It helps that Race Street Pier is everything that Penn's Landing is not. The park is easily accessible from Center City and the adjacent neighborhoods by foot, bike, and car (although the transit options aren't so good). When visitors arrive, they can enter the park from a real urban sidewalk on a real urban street. As they proceed along the 540-foot pier, the powerful design ensures that they are thoroughly immersed in the experience of being on the river.
The new $6.5 million park promises to do for the Delaware what the Schuylkill Banks trail did for the city's little river, becoming an after-work mecca for picnics, fishing, and lounging. People do go to Penn's Landing, but primarily for scheduled events. If Race Street Pier makes the Delaware a place to hang out, it will become harder for the city to continue ceding precious frontage to undesirable uses like big-box stores, casinos, and parking garages.
Race Street Pier is all of one acre, but the design by Field Operations - the same firm that gave Manhattan its wildly popular High Line Park - feels far more spacious than its diminutive size would suggest. The designers manage to squeeze in a boardwalk, a lawn, a small amphitheater, a bosque of trees, meandering paths, and plenty of benches by manipulating the surface topography.
The word topography comes up a lot in conversations with James Corner, Field Operations' founder and head of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Like a natural landscape, the pier contains multiple ecosystems. It moves from lowland to upland, from the open, unshaded boardwalk savanna through stands of swamp oaks and sweet gums, and down to a soft mound of an oval lawn, whose slope was sculpted to support the backs of hardworking sun worshipers.
