Designed by Philadelphia's James Corner and New York's Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the two-year-old High Line may turn out to be the most influential work of architecture completed during the boom years, the Guggenheim Bilbao of its decade. Every city wants one.
That includes Philadelphia. And now the city is taking the first steps toward creating its own version on the viaduct that carried the Reading Railroad's trains into Center City. Not only did the Nutter administration endorse the park project in the Philadelphia2035 master plan that was released last week, it has sent two high-ranking emissaries to Los Angeles to negotiate the viaduct's purchase from the remnants of the Reading company, now primarily a real estate holding company.
A small group of activists living in the Loft District, the cluster of old factories north of Vine and east of Broad Street, has been pushing for a linear version of Rittenhouse Square for nearly a decade, and they're finally seeing their efforts pay off. Sarah McEneaney, a painter, and John Struble, a woodworker, moved to the neighborhood decades ago and fell in love with the wild landscape that took over the industrial relic after trains stopped rolling into Reading Terminal in the mid-'80s. Now they practically have part-time jobs giving tours to city officials, representatives from philanthropic foundations, and landscape architects.
The Center City section of the viaduct was demolished in the late '80s to make room for the Vine Street Expressway and the Convention Center. The trains that used the viaduct went underground, into a new commuter rail tunnel that linked Reading's old routes and the Pennsylvania Railroad's into a unified system we today call SEPTA. But after that final section was taken down, the rest of the massive stone viaduct proved too much of a bother to remove.
