly disallow.

Right.

So over time, this results in sort of this political situation where suddenly, you know, state senator Jim Shittman from Armpitsville, Crawford County, suddenly takes, you know, extreme interest in the local politics of Philadelphia, which is a city he hates, except when it's, you know, politically convenient to like defund orphanages or something in the name of working people, or, you know, say that, I don't know, bus drivers are essentially chauffeurs for wealthy Philadelphians, right?

You know,

that takes a while to happen.

For the moment when Dilworth takes charge, he's the second mayor under the Home Rule Charter.

You know, and the Home Rule Charter does something very funny, and I don't understand why it happened,

which is the city had elected consistently Republican mayors and city councils right up until 1951.

And the whole thing just flips instantly to the Democrats.

And it's because they got this done.

They got done something big and exciting and that they were saying was going to change people's lives.

And there'd been a lot of focus on suburbanization at that point.

You know, people were still leaving the city.

They were going to Levitown.

They were going to the main line.

They were going to, I don't know, like Sea Cane or somewhere.

Right.

You know, Dilworth is like, you know, we're going to build a new mayor's residence.

I don't know if it was a mayor's residence or just his house.

No, it's always, it's always a personal home.

There is no Philadelphia mayor's residence.

So, so Dilworth moves into the section of the city that they're going to redevelop next, which is now called Washington Square West.

Yes, he has a very, very strong show, a strong show of confidence by building a brand new 17th century house

or 18th century, excuse me, right on Washington Square where they're about to do all this redevelopment.

And it's like, okay, you know,

listen, I'm going to deal with all the construction noise as well, but we're going to do this.

We're going to do these fucking projects.

This is going forward.

Right.

And so Jane Jacobs, who writes about the Philadelphia public squares in 1961,

refers to Washington Square specifically as a pervert park.

And so that's, you know, after this house was built.

So that bet took a little while while to pay off.

And also

shown here is one of the earliest parts of this whole scheme to get completed.

This is within the confines of Love Park, is the Welcome Center, which is this big UFO-shaped thing.

Oh, yeah.

Right?

It's pretty cool.

It's the only thing that's still there.

Greasing's earth from Philadelphia.

Yes.

Yeah.

It was inspired by like those World's Fair buildings in the 1960s.

Oh, so sure.

Dilworth is the guy who kicks this all all off, but then we need the mechanic, James Tate.

Yeah, so James Tate is the other kind of Philadelphia mayor, the one that comes in and fixes everything.

And we barely have any photographic evidence that he even existed because he was probably too busy just putting out fires every day.

All the home rule charter stuff, you know, that's like six years old now.

It's just long enough to create some like serious structural problems with the stuff that he's got to fix.

But he's really good at what he does and he keeps carrying on the work.

So a lot of the projects that get proposed under this first city plan that Ed Bacon puts together in 1954, those actually start to get done now.

You can see like the sports complex starting and you can see the sports complex getting finished down here.

It was so

you can see the Broad Street line getting extended.

You can see, you know, I think that happens a bit later or they don't will lay the trackways for a long time.

um you can see here's finally they're excavating love park so they can finish this design with you know five stories of parking underneath it which is a good idea yeah and you can see municipal services under construction and nearing completion at this point um i don't know much about james tate at all other than he was our first catholic mayor in what had always been a very Catholic city.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's hard to get information about this guy.

I mean, he was part of the same movement.

So, you know, like many other municipalities, when Dilworth was mayor, Tate was the head of city council.

You know, they had the plan of succession.

They're all working collaboratively together to make Philadelphia pretty goddamn cool.

The wasps did damnatio memori to him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, so Tate is, you know, he's out here.

He's pulling the levers.

He's, you know, twisting the dials.

He's making sure this project is just gonna it's gonna keep going forward through this whole time but tate is also like you know he has an appointed successor um you know and no one could have stopped this from happening oh right yeah

i'll tell this i'll tell this story so um so what happened so what happens is uh james tate actually ends up serving 10 years you're you're supposed to be term limited to two terms as a philadelphia mayor sounds like he was in prison no

yeah

back in, okay, so back in the, back in the end, you walk into City Hall with the sash and the first guy's like, what'd you get?

Back in the 1700s.

Back in the 1700s, being mayor of Philadelphia was a punishment that your friends gave you because

it was not a salaried position.

You had to do it and not get paid for it.

And so there were guys who were like, yeah, you know what?

I'm just not going to do it.

I'm going to pay the fine instead.

So the guy who didn't want to be pope.

Yeah, exactly.

And no, there's one guy.

There's one guy who keeps getting re-elected over and over and over and over.

So, yeah, anyway, when Tate is wrapping up his term, which included two extra years from Dilworth,

about a month before the election is supposed to happen,

he talks about...

No, wait, Roz,

we should save this for later, right?

Okay, no, we can do it now or whatever.

He's not paying Pope.

Hold on.

So what happens is

there's a chief of police named Mayor Frank Rizzo

who will come into our story very soon.

No Gods, No Maz episode.

And so, so, James Dane.

And a chief of the fire department, who was his brother.

So, Tate hosts a press conference a month before the election happens.

And he goes, hey, yeah, so

I'm going to retire and Frank Rizzo's in charge now a month before the election happens.

And so all the news reporters start asking all of the procedural parliamentarian questions: like, wait a minute, sir, is that really how that works?

That can't be what's happening.

And he's like,

Yeah.

Well, anyways, I'm retiring now.

And so that's how he gets out of political office.

Yeah, he's like, nah, give it to Frank.

Yeah.

Which leads us to the fool.

The fool, the king, the king/slash fool.

Frank Rizzo.

The man himself.

The world's widest man.

The worst to ever do it.

No, true.

I am going to say, do we want to continue?

I may have to drop soon.

Corinne's going to be home soon, and I would like to hang out with my wife.

We can do that.

The decline is going to be pretty quick.

Let's just keep going.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'll drop if I have to.

Just giving up on podcasting to hang out with your wife.

I sacrificed so much wife time for this podcast.

And the reason why, the reason why is because this pays for me to get my wife nice things,

which is a joy beyond imagining.

So

thank you all for funding my wife.

My hands look like this, so hers gonna my hands look carp, just carpal tunnels.

My hands look like completely normal, so that her hands look like this, and it's just like festooned with rings.

Go fund my wife.

Stop funding my wife.

Stop funding my wife.

Right.

So Rizzo's a terrifying and incredible figure in American politics.

Rizzo redefined, I think, what a mayor is.

Rizzo is, I mean, he is,

in my mind, the epitome of a mayoral archetype, which is the strong man.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

So he comes up through the police department.

There's a really great documentary.

Yeah.

There's a really great documentary called Amateur Night at City Hall, the Frank Rizzo story.

I highly recommend it.

It's so good.

It's so good.

And so Rizzo's rise comes up from him being a strongman cop who knew how to get in front of the camera at all of the crime scenes.

So in that lower left-hand image,

right in the crook of his tuxedo jacket, that's a nightstick.

He left the social function to go see what the cops were doing when the news cameras were.

The one above that,

he got to star on a propaganda TV show from the 1960s called Law Break.

He just knew how to play the news media.

And, you know, it's almost one of those things where he's the blue, the blueprint for Donald Trump, but he's also like, thank God Donald Trump didn't know about the Frank Roseau blueprint.

Thank God he wasn't that good.

Yeah.

I mean,

he was incredible at like just, you know, bullshitting in such a way that the media would listen to him.

Yeah.

And so he would, and he would say like crazy press quotes that, you know, activated all the people in South Philadelphia who were scared

dealing with all of the, you know, depopulation that happens because of white flight in the 1960s.

You know,

and

also bizarre quotes like, I never saw my mother naked.

Right.

And on his, on the, on the campaign, on the campaign trail, he says, you guys just wait and see.

I'm going to make Attila the Hun look like a fat.

Just crazy.

She could be saying that, Frank Rizzo.

Frank Rizzo.

And see, Nova, that's the thing.

Frank Rizzo says whatever he wants.

He speaks in the third person, and Frank Rizzo loves it.

And all the people who Frank Rizzo loves love it too.

The funniest part about all this is

he does these crazy long news press conferences.

He'll just do these constantly and then the radios will just play him talking for three hours.

And so during one of these press conferences, he makes like a,

I forget what the lie is about,

but

he pulls the old Donny Trump on them, right?

So he says like, you know, I'll go down justifying that to my grave.

I will always say that.

I definitely, you know, said that and I meant the truth by it.

And if anybody wants to catch me on it, i'll take a lie detector test and it'll show that i wasn't that i was telling the truth and so uh they strap him to a lie detector test

him to a lie detector test

and he loses

oh frank riso

but this but you know all these scandals even the the the um the group of you know uh Democrat, you know, young student Democrats who are trying to get him recalled in the election.

The only thing that actually makes him unpopular as a mayor and makes him

lose his mayorship is he switches parties to try to become a member of Richard Nixon's cabinet.

And that's finally the thing.

He switches to becoming Republican.

He supported

Nixon even when he was a Democrat.

He was pals with Nixon.

One of the things that he gets done as a result is he manages to get the last of the funding out of the urban mass transit administration to get the Center City commuter connection built.

You can see the groundbreaking down here, which is the thing that unified all the

commuter railroads in Philadelphia into a through-running S-Bond type service.

Also, is this?

What's his face?

Yeah, that's thatch.

So, so,

okay, so that's Frank Rizzo was the only rat to try and climb aboard a sinking ship.

Yes, and he, yeah, he did to some, but the ship still sank.

Yeah.

Well, he, uh, he, I mean, the other thing we have to talk about, Rizzo, extremely racist, major police beatdowns.

Oh, yeah.

Everything.

Uh, he's the mayor who shot up the move house and then had it demolished.

No, he's not.

No, no, he's not.

The first move house, not the second move house.

Oh, yeah, right.

Excuse me.

Thank you.

Yes, my bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He shoots up.

He's going to go with that shit.

He shoots up the Palatin Village move house.

Yes, yes.

32nd in Spring Garden, right?

Yeah, and it doesn't get better from there.

And, and, you know, the police get very aggressive and violent during this era.

Um, and the city is not better off for it.

I mean, this is this ultimately doesn't work.

Yeah.

Well, so the police, you know, and it's, it's this cyclical thing, right?

The police become violent.

And then the, the, you know, and then the people who are reading the news or listening to these radio broadcasts think, holy shit, it's so scary out here because Frank Rizzo is is telling me how terrified I should be.

And so it pretty much rapidly accelerates what was a slow depopulation of Philadelphia,

which of course leads to lower tax revenues and lower abilities to pay for things.

Oh, and then he hired like a shit ton of people just to have like random make work jobs.

Like if anybody called him and was like, I knew you when I was, when you were a police officer, can I have a job, please?

He'd be like, yeah, sure.

Which again, I don't disagree with as a theory, but it completely bankrupted the the city because we were.

I disagree with the assholes doing it, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so he really, he really just

creates this, this bad situation in the city where it's like every year is worse than the last year.

Every year the city gets more dangerous.

Every year the cops get more violent and unhinged.

And

they're empowered too.

And, you know, it doesn't lead to any better outcomes.

But he also guts the Fairmount Park Commission, which which is like the first in a long, long line of cuts.

He slashes their budget by 50% because he didn't like that they had their own guard police force that was outside of his purview when he was police commissioner.

And so this leads to a rapid decline in Philadelphia parks and public spaces.

Yeah, inter-police conflicts, police on police violence.

Well, and the Fairmount Park Guard weren't, they weren't gun-carrying cops.

So they were nightstick cops.

They were park park rangers, you know, like they weren't really, they weren't really beat your ass cops like everybody else was in the city.

But, you know, Rizzo comes in and so much of this groundwork has been done in order to build this great civic center and he gets to open it.

Yeah.

You know, and

let's look at this.

We have our, you know, beautiful diagonal viewpoint straight through city hall, the fountain, and the parkway.

You know, we have our view shed through municipal services building and also the fountain.

I just think this, this all could have been under the purview of a bunch of park rangers.

You know what?

Here's the thing, right?

Moderate position.

This is going to appeal to Democrats, right?

Police abolition.

You wind up like the Philly Police Department, and instead of that, instead of just having like nothing, you reinstitute the Fairmount Park Guards.

And they just do everything.

It is now all park ranger territory.

They all get horses.

It's great.

Yeah.

It's like due south.

It's great.

Like

National Park Service guards, though.

Those guys are scary.

No, those are different guys.

No, and the sad thing now is, like, you know, again, when you have people who are dedicated and committed to a specific public space, they really get to understand all of its ebs.

Like the nuance and dynamics.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like today, so like today in Philadelphia, the park ranger program are seasonal employees who are usually moved around from site to site, just randomly ad hoc.

Most places, they really just open up the

athletic fields and then leave and then come back and close them back up because they're going to 30 or 40 different sites that they just get eyes on.

And public spaces need to have continuous maintenance and vigilance and eyes on the street in order to be successful.

But I'm starting to get on my high horse here.

We've got a lot to cover.

More park ranges.

I mean, and this overall, this is a fully realized project.

This is, um, and I was lucky enough to have arrived here early enough to have seen it in its full majesty.

Um, yeah, but no, they did it, they did the entire thing, and did the whole thing, and it was really good.

And you think about how critical this is.

So, this is transportation infrastructure, right?

It's not just the parkway, but it's all of these transit connections that all meet in the heart of the city.

Yes, and it's all these, yeah, you've got these viewpoints.

You get the subway through here, You have the broad street line, which has to go around the tower because it was too heavy to tunnel under and goes there.

And then you have the center city commuter connection, which goes through

here, I want to say.

Yeah,

I think it's pretty much straight down market.

And then you

down JFK.

Yeah.

And then you have the trolleys, which sort of go around here.

And then there's a station here, and then they make a curve, and then I'm pretty sure there's some kind of extra-dimensional space.

Somehow it winds up here, because I've never successfully navigated to the station that's somewhere in this location.

Yeah.

Right.

So they brought this visual coherency above ground.

Below ground,

it was actually a working shopping center for a while.

It was like the Montreal underground city.

But in the last couple of years, it's really declined.

There were three Dunkin' Donuts right over here.

I used to take the L

into 15th Street, and then I could walk directly underground.

Well,

I would walk over the suburban and then just cross the street and get in.

My building was 1515 Arch up here.

Yeah.

But I spent like on my commute from 40th Street, which is where I lived at the time, it was, you know, I spent all of like two and a half minutes above ground before I got to my office.

No, and this is how, this is how Ed Bacon solves for the, the, the ill of cars in the city, right?

Because he doesn't really love them.

He realizes that they're a necessary evil.

And so he says, okay, how can we split up as much pedestrian activity from the vehicular activity as possible?

Again, there were so many Dunkin' Donuts down there.

I don't know why, but it worked.

It worked.

And it was beautiful.

And you could walk straight through it.

And again, weeping.

We don't know how to do this anymore.

We don't know how to do this anymore.

We don't know how to do this anymore.

And keep in mind over on

the east side here, there was also the east market development.

You know, the concourse extended another mile that direction.

Yeah.

It was unreal.

I can't believe they did all of it happened.

All of it happened and was working until 2019 or 2020.

Yeah.

That's the sad.

That's the crazy part.

And it was a fantastic space.

It was cool in the summer.

There was so much, you know, because the basin does a lot to cool the air, as does the huge fountain.

Yeah.

The trees were big.

It was, you know, there's lots of elevation changes.

The materials were good.

There were lots of places to sit.

All of this was good.

It was really good.

Yeah.

It's the thing where you have all these human, you know, human scaled spaces that, you know, that's not a sitting, that's not a sitting wall.

That's not a laying wall.

It's not a walking path.

It's all of them at the same time, right?

You have, yeah, yeah, you have these changes through space where you have steps that you have to walk through because that creates these processional movements.

And the park was really

heavily utilized despite the fact that it was very, very poorly maintained.

you know, from an infrastructure standpoint.

And then also just from a general ongoing upkeep of cleanliness and maintenance.

Yeah, you got lots of colors in the pavement.

This is beautiful.

It's hitting the like SimCity 3000 aesthetic, you know?

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm hearing the soundtrack in my head right now.

And like, you know, a park like Love Park has to serve, it serves a generally limited use set, right?

You don't have, in this time period, you don't have residences around it.

So it really becomes a park that doesn't have a destination of its own to it, other than as a place where office workers eat lunch and, you know, sometimes people hang out and it starts to develop this reputation as, you know, kind of a SCSI park.

Yes.

Yeah.

Fairly early on, it's like, yeah, this is also combined with, you know, municipal disinvestment, which is

all over America at the time.

Like, can you imagine?

I mean.

To some extent, you can't like blame individual mayors or political decisions for what happened.

There was just massive disinvestment in general and a general decline.

And, you know,

it was just harder to live in cities.

It was, you know, more people got poor

and more people got homeless.

You know, this is, you know, also a result of like eviscerating the welfare state.

This is as a result of eviscerating public housing.

You know, Love Park fairly early on became like kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don't want to go there.

Well, and the thing is, like, despite that, or in spite of that, or because of that, you know, these places still draw tons of people.

They're still beautiful spaces for many months out of the year.

Yes.

But the people who have to live around them constantly, or the people who have to work around them constantly, you know, these are municipal leaders, and now they've got a big plaza that's architecturally cool.

But if you can't maintain it or you don't pay to maintain it, it becomes an eyesore.

Yeah.

So this is what?

This is opened in time for the bicentennial in 1976.

Do we embarrass ourselves?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rizzo comes out

like he says a bunch of racist things and then introduces Frank Sinatra.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's Italian-American accent.

Yeah.

And Rizzo, ahead of the bicentennial, asks to call in the National Guard.

to Philadelphia in case there's a lot of people.

No, for any particular reason, just for the reason.

Literally.

In case there might be riots.

There might maybe be riots.

I mean,

at least in the 70s, like the weather underground might blow up a garbage can outside your work or whatever.

That's a good point.

So, because everybody sees it, you know, because this gets picked up in all the newspapers all over the country, nobody comes to Philadelphia for the bicentennial.

We're going to have a firm hand with crime, right?

Like, we're going to advertise everywhere.

If you come to Philadelphia for the bicentennial, we'll kill you.

Exactly.

our cops or gangs will kill you yeah

cops and other gangs etc

but that's also when the actual love statue by uh Robert Indiana is put in right

Andy sorry about Andy she's a very

I'm not upset she's a very angry senior dachshund and I'm sitting on my chair which is far away from her couch

um but yeah so this is you know I overall I think architecturally successful that no no maintenance for a long time no like, you know, active disinvestment by the city, which brings us to the saviors, the punks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the punks.

Yeah.

So the punks love to skate, and they also like to shake things up a bit.

And they're not deterred by scuzziness.

If anything, they're attracted by it.

They're attracted

to it.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And, you know, what ends up happening is kind of the worst possible problem for for a municipal leader, but the best thing for literally everyone else.

Love Park becomes a park that's a haven and an awesome place for skateboards.

Concrete, all of those angles.

It's all granite, Nova.

It's even better than concrete.

Wow.

And the thing...

It holds up really well, the grinding.

Like, you could visibly see, you know, the gunk that came off the skateboards because people, you know, were grinding so much on it.

Yeah, I'm not thrilled about the idea of somebody in a t-shirt and baggy jeans sliding across a granite slab at speeds like

well you know people did get injured every yeah i mean more than once in a while and it kind of come comes with the that comes with the sport um

right and and so Love Park finally gets a reason for people to go there and not just take a picture with the nice, pretty love statue, but actually spend time in.

But the people who figure that out are skateboarders which in the 1990s and 2000s were the lowest scum of the municipal earth yeah i i i i don't personally remember this but like i know from my study of history that before 9-11 these guys were public enemy number one i mean they were like skateboarders yeah yeah yeah yeah

they they they were osama bin laden yeah oh yeah absolutely

yeah they were isis yeah

of course so because of this, Love Park becomes known as a skateboarding park, not just across the East Coast, but nationally and internationally.

Skateboarders hear about it.

They watch videos of it.

I read a lot with the X Games when I was a kid.

Yeah, we talked

two times.

The X Games were hosted twice.

And in between them, the city decides to ban skateboarding in Love Park.

Fuck off.

I watched a bunch of skateboarding videos just to find, you know, images of the park that were old.

And I didn't realize all of the skateboarding culture, which was like, you know, at the time, it was like you go to the skate shop and people would have VHS tapes of them doing sick tricks that they just sold to the skate shop that you could then buy.

The human desire to show off a video of you doing some cool shit has been around for a long time.

Yeah.

And I was like, oh i understand the the secret tapes from uh tony ox bro skater too now yeah

yeah and the other the other thing that i i read about these skateboarding or i that i read about in the skateboarding videos is that because love park was a curved plaza fisheye camera lenses looked really good in it so that's what you see in that lower left-hand corner

yeah uh-huh it just it and and and with the statue right next to the big impressive jump that you would do, it was like the most cinematic spot in skateboarding history.

And again, it was right in the heart of downtown.

You got to see City Hall in the background.

Center City.

Don't say downtown.

I can say downtown because I live in Center City.

So over there is downtown.

You know this, Roz.

I'm allowed to say it.

I don't believe you.

Oh, God.

Next slide, please.

Yes.

More pictures of skateboarding.

The other really great thing that happens is because, again, this plaza is not taken care of in any meaningful way.

Skateboarders learn that you can use a thing to pick up the granite slabs that make up the pavement and they stuff shit underneath it to make ramps.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Every time I walked around this park, all those slabs were loose.

Yeah.

You could jump over the trash can.

You could move the trash cans and jump over them.

It was the big one.

That was jumping over the trash can.

The other big one is you had the fountain gap.

Yeah.

Right.

Where, you know, the fountain was drained for the winter.

So you jump off the highest stairs next to the love statue.

And

what happened in this case, this man appears to have made it.

In most cases, you eat shit and bleed a lot.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but it was just so good.

That was really good.

And this was

cited as a contribution to making

the whole area was safer because there's always people.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Right.

Like the skateboarders realized that they were in a municipal plaza that had office workers walking through it.

They would respectfully wait while people pass.

Like it was, it was like any other public space.

You treat people.

Punks are nice by large.

If everybody's given an opportunity to respect everybody else, they'll usually take it.

And so despite all of this, the bad thing happens.

The bad thing happens.

Yeah, the bad thing happens.

They got the X games twice.

You know,

they,

you know, it brings in a huge amount of tourism money.

They ban skateboarding and then, you know, they try and do a renovation to prevent it, which is where Ed Bacon comes back.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is the coolest thing.

Yeah, there was a accidental renaissance art here.

Yeah.

So Ed Bacon's like, what, 93, 94?

He's 93 years old.

Yeah.

He doesn't look a day over 85.

Yeah,

when they finally banned skateboarding in Love Park.

And you see here this sign that says skateboarding prohibited at all times in JFK Plaza, which was its government.

Forfeiture of fucking

I love that it has a government name.

Oh, yeah.

I also love that,

like, again, skateboarders, you may have been, if you're kind of of the generation that I am, downstream of skateboarders believing themselves to be the most oppressed people in the world.

Absolutely.

That's because they were.

They used to be able to move somewhere.

Right.

So, so what, so what they do is instead of having uniformed cops standing next to the sign and yelling at people,

they had undercover plainclothes cops just tackle you if you had a skateboard and were doing tricks.

The skateboarding

Coat,

wearing a fucked up bucket map and like

killing a kid.

Snapdos revolver that only shoots nerve bullets.

Yeah.

And Vincent Kling, I think, was also at the protest, but I couldn't find the video of that.

Yeah, this was like, there were a few big protests.

You know, this one was where there's a video of this.

Ed Bacon coming out and saying, I am going to skateboard my beloved love park, you know, in defiance of, you know, the city council that outlawed this.

Um, there's a few rallies where, um, of all people, uh, councilwoman Janny Blackwell comes out to support the skateboarders, who I mostly know the one, the one good thing she ever did.

Honestly, yeah, I mean,

I mostly know her is like, oh, yeah, we did this pilot bike lane.

I think we should rip it out now.

But uh, no, she supports the skateboarders,

yeah, because Jenny Black don't know how to party, man.

That's a good point, yeah.

And they do some light renovations to the park, right?

They add some benches and inconvenient locations for skating to make it harder to, you know, do like sick grinds and stuff like that.

Um, and this is uh

taken poorly, it also doesn't work very well.

A lot of people, a lot of people are still skating, and the park is also not being very well taken care of.

and so you know i this is a globally recognized you know skate skating area right it's not a skate park but it's a plaza that's very easily skatable and so you know i

you skateboarding is getting big yeah

um as like an extreme sport at this point so of course uh

dc shoes comes in is like, if you reopen this park to skateboarding, we will give you a million million dollars.

And the city doesn't take it because they're cowards.

And

this here is

not negotiate with skateboarders.

Yeah.

This is CEO of DC Shoes here, Ken Block, with a million dollar check.

If you know Ken Block, he's the guy who drove the cars sideways on YouTube very fast.

Yeah.

He has departed us, unfortunately, but he was really fucking cool.

Yeah, he was really good at driving a car sideways.

Like the city passed up so much here for no reason other than they hated skateboards.

Yeah.

And like, I'm sure there's liability considerations here.

I'm sure there's like other issues to be mindful of.

But if your

tourism is shifting towards younger people who have money to spend and you take away the cool thing in the middle of the city that they all love to see and do, you send a bad message.

Yep.

Yep.

So, in the meantime, you remember there's a five-story underground parking garage under this.

I don't know if it's five stories, might be four.

There's some amount of underground parking.

Who gives a shit?

Yeah, it's and the roof membrane goes kaput.

Too many ollies landing on it.

Apparently, yeah, exactly.

Do a kickflip, you fucking pussy, to just like mirror park our garage.

You do the kick flip, an 80, like a 95-year-old man does a kick flip for the first time in his life, lands it perfectly, disappears down a massive

immediately turns to dust.

Falls four stories straight down through.

He ascends into heaven.

So the parking garage roof membrane goes kaput.

The roof membrane is what is preventing the rest of the parking garage from water intrusion, which is a big problem in in an underground parking garage.

There's the problem with the roof membrane going kaput is there's only one way to access it, which is to dig up the entire park.

Yep.

So, when yeah, when this

is announced, I mean, and basically,

when they announce this,

the goal is made very clear that Love Park will not be going back.

They will not have Love Park there, and they are designing a new park that will solve the skateboarding problem once and for all.

Once and for all, we will never host the X games again.

We will never be a globally recognized skateboarding park.

This is a problem which was literally worse than 9-11, and we will solve it.

And so what they

finally, after a lot of back and forth, the only part and a lot of

specific targeted activism towards saving this saucer, that is the only part of this plan of the original love park that ends up getting safe.

And it's kind of done begrudgingly, but that

whole building is eventually restored, is currently awaiting a future use, which I've heard is potentially they might have somebody promising it's going to go in there, which would be cool.

But like all architectural projects that are announced, architectural projects start with the rent.

Yeah.

This is also buoyed by the great success of demolishing Dilworth Plaza, the sunken plaza we saw before, in order to kick out Occupy Wall Street.

Yeah.

Which was also replaced by a very inferior space, I think.

Right.

So you get this notion, especially in like the capital planning part of the projects, that we're just every time we redesign a space in Philadelphia, it's it's going to be this weird flatland thing.

Yes.

Because we simply do not have the money for maintenance the way that these spaces really, really need them and deserve.

So we're just going to get rid of the parts of the park that make it hard to have it be anything other than

no nice little stone walls, no elevation changes.

It's going to be a lot of crap.

Yeah.

I mean, the lawn in these early renderings, you can see the fountain seem to have a basin.

You you know, I'd be so cool if it ended up looking like this.

Oh, yeah, yeah, and and there's so many people, they're all having a great time in the direct sunlight.

Yeah, you can do a lot of things with entourage that real people don't do

entourage here being the happy cut-out people you put into architectural renderings.

I learned a term.

Yeah, I learned something to that.

They're having a great time either standing or sitting in a bench in direct sunlight or just standing around in the middle of the grass

as as we do in parks of course yes and yeah another another part of uh the reason for you know going for a design like this is something that's uh very popular at the time which is the p-word

privatization programming

yeah people love to have a space which is easy to program.

Yes.

You can have some kind of street market that happens once a weekend.

You can have a farmer's market.

You could have some kind of little cultural festival.

You could have, I don't know, anything.

You can program the space.

Use the lawn to program the space.

Yeah.

And then you never have to worry about skateboarders again.

Exactly.

Yeah, what are they going to do?

Skateboard through the farmer's market?

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're going to pull a Nicholas Cage jumping through

fucking, what should we call it?

Redding Terminal Market?

No.

um

but i yeah

so they're gonna solve this problem once and for all wednesday february 10th 2016 at 11 o'clock in the morning groundbreaking for the new love park occurs they pull out a box full of dirt and the gold shovels

where do they keep these gold shovels do you think just in like

broad street station next to the rifles yeah i have seen the gold shovel closet it's at the department of Public Property on the 11th floor of 1515 Arch.

They're not really gold.

They're at the national treasure.

I'm going to steal the gold shovel shovels.

I think it's the 11th floor of 15.

I know for a fact it's in 1515 Arch.

If you steal the gold shovels when I work there,

they'll never be able to do this again.

Critical strategic infrastructure that you can degrade.

The machine that removes a park's aesthetic features.

You see back here,

wonderful, mature trees.

You can see everything's in basically fine condition, you know, to the point where they did have to haul in a box with dirt in it to do the groundbreaking.

That's my favorite part.

This is so fucking stupid, man.

Everybody digging this trough.

I'll just say again,

the current trash strike happening in Philadelphia, that box of dirt

was handcrafted by members of District Council 33 who had to do that crap for this press conference.

You can see, of course, here, one of the most enthusiastic guys,

Mayor Jim Kenney.

But for the rest of us,

so sad sometimes.

So sad sometimes.

Me too, Jim.

This is Jim Kenney's greatest tweet ever.

Unfortunately, he was banned from posting early on in his mayorship.

Did he send too spicy a tweet?

What the fuck?

His comms team took away his phone

after he would post too hard during Sixers games.

So sad sometimes.

This is real.

So sad sometimes.

And he was actually...

And he was a great poster.

And then

I sympathize very deeply with Jim Kenny as somebody who's just trying to do the right thing and gets overwhelmed when people get mad at you.

And that's exactly what happened during pandemic.

He just did not want to be mayor anymore.

No, why would you after everybody hates you and all your political enemies think you're garbage?

All your political friends too.

I often think about

the onion Bill de Blasio one.

Well, well, well,

not so easy to find a mayor who doesn't suck shit, huh?

But in terms of Jim Kenny, my favorite bit about that is that Bill de Blasio knows and references that.

Yeah.

And they're like, yeah, you guys have seen that, right?

Like, I've read multiple interviews with him where he's like, yeah, I think that's funny and accurate.

So they take this whole park and they just demolish it.

Throw it in the trash.

Yeah.

They threw all of it in the trash.

Well, he didn't quite throw all of it in the trash.

We'll get to that.

But they threw it in the trash.

Yeah.

And

these are some of the things.

These are some photos that June and I took a few days ago.

This is when they are doing programming, of course.

Yeah.

So there's stalls where people can sell their wares.

Yeah.

So what I'll say about this, right?

We did our site visit.

If we're going to get mad at something, we might as well look at it in person before we cast final judgment.

And, you know,

back to what I'm saying, right?

They took the park out of this park and they put the programming as the major feature.

And I think they actually successfully achieved their goals.

The park is actually pretty

populated.

There's people hanging out there.

That wasn't necessarily the case back with Old Love Park because it wasn't maintained at all.

Right.

They've also removed all the features that make it difficult, like that make it a park in any real sense of the word, right?

Maybe for capacity release.

I would call this a square, for instance, maybe.

Maybe a plaza of some kind.

Yeah, it is JFK.

Well, they changed it to JFK Park instead of

a plaza.

Which is a lie.

A lie to the pit of hell, Roz.

November, you are correct that this is listed on the city's internal documents as a square/slash plaza.

They didn't want to get hooked up to the Frank Rezzo Light Detector by calling it a park.

God knows.

But any parts of it, but the parts of it that were so successful and strong were about that contrast between the park-like elements and the harder escape elements that were all you know the two flavors of monotone and vincent clings this is just chaotic in a totally different way and it's not because there's 10 by 10 tents like the the there's no rationality to the park's actual layout or design and then the areas like in the next slide right the areas that don't have

the street market going on like that's a tent from the market right there yeah

nobody's hanging desolate this is just desolate man it's It's a huge swath of space, too.

In the middle of Center City, right?

Sorry, downtown.

So I'll just go fuck myself.

No, oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Congratulations.

Presumably going to just barely be able to grow out by the next time I have to replace them.

Well, and so that is one of the big issues with these parking garage parks, right?

You can never have tall trees there.

Because the tall because trees only get as big as their root structure.

And the root, then there's not enough soil to actually have like a decent roof structure in any of these parks so so people go to parks in philadelphia to reconnect with that william penn flavor of nature that never will happen every 50 years they're gonna have to tear up at least all of the trees and then you have yeah but more programming but but again

the programming stuff was really good so They didn't just have a street festival going on.

They had the big Lego blocks.

They had ping pong set up.

This is the parks and recreation seasonal employees that staff the place putting the blocks away at the end of the night.

But that's the thing is that all these, this isn't a park.

This is a bunch of Lego blocks.

You got to put them away afterwards.

You can't just leave them out.

Right.

And there's no, and there's like, you were talking about the, I forget the name of the piece, but the old like sorry pieces and chess pieces that used to be.

Your move.

Your move.

And like that was hard scaping that could actually be used to play on and like invited feelings of play and people actually playing on them.

And I have this bullshit.

And these kids are getting paid.

Well, not getting paid at all because everyone's on strike.

But

they're not on strike because they're seasonal employees.

They're not covered by the union.

So they were there two days ago when I went back.

Don't get your trash at Sherelle Parker's house.

The good news is they are also getting rid of your move.

So no, they already got rid of that.

They already got rid of it.

No, and that's the same thing.

That was an iconic piece of artwork in the 90s and 2000s in Philadelphia.

For sure.

They let it go to waste.

They let it rot out, and now it can't be rehabilitated.

It has to be all remade if they want to remake it.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then we have to talk about the state of the fountain.

Yeah.

So spray grounds.

So, so this, this is, the fountain is still in the same place, right?

From a wayfinding Ed Bacon theoretical view, they threw him a bone, but they didn't build a fountain.

and one of the reasons for that goes back to the way that these spaces interact with like ADA logs because a spray because a spray ground is something you can allow children to play in a fountain you cannot

that fucking sucks aesthetically though this is a puddle oh it's so bad

no no this isn't a puddle The basin helps a lot with cooling down the area around, but also you got nasty, dirty water in there that'll give you a disease.

The thing is, this is a recirculating fountain you know as far as i know almost where all this water goes and slides down the pavers into a drain and is recirculated from i don't know if that's cleaner um

i would i would assume there's some better filtration in it but it's an interesting question yeah i i just know that this is this is quote unquote healthier for whatever that's worth and and also like again something that you can legally make happen in the 21st century.

But the problem with it, so you said this is the puddle?

Yeah.

No, this isn't the puddle.

This is the puddle.

So that's not a knife.

This is a knife.

Right.

So

you have this giant spray ground.

Okay.

And

the way that they graded and sloped the surface, which I'm sure you have to do all at once, it doesn't, you can't like re-fix it piecemeal.

It creates this stream that goes to a section of, you know, the grass dirt zone.

Yeah.

The cigarette swamp.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The great dismal swamp.

Right.

And then it's caught by a different

Grover Park.

Right.

This is totally code compliant.

It follows all of the rules and regulations.

And you can build it yourself in a couple weekends.

Yes.

No, so then that water just creates this constant puddle on the ground and in the garden, which I'm sure is not great for the plants.

or you have to make you have to figure out the planting program right

yeah the membrane that they're worried about the membrane is probably not doing good yeah um that's probably very bad yeah well and then all these all these public parks right they they have to because again they're understaffed they have to drive road salt trucks through well you can't it's not hand shoveling like except in really rare circumstances almost almost always it is just simply a giant truck drives around and dumps road salt everywhere and then that goes somewhere

into into the fountain which is good for the kids um yeah for the children yeah let your kids lick it

hang on i gotta shut my door because we're all shouting in the hallway

right you look like

life you know i do i do november my life is so hard

no i can hear that there's isolating mics And then

we didn't talk too much about it, but

the saucer.

Yeah.

The welcome center.

That was preserved.

That doesn't feel very welcoming.

I'll tell you that shit right now.

Well, it's just hard scaping around it with nothing nice to look at.

Also, the two big barriers in front of the entrance.

Oh, yeah.

Also,

you get nothing.

Yeah.

Welcome to the hole of the world champion Philadelphia Eagles.

Then just you skipped your face, slammed to a curb.

Right.

So

despite this building being intended for a visitor center, a couple of years back,

they said to themselves, actually, a restaurant should be

no, you don't need.

Oh my god.

Quint, it looks kind of like the Pitts Gloria.

Again, I've been told by reliable sources that a promising deal is in the works, but I don't understand how you put enough tables in here to make it revenue generating in a permanent way.

Yeah, exactly.

Where does the kitchen go?

Your butt, Roz.

It goes in your butt.

Underground in the

car park, yeah.

Or maybe it's just a hot dog roller

you never know but but

extremely live electrified hot dog grills yeah oh yeah gosh yeah

and so this building being disused is even more kind of sad and frustrating when you you know there was a hard-fought preservation battle to redo it like the whole thing was gutted and all the glazing was taken off and the whole thing was put back together again and they still can't find a tenant for this building that is supposed to be the welcome center for the entire Fairmount Park system, right?

Which was at one point the largest municipal park system in the entire world.

Um, then those definitions got all messed up, but you know, the fact that it doesn't have a

tenant in it is made even more infuriating by the buildings in the park that do have their own tenants.

Yeah,

like the visitor center, right?

So, they took the welcome center and they built something like directly next to it that sells, you know, stuffed toys and stuff like that.

Um, a gift center for

you know, uh, tourists.

Well, my fambassador adventure starts here, and I signed a pledge to be a fan ambassador, and I joined the PHAM.

I guess that means I'm not allowed to throw bricks at Cowboys fans anymore because they've got to be warm and welcome.

No, and you're definitely not allowed to skate in local.

The fam, dude, the fam, it's like fambassador.

It's to throw represents like pride, I guess.

It's like a Philadelphia version of Flan.

No, yeah.

I don't know.

It's a delicious design.

To harness civic pride and show the world how Philadelphia shines.

Do we?

We can't pick up our trash because Mayor Parker is a fucking moron.

Yeah, we should just throw batteries at Mayor Parker.

We should throw a truck at her.

A whole fucking garbage truck.

Pick it up.

We'll get like 130 dudes.

We'll all lift at once.

We'll do a clean and jerk and we'll just throw it out of their fucking house, dude.

I don't know if that's an actionable threat or not.

Pick up my trash.

Get your ass here, Sherelle.

I got a lot of it.

Then we got the car park, too.

The car park.

I think this is a riff on the Robert Venturi plan for Love Park way back in the day, which is the fountain would have been significantly weirder.

And there would be a structure around it in such a way that if you approached by car it would say parking but if you approached by foot it would say park yeah um

very strange structure

used to be so much fun it is so much fun

i i consult crazy i could both i i consult the ghost of crazy uncle louis

yeah

but

only for ghost of crazy uncle louis

yeah the biggest sign in the park used to be uh the love sign Now it's the parking lot sign.

Yeah.

Extremely cool.

And, you know, so far, I mean, again, on days when this is not like a programmed space, you know, it's a little more vacant, especially on hot days.

Yeah.

You know, the spray garden works.

You know, it's not a total disaster show.

I will say the one good thing that happened was the portal.

Right.

And this is the whole, this is the whole story of like what happens when you aren't actively, aggressively programming this market every single hour of every single day.

You give Philadelphians an opportunity to engage with cities around the globe.

No, would you let us do that?

Yeah, and

OnlyFans models come from New York to flash them.

Yes.

It's quite sad.

As you do.

As you do.

No, she had very nice boobs.

Oh, Nick's Ross.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Next roster.

My dear.

We are a family-friendly podcast.

Oh, yeah.

You couldn't couldn't see them in the video.

I mean, you could.

You could see enough.

You could see enough to imply the rest of it.

I take an approximation and I simply fill in the rest with my large language model, which I call my imagination.

Do you have any idea how much brain power Roz needs to use to imagine nice ditty?

It's like a crate, too.

Jesus Christ.

It uses a lot of water.

It uses a lot of energy.

We're boiling the oceans for Ross to have baggy boobs.

All right.

My chair's getting uncomfortable.

Hurry this up.

Yeah, we're almost.

I know.

This was also taken away from us for some reason.

Well,

it was moved to the center of City Hall, which again is legally distinct from Dolores Hall.

Harder to get your tits out in.

Yeah, I think.

Speak for yourself.

Well, no, Nova, the bigger thing is they lock it up at night now.

Yeah.

In the closet next to all the golden shovels.

Yes.

Yeah.

Can you imagine having to roll this fucking thing?

I've taken the stairs in 1515 Arch, and I would not want to roll that thing up there.

No.

They move it in the elevators.

Those elevators are bad.

They would trap people like once a week.

I think that you and I have just have horror stories in the city government.

One time I was eating my lunch, I just saw a big ass mouse run across our desk, and I was like, okay.

That's either cork or Brandon.

The three fundamental buildings, city hall, municipal services, and 1515 arch.

And then what happens to Love Park?

Well,

they saved some of the granite, and it's re-erected as a skate park in the city of Malmos, Sweden.

Wow, that's cool that they get to have that.

We don't.

You can see there's even a propped up piece of granite here and an original trash can.

So you can do sick tricks over it.

Swedes the only one still preserving American values.

These are the this is this is what's left and it's designed specifically as a skate park for skateboarders.

We also did a skate park.

It's called I think Payne Park

up by the Art Museum

which

That was the time.

I don't skateboard.

I don't it's probably fine,

you know, but it's not this,

you know, and, you know, you can see that, well, obviously this thing went over the ocean and with proper maintenance, it still works.

Granted, this is just on the side of a sidewalk in Malmo, but

someone appreciated it.

It wasn't us.

Yeah,

it lives on and people cared about it enough to get it over there.

I mean,

that's an insane amount of weight.

transporting granite across the globe two or three times.

Yeah.

those trash cans, by the way, that those things are indestructible, but they're six thousand dollars a piece.

I was gonna say

900 pounds a second, yeah, yeah,

and uh, you know,

this feels like you know, uh,

a warning story.

I, I, I remember when this was happening, I remember having discussions on the

the urban PHL Facebook.

Don't say its name, don't say its name,

John Geating will pop up from behind you with a knife ready to go.

Only if you do it three times.

Yeah,

there's when I can say there's nothing wrong with John Keating, but I would prefer to have friend relations with him.

I didn't take a moral stance on John Geating.

I just said his name.

I just, much like November, I couldn't.

Don't say his name.

Don't say his name three times into a CMX two and a half parcel.

No,

no, but it's

like that eventually every episode of all those repairs will simply end with local beef food.

Yeah, you kind of look at this.

There was not sufficient outrage to prevent this from happening.

No, you're right.

Because

it looked like a lot of things we were walking like zombie-like into a much worse situation.

I mean, after seeing Dilworth Plaza go, you know, it should have been obvious that, yeah, this is going to also be fucked up.

And it's currently happening with Thomas Paine Plaza.

They're going to fuck that one up.

If I had a guess, you know, this is going to happen again to like Washington or excuse me, Franklin Square or something.

Well, Franklin Square, you know,

all the public squares still have their own special flair, right?

But Franklin Square is already heavily programmed.

And for some of the year, pretty heavily privatized.

That's true.

Yeah, this is another, another way to do it.

They have to operate as a tourist destination for people from New Jersey, which is real.

They've got, you know, a carousel there.

They've got mini-golf.

It's actually pretty great.

And it's ran by the same people as the Betsy Ross house.

Yeah, it fucks.

Yeah, they do a good job of it.

But I got, you know, from my perspective on Patty Corner from this one,

you know, these public spaces were granted by William Penn to be publicly open and publicly available and publicly accessible as places of respite and refuge not of programming and party that's him that that that that's something you can do sometimes but once you rely on it it i'll buy that and put it here so people can't see into the chinese lantern festival the barriers you know you you but and but the thing is like it creates this opportunity for okay let's just let's just think in a in a theoretical future franklin square grows through a redesign are they going to prioritize the revenue generating capabilities of that lantern festival when they redesign this park to make it much more of a flatland than it already even is?

You know, those are the kinds of things that we have to worry about with these public spaces and the programming challenges.

And some public spaces need them, need programming 24-7, but, you know, you have to balance that with all these other community needs and considerations.

Like Franklin Square is right next to a huge Asian American, like low-income Asian American that needs a public park.

They don't have a lot of parks up there.

Totally bereft of green space.

The only other one near Chinatown is on top of an active highway.

Yeah, and then, you know, just in terms of like contemporaneous spaces, we just trashed another one.

Yep.

Which was Penn's Landing, which I always thought was a very exceptional sort of postmodern space, you know, fantastic, you know, fantastic brickwork, you know, all this stuff.

I mean, admittedly, it's great that they're covering up the freeway.

Now, what you will also see here is that they are planting a load of trees in an elevated space, which is, you know,

yeah, in 30 years, they're going to have to rip all those out so they can review the membrane, you know, right before they're about to provide proper shade.

Yeah, and those trees, those, again, those trees will never get taller than the 10 or 15 feet of topsoil that they already have.

so you're just setting yourself up for failure i mean that part really doesn't make any sense yeah so and they also scaled up way the hell back so it's just like a block and a half now oh i was just like do do it with your chest man yeah this is we've learned nothing nothing's been learned we're gonna keep doing it nothing new under the sun um yeah you you build the park on a membrane the park uh collapses through the membrane membrane yeah i was hoping to uh land on a positive note, but well,

that's this show.

You must fight for your right to park.

You must fight for your right to park.

Should I do my commercial here?

That's a positive note.

Yeah, you should do your commercial for the greatest park in Philadelphia.

Right.

So unlike most of Philadelphia's public spaces, Rittenhouse Square in the southwest quadrant of Center City.

has continuously served the public since its creation by William Penn in 1682.

It was never a public gallows, it was never a public burial site, was never leased off for any private interests, and it hopefully never will be.

I think the difference between these public spaces and what we have in Rittenhouse Square, which has been for many, many decades now widely regarded as one of the most beautiful and most wonderful public spaces in Philadelphia.

is that the community has always provided for it for the benefit of everybody in the city.

When the redesign of Rittenhouse Square happens in 1913, the neighbors come together to create a formal garden that will bring the most joy to the most people.

And then later in the 1950s, when this parking garage nonsense is proposed for Rittenhouse Square, it's an idea so powerful that it creates a NIMBY movement in Philadelphia.

Now, that has largely changed in my neighborhood.

And Rittenhouse Square remains as vibrant a public space as it ever has.

I am very proud to help run the nonprofit called Friends of Rittenhouse Square that has made many tremendous changes over the last few years.

We take care of all of the square's needs from landscaping and beautification to, you know, replacing the benches and calling in problems that

arise every single day of every single year.

I just found out that a light was broken right before I came over.

And it really is my pleasure to do it.

And it's the pleasure of my team because beautiful, dynamic, vibrant public spaces create so much joy and bring so many wonderful people to the spaces that they inhabit.

And if you care for them, if you make sure that they have dedicated people who are in there every single day watching the place, making sure that it's taken care of, it works out right.

So if you ever like Rittenhouse Square or ever want to,

if nothing else, please stop by.

If you could leave a Google review, that's always nice.

And then, you know, everything in that park is don't is everything in that park is donor supported.

The city is never fully or carefully or well-funded, Rittenhouse Square.

So the non-profit that I work for is the Friends of Rittenhouse Square, and we run all of Rittenhouse Square through member donations, every single of the park's operations, all the landscaping, all the maintenance, all the ongoing challenges.

In close partnership with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation and the fine people at DC30.

Yes.

Fuck you, Mayor Parker.

Join a union, go on strike, burn Terrell Parker's house.

That's my ad.

That's probably an actionable threat, my fault.

Yeah.

I do a recurring donation to Friends of Rittenhouse Square because I support patrician interests.

Hooray.

By the boy.

Yeah.

No, if I do it, so can you.

You know, to prevent it from, I don't know, in 20 years, they turn it into sort of a, I don't know, a lawn with some swooshes on it, you know?

oh yeah it'll just be nike swooshes we got to be really careful i hate like the like swoosh it's so bad like yeah the pathway thing yeah that's so popular right now yeah yeah so um yeah uh

parks are good we should make them better yes um and not worse which seems to be the trend right now yeah they can be spaces of great architecture that impact millions and millions

what do we learn that we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

This is true.

No, do you have to play the music?

No, I was setting you.

Okay, fine, whatever.

Shake hands with danger.

Oh, Jesus.

Oh, the delirium has set in.

Well,

we were using an older one, which didn't quite make the cut earlier, even though it's very good.

Okay, I'll be down in five minutes.

By the way, send these in to wtyppod at gmail.com.

Danger that happened to you at work.

Keep them light.

Keep them light.

You know, keep them about a page worth of text.

But this is ideal, dangerous stuff that happened to you at work, ideally stuff that was not your fault.

Yes.

But was your boss's fault.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hello, Liam, Justin, November, Gareth,

other qualified individuals on the podcast.

I got to go first this time, though.

Been listening since the beginning, but it's my first time submitting.

First time, long time.

Today, I would like to tell you the story of how I witnessed a near-catastrophic event caused by insensitivity to foreign languages, improper safety barriers,

and the enigmatic temperament of sheep.

Ideas, this is the register you should be hitting.

At the age of 16, I was a part-time historical interpreter at a historic farm in New York State.

Think of it as a less fun version of colonial Williamsburg,

Which actually talked about slavery.

Canceled.

Doesn't Colonial Williamsburg talk about slavery now?

Now they do, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean,

by now, they might not have due to the total defeat of Woke on all fronts by Charles.

That's a good point.

That's a good point.

I don't know.

We got to take Colonial Williamsburg to task.

This property would recreate the experience of Dutch colonial farmers in the 18th century, complete with wool costumes and wooden-soled shoes.

Oh, cursed, miserable.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

Hanging around in my clogs in a New York summer.

Yeah.

To add to the authenticity, there was.

He was trying to do it all in blackface, too.

Jesus.

Oh, God.

Because of the Dutch.

Yeah.

To add to the.

Oh, no, I'm not going gonna make that joke um to add to the authenticity there was a functioning farm on the property which included a small flock of about 30 heritage breed sheep the patriarch of this flock of sheep was an eight-year-old ram named wilbur who's the main character of our story oh yeah

only one main character not six okay

before i go any further i want to quickly remind the audience of three facts about sheep.

Number one, sheep are much stronger than you think they are.

I can hear Devon chiming in with the personal experience of rams, yes.

Number two, sheep are much faster than you think they are.

Number three, sheep are much dumber than you think they are.

True of all animals, I think.

Yeah.

Wilbur was exemplary of these three qualities.

A 320-pound behemoth with horns the size of your head and testicles the size of grapefruit.

Oh, yeah.

Like most sheep, he would get extremely aggressive during the spring.

And when I say aggressive, think bull levels of aggressive.

He would charge anyone, me, my boss, children, chickens, even his own lambs.

What a douchebag.

I have seen him charge his own shadow on no less than 10 occasions.

As such, during the spring, we usually kept him penned up during open hours so he would not murder guests.

We kept him in our old wooden barn behind a waist-high wooden barrier with the laminated sign in English explaining why Wilbur was in the pen and not enjoying the sunshine with his lambs and his eight wives.

Laminated sign that says this ram is a piece of shit.

Yes,

the real asshole.

One fine Saturday, I was instead tending to a flock of children near the old barn, teaching them how children in the 1700s filled their free time, which in fact was stick and hoop.

Although they're Dutch children, so it's like steak and hoopin'.

Steak and hoopin' steak and hoopin'.

The weird thing is, the stick is made of metal, but the hoop is made of wood.

All of a sudden, I hear a frantic voice on my walkie-talkie yelling for all available employees to immediately report to the barn.

We have a code Wilbur.

Code dub.

Code dub.

Code Wool.

I abandoned my post and ran.

When I reached the barn's open doors, I stood stunned with with two of my co-workers.

We saw a young mother with a camera taking photos of her toddler.

Her toddler was at that very moment in Wilbur's pen

and had just pet Wilbur on the nose when I arrived.

That must have been such an unfamiliar sensation to him that he was just too angry to do anything for a minute.

Rammy, get your gun.

As I stood frozen, contemplating how I would explain this to the police, our medical examiners, presumably the coroner,

I was quickly nudged into action by my more experienced colleagues.

Wilbur was staying completely still, eyes locked on this child.

It's sort of like going into prison on your first day and finding the biggest, meanest dude there and giving him a really nice hug.

Like he's going to kill you, but he's like stunned for a second.

The mother stopped taking pictures and was instead staring blankly at my boss as he tried to explain the peril her child was in.

It didn't occur to us until later that, of course, she did not speak a word of English.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

This was even more complicated by the fact that we could not make loud noises or sudden movements so as to not spook Wilbur.

This is a woolly bum.

You have to go in with the bomb suit.

The little robot flaws in you.

Nice.

Nice chute.

Nice cheat.

The thing is, if I do my job wrong, I don't have to worry about it anymore.

instead, me and my two colleagues, excuse me, my two colleagues and I quietly entered into the empty pen.

They probably weren't thinking about order when they were, you know, in this situation.

Entered into the empty pen next to Wilbur's.

All at once, we hopped in, hopped the barrier into Wilbur's pen just as he began to get agitated.

Oh, fuck it, okay.

We tackled the beast while my boss jumped into the pen and grabbed the toddler, thankfully saving him from any harm.

Those of us who tackled Wilbur were not as lucky, each of us receiving multiple nasty bruises from the flailing animal.

Wilbur, the angriest he has ever been in his life, trying to kill everything around him.

Except maybe this toddler.

Finally,

surrounded by things that kill and and

Wilbur and the target-rich environment.

And Wilbur wept for there was nothing left to kill.

The child and the mother both left the property unharmed, with the mother claiming via translator that she thought that because it was so easy to put her toddler in the pen with the ram that she was allowed to do so.

Rombe defense.

Yeah.

You said that so authoritatively that that was like a known thing, like the Nuremberg defense.

It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You claim the Harambe defense.

Of course,

it's not the Harambe defense, but it should be.

They should have shot that kid.

For the duration of my time on the farm after this, Wilbur was kept in a less publicly accessible area.

They put him in a metal-free prison that they kept Magneto in and exiled him.

But Wilbur did still attack people whenever possible.

Just a being of pure, untrammeled malice.

That incredible work.

While I would love to paint myself and my co-workers as the heroes of the story, it has never escaped me that if Wilbur had wanted to, he could have killed this child in seconds.

He didn't, and in fact, did not behave aggressively at all that day until three people tackled him.

Fair enough, right?

Yeah.

I'm still not sure why Wilbur showed restraint that spring day.

Like I said, he did not have a soft spot for children.

To blame provenance.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Audacity.

It'll remain a mystery.

I like to believe he spent the rest of his life doing what he loved, eating corn, attacking inanimate objects, and shitting in front of passersby.

Beautiful.

Heroic.

That's what we all want.

Beautiful.

Thanks for putting on a good show.

Hope that not too many people died in whatever disaster you talked about.

Technically, none, unless you count Kling going through the floor of the park and dying in the basement.

No, no.

Ed Bacon died, and so did Ken Block.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

So

that was not related to the disaster.

Yeah.

Yeah, and Vincent Kling's dead now, but that's a whole other.

Oh, Vincent Kling is dead now, too.

Yeah, that's true.

So is Rizzo.

Thank God.

So is Dilworth.

All this will pass away, you know.

Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Where are the parks of yesteryear?

Yeah.

They're concrete now.

They're in Rittenhouse Square.

We have park at home.

A bunch of new gray pavers.

Bunch of gray pavers everywhere.

Yeah.

It's going to be gray pavers.

Oh, God.

Well,

that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be about Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Thank you for listening to this for three hours and 19 minutes.

Three hours, 20, baby.

We hit it.

We hit 320.

Yeah, I am not sorry.

And given the opportunity, I would do it again.

No, I am unapologetic.

You deserve to suffer.

Thank you for the money.

Yes.

Yeah, come on.

Every six months, I get to harass you with three hours of architecture information.

Oh, it's the best day of my life, June.

I don't give a shit.

I can listen to Ross talk about Roz and you talk about anything for any amount of time.

I don't care.

Yeah, that said, I would like to go get drunk.

So, can we wrap this up?

No, we're going to do another three hours about Lowe's and Circle now.

Yeah,

now it's a quarter to three in the morning.

I'm good to go.

I'm good to go for another one.

Let's go.

All right.

Thanks, folks.

Bye.

Thanks, everybody.

Good night, everyone.

Good night.