Changing Skyline | Developers fight plan to extend streets to riverfront

It seems unlikely that many people out for a stroll on Market Street in Center City ever stop to ask themselves, "Should this street be here?"

Market Street exists because Philadelphia does. Some, of course, will recall that it was William Penn and his surveyor Thomas Holme who laid out Philadelphia's brilliant, character-defining street grid in 1683. But even those who forget their history know it's their inalienable right to walk, saunter, jog and drive along the city's thoroughfares. If there is a consensus about anything in our country, it's that city streets are public places. We can amble along Delancey Street and admire the Quaker mansions without having to worry that we're trespassing on private property.

Please excuse me for stating what seems obvious. It's just that there are folks in Philadelphia who are trying to challenge the concept of free and open streets.

Last month, zoning lawyer Michael Sklaroff, former city planner Craig Schelter, and a slew of developers launched what is shaping up as a gloves-off campaign to scuttle an eminently sensible proposal to extend the existing city street grid down to the edge of the Delaware River. The new street network would break up the central waterfront's large, formerly industrial tracts into manageable blocks that could be developed into something resembling a real Philadelphia neighborhood.

That recommendation is the centerpiece of a landmark plan for the waterfront that will be introduced to the public Nov. 14 at the Convention Center. Simple as it sounds, the streets proposal is key to transforming the riverfront into a livable place. But if you listen to Sklaroff and Schelter, you might think that the plan's author, Penn Praxis, was plotting a socialist-style takeover of private property, with the venerable William Penn Foundation and City Hall in cahoots.

In a recent letter to the city planning director, Sklaroff warned that imposing the street grid would be "a disastrous showstopper for waterfront development." But he left it to Schelter, a former top planner who now hires himself out as an adviser to developers, to reveal the true ugliness behind that lawyerly warning.