Changing Skyline: Master plan for riverfront nearly ready

It's been almost a decade since Philadelphia started a long-overdue conversation about transforming the vacant acres along the Delaware River into a vital urban neighborhood. Yet, other than a single, suburban-style casino and some lonely high-rise condos, little change is visible on that bleak, postindustrial landscape.

The city now appears ready to stop talking and start doing.

After four decades of false starts and scattershot projects, consultants are putting the finishing touches on a detailed and focused master plan that will provide Philadelphia with step-by-step instructions for reinventing its waterfront. Now in its next-to-last draft, the plan was presented Tuesday night to neighborhood groups for what officials hope will be the final round of discussion.

Based on a presentation I saw last week, the most striking thing about the emerging master plan is the modesty of its ambition. At the same time, the proposals, even in their current rough form, appear more attainable than schemes floated in the past.

And that is mostly as it should be.

Gone are the 50-story towers that were once expected to form a spiky stockade along the six-mile length of the central Delaware, from Allegheny Avenue in the north to Oregon Avenue in the south. The plan, unfortunately, no longer maintains any pretense that the money or political will exists to fully cap the I-95 trench that brutally cuts off Philadelphia's downtown from its founding river.

Instead, the planning team, led by the same two firms that laid the groundwork for New York's successful Battery Park City, envisions a waterfront dominated by rowhouses and mid-rise apartments, even on the previously sacrosanct Penn's Landing site. It would probably take 30 to 50 years for the proposed housing to fill in the waterfront's many blanks.

Despite that lengthy time frame, the planners are urging the city to invest now in a few high-impact infrastructure projects that would set the stage for private development. The most dramatic is a large, landscaped deck that would slope from Front Street down to the river, between Chestnut and Walnut Streets, extending the existing I-95 cap over Columbus Boulevard.