Changing Skyline | Brandywine Workshop to brighten S. Broad St.

The branding of Broad Street as the Avenue of the Arts is one of those hokey marketing ploys that actually seems to have paid off. In the last decade, the blocks immediately south of City Hall have been transformed into Philadelphia's twinkling theater row. The cultural chain was extended another link in October, with the opening of the Suzanne Roberts Theatre at Lombard Street.

Continue walking south, however, and the Avenue of the Arts doesn't seem so bright. The only lights you see emanate from gas stations and fast-food places. The avenue's charter members, the Clef Club and Arts Bank, rarely open their doors these days, and the Pennsylvania Ballet's dancers no longer belly up to the practice barre at their Washington Avenue studio. Even the long-established Brandywine Workshop, ensconced behind the heavy wood doors of a 19th-century firehouse near Fitzwater Street, appears dormant.

That erroneous impression should be corrected soon. Brandywine Workshop, which operates the only public art gallery on South Broad, is making a play for the limelight. It has just released a design by Metcalfe Architecture for an eye-catching, transparent entry that is intended to let the sun into its historic building and advertise Brandywine's presence on the avenue.

Brandywine really does run a nonprofit artists' workshop, where hulking offset presses clank and shudder and the air is perfumed by the near-forgotten scent of printer's ink. But it also has amassed an impressive collection of lithographs and etchings by the top practitioners of those painstaking art forms, and it wants to share the work with the public.

Brandywine conceived its $4.5 million renovation as a strategy to get more visitors into its exhibitions. The workshop, which was founded on Brandywine Street in 1972, jumped at the chance in 1991 to acquire the spacious Italianate firehouse near Fitzwater Street, but soon found that its solid facade is a formidable barrier that tends to scare visitors away.

The big problem is that there are no windows at street level, since the 1849 building originally housed pump wagons and other equipment of the Franklin Hose Company. Yet because the ornate marble facade, which was redesigned in 1867 for the Harmony fire company, is historic, Brandywine is prohibited from altering its appearance.