King of Prussia still evolving

Frederick O'Malley remembers stopping at a hotel in St. Louis while traveling on business in the 1950s.

After he registered his address and walked to his room, the phone rang.

"You've got to be kidding," the desk clerk said. "Is there actually a town called King of Prussia, Pa.?"

O'Malley assured him, "Yes, there is."

King of Prussia in those days was an obscure crossroads 19 miles northwest of Philadelphia that had taken its odd name from an 18th-century monarch.

But by 1958, with the completion of the Schuylkill Expressway to Center City, the match had been lit on a boom that would turn King of Prussia into the region's most extensively developed suburb - an edge city boasting the second-biggest mall in the United States, vast office complexes, an industrial park, even its own convention center.

Now, a half-century later, the last major piece of green space left in King of Prussia is being developed.

The 135-acre Valley Forge Golf Course will soon become the Village of Valley Forge, a "new urbanism" project that in its initial phase will include specialty shops, two hotels, and 310 above-the-store apartments, all laid out city-style. Eventually, 2,000 housing units could be built.

Recognizing the land's growing importance as other green space disappeared, Upper Merion Township - in which King of Prussia is located - fought for many years to block the golf course from being developed.

The township, belatedly, could see what land-use critics saw.

"There's just too much concrete in that area," said Jeffrey Featherston, director of the Center for Sustainable Communities at the Ambler campus of Temple University. "It's inevitable that there are problems with storm-water management and congestion."

But blocking golf-course development was like shutting off the tap after the sink had overflowed. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that, after permitting so much development, the township couldn't suddenly pull the plug on the development rights of the golf course owners. It called that reverse spot zoning.

Arthur Loeben, who was Montgomery County planning director from 1957 to 1995, looks back on the King of Prussia development story as a mixture of success and failure.

"Economically, it's a huge success," Loeben said. "Physically, I think the design is pretty awful. . . . It could have been done a lot better, I think. It was done piecemeal."