City Howl Help Desk: The Society Hill slabs mystery

ONE EVENING in Society Hill, on his daily jog, Brian Hamilton came across a ridiculous number of concrete slabs. The mother lode, if you will. Hundreds of the slabs, along with bundles of bricks and haphazardly placed wooden beams, lined Front Street near Walnut, taking up the equivalent of about half a city block.

There's something you don't see every day.

Except, Hamilton did start seeing the construction materials every day. It's been a year, he said, and they haven't budged.

"It's a little obscene," Hamilton said last week, when we visited the scene, near Penn's Landing parking.

It did feel weird, like someone had misplaced thousands of dollars of construction materials.

Even if the materials hadn't been forgotten, it sure felt like they had. They weren't being carefully monitored: Someone had stolen some bricks from a neatly bundled stack.

So, we made some calls to figure out how a half-block's worth of concrete slabs had come to occupy a city street.

STONEWALLED: We called up Andrew Stober, chief of staff at the Mayor's Office of Transportation and Utilities, who told us that the owner of these mysterious materials is . . . the city of Philadelphia! The slabs are part of a sidewalk-improvement project in Society Hill, installing handicapped-accessible sidewalk ramps.

The project started last spring, as reported by PlanPhilly, but was held up when members of the Society Hill Civic Association protested that the ramps and other improvements did not look like the ones that they had approved. Members of the association were concerned that the construction didn't fit in with the neighborhood's historic look.

By summer's end, the city and the association had come to an agreement over the construction, but the city had to renegotiate the contract for the work.

Meanwhile, the materials sat on Front Street for months, where the contractor had left them.

Stober said it would have been expensive to move everything, adding that not many people park on out-of-the-way Front Street.

The Streets Department hadn't been concerned about people stealing the materials, Stober said, because they were so heavy.

When we spoke with Lorna Katz Lawson, chairwoman of the association's Zoning and Historic Preservation Committee, who lives near the materials' makeshift storage area, she said that "everybody's just kind of living with it."