Changing Skyline: New IRS building now an even bigger barrier to uniting Schuylkill's banks

For all the monumentality of the old 30th Street post office, Philadelphia would be better off had it been located in some less-visible corner of the city. Armored in a quarry's worth of limestone, the full-block building lords over the Schuylkill like a medieval fortress. Its main charm was the lavish art deco retail store on the ground floor. But now that the Internal Revenue Service has moved its regional headquarters there, even that space is off-limits to the public for security reasons.

In spite of those unfortunate qualities, the IRS's new, $252 million offices are being heralded by city poobahs as a great new gateway to University City, the connective tissue that will bind Philadelphia's east and west banks into one, job-generating unit. The word gateway was uttered so many times at last week's dedication, it sounded like a form of denial.

The post office, designed by Rankin & Kellogg during the Great Depression, was an urban barrier in the past, and it is an even bigger barrier now that it has been ringed with security posts and twinned with an off-putting parking garage. Uniting the two sides of the Schuylkill is a worthy planning goal, but a high-security facility cannot possibly serve as a gateway to anything.

I'll concede that the city is better off having this enormous bunker filled with 5,000 IRS employees than having it sit empty. But who said those were Philadelphia's only choices? The University of Pennsylvania, which bought the property from the U.S. Postal Service, had explored several intriguing uses, including research labs and a shopping mall, before flipping the building and an adjacent site in 2007 to Brandywine Realty Trust, developer of the iceberg-shaped Cira tower nearby.

Brandywine knew that the IRS would need a high level of security at its new home, which was renovated by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. While hardly unreasonable, the agency took safety to an extreme. The installation of blast-proof windows on the upper floors makes sense. But the decision to ban public uses at street level feels like overkill and is a loss for the gateway cause.