Play House shines spotlight on potential of Philadelphia's vacant land

When Marianne Bernstein was a little girl, her mother eschewed regular toys. Instead, she was given a simple wooden cube with a hinged door - a playhouse - and there had free rein to invent her world. She has been reinventing her playhouse in city lots ever since.

In 1999, she persuaded the mayor of New Haven, Conn., John DeStefano, to give her keys to a needle-filled parcel on Chapel Street. She turned it into a vanguard space for public art. Two years ago, for DesignPhiladelphia, she installed the Welcome House in LOVE Park. Now, on Philadelphia's seminal vacant lot, on Broad Street across from the Kimmel Center, Bernstein has repurposed her playhouse, this time as an aluminum performance cube and four-sided video monitor running films that document artists' interventions on vacant lots throughout our city.

Bernstein's Play House, which she designed with Daryn Edwards of Interface Studio Architects, is part of a multimedia DesignPhiladelphia project that has transformed the Broad Street lot into the glimmering and forceful "This Is Not a Vacant Lot," meant to reveal new possibilities for the transformation of the city's more than 40,000 vacant parcels. "The idea," she says, "is about what you can do in an empty lot when you don't have any money."

Bernstein is well-known in the art world as a pusher of boundaries. "They used to pat me on the head and say 'dream on, little dreamer,' " she says, but "it's almost like magic seeds. If you bring positive energy to a space, things change."

This makes the art installation - with 250 PVC poles representing the geographic distribution of the 40,000 lots, installed by Edwards' partner Brian Phillips and Julie Beckman of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design - a rather perfect microcosm of the city itself. With limited resources, Philadelphia faces a monumental problem: how to reorganize and reposition more than 3,000 acres of vacant land, which cost taxpayers $20 million annually to maintain, have drained property values by about $3.6 billion, and sap the life out of neighborhoods from Kingsessing to Kensington.

Philadelphia shows the scars of deindustrialization and economic recalibration perhaps more than any city but Detroit. In part because of a policy of working to conserve the industrial economy in the 1950s and '60s, the life of the factory neighborhood unraveled slowly, but now it is truly gone. And we are the inheritors of the mess.