Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 182: The Life and Death of Love Park

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

one weird trick to destroy a beloved public space for the sake of parking june's bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rittsq.bsky.social https://www.friendsofrittenhouse.org/ LINK TO BUY A VAN FOR LIAM��S COWORKER: https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24216/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I'm also entering Syco mode, I feel like such a fucking twat doing this with AirPods. It's fine. I mean, listen, we've only been doing this, what, 18 years or so? A million, a million years. I couldn't get the mic to work with the interface, it just will not do it. I assume it's a bad cable, but I don't have a replacement here. It's fine. Like, we'll...

So I'm on, I on yeah, they have some power Yeah, it's a power. I mean just air pods air pod pros actually That aren't even mine put 40 volts into the air pods and see what happens. Oh, yeah Alright we should do a sync point Gonna do three two one mark everyone clap three, two, one, mark. Okay, good. We're podcasting. We're gonna talk about an exciting subject. At least to June and I.

Yeah. Who knows? Yeah, we worked very hard on our 60 plus slide presentation. Oh yeah. Everybody be nice to us. Did someone send me the PowerPoint? Uh, it's in the group chat. Do I have the notes?

Thank you. It's in the group chat. I'm on a foreign computer, everything's very confusing to me, I'm like, I'm so- I don't know if there's a reason to be xenophobic about it, like, you have to put it in H. You have to put it in H! Gets 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene. LIAM I hate all of you. ALICE Missed you too, buddy.

LIAM Hi. We are actually recording, you are now at a work site. JUSTIN You gotta put up caution tape around the room. RILEY Yeah, you have to secure the perimeter, you gotta get the flaggers, y'know. One of the things that I really want to do is to set up, like, a red recording light on the outside of a door that I can just hit with a switch on the desk. Turns out that that's really difficult to do in a rental, so, that is, y'know, I'm just not gonna do that.

What I am gonna do is get a little 5.99 sliding door sign off of Amazon, stick that to the door and be like, y'know, recording in progress, and if it fucks up the door, it's not my door, it's my landlord's door. Y'know? JUSTIN Wow, there you go. ALICE Yeah. Thank you. Thank you go. Thank you. Thank you for- thank you.

I'm working! I'm doing work! Leave! Leave me in peace! Where's the car key? Ah, upstairs! Liam, come back, Roz and I are about to torture you. This is the problem with ever leaving the city

of Philadelphia. The American Glasgow. Trees? Everywhere trees? LIAM So I don't fucking leave Philly. ZACH No, November, I was thinking about that, like, Philadelphia is the Naples of America. ALICE Don't say those words in that order, sir.

ALICE Philadelphia is the Venice of America. No, I mean, Glasgow, conversely, is wet Philadelphia. Yes. Or possibly wet Detroit? Hard to say. Interesting. Uh, I do, uh, do we want to get into it if we have, I'm sorry, does this say, uh, oh boy, sixty-six slides?

Yes. Oh Jesus Christ. JUSTIN It's okay, some of them are like, in place of animations, I really should've done them as animations. ALICE There better be one 60 frame video in here. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly, we gotta sorta budget John Boyce thing going on later on. ALICE Who's the docu- who's the guy I like that does the, the, like that does the baseball

documentary? JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah, John Boyce. ALICE So, Ken Burns. JUSTIN Ken Burns, yeah. ALICE I like the John Boyce comparison better, because that way, instead of pretty good, it's like best value pretty good, and it's just called okay.

A show about stories that are okay. JUSTIN Or they're okay, yeah. So, with that in mind, welcome to, Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. With slides. I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. Oh my god. He him. Next. You're doing okay there, buddy? What's up y'all, my name's June Armstrong and my pronouns are she and her. Where are you here, June?

Why am I here? Yeah, like, existentially? Oh no, so why I'm here is because we were watching that, okay, so the Franklin Institute OmniMax theater that used to exist used to play a short film about Philadelphia back when I was growing up. And we were watching that on YouTube the other day, because that's the kind of shit that Roz and I get up into when we're bored. And we saw a park in the middle of the city that I had forgotten about, which was the beautiful and

tragic Love Park, aka John F. Kennedy Plaza, reverse those. ALICE Yes. What we see on the screen here... LIAM Oh my fucking god, I'm... understand how AirPods work, yeah, go ahead. JUSTIN What we see on the screen here are three shots of the same space, but at different points in time. You can see a beautiful fountain, very large fountain, and a nice basin, with the Love Sculpture on a trapezoidal base, you can see an overview

of JFK Plaza here, you can see the flying saucer, you can see the basin, all the nice uh, you know, sort of postmodern, um, you know, hardscape, big trees, everything else, and then you can see it more recently. Where it looks like dogshit, yeah. There are none of those things. They gentrified it, sort of. So this is one of those, what's happening here, something has happened here, it's not supposed to be like that.

It's not supposed to be like that. A process has occurred to this park. Yes. Yes. And we're going to talk, first we're're gonna talk about how the park was built, how it was good, why it was good, and then why and how they fucked it up, and like, how this was allowed to happen. You know, cause I have quite fond memories of this park back when I worked for the city.

You know, it was just a nice place, and it kind of isn't anything comparable now. And just on that note, with what's going on right now, y'know, the people who work for Philadelphia Parks and Recreation are incredible, they do so much with so little, and this park has many many many layers of failures, but the people who run it do the best fucking job they can, and that I think is part of the sadness of this whole thing. Yes. Oh, yeah. I'm an expert in landscape and, you know, landscape and urban, you know, parks and things

like that in my professional career, which we'll talk about during the course of the presentation. Yes. Yes. June's in charge of the other park. A different one. Yeah. The arousal, I spent like six hours working on this presentation once one time.

And like, oh, I, I, my favorite thing that we question we often get is like, what's your process like? I'm like, oh, it's real bad. And people are like, but no, like I learned so much. You guys are so funny and so interesting. I'm like, yeah, our process is real fucking bad. Go to my Google drive. Yeah. What's your process? I wish I knew anyway, before we do that,

let's talk about the goddamn nose. Oh shit. Excellent, excellent news on the SEPTA front, which is nothing is happening. We know, we know, we know about the, uh, the big death bill, uh, that didn't make it into the news because they wrote this ahead of time. We'll put it in next time because the news operates on like a six week delay anyway. Yeah, exactly. So as of time of recording, the Pennsylvania legislature is still deadlocked on SEPTA public transit funding, you know, for our transit system here in Philadelphia. So the board approved the horrible doomsday budget that like knocks out, you know, a third of all bus service, half a regional rail, lots

of stuff is going away. They're gonna stop running the trolleys after 9pm. LIAM They're gonna stop running most of it after 9pm. ALICE Yeah. I mean, that's gonna be fine, though, because anything that does run is gonna have to make its way through the heaps of trash. JUSTIN Yeah, that's true, the sanitation strike is also happening right now, it's day four, I'm becoming an insane British bins guy.

The mayor finally did something, and that something was bad and stupid. I've been seeing bits and pieces of this. Is this the opening, the like, waste disposal centers, that were just open dumpsters? The thing the mayor did was not reach a deal with sanitation workers, so they went on strike. This is the first thing she has done. ALICE Total support to the sanitation workers, who are the bedrock of human civilization, and without whom, as the city of Philadelphia is now learning, is the deluge, is the chaos,

is rat hell. JUSTIN Yeah, we're about, y'know, combined with Sanitation Strike and, uh, SEPTA going offline, we are probably about, I dunno, four weeks from anarchy. Just complete bedswim. SEAN Self-fill is about 60s from it. Yeah, I think so, actually. A lot of those places have like, twice weekly trash pickups. Yeah, it's gonna get real bad, and speaking of, y'know, like, the trash people, all of the Parks and Rec workers who actually are like full-time maintenance employees, so all the people who actually keep the system running on like, you know, bubble gum and row.

All of the rodent control people are also DC 33. Like, you know, they really are the lifeblood of the city. They keep them working. All the streets crews, all the water department crews. It's it's it's such a shame. And they do a great job because, like, unlike New York City here in Philly, we don't have rats. We have mice, but we don't have rats. ALICE No, we have rats. RILEY That's gonna change very quickly.

ALICE We have rats now, Roz! RILEY Just a busload of rats down from New York City. JUSTIN Oh my god, it's the fight... you were worried about the Antifa buses, now the rats are coming down. RILEY Oh yeah. ALICE I think all rats by definition are members of Antifa. JUSTIN I think so, yeah.

I mean, you know, everyone's got a bus driver, he's being controlled by the rat in his hat, y'know. Like a rat puppet, yeah. Rat-a-tour bus. Yeah. Oh, oh, kinda. So anyway, this is, y'know, this is a product of dumbass legislators in Harrisburg who have you know too much interest in Trying to you know just make the the liberals miserable. You know cuz that's all we do That's all we do in politics these days is punish people

so, you know this I I So, you know, this, I... I still think this will be resolved in some fashion, because too many rich mainline people are gonna be pissed off with the Thorndale line disappearing. I was in thought. Yeah. But, who knows. Yeah. Amazing.

Everyone's gonna get stuck in traffic, and then they're all gonna get fired for getting late. It's gonna be impossible to employ anyone in Philadelphia, and then we all die. If we haven't already died from diseases from garbage not being picked up. Yeah. So yeah, that's the status of the city at the moment. City update. Bad.

Seems bad. Bad. Yeah. In other news... Oh, shit. I have. Mm. Bad. Seems bad. Bad. Yeah. In other news... Oh, shit, I have to reload the thing. Oh, girl. There we go.

It's 1137 PM. Yeah, so... I was a little sarcastic, I'm sorry. So, as of today, it is majorly illegal, anti-terrorism legislation to be a member of, incite support for, or really make any kind of statement that tends to glorify or support a group called Palestine Action, who legally are now terrorists for the crime of sabotaging a bunch of Elbit arms manufacturing facilities, and also two RAF refueling planes. This is...

385 to 26, you fucking cowards. This is one of the dumbest things to have ever happened. It is in many ways unenforceable. I mean, there might be some interesting test cases for this, but it was kind of the case that a thinly veiled MI5 was briefing to newspapers that it was kind of making an impossible circus of their job of enforcing that, like, prescribed group thing. But it has now happened. And Palestine Action, who, again, it is illegal to support in the United Kingdom, responded to this by changing their name to Yvette Cooper, which is the name of the Home Secretary who prescribed them and who made it illegal to support them.

So as far as I know, it's not illegal to be a supporter of Yvette Cooper, so long as you only mean the person and not the group, and how someone is supposed to tell the difference, I'm not sure. ALICE That's genius. That's really good, I like that a lot. ALICE It does not seem to have stopped them, and I don't... Legally I don't say that with any tone of admiration, I merely observe and report that it does not seem to have deterred them at all.

Which also, I think, maybe makes a mockery of the point of prescribing them in the first place. I was about to say, plus the name is generic enough that, y'know, I guess if they really wanted to they could really start to go after a lot of people. Y'know, they had the resources for it, which they don't, because it's Britain and everything's defunded. ALICE Just any kind of pro-Palestinian speech, yeah? JUSTIN Exactly.

If it was America, we now have the thirty-five billion dollar ICE budget. They could probably start, I don't know, putting people into concentration camps, but... Britain, I don't think they can do that. ALICE Well, except for maybe turning the whole country into one big concentration camp. We are our own alligator Alcatraz in a lot of ways. JUSTIN Yeah, you're going children of men pretty quick over there. ALICE Oh, really? Yeah.

ALICE Feels like it, yeah. Every day there's a new little thing, this is kind of the more obvious one, but it's a little stuffer too. Like I checked the news the other day to find out that trans women are effectively banned from donating blood in the UK now. Weird. Um, this one's a weird accidental thing, where, since they've legally defined trans women as men, that means the blood service has to test against male ranges, so they... so if

you go in to donate blood, they'll be like, you are deeply, deeply anemic by male standards, and therefore it would not be safe for you to donate blood, so you can't. Right? But practically, practically that's a sort of ban by accident. And I think that too is emblematic. If Palestine Action being banned is the British state acting on purpose, then this is the British state acting by accident. And somehow they both end up being repressive, which is curious about the purpose and nature of states and governments.

But yeah, as I say, it would be very illegal to support Palestine Action in any way. ALICE How bafflingly stupid. Well done. Yes. Now, Dev, if you can just insert a 20 second beep here, we can say it, this is very stupid, and you know, I think that, uh... Yeah, everyone involved in your country's government should do us a favor, face the wall by themselves, put a shock on it.

If you are a Republican at this point in your life, you should have the decency to do us all a favor. Look, pal, you might be able to say it in America. But you can't say it on YouTube. The world would be a better place without you in it. The thing is, and this is- Is that guy gonna do it? Comrade?

Yeah, thank you. I think there's an interesting kind of situation which you might actually need legal advice on, as to, you guys are Americans, right? You can support Palestine Action, I'm not sure if you can do it on here, and I will still get in trouble, even if we do that on the basis that, like, you might support them, I couldn't possibly comment. And in fact I don't. I don't know, that might still be illegal, I might still get to go to, like, men's terrorism prison for that, so...

ALICE I have a lot of confidence, if I have one thing, confidence in one thing, it is that we have good First Amendment lawyers. We might not win, but we can make sure everybody else loses. ALICE You do, I dunno about me. And so, yeah, I just, I continue to urge people... SEAN Can't possibly comment on it, of course. ALICE I can't possibly comment on this. What I can do on a completely unrelated basis is say that from the river to the sea, Palestine

will be free. I can say that Israel is committing a genocide, I can say that it's a dangerous state to world peace, and I can urge everyone to continue to support and stand up for Palestinian rights in the face of their continued occupation and genocide. JUSTIN If you do that in the United States right now, you wind up with your surrogate Brad Lander going on television, and being accused of not taking anti-Semitism seriously. You may not even know he's Jewish. ALICE He's Jewish.

JUSTIN Doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, like... Oh my god, oh my god. I don't understand that. I really don't. I mean, listen, I understand that I'm not Israeli because I'm not cursed by God, but I just, like, I don't get the like, well, did you selfie? Shut the fuck up! Pora points us towards justice, not towards whatever bullshit involves killing Palestinian kids, you dumb motherfuckers Nazis.

I hate these fucking people! I hate that I have to share a tent with them, in the desert. I think, I mean, it strikes me, as someone who opposes antisemitism, that it's probably a bad thing to claim that antisemitism extends to a bunch of stuff that it transparently doesn't. I worry that that kind of discredits the term for a lot of people, and I worry about the sort of like second order consequences of that. But...

JUSTIN Yeah, something. Something stupid might happen in the future, yeah. Alas and alack, we are not in control of these issues. Yet. Maybe one day, something will happen. I don't know. This, this, uh, y'know, seeing them try to Corbinize Mamdami has been, y'know, just crazy. Um.

ALICE I mean, they're gonna try and do it. And, all I can say is I hope it doesn't work this time. JUSTIN I hope it doesn't work, too. I mean, this is the same playbook over again. Yeah. ALICE Corbin is supposedly starting a new party, which is a very funny thing for him to do. The week after we on Trash Future were like, yeah, fuck it, roll the dice, join the green

party. So, thank you, Jeremy, master of timing as always. But yeah, obviously I will be joining his new party, whatever it's called, like, day one. Unless it's called Palestine Action, because then that would be illegal. JUSTIN That would be illegal, then, yeah. ALICE Well, if you started a new group called Palestine Action, which is distinct from the... whatever

that... It's interesting. You're doing the kind of Twitter text circumvention thing where it's like, it was called Palestine Action but the A is the A from the Russian keyboard, so it doesn't trigger the same thing. There you go. There you go. Grok, is this true? Well, if you're gonna talk to a lawyer, or AI lawyer you can get the, y'know, consult

for free, so. Oh god. I use, I use Grock as my lawyer. Oh my god. As Grock is my witness. As Grock is my witness. Just stop. Shaking your head as you erase the sign that says, it has been this many days since a lawsuit.

ALICE Anyway, I'd say British democracy was nice while it lasted, it was always a fiction, never been clearer than it is now. JUSTIN It would've been a good idea. ALICE Yep. We just, we need to be civilized by force, I think, that's the only option at this point. President Xi, my country, the United Kingdom, yearns for freedom. Please send J-20 strike fighters. JUSTIN LAUGHS.

ALRIGHT, well. On that note, that was the goddamn news. Hey, I gotta write one time out of three. Yeah. Nice. Good news, folks. We only start at the beginning. The beginning of all things. Yeah. Good news, folks, we only start at the beginning. The beginning of all things.

Before you can talk about Philadelphia. Before you can talk about a specific place in Philadelphia and cover the entire history of that place, you have to cover the entire history of Philadelphia first. I saw a video series about this, wasn't it colonized by like, Swedes or something? Uh, yes. Pretty much. I remember that video series, too. No, we can't acknowledge it, though, in this contest or whatever.

Don't hurt his feelings. A fa-hort advertisement upon the situation and extent of the city of Philadelphia, and the ensuing platform thereof. RILEY Yeah, so, a lot of people, especially, you know, Philly has all this iconography, for those of us who are locals, I think, but like, the map of Philadelphia is what most people think of as the William Penn map, and it's pretty widely publicized, but it actually has, it's actually three documents and basically a real estate advertising map, right? ALICE It's a timeshare. like it's actually three documents and basically a real estate advertising. Right. So time share.

Yeah, you're basically your. William Penn's basically saying, hey, you should come invest your land in my new in my new thing, because this is the only way I'll recoup the debt that I'm that my dad was owed. So please, please help. Yeah, please, please, please help me become rich again or more rich. I'm not really sure which one. I it's been a long time so I learned about it. But

the the the weird thing about Philly is that, you know, this map is like pretty well known because it's basically the same map now. And William Penn, you know, was one of the first, you know, post Renaissance people to fully plan out design a city and actually like again, the weird part is that people actually listen to it and probably the most listened to part of William Penn's plan. And it's actually the biggest description on the short advertisement. So it was the short advertisement, the map, and then a list of the influencers, the cool people in England who were already subscribed

to the William Penn channel. Yes. Yeah, so the longest- Look at all these cool people who bought plots on my land. Which by the way, we should mention, was purchased fairly from the Lenny Lenape, who still say to this time, yeah, Penn was fine, it was the other white guys who were the problem. And his son was a piece of shit. But yeah, sons were also pieces of shit.

Yeah. The walking triniest are bastards. Which incidentally is one of the reasons that Britain House Square wasn't developed until the later in the 19th century. But like the longest description on this paragraph is the next slide, right? Yes. And, and most of the paragraph is actually talking about the importance of public squares in Philadelphia. Public squares are near and dear to my heart

and a lot of the other people who, especially in our presentation, were thinking about the city, right? Yeah, a square of eight acres to be for the lake youths, as the more dash field in London and eight streets defines the fade high free they run from front to front and 20 streets defines the broad free uh yeah the run cross the city from five to five all these streets are 50 foot breadth yeah but you missed the important part for our purposes today yeah i'm sure, I'm sure that I did. Yes. Today we're all gonna learn about the long S. We did that in the newspaper episode, the print media episode.

You're a goddamn noofman. Yeah, so the squares in each corner of the city have their own use, which is for this, you know, the Moorfields in London during Penn's time was the original kind of public park. It was just grass field and walking paths that were tree-lined. But the square in the center is kind of what we're talking about today.

And instead of being this kind of open green public space, it's supposed to have all of the public buildings, right? So the public affairs building, meeting house, assembly and state house, market house, schoolhouse, and the other public concerns. So the idea really was that over time, Philadelphia would fill out, but all of the, you know, it's that lightning era thinking where all of the ideas would come from the center of the city or all the most important things were in the center. And this was really revolutionary, right? Because before this, cities grew up as spaghetti. And who's to say whether that's better than this? But this at least looks pretty. Yeah, I mean, it has sort of, you know, it's from like the Roman, you know, plan for new settlements.

You have the Carto, the Decumanus, you had the Bath in the middle, you know, all that stuff. It's very old-fashioned in that sense. It was the first one to be done in a while. It's the first one to be done in a while. And again, the craziest part is that, you know, unlike most major American downtown cities with some exceptions, the urban renewal here is a lot different. It didn't get wholesale with a lot of other cities.

So it still retains like a weird charm in that. But but but the important thing is that we decide to describe Philadelphia. Yeah, exactly. And like the ideas were durable, right? Unless I don't feel safe. So if you go to the next slide, like, yeah. So so this idea was really durable, but this is it 100 years later, right?

This is the first survey map of Philadelphia. And and even though like what William Penn shows as his cool, perfect city, like it doesn't get filled in. And he envisions like orchard houses and like, you know, grand lots. Everybody moves in right on top of each other, right on the one river where you can actually get in and out of the city. No one lives here, though, right? Because how could you? I mean, this is all still country at this point, right?

As far as I know from really Philadelphia. Yeah. Yeah. The city for the first hundred years. So that's from 1796. Like that part of the city isn't... Philadelphia doesn't extend past Washington and Franklin squares, which were over by 6th and 7th Street. Right, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and so right after that, right around this time, they actually clearcut the city, which is its own whole story. And they also start to get rid of the elevations. So you see how they're indicated on this map with the shading. They actually flatten the city and they clear cut it and they bring all the streets to the level so that it's easier to traverse here. Oh, and yeah, those ponds were for brickyards

and they have like round portable brick kilns underneath them or next to them. And that is actually also part of the story of house square. But we're talking about Love Park today. Yeah. But yeah, basically the idea for the center of the city being important, like really had legs. And so this is in 1796 and about 100 years later, you really start to have like the whole thing is just fucking filled in because Philadelphia goes through

a huge explosion of residences and houses and it's just a huge, huge expansion. Yeah. So yeah, I guess we jumped forward about a hundred years here. Mm-hmm. Yeah. This is an exciting document. I love these. This is a fire insurance map.

What do you mean? You know? Yeah. This is the Bromley Atlas. Oh, I remember you showing me these. 1895. Everything in pink is made of brick. Everything in yellow is made of wood.

Everything that's gray is made of stone. This is so they can, you know, when you get assessed for fire insurance, you know, the assessor can look up and say, well, this building is good, but the one next to it might catch fire. We have to consider that. Um. RILEY Yeah, and these were really measured drawings and documents, because they had to assess the insurability.

ALICE Really, really durable looking city, in the sense that it's mostly brick built, though. I also really like the extremely prominent Masonic Temple. RILEY Oh yeah, that's a good building. LIAM So right there, Yeah, I like it. RILEY Yeah, and like, again, with this insurance atlas, it's hard to really get a sense for the scale of everything, because between 1796 and 1895, when this math is made, Philadelphia really does become the workshop of the world.

The Industrial Revolution here. And I'm seething in Glaswegian, like... Well, you know, that's the thing. And like I was saying earlier, Philadelphia is the Glasgow of America. Philadelphia is the Naples of America. Philadelphia is the Ankara of America. Philadelphia is the Zagreb of America. Sure. So, so the really so if you look at some of these row houses like you can find this map online in a couple different places.

The Philadelphia atlas thought phila.gov has all of these layer on top of each other. You can zoom in real close and you can see a regular size row house. And that's the tiny little rectangles and squares in this image, because this was the downtown heart of the city. And again, because the city hall had been moved there and they built the biggest city hall that has ever been. One point, the world's tallest building at one point. Right. So but you don't get a sense of the scale of this.

Yeah, I mean, before we move on, I guess we're going to talk about a couple of areas here, most notably, like just about around here. But also let's point out, we've got the Broad Street station, huge terminal station right up against City Hall, which is here, the public buildings, right? We're gonna talk about this horrible block of buildings here where something very stupid was built. We're gonna briefly talk about the Watermaker building here, but it's not that important.

And then also, I think that's it. Yeah, the Reading Railroad was also right there. The Reading Railroad terminal becomes, you know, this is up here. This is also a huge building, which is still there, but the trains don't go there anymore. So anyway, you know, this, this is, when you look at this and we're going to show some pictures that look very nice, we do have to remember this is 1895, you know, there's no electricity, there's horse poop everywhere, everyone has gas lighting, right, there's steam trains coming in and out of Broad Street Station. Yeah, till the 1950s, the entire city was just getting bathed on a daily basis with

coal soot. Yeah. No one cleans these buildings. ALICE Again, it's Glasgow's wet Philadelphia, like, all of the 19th century glass-waging tenement buildings and stuff, very very black stone, until the invention of the power washer, and then you realize, oh wait a second, this is sandstone under here, and they're actually quite pressing. RILEY Yeah.

Pressure washers destroy that shit too, so every time you do that you just trim off a little bit of the top. Unless you're very careful, that's part of my job. JUSTIN That's the problem with it, is you think you can do power washing, no, it's actually you need scaffolding, water, and soap. RILEY It's a science. So yeah, I think it's a good place to, you know, start to talk about how various events unfolded is, you know, the centerpiece of the city is City Hall, it's right there, in the middle of town.

Oh yes. It's such a good place. Which is exactly where it should be. This was a good idea. This is the one that he... Am I correct in saying all three of us have worked here? Jun, me, Roz, yeah. which is exactly where it should be. This was a good idea. ALICE This is the one that if you- SEAN I'm not correct in saying all three of us have worked here. Jun, me, Roz, yeah.

RILEY I have not worked in City Hall. SEAN Oh, I thought you had, Jun, okay. ALICE Okay, so, Jun and I need to get jobs in City Hall. RILEY Oh yeah, you can. RILEY My job is municipally adjacent. ALICE This is the building that if you look at it from the right angle it looks like William Penn is like holding his dick in his hand, right?

LIAM He is! He's pissing all over the Phillies 2025 season. And all over the Mets. I will say, I'm fine with whatever the skating rink and all that, but like, coming out of the Broad Street station and just looking up and seeing this building imposing its second empire will on me is absolutely stupendous and it's one of my favorite things about Philly. Gigantic statue. If you like second empire, you will like this building.

Why did you put this line in? Was this simply to taunt me? I love second empire. City Hall is very important to this story, right? So, City Hall... Oh, shit. Hang on. It takes... It takes 30 years to build, 1871 to 1901.

Can't rush perfection. It started to be occupied before they finished it, right? Because, you know, it's just such a big building, right? But even before it was finished, this style of architecture became extremely dated and deeply, deeply unfashionable. And so everyone wants an excuse to get rid of it for a long time. Yeah. And and it's hard to again, like you're in a city where the sidewalk is normal and the tallest one of the tallest buildings ever built is right next to you.

It's the largest municipal, right? It's still the largest municipal building ever constructed. It was the tallest building in the world. Like, it has one of the most, like, it has a complete sculpture program with like over 100 or 200 maybe even sculptures. The whole thing is just lavishly adorned. And it was and all those windows, those are double story windows. So they did the thing where they made the building appear smaller than it is. When you're when you're when you're standing in front of it, it's all mass. Huge, big, really big building. Very, so good. Very, very big building.

Very, very big. Yeah. And yeah, it's really big. It's hard to describe how big it is. Colossal, yeah. Yeah. Also I believe it's still the tallest habitable masonry building. This tower is all, well, up to about here it's all masonry. And then, you know, that is, uh, underneath that were some wooden pile foundations, which

when they went to go build the subway underneath it, they found weren't there anymore, and they just brought it away So yeah, no foundation, but it's heavy So unless the Tartarians are right and there's another 70 stories buried in the mud underneath, I don't know. ALICE We don't know, we lost the technology. ALICE It's like you're looking at the top third of this building, right? JUSTIN Yeah.

RILEY Ross and I watched a video of City Hall under construction in a Tartarian architecture YouTube video. That was my favorite part of the whole thing. ALICE Oh, maybe this is all fake, yeah. Right. And in the background, in the background of the City Hall image, again, just for scale, so that's Broad Street Station. Yes.

And the same, it's the same fucking thing. Broad Street Station was the largest single span train shed ever constructed. It was also a huge building. And if you look at it, it's ginormous. And so it had this big via the trains came in elevator. So it had this huge viaduct that spanned half of a city block going all the way from the river into City Hall. So it covered half of the city, you know, horizontal.

And so that was that was they called it the Chinese wall because all the crossings looked Like you were going to enter the hell death like you see those little tiny teeny verticals there. Those are guys Yeah And so this is broad street station if you remember from one of our Penn Central episodes This is where they kept the rifles in the attic. Oh, I'm sure.

You know, this is a big, old-fashioned stub-ended terminal. You know, you got steam trains coming in and out. You know, and this is sort of something the railroad doesn't like, it's inefficient. If you have a train going from New York City to Washington, DC, it has to come in and has to back out very slowly the whole way to continue its journey. This is why 30th Street Station was built further across the river in order to, you know,

stop that from being necessary. Right, train just continued through. It's a little more inconvenient if you're going to Philly. It's not that bad though. The other thing is they built this building over here, suburban station, as offices to replace the offices in the main terminal, Broad Street Station, and they build it for the suburban trains, which were at this point mostly electric.

So those are all in a tunnel underneath. So yeah, Broad Street Station hangs around for a while, but it's one of these things the city fathers and the railroad want to get rid of. And the main thing that they have problems with this, well, 30th Street Station can't really take steam locomotives and Suburban Station definitely can't take steam locomotives. Although M-Trac tried running diesels in there for a while when they ran the Atlantic City trains. Oh my god. Yeah, so uh.

You like fumes? Yeah. Yeah, it's, he thought it could be worse than, whatchamacallit, Back Bay station. Yep. It sure can be. It's fume. Yeah. Die, motherfucker, die. The result of this was Broad Street station hung around for a lot longer than it should have, you know, from a railroad operations standpoint. By the time Suburban was built, you know, they had realigned most of the tracks to go

directly into there. You still had the big viaduct, the big Chinese wall, with all the tracks on it, they just all jammed down into one track at the end and went on a horrible spur to join the main line as like a temporary thing where they're like okay, sometime soon we can finally get rid of this thing. Yeah. And, oh, and the other thing about the Chinese wall that's important is that, you know, this whole impassable cave that you had to walk through and hope you didn't die under,

really separated the neighborhoods north of Market Street and south of Market Street. I've heard, and I want to believe it, but I doubt that it's true, even if it's apocryphal, that this is where you get wrong side of the tracks from. The whole neighborhood north of Market on this west side of Broad Street, Logan's, Logan Square really had a lot of heavy industry right next to houses in a really weird way. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit. Yeah, and this is, um, this is Frank Furness' biggest building, which obviously is why it was demolished, because everyone, you know, hates him. Of course. Yeah.

And, you know, he was dead, he couldn't shoot you for saying that, at this point. What else? There was one more thing I wanted to say. Chinese wall? You didn't cover that. No. Well, yeah, the Chinese wall is back here, it blocks off development. Unlike, uh, unlike Broad Street Station, the Redding Terminal, which also had a very large train shed, I think the largest extant one in North America, uh, possibly the entire,

like, Western Hemisphere, uh, instead of having just a wall, a masonry foundation, they built a market underneath. That's one of the reasons it's still there. Redding Terminal Market is still very popular. Yeah. Oh, and that was another durable idea. There used to be a market there, and they built the train station. So, um, there's a few other buildings around City Hall, including a very stupid one, the arcade building. This one's so funny. And the arcade building was built sort of speculatively.

Another Frank Furness building, but I think there was a lot of railroad offices in there. Essentially, rather than try and purchase the land on that one block, they just built a very thin building over the sidewalk. ALICE & LIAM Yes! A spike building! This gives me anxiety, with the idea of walking under it gives me anxiety as well. I think that's a point.

Yeah. Oh, and you could also take that- Skybridge, directly to Broad Street station. Yeah, just like one of the weirdo hulking skyscrapers that you had to contend with if you came to Philadelphia in the late 19th century. Hostile architecture, but writ large. Right, and the whole city was kind, hulking like this, right? All those Frank Furness buildings were the buildings.

JUSTIN Yes. LIAM Right. JUSTIN Yes. Come see our buildings, they're all weird, like this also, the John Wanamaker's Grand Depot. Which was a converted early freight depot. It was a freight station that was converted to a department store. This disappears shortly before our story really starts going when the parkway gets built. But it is I don't know.

It's another we're not building. No. And Wanamakers was the first department store in the United States. Right. Like, yes. That this whole all of this stuff is happening all at once right now. Heart of the city. But it's all really chaotic. Like like that building, that building is hugging row houses. You know, like like everything's happening all at once right here. People are still dropping shit on the streets.

You know, there's like dead horses. There's like live horses pulling horrible, you know, whatever. More than live horses pulling carts People are getting run over by trolleys Starlet fever yellow fever dead gay fever West Nile virus being constant fire Yeah Don't forget like old-timey diseases, too. Those were rampant. I just said some fever No, like I'm thinking like like like and something yeah, yeah consumption

That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, exactly so This you know this sort of general congestion leads to movement I think a lot of people should be familiar with which is the city beautiful And like well, so how is this applied in Philadelphia? And the answer to start with is the parkway. Yeah, this is this is our major city, beautiful project. Like it's happening at this moment in American architecture, you know, right after the Colombian exposition, like the Chicago World's Fair, right? 1893, all the cities go, oh, shit, we got to make all of our buildings

look white and beautiful and linear and rigid and axial like this. ALICE Yes. It's gonna be so much light and air you won't notice the horse poop. What if we just, like, cut across this whole grid, and that's a shortcut from William Penn, with his dick in hand, directly to Paris. The city everyone wants to be like. Jason Buehler And so, exactly. Because in the 1920s, really, Philadelphia did have, or in the 1900s, Philadelphia had Parisian, you know, French trained architects

working and designing all of their public parks and green spaces. So, Paul... ALICE The Philadelphia is the Paris of the United States. ZACHary Yes. ALICE Trying to explain this with the, like, thickest Philadelphia accent you've ever heard to a guy who just got here from Paris. And exactly as halting a tone as I did. ZACHARY So, Paul Philipperay design makes these plans for a park, you know, a parkway that leads to the entrance to Fairmount Park, which was another like civil achievement, huge swath of park ground, and then also like the watershed protection mechanism.

All of the park space in Philadelphia is really interesting, especially in this time, because they're acquiring parks. It's a bunch of real estate guys who are acquiring park. And so they're not only doing it to, like, improve their own investments, but they're thinking entrepreneurially like that, which is like, oh, if we put a park here, we put a really, really good park here. We're going to make a really cool section of the neighborhood. People are like, what can imagine that? Yeah.

Who could who could think that actually like well funded, well cared for and beautiful green spaces would be something that people would like and want to live. And so this happens alongside the car, but it doesn't really prioritize the car at first. It really is prioritizing this like Boulevard experience for pedestrians who are going to the big. And they also they also propose an art museum at the other end of this boulevard.

It turns out to be exactly one mile long, which is just kind of a weird, cool thing. The reservoir was obviously up on a hill, so they get to take advantage of that whole Greek temple thing. Yeah, this is, uh, this is, this was the reservoir for the Fairmount Waterworks. Um, you know, so, the, the, the museum is built on top of the Fairmont. Right. Um, and, and it takes a, it takes a while for them to build it, but like, you know, this, this wasn't really designed initially with cars in mind, but very quickly it becomes the road, the car suit, right?

The notion is how do we open up space and get more air into this part of the city? It's also partly slum clearance, because this is the neighborhood where all the Irish Catholics live. Or, sorry, just Catholics. And again, it was the wrong side of the tracks in or sorry, just Catholics. LIAM BOO! ALICE And again, it was the wrong side of the tracks in Philadelphia parlance. JUSTIN Mmm.

And also, there's like, tanneries up here, there's like, all kinds of nasty stuff, I mean, somewhere right back there was the Baldwin Locomotive Works. What else was up here? I'm not super familiar with all the industry that was up here. There was an Ironworks that existed, yeah. Until like, the... Oh. God dammit. The smelly stuff you kept outside the medieval walls.

Right. In fact, the Chinese wall in this case. Right. And all of this is all of the toxic 19th century industry, as opposed to the toxic 18th century industry, because the Schuylkill River side of Philly only really becomes developed after they figure out that there's coal in the Lehigh Valley that they can ship straight to Philadelphia on the river. ALICE Just the 19th century kind of hysterical anti-Catholicism, as being the wrong side

of the tracks, you know, a guy kind of locking the doors on his carriage because he sees someone with a rosary. Like, a priest. RIght, so in the lower right hand... ALICE Philadelphia's just Glasgow! Those people still exist here! RIght, and this is also like like Beaux-Arts architecture, right? Like the architects were Paul Philippe Cray was studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. Like that had been around since 1671, creating

these axial designs for buildings, right? They all form along, like, they're all symmetrical, they all go along a major corridor, and that really explains and displays how you're supposed to go through this space. And that kind of planning continues to be a theme throughout the 1960s and 70s and 80s in some respects. Yeah, and some interesting things happened in that, you know, sort of vein. Like the free library here and the not yet built in this image family court building were direct copies of two buildings in Paris, fronting a similar square.

They were going for it. Yeah. Sometimes people weren't that creative. No, they were like, how do we be more like Paris? Will we simply become parents? You just build the buildings. Yeah, exactly. One for one.

Do you love that? What? What? Paris,, yeah, exactly. It's one for one, dupe, I love that. One in Paris, but she in. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And the, uh, one of the other interesting things about the parkway is, you know, it was not intended to be quite the way it is today. I mean, obviously they finish it, right, it takes a long time to get developed because,

you know, there were more, like, comprehensive visions for this. This is an early one. I forget the exact context of this one, but you can see it would have been flanked by much taller buildings, much more imposing, you know, museums, public buildings, so on and so forth. You got novelists in there. Yeah, you got an obelisk. Yeah, you've got some kind of museum here where the municipal services building is. Broad Street Station has been refaced

with some classical bullshit. It's so funny. They can't quite get rid of the arcade building, apparently. Oh, and those those blocks right behind the arcade building, that little narrow one is Moll Street. And that was like a famous bar block back in the 19 teens. But yeah, this this is a model that they that they made for the parkway when they first rolled it out in 1907 or whatever.

And and apparently on opening day of the model, people just like went crazy around it. Which is a really funny piece of news for me. ALICE And gnashing of teeth. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Taking psychic damage from this thing. RILEY But yeah, the whole notion wasn't that this was like... ALICE Wait, crazy good or crazy bad?

RILEY Oh, no, crazy good. They were all excited for it. ALICE Oh, I was envisioning a kind of Lovecraftian kind of horror, you know, the model out of space. It just started screaming at you. JUSTIN It started speaking in tongues. It's like a Pentecostal service. Someone gets out a box of snakes, you know?

RILEY Oh yeah. No, and it's just, the whole idea of it was to build a museum district and combine all these disparate cultural institutions that were spread all over Center City into one area and really do like a totally beautiful beautifying treatment here. Not like not the what else? It is bullshit nonsense copy of Paris. Yeah, it's not it's not it's not specifically for slum clearance, right? That's like a side goal. The real goal is to make something that's actually gorgeous and fills in this kind of whole angle of the city to the greatest urban park that had been built to date in one place,

or you know, no disrespect to Central Park. I have to be nice to all the parks equally. They're all my children. They're all beautiful. They're all my children. They're all beautiful. They're all my beautiful children. So anyway, they build the damn thing. You can see here's some of the piecemeal construction.

Yeah, you can see the image. That's an image of it under construction. They fucked up the alignment at first, so it cost like a couple twenty extra million dollars than they expected. Um, uh, you can see right next to that up top, that's an image of the neighborhood before they started to actually demolish all the buildings. And because they had to realign it, they ended up taking out a shit tonics. Um, yeah. And also surprising that there's, you know, a lot of, you know,

you, you can see the, some of these are really big single family houses. Some of these are apartments, but some of these are like, you know, rich people. Yeah, yeah. That's super fancy one on the bottom middle slide. That was actually the mayor's house. And like the mayor's house is a funny thing in Philadelphia as a concept, but it's often tied like charismatically

to the actions of that existing mayor. Blankenberg is not- We'll talk about that later a bit, yeah. And then, yeah, you can see a church that they actually moved on rails, but that was really rare, they mostly just tore these buildings down. So, alright, we got this parkway. Right? You can drive on it.

You can keep it. Yeah. And we can start- Parkway, you can park drive on it. You can keep it. Yeah. And we can start- You can park on the- Yeah, you park on the driveway. Oh, here you can see the horrible spur from the Chinese wall onto the new railroad bridge into 30th Street Station. Logan Square becomes Logan Circle.

Yeah, like all these other plans, like they finish they finish the demolition and Then they're like, oh shit, we don't have any more money. What the fuck do we do? Yeah, you'll notice Yeah, no buildings here. This is a vacant lot for development. This is a vacant lot for development Coming soon. This is a vacant lot for development so on and so. Here, the Rodin Museum's been built already. Yeah. Yeah, and then a lot of these remain vacant for 70 years. Jesus. Right, and there's like, you know, again, the accessory parking lots that they have

to demolish, or that they just choose to demolish or whatever. Like, it really does remove a lot of the city, And then it's not really replaced until much, much later. You know, I mean, and and Philadelphia, like, continues to be a manufacturing hub quite successfully. But then it it shit like, you know, when World War One breaks out, they build a giant shipyard down on Hog Island, inadvertently creating the greatest sandwich known to humankind. But that's a huge pork spending project, and then before the shipyard's even done. Yeah, exactly.

That might be why it's called that, honestly. But yeah, before they're even done building the shipyard, the war's over, and the city sunk a shit ton of money in. Just really bad financial mismanagement happens over and over again in the city and through the 19th. But like till the 1950s. Yeah. But that doesn't stop. That doesn't stop people from wanting to go further, which leads us to some of the other ideas for improving the civic center,

namely, let's demolish city hall. Right. These are these are really early renderings. These are from 1924 and they're both done by Paul Kray, who was the architect of all the Fairmount Park properties at the time. And he's already thinking like, again, they have imagine infinite money. Imagine that people are continuing to move to your city. Imagine that everything you want ever gets built. We're going to tear fucking City Hall down.

Nobody likes that thing. It looks like shit. But we can't really figure out how to tear down the tower. So I guess we should get it. It just too big to kill. I was a little too big. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what happens with City Hall. City Hall is a focal point for the parkway they just built. Yeah. Or the City Hall tower.

So that's why all the proposals kept it. Right. But yeah, they want to get rid of the rest of the building and just turn it into a cool traffic circle. Yeah, exactly. You know, this is you know, and you look here, you can see, OK, only a couple of cars are going to be using this at a time, right? Traffic is going to flow great. This is a great idea. Guys, we should do this. This is awesome. a great idea. Guys, we should do this.

This is awesome. Yeah. Then interestingly enough, we see another square, admittedly, with the parkway going directly through it, has already been marked for clearing out. Right. So that was the that the Cray calls that like the Parkway for. So, you know, very early on in the development of the whole thing, the idea of really treating this square as special and important is like a is like a critical part of the design for this part. And the other funny thing is that, you know, Cray is working in this really interesting

time period, right? He goes on to design the Federal Reserve Bank building, like that very modern looking one, but it has the classical detailing. He was like a leading figure in American architecture, until the Nazis stole that shit and used it for themselves, and then you can't build anything that looks like that. Let's get a reverse operation paperclip. Literally. Literally. Take it, take it, you Nazi schwein.

ALICE But yeah, this whole area was given specific attention and it was part of this effort to beautify and reimagine what the center of the city could and should look like. JUSTIN In this drawing as well. No one can get rid of the fucking arcade building, it's still there. ALICE It's stalking November. Waiting for her to walk under it. My god.

Have we considered that the arcade building might be a mimic? Possibly. Possibly. They should put it back. They should just put it back, yeah. People really liked it. And now we skip directly to the 1960s. Yeah.

Oh boy. Buckle up motherfuckers, it's time for some architectural theory. So in the 1960s you produced some of the best and the worst architecture in the contemporary period, right? Often by the same architects, engineers, and designers, there's this thought, in the post-war era, we could have a different relationship with buildings as urban dwellers, right? So y'know, for instance, we're not gonna live in individual buildings anymore, we're gonna live in some kind of megastructure.

Streets in the sky. Streets in the sky. The, whatever the fucking Corbusier building is called. ALICE. Unite, habitation, yeah. RILEY. No, and the other funny thing that happens during this time is that architects start planning in section instead of plan, and so the elevation changes become a big part of

it, the drama of movement through space up and down becomes something they start to consider primarily instead of second. Yeah, so this guy down here is a sketch by a guy we'll talk about in a bit, Ed Bacon, for the Market East development, right? You can see City Hall in the background here. You can't see if the arcade building is there, but I assume it is. It's got to be. You know, and you see like, okay, this is going to be some kind of incredible office building, but then there's going to be a parking deck underneath it. Might not be offices, it might be apartments.

Maybe it's both. Who knows? Then underneath that there's a, there's a bus station, then a ground level, there's pedestrian circulation. Then you can see underneath there is some kind of what we would call regional rail here, and then the Market Street subway is over here, and then you have, you know, malls and public areas over here, right, and this is all in one building. You know, you might live, like,

weeks of your life without leaving this building, you know, if it's design- if it's big as it is, and like, you know, as, uh... Yeah, look how long it's supposed to be. Like, it's supposed to be the whole side of the entire city. People are trying to build, essentially, archaeologies, right? Yeah. Hmm. That's a wing condition, though.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And yeah, here's the thing, we get close. You know, obviously here's a picture of the Barbican, that's a good example of the huge scale of structures people are thinking of. You know, Habitat 67, right? Yeah. Yeah. Up here in Montreal.

A smaller planned community is like Reston, Virginia, up here, you know, where we were building these modernist row houses above a wonderful market square, no cars whatsoever, while they're back there in a parking lot. Resto- the rest of Reston was not built this way, but the good part was. No, and the architects are kind of doing something akin to like city planning and the city planning is kind of doing something similar to architect. You know, they flow much more even. Yeah, exactly.

And you're not necessarily thinking in terms of I'm going to put a building on this lot. You're like, we're going to radically reshape the city in ways that were not possible without technology. We have this now that we have it, you know? Right. Which I guess, yeah, you move into some of the more aggressive examples like lower Manhattan Expressway, this is a Robert Moses project. ALICE And this is Jesus, okay. JUSTIN Yeah.

A great place to put apartments is on top of a highway. ALICE Everyone can get carbon monoxide poisoning. ALICE Real fucking quick. RILEY The important part is that it looks badass. JUSTIN It does look badass. RILEY Yeah. ALICE That may literally be the important part. RILEY Yeah, and then there's Kenzotanga's plan for

the Tokyo Bay, which is a hugely scaled project, just rethinking, oh, well, we just don't even need to worry about building on land, we're gonna build a whole new half of the city. And these are all megastructures, like, in the same kind of vein, they're entire self-contained buildings that are cities. Is this where the Tokyo, the super tall tower project stems from? Yeah. No ca. Oceans are now housing developments.

And then you have the fun proposals. Now you have the fun proposals, you have the fun proposals. Then you have the fun proposals, you have the parodies. Yeah. Yeah, there's the... Super Studios continuous monument. This is an Italian design collective and they're just like, wow, all these buildings are getting really big. What if we just built a building that was a huge glass building that just encircled the entire earth?

Um, I mean, make a lot of things simpler, make some more things more complicated. Which in many ways is every piece of Italian design, y'know? Well, y'know, it seems to have inspired the Saudis. Yeah, but the Saudis don't have the same kind of vision. This is, this is, you know. No, they, yeah, whatever their vision is, it's bad, folks. And what, Arka Graham wanted to do the walking city. Yeah, they did a bunch of these fun proposals.

They're really good drawings, and the idea was, yeah, what if your city was like shaped like a weird little bug guy, and it could move around, it could do everything that you wanted it to, and it could go visit its friends do everything that you wanted it to and it could go visit it's friends. You guys have seen Star Wars right? Which pretty much. It hasn't come out yet but don't worry about that. What's the what's the film with the the the cities that are mobile and eat other cities?

Um. What the hell are you talking about? Not Howl's Moving Castle. No no no it's uh it was a book first. Ah, shit. Alright, hold on. This is gonna be a fun Google search. Cities that eat other cities movie?

Question mark? This is great. This is great podcasting. Are you talking about mortal... Is this Mortal Engines? Is that what you're talking about? Mortal Engines sounds about right. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah. Alright, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, why the fuck not? Right, so this is the moment, really, in cities where, like, you just have infinite ideas, and like, all of the guys are ideas guys. Infinite LSD, which is important. Yeah. I mean, that's a critical training tool for the for the 1960s.

The young architects. Yeah. And creatives back then. Yeah. Right. But so not a creative type. Sorry about that. So you know, the result of this is, okay, we've got lots of new ideas and architecture.

We're going to have different ways of relating to buildings, the city in general. And that's how we go from this to this. JUSTIN Oh. Ugh. RIley Yeah, this is Lou Kahn, crazy Uncle Lou Kahn's traffic proposal for the city of Philadelphia. This is done in the 1950s. ALICE We are going to make... the notes on this slide

are fucking cold. JUSTIN Oh, it's so good. ALICE I'm really enjoying the seeming electromagnets he's creating. JUSTIN Right, so what he says is that we're gonna make Philadelphia pedestrian only in the William Penn part. We're gonna go all the way- we're gonna re-tourne all the way back, and we're gonna put canals in too.

And if you wanna drive to Philadelphia- Philadelphia is the is the Venice of America. I'm always saying that. Exactly. And if you if you want to drive into Philadelphia, that's cool. What you're going to end up at is one of these gigantic spiral shaped parking garages, and that's where you're going to park your stupid fucking car and keep it out of my face. Yes. Yes, exactly. And as we like electric trams to bring you around or you can walk everywhere. car and keep it out of my face. Yes, exactly.

We like electric trams to bring you around or you can walk everywhere. I suppose there'd probably be something with the boats. There are still a few streets on here that seem to be allowing motor traffic, but far, far fewer than there are today. I guess the Vine Street Expressway gets built to also the South Street Expressway. Yeah. Which didn't get built. But this is near close, right? Yeah, very close.

Yeah. That was successfully defeated. But yeah, this is an interesting proposal. It receives a lot of there's a lot of artistic significance put on it. I know that much. I don't know that much about it, to be honest. It's a good idea, though. Yeah, crazy, crazy, crazy.

Uncle Lou Kahn was over here making his crazy drawings and showing it to everybody. Yeah, you got the idea. There's the coils, right? Let's do this. Right. They're like, they're like, wow, this is cool. Nobody's ever going to do this, but this is cool. Well, they actually did do one of them.

Right, Ross? Yes, they actually did do one of them, right, Ross? Yes, they did build this specific parking garage. So that's that's cool. We got this one parking garage out of the strong. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that's that one was supposed to be sort of you were supposed to have direct access from the Vine Street Expressway to that parking garage. And then the feds came in and said that's illegal for some esoteric reason.

So they didn't do it. So you have to drive on surface streets to get there. But that was one of the parking garage proposed. And it is there. It's not spiral either. It's a boring square one, which brings us to the subject of parking garages. My dog's yelling at me to go outside. So, Roz, make your lecture extra long. OK, see what of parking garages. My dog's yelling at me to go outside, so Roz, make your lecture extra long. Okay.

Let's see what I can do here. So parking garages are the worst kind of structure. Number one, because they let people drive cars into cities. That's true. Right? Yeah. They haven't found a way to make one look good yet, and they've tried. Some of the early ones I think looked good, but that was back when they put windows on

them and stuff. Back when they were the temple of the automobile, and then you would drive in and then die immediately of the fumes. Yes, exactly. The worst smog inhalation anyone has ever experienced in the history of anything. But these parking garages, they're generally just bad structures, right? They're not climate controlled, so they're subject to, you know, freeze-thaw cycles. They're not weatherproofed, so they're subject to weathering from precipitation or from road

salt, which is another thing most buildings don't have to deal with. They're subject to these heavy loads in the form of cars, and those cars move around, right? They have to be built as cheaply as possible so they make economic sense, right? Two parking spots is the same floor area as a studio apartment. Jesus. They usually can't be converted to higher and better uses, just due to their sort of construction, you know, ceiling heights, things like that, right?

Also they're beat to shit by the time you want to convert them. You know, and despite these parking garages being, you know, the first experience of a place you get when you go to a location, they are stupid ugly. Like, they're- it's a bizarre way for this. This is essentially your foyer to, you know, any sort of building or location, and it's like, no, you have to go into a horrible warehouse for cars to get here. Right? They also tend not to be built correctly, especially the, the modern precast ones. There's lots of problems with the grout, lots of problems with the minimal, um,

cast in place concrete that is usually put into them. Um, they are usually not well maintained, right? Um, underground garages have all of these problems as well, but they're, you know, not visible to the public and they have additional problems like runoff, right? Y'know, so I can't imagine, like, a deep underground garage. Imagine if you had to clean out the sump. Oh my god. ALICE & LIAM GROANING.

ALICE AND LIAM LAUGH. I'm back, everybody. And so... ALICE & LIAM Did you have about the, um, cause you know automated, like, parking garages, I'm back, everybody. And so... Did you have about the, um, cause you know automated parking garages where your car just gets lifted on a hydraulic thing and stored in... There have been a couple of those, there was one in London that ate somebody's car, and by ate I don't mean it destroyed the car, what I mean is it stored it irretrievably.

And when they sued to be like, I want my car back, it is trapped in your car labyrinth, you put it in the fucking car jail from car and door. I'm sorry, it got eaten by the car minotaur. Or the minic- car. Because it requires a series of precise moves to get the thing out, you have to do basically the plot of the movie Cube to get your car back. They had to tell that person, yeah, sorry, your car, we can get you your car back in four years time. And there's no way to get there ahead of that other than just, I guess, demolishing the entire parking garage to, like, breach in and rescue your car.

Your car is just trapped. Your car is going through a multi-year experience with this. Oh my god. I mean, yeah, I suppose that makes sense for that kind of garage. I mean, it's weird that they had a specific date on that, but I suppose that's, you know, another thing about parking garages is, you know, because of all these problems they have with them, they tend to have very short lifespans, right? Um, you know, we're talking like 30, 40 years tops, cause they just get beat to shit and they're not necessarily built that well to begin with.

And of course we're in a situation where everyone's getting electric cars and, you know, rather than doing the same thing, which is, oh, maybe we make the cars a bit lighter. Maybe we, you know, we than doing the same thing, which is, well, maybe we make the cars a bit lighter. Maybe we, you know, we take advantage of some efficiencies, especially when energy is, you know, likely to be more scarce in the future. It's like, no, everyone's buying electric SUVs. So the car parks are put under more strain. So, you know, I expect, I just have a quick aside.

The thing that really pisses me off about electric cars now is the honking ginormous like electric SUVs with the Hummer EV and the Cadillac Escalade EV version that weigh 9,000 fucking pounds and yet can get from zero to 60 in 4.5 seconds. It's like the F-150 Lightning that the guy used to do the terrorist attack in New Orleans. I am firm believer in going fast, recklessly fast. However, I am not a believer in endangering people besides myself to do it. I believe that I should be put in charge of the Federal Highway Authority and I will, I will regulate electric cars so that you get 20 horsepower, everyone drives an electric

dishevel and the streets are made much safer. You only need to go sixty! What do you care? Except for me, I get an exemption. ALICE You're the safer driver, yeah. NICHOLAS Yes, thank you, November. ALICE Yeah, of course. JUSTIN So, yeah, the result of this is these buildings

tend to be, need to be replaced relatively frequently, compared to a lot of other kinds of buildings which are climate controlled or, you know, otherwise have these sorts of, you know, they're easier to maintain than they have less of a shelf or they have more of a, you know, a life to them. So naturally, if you're going to build a grand civic plaza, you build it on top of an underground parking garage. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, right.

So, you know, we've now covered the two main constituent parts of our episode, right? We accidentally made the giant traffic car sewer, and then we accidentally fucked up and forgot to put a place to put all the cars like like Lou Con one. So crazy, crazy, old uncle Lou Con. So what happened? So it slightly before crazy uncle Lou Con starts his drawing in 1948, the newspapers start to like do the thing where they're like, surely all of the citizens agree that we simply must have more legal underground municipal parking garages in Philadelphia.

And back in those days, like we'll talk about in a minute, the process for getting anything done in Philly had to go through the state legislature. So in order to legalize the building of underground parking garages, it had to go through that. Where they originally had planned to site it was right next to that Parkway Four Court area from earlier. You can see it, it was always supposed to be kind of like bisected by the road.

This is what was called Rayburn Plaza, and it had a municipal bandstand on it. And later it's called Thomas Payne Plaza because Thomas Payne allegedly did Common Sense. But it was always this kind of place of public. And then and then went on a podcast about Philadelphia sports. Absolutely. Big shout out.

Oh, yeah. Ten thousand losses where I feel a little guilty because I told Tom I couldn't record today and then Awww. Yeah, 10,000 losses. I feel a little guilty, cause I told Tom I couldn't record today, and then Ra got pressed into service with fucking AirPods today, cause Ra DM'd us last night, like, hey, can we record today? And I was like, motherfuck. I gotta get the slop out. 10,000 losses does not pay my bills, this slop does.

Hello hogs, thank you. ALICE I really like doing this show. LIAM Me too. RILEY I always have a great time. LIAM Oh man. You were saying, I'm sorry. RILEY No no no no. So okay, they finally get the legislation passed, The city takes out a two million dollar loan to start the construction

of two nine hundred space parking garages. That's your return on investment there. They start to get to work and about a month later, they decide to pause the plan. And then a month after that, they just shelve it entirely. My favorite part is in the in the one where they finally like, you know, say, okay, we're not we're not going to do this right now. The second paragraph down here, the city traffic engineers stress that but more parking by motorists at such outlying points as all of the transit terminals would really help because such drivers can board

high speed transit facilities at those locations and get to the center city area as quickly as they could their automobiles. The guys are like, uh, did you think about taking the train? JUSTIN Yeah, just take the fucking train! Just take the fucking train! RILEY So we ran the numbers and I think you just need to take the fucking train. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, it's surprising how, you know, it took so long for the city fathers to become car brand. It happened eventually. But but here it was like, no, no, put it put

it at 69th Street Terminal. Come on, what are you doing? Yeah. And so like this idea, like all other Philadelphia ideas is like horror horrifically durable, right? So they actually end up excavating out this building's base in order to make this parking garage thing, but they don't ever get the money authorized to build the actual parking garage thing. It becomes the big cavern basement of the municipal services building. ALICE. Big home.

Big home. I've been in it, it's a big hole. RILEY. It's a big hole. Big hole. Big hole. I've been in it, it's a big hole. It's a crazy space. You know how the, you know, you look at, like, the Ottomans, for instance, having the huge like cisterns or whatever under Istanbul, or like any of the kind of like, Japanese like, stormwater cavern things. And you go, wow, that's incredible they built that. Do you think future civilizations will be like, ah, they probably just couldn't get

the appropriations to put whatever they actually wanted to put in here in? Yes. Exactly. We think this was some kind of storage basement, dunno. So this is the state of the area coming into the 1950s and 60s. You have a- Yeah, the one thing I just want to add about this is that this underground parking garage movement thing actually ends up creating the modern Philadelphia NIMBY movement on

accident in because they propose one for Rittenhouse Square, but that's a whole nother story. Yeah, so we got we got a big hole in the ground. We got a parkway which is now jamming cars into Center City. We've got City Hall and Broad Street Station. Broad Street Station at this point, not necessarily useful. The arcade building is still there. ALICE Oh, poor November. ALICE I'm never gonna triumph over this building, you know.

JUSTIN And now we have to introduce our cast of characters. ALICE At only an hour and twenty-six. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE Why won't you get deaf? ZACH These are the players of the story. cast of characters. Yes. At only an hour and 26. Yeah. Oh, you're deaf. These are the players of the story. Yeah. I don't recognize this tarot deck.

Oh, uh, Roz and I made this up the other night. Yeah. It's really good. Let's start with the priest. That's right. Edmund Bacon. Woooooooooooooo That's an alarmingly shaped man. Alright. You wanna make your case, Liam?

So from what I understand of him, he's the intellectualization of what Robert Moses couldn't do. Ah! See? Yes and no. Okay, well again, I don't understand as much as you do, Irving Sending's on my forte, but I'll kill you, Roz. So dead, buddy.

That is a shape of forehead I've never seen before. Could the estrogen have saved her? You have seen that forehead before, if you've seen movie films. Yeah. Movie films. Yeah. Movie films. Yeah. Kevin Bacon. No shit, really? Yeah.

He's Kevin Bacon's dad. What the fu- the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon applies to urban planning? Yes. Yeah. And Kevin Bacon likes to say the only reason he busted his ass being an actor was because his dad worked twice as hard. Which means that Ed Bacon must have been crazy. As you can probably imagine.

Yeah, I mean, all the people in this, all the people we're discussing today have alarmingly low Kevin Bacon numbers. But like, so, so Liam, I think the Robert Moses comparison is pretty like fair, right? In a lot of respects, right? They're both working with huge, huge swaths of land. They're able to really wield the concept of redesigning and redeveloping the city. But that's kind of where it starts and stops. Because because Bacon, Bacon wasn't an autocrat. He worked in collaboration with

all of the people involved in the city from top to bottom, right? So, that's not only like, y'know, he actually gets kicked out of Flint, Michigan for being accused of being a communist. So he comes to Philadelphia and- ALICE Not a difficult thing to do in those days. RILEY Of course. As was the style of the time. JUSTIN He was in charge of the housing association there, right? Trying to get public housing built, but not in ways that were amenable to real estate. RILEY Yeah, no, I think he was just head of city

planning. Like, he's a, y'know, he was a classic classic Philadelphia Quaker in all of that conservative, like, kind of, Stead-type of way. We went to the same high school together. Just so you know. Yeah, the big thing about Bacon compared to Robert Moses is Ed Bacon is through and through he's an academic, right? As opposed to Robert Moses, who got the opposite of an education, which

is a PhD in political science from Columbia. Oh, that's not real. Okay, yeah, fair enough. You know, he knows history, he knows theory, and he's very, very good at it. Yeah. And so, the two things that happen here, like, so Ed Bacon's senior thesis when he's an architecture student at Cornell is to design a civic center for Philadelphia. Like he's taking this idea that started in 1907 with the Parkway, and he's thinking, okay, how do we actually finish this thing so that it becomes something much, much grand? And look here, Roz, he even just says, let's get rid of fucking City Hall.

Yeah, he's also saying, yeah, we'll get rid of City Hall. He also draws one of the most phallic plazas that I've actually seen. And usually when I think people say like the architecture is a dick metaphor thing, I'm like, you're full of shit. But this this one's my. No, it's just it's not even a metaphor. It's just to be that. So you see the you see the black dot at the tip of it, right? That was a fountain. And the whole point was to be this central radiating pivot point from which one would

spurt up the Ben Franklin Park. Oh, spurt up the Ben Franklin. Uh huh. Yeah. And, you know, just create this beautiful canal of a public space that goes all the way to the, you know, metaphorical art museum A. JUSTIN Obviously, these colonnaded arcades down here, that's the hair on the balls.

ARIEL Right. And that's actually, so it's a common misconception, that's actually where the municipal employees are stored in urban planning. ALICE. Civil deference, if you will, yes. RILEY. Hi Bruce. Sorry.

And so yeah, like, just, Bacon's been working on this whole notion of how do we actually fix Philadelphia for his entire, his entire professional life, and he becomes the head of city planning and he's suddenly in a position to actually do it, thanks to some of the other characters. You got anything else for this one, Roz? Oh, you know, I mean, we're gonna see this project through in a bit, but yeah, he's able to... He is able to see this project through over a very long period of time.

But I think the big... One of the big things is the way he works is very radical in an era of, like, the prevailing opinion in municipal planning is, you know, any building over forty years old is unsalvageable in a shit box and it has to be demolished. Right? Sure. Okay. Eligible in a shit box and it has to be demolished. Yeah, sure You know, this is during a contemporaneously to this the whole city of Denver demolishes itself, right? Okay, just for attention. There was no city of Denver for like ten years

because they thought you know, all we got to do is wipe out these old buildings and You know private development will come in. If we don't build it, they will come, right. Yeah, yeah, private development will come in and build better buildings. And then that just didn't happen. So you know, this, the bacon is much more like, we're going to come in, we're going to, you know, we're going to fix what can be fixed, we're going to change what needs

to be changed. One of his big inspirations, you know, if you read his book, Design of Cities, which I couldn't find my copy of, was, you know, the great Pope slash Mayor, Sixtus V. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Future, future No Gods No Mairs episode. Unless he's already been one, and I just have blanked that from memory. RILEY I think you did one who was in the same range of years, but it wasn't Sixtus V.

ALICE We've done A Pope before, certainly. RILEY Sixtus V plans the renovation of Rome, right, I've just gotta... this is a big inspiration for Bacon. And the whole idea are, you know, grand boulevards through the old city, and they're anchored by various monuments. They're gonna be churches, they're gonna be obelisks, they're gonna be, you know, visual points, landmarks, the Coliseum, so on and so forth, which are going to sort of let you know where you are in the city and how to Get around without a map even yeah, right. It's a wayfinding system

Pretty much and the thing that the thing that Bacon does with six is the fifth is well The thing that he does in Philadelphia is he unites all the parts right this? The city leaders, the architects, the planners, like the business leaders, like he figures out how to get them all aligned around a single idea. And he also gets them to believe the pithy line that Rome wasn't built in a day, because he walks through in agonizing detail, like, okay, six this cleared out the cleared out the streets, and he referred to them as highways, which I think is really interesting. But he's like, pick six, six this cleared out the streets and put down obelisks. And then over the next 100 or 200 years, various other architects came in to finish the plan. And

so, you know, connecting it back to this whole notion of like, okay, well, you exist in the context of all that has come before you and all that will, you know, will come to be. That was very much a part of what he was selling to people and people were buying. Yeah, it's as opposed to Robert Moses who just fell out of the coconut tree. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah, so he's drawing on much of this old tradition, but he's also, again, very

modern, we go back to this Market East plan, this is one of his drawings, about like, okay, we're doing something new and radical as well. We're doing something that, you know, is very much of the 60s. Very much, it's, it is very much, you know, of its time, it's of, you know, contemporary architecture. You know, we're going to have modern rapid transit. We're going to have shopping centers. We're going to have offices. We're going to pedestrianize Chestnut Street, or we're going to put, we're going to make it rapid transit only. It was only buses for quite a long time.

We're gonna have these new kinds of row houses. We're going to renovate what can be renovated in Society Hill, but also encourage new development. Society Hill towers, things like that. He plans Lake Gala, the great Northeast, so on and so forth, the Northeast section of the city that was still largely undeveloped in the 60s. Yeah. And Society Hill was a really it predates this

this like intentional city planning process by a little bit. But he really did have just like total rain over redesigning the city. And he took that responsibility very seriously. So like exactly Society Hill was one of the first urban redevelopment projects. And instead of doing the Pruitt Igoe, we knocked down three city blocks. We build a mega tower. It was selective site by site demolition of the homes that were actually

in true disrepair. And admittedly, you can see here society Hill towers. They did do some really big buildings, but that was the exception, not the rule. Right. And that was that was a centerpiece and that was a way finding point. And that was this that the other thing that goes back to these larger notions of how you see a city. There's also an interesting story here where that was the site of the Dock Street Market, which was the, you know, a market that set up contemporaneously

with like colonial Philadelphia and then guys were just driving trucks into it to get their growth, you know, to get their wholesale grocery. So that was totally crowded. Yes. And I really love the society Hill. He puts a greenway in. So it's a pedestrian eyes separate walking path through the city. And they front

up on the buildings. It's really, really, you know, different, interesting, eclectic. It takes you all through society hill, and it separates you physically as a pedestrian from vehicular traffic in a way that wasn't really in the kind of zeitgeist of urban planning for another 20 or thirty years. JUSTIN Yeah, it's very different from a Robert Moses proposal that would be, eh, shove a highway through it, it'll be fine. LIAM Sofiel! JUSTIN Yeah, put some housing towers in. So that's Bacon, he's academic, he takes his responsibilities seriously, he's good at getting

people to work together over a very long period of time. Now we talk about our next guy, the Alchemist. Yeah. Vincent Kling, Vincent Kling, an architect, an architect who gets no respect today and absolutely none. And like Frank Furness, almost all of his best works are torn down or modified beyond recognition. But but Kling was Kling was equally important to the design of the whole thing.

Yes. Bacon doesn't think of himself as a architect. He thinks of what the city planning is, is the stuff that puts a city together, that architecture follows. But Kling is actually the architect, so he's given license to actually make these projects around City Hall happen. Yeah, and you would think that you would go to, at this time, Philadelphia's greatest

living architect, Louis Kahn. Crazy Uncle Louis Kahn. Crazy Uncle Louis Kahn. And they do! And he designs whatever this thing is. It's so fucking cool. Right, so, Luke Khan actually did mostly speak in riddles. He would say stuff like, the street is a room by agreement.

Or in a small room, one does not say what one would in a large room. He has a whole monologue about what a brick wants to be versus what you can do with a brick and how you- I mean, listen. Of course. So he whomst among us, though. Yeah, but he still puts those big post-tensioned, you know, slabs through the arch, you know? So is that brick really being an arch?

I don't know. Impossible to say. So, you know, he has this big Thing here is that okay, you know We need some buildings and some serious design for the Civic Center which involves things like office buildings Right as opposed to again whatever this thing is And look how serious he looks talking about And look how serious he looks talking about it. You can just imagine him being like, this building will change the way that people go

to buildings forever and ever and the rest of their lives, and I didn't make this in the last 24 hours with Ken. And you're looking at him like, this man is- I've slept more recently than the last two or three days, yeah. And you're looking at this like this man is dangerously insane. There goes crazy Uncle Little Totty. He has made this out of straws. This is not a serious person.

I don't feel especially safe around this man, let's do it. So you know, Ed Bacon and the planning team are like, okay, let's go to a guy who could design a floor plate. JUSTIN Yeah. This building is so, is like everything else from this movement. It's so so goddamn good, and it's so so neglected by the people who are entrusted to maintain and provide. I've only been in municipal services building in one of them

in one of the office parts once. And it's got the flavor of fluorescent lighting that just immediately makes you go insane. The municipal services municipal services building. This is, I think, one of the greatest buildings we got. I mean, this is also, this rendering goes really hard. I love it. Oh my God. Right across the street from City Hall.

Municipal services is the one that used to have the big Frank Rizzo statue about in front of it. Anyway, you know, it's all like board formed concrete. It has wonderful, like nice stone stone finishes inside, in all the elevator lobbies, in the main lobby, in the basement. Gorgeous finishes. The basement is where there's all the, because they excavated that whole area, that's where you go to stand in line to get permits from the city for building stuff, or, you know, a change your water service, or more frequently... You can't do that, don't worry, you can't do that.

More frequently you hire someone to stand in line for you, because it's not the most efficient system down there. It's not a system down there, Ross, it's a fuckin' labyrinth of a minotaur that gores you. Welcome to the Utah, welcome to MSP! Welcome to the municipal services building. Fuck you. And they literally they literally print you off a piece of receipt paper with your number on it and it is the waiting room.

It's kind of fun if you have nothing to do all day. But but like like everything else with this with this stuff like the idea of oh you simply go to one place to get any kind of permit done or interface with any kind of city department customer service desk. That makes sense. The execution of it is hell. ALICE This is the kind of socialism I want, and support. This is actually existing socialism, the basement that could have been full of cars, but is instead full of people waiting for permits.

What kind of permit? All of them. LIAM All of them. All of them. All of them. You know what else? You know what else? The elevators are really fast. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Okay. But yeah, so this is, um, so anyway, uh, municipal service is a very good building. Um, and yeah, so Kling is given control over just a huge amount of space. Um. Yeah, and again... All you have to do, to do this, is not talk in riddles, and be capable of designing a building that you can sell space in.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about Kling, you know, Luke Kahn was more like, you know, he gets into more radical architecture early. Vincent Kling is like, you know, I'm going to go work for SOM for a while and design a couple of buildings and then start my own firm. And, you know, that works out for him. Yeah. And again, Kling has given full rein of all the parts that Ed Bacon has been like salivating over and trying to like un-bucculate. Hi, it's Justin. know, trying to like un-fuck you. The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks you get what you pay for It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes So you can learn about exciting topics like guns pick up trucks or pick up trucks with guns on them The money we raise through patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't.

It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. Hey look, Roz, what's there? The arcade building. The arcade building. The arcade building is still there! So yeah. Oh guess what?

Kling is the only man who can do battle with it, and he kills it. And he does. Yes! Alright, this man is my knight errant now. I'm gonna bestow upon him like a favor, like a little ribbon or something out of my hair. Ideal. You see this huge atrium here is on the location of the arcade building. Hitler dead, what new.

Yeah. RILEY No, and so he designs all these giant civic spaces and the buildings that are in between them, right? So the clothespin right below that is the, that's the way you get into the underground concourse, right? So it follows this whole thing that Ed Bacon's been trying to get done, where you have these monument obelisk type shapes that draw you to a specific place if you need wayfinding. And it's the same thing with the fountain in Love Park. It's very, very tall because it creates this point of axis between the parkway and the city hall complex. And then after that, that's what the artwork is, right? Then you get to fill the space in with artwork that then sustains itself, like the love sculpture,

the clothespin, my favorite, and it's one of my most mourned pieces of Philadelphia public art, but this sculpture series called Your Move, of all the game pieces... Oh yeah, me too! Yeah. So it is an intentional reference to this notion of Rayburn Plaza, that place with the bandstand on it, being a place of performance and play and entertainment. Like, those, the specific pieces they have, they have some checkerboards that are supposed to be bandstands. And it's so much fun, you know, you have all these giant household

trinkets lying around and it's really beautiful artwork. And they're really beautiful public plazas that are simply not well maintained as public spaces. This is one of my favorites here was Dilworth Plaza. Big sunken Plaza. You can see it fronts Municipal Services building. There's a big waterfall here that drops down a story. You got some public art. All these arcades here, these interface with the concourse, which was, you know, sort of a big underground series of pedestrian walkways that link basically every building, you know, in the, you know, in the civic area, but also all the way down

Market Street for quite a ways. And it only, they only started to close it up during, it's the saddest thing. You used to be able to just walk in. And again, it's on alignment with municipal services building. This is, this is Beaux-Arts architecture. It's just executed in concrete. Right. All of this stuff is about creating a grand access and grand viewpoints and really highlighting and celebrating parts of your city.

It sounds kind of stupid and it sounds hokey because it's aspirational. But like, I dunno, maybe I just think it's neat, but I think this is beautiful. It is. And, y'know, the game sculptures are kind of whimsical, y'know? And I appreciate some whimsy. Yeah. So, but at this time, although this is, y'know, theory, right, so we have to introduce our next character. Richardson Dilworth. That's right. I beg your pardon. Oh, this is, you know, theory, right? So we have to introduce our next character.

Richardson-Dillworth. That's right. I beg your pardon? Oh, boy. I'm sorry. Richardson-Dillworth, no. Richardson-Dillworth, okay, sure. Richardson-Dillworth.

Richardson-Dillworth. This is a certified Richardson-Dillworth moment. The last WASP mayor of Philadelphia. This is a certified Dillworth b-b-b-b-b-banger, banger, banger. Certified Dillworth bangers were all over the place in the 1950s. I don't like the sound of that. No, because because you know, you have the you have the vague two types of mayors in

Philadelphia theory that I've been cooking on where you have the you know, you have the autocrat, you know, the charismatic leader and cheerleader and guy who gets stuff done. And then you have basically like the fixer and the technocrat, right? Somebody who's trying to figure out how to fix all these things and just keep things going. And then, you know, unfortunately, like Jim Kenny, sometimes you just get burned out and never want to be mayor ever again. So sad sometimes. So sad sometimes. So sad sometimes.

But yeah, so Dilworth really, so, you know, Roz, you should talk about the city charter part, but Dilworth was always at the ribbon cutting, he was always making new big projects happen, and, you know, all these, all these civic leaders in the 1950s were all, you know, full-throated gung-ho support of each other. So they weren't, they weren't like having these kind of intra-group disputes. They were all on the same page and they all work with each other to make these things. That didn't hurt that there was a lot of money for these projects available. Oh, a ton of money.

And the city could still borrow shit tons of money. One of the things that helped that was something strange that happened in 1951, which was the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter. Right? And this essentially changes- Yeah, he finally got rid of the British yoke. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The British in this case lived in Harrisburg.

Brits out of Philadelphia. Yeah. This essentially- Oh, ironically, yes. Yeah. Yeah. From this, essentially what the Home Rule Charter does is it changes the legal status of the city, city government from, you know, you can only do what the Commonwealth explicitly allows to the converse of that. You can do anything the Commonwealth doesn't explicitly disallow, right? So over time this results in sort of this political situation where suddenly, you know,

state senator Jim Shittman from Arnpittsville, Crawford County, suddenly takes, you know, extreme interest in the local politics of Philadelphia, which is a city he hates, except that when it's, you know, politically convenient to, like, defund orphanages or something, in the name of working people, or, you know, say that, I don't know, bus drivers are essentially chauffeurs for wealthy Philadelphians, right? You know? But that takes a while to happen. For the moment when Dilworth takes charge, he's the second mayor under the Home Rule Charter, you know, and the Home Rule Charter does something very funny, and I don't understand why it happened, which is the city had elected consistently Republican mayors and city councils right up until 1951. And the whole thing just flips instantly to the Democrats, you know,

and it's because they got this done. They got done something big and exciting and that they were saying was going to change people's lives. And there had been a lot of like focus on suburbanization at that point. You know, people were still leaving the city. They were going to Levittown, they were going to the main line, they were going to, I don't know, like, Seacane or somewhere, right? You know, Dilworth's is like, you know, we're gonna build a new mayor's residence. I don't know if it was a mayor's residence or just his house. No, it's always a personal home.

There is no Philadelphia mayor's residence. So Dilworth moves into this section of the city that they're going to redevelop next, which is now called Washington Square West. Yes, he has a very strong show of confidence by building a brand new 17th century house. Or 18th century, excuse me. Right on Washington Square, where they're about to do all this redevelopment, and it's like, okay, you know, listen, I'm gonna deal with all the construction noise as well, but we're gonna do this, we're gonna do these fucking projects.

This is going forward. Right. And so Jane Jacobs, who writes about the Philadelphia public squares in 1961, refers to Washington Square specifically as a pervert part. And so that's, you know, after this house was built. So that that that bet took a little while to pay off. Then also shown here is one of the earliest parts of this whole scheme to get completed, this is within the confines of Love Park, is the Welcome Center, which is this big UFO-shaped thing. ALICE Hell yeah.

RIght? It's pretty cool, it's the only thing that's still there. ALICE Greetings Earth, from Philadelphia. RIght. ALICE Yeah. It was inspired by those World's Fair buildings, in the 1960s. ALICE Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was inspired by like those World's Fair buildings in the 1960s. Oh yeah. So Dilworth is the guy who kicks this all off, but then we need the mechanic.

James Tate. Yeah, so James Tate is the other kind of Philadelphia mayor. The one that comes in and fixes everything. And we barely have any photographic evidence that he even existed, because he was probably too busy just putting out fires every day. All the all the all the Home Rule Charter stuff, you know, that's like six years old now. It's just long enough to create some like serious structural problems with the stuff

that he's got to fix. But he's really good at what he does and he keeps carrying on the work. So a lot of the projects that get proposed under this first city plan that Ed Bacon puts together in 1954, those actually start to get done now. You can see, like, the sports complex starting, and you can see the sports complex getting finished down here. You can see the Broad Street line getting extended. You can see... You know, I think that happens a bit later or they don't lay the trackways

for a long time. You can see here's finally they're excavating Love Park so they can finish this design with, you know, five stories of parking underneath it, which is a good idea. And you can see municipal services under construction and nearing completion at this point. I don't know much about James Tate at all other than he was our first Catholic mayor in what had always been a very Catholic city. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to get information about this guy. I mean, he was he was part of the same movement. So,

you know, like, like many other municipalities. When Dilworth was mayor, Tate was the head of city council. They had the plan of succession, they're all working collaboratively together to make Philadelphia pretty goddamn cool. ALICE The Wasps did damn nausea mem memore to him. Yeah. Yeah. So Tate is, he's out here, he's pulling the levers, he's twisting the dials, he's making sure this project is just gonna keep going forward through this whole time, but Tate is also like, he has an appointed successor. And no one could have stopped this from happening. Oh right.

Yeah. I'll right. Yeah. I'll tell this story. So what happens is, James Tate actually ends up serving ten years. You're supposed to be term limited to two terms as a Philadelphia mayor. That sounds like he was in prison. No. Not a good behavior. Well, no.

Back in, okay, so back in the... You walk into City Hall with the sash and the first guy's like, what'd you get? Back in the 1700s, back in the 1700s, being mayor of Philadelphia was a punishment that your friends gave you because it was not a salaried position. You had to do it and not get paid for it. And so there were guys who were like, yeah, you know what, I'm just not gonna do it, I'm gonna pay the fine instead. That-

It's the guy who didn't wanna be Pope. Yeah, exactly. And no, and there's one guy- So it was the other guy, yeah. There's one guy who keeps getting re-elected over and over and over and over and over and over. So yeah, anyway, when Tate is wrapping up his term, which included two extra years from Dilworth, he, about a month before the election is supposed to happen, he talks about- no, wait, Roz, we should save this for later,

right? Okay, no, we can do it now, or whatever. He's nothing. So, what happens is, there's a chief of police named Mayor Frank Rizzo, who will come into our story very soon. ALICE Yeah, future No Gods No Mas episode, of course. And a chief of the fire department, who was his brother. RIZZO So, Tate hosts a press conference a month before the election happens, and he goes, hey yeah, so, um, I'm going to retire and, uh, Frank Rizzo is in charge now, a month before the election happens. And so all the news reporters start asking all of the procedural parliamentarian questions

like, wait a minute, sir, is that really how that works? That can't be what's happening. And he's like, yeah, well anyways, I'm retiring now. And so that's how he gets out of political office. Yeah. He's like, dang, give to Frank. Yeah. Which leads us to...

The Fool. The Fool. The King. The King slash Fool. Frank Rizzo. The man himself. The world's widest man. Oh yeah.

The worst to ever do it. No, truly. I am going to say, do we want to continue, I may have to drop soon. Corinne's going to be home soon and I would like to hang out with my wife. We can do that. Or do you want to keep going? The decline is gonna be pretty quick. Let's just keep going.

I don't know. Yeah. Okay. I'll is gonna be pretty quick. Alright, let's just keep going. I don't know. Yeah. Okay. I'll drop if I have to. Just giving up on podcasting to hang out with your wife, I sacrificed so much wife time for this podcast. And the reason why, the reason why is because this pays for me to get my wife nice things. Which is a joy beyond imagining.

So thank you all for funding my wife. My hands look like this, so hers gonna... My hands look just carpal tunneled. My hands look completely normal, so that her hands can look like this, and it's just like festooned with rings. Go fund my wife. Stop funding my wife, please. Stop funding my wife, please. Stop funding my wife. Right.

So Rizzo's a terrifying and incredible figure in American politics. Rizzo redefined, I think, what a mare is. Rizzo is, I mean, he is, in my mind, the epitome of a mayoral archetype, which is the strong man. Oh, yes. Yeah. archetype, which is the strongman. Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah. So he comes up through the police department. There's a really great documentary.

Oh, it's a good song. Yeah, there's a really great documentary called Amateur Night at City Hall, the Frank Rizzo story. I highly recommend it. It's so good. It's so good. And so Rizzo's rise comes up from him being a strong man cop who knew how to get in front of the camera at all of the crime scenes.

So in that lower left-hand image, right in the crook of his tuxedo jacket, that's a nightstick. He left the social function to go see what the cops were doing when the news cameras. The one above that, he got to star on a cop again to TV show from the 1960s called Lawbrick. He just knew how to play the news media. And, you know, it's almost one of those things where he's the blueprint for

Donald Trump. But he's also like, thank God Donald Trump didn't know about the Frank Faisal blueprint. Thank God he wasn't that good. Yeah. I mean, he was, he was incredible at like just, you know, bullshitting in such a way that the media would listen to him. Yeah. And so he would, and he would say like crazy press quotes that, you know, activated all

the people in South Philadelphia who were scared, dealing with dealing with all of the, you know, depopulation that happens because of white flight in the 1960s, you know, and and also bizarre quotes like I never saw my mother naked. Right. And then on is on the on the campaign on the campaign trail, he says, you guys just wait and see. I'm gonna make Attila the Hun look like a f***. Just crazy shit. ALICE I don't know if you can be saying that, Frank Rizzo. RIZZO Frank Rizzo, and see, Nova, that's the thing,

Frank Rizzo says whatever he wants, he speaks in the third person, and Frank Rizzo loves it. And all the people who Frank Rizzo loves love it too. The funniest part about all this is he does these crazy long news press conferences, you know, he'll just do these constantly. And then the radios will just play him talking for three hours. And so during one of these press conferences, he makes like a I forget what the lies about. But he he pulls the old Donnie Trump on.

So he says, I'll go down justifying that to my grave. I will always say that. I definitely said that and I meant the truth by it. If anybody wants to catch me on it, I'll take a lie detector test and it'll show that I was telling the truth. And so they strap him to a lie detector test and it'll show that I was telling the truth. And so, they strap him to a lie detector test. And he loses. Oh, Frank Rizzo.

But, you know, all these scandals, even the group of young student Democrats who were trying to get him recalled in the election. The only thing that actually makes him unpopular as a mayor and makes him lose his mayorship is he switches parties to try to become a member of Richard Nixon's cabinet. And that's finally the thing. He switches to becoming Republican. He supported Nixon even when he was a Democrat. He was pals with Nixon. One of the things that he gets done as a result is he manages to get the last of the funding

out of the Urban Mass Transit Administration to get the Center City Commuter Connection built. You can see the groundbreaking down here, which is the thing that unified all the commuter railroads in Philadelphia into a through-running S-Bahn type service. Also is this... What's his face? JUSTIN Yeah, that's Thatch. That's Thatch. Okay, so that's...

ALICE So Frank Rizzo was the only rat to try and climb a boarder sinking ship. ALICE Yeah, he did, to some extent, but the ship still sank. But he, uh, he, I mean, the other thing, we had to talk about Rizzo, extremely racist, major police beatdowns, everything. He's the mayor who shot up the move house and then had it demolished. No, no he's not. The first move house, not the second move house. Oh yeah, right, excuse me, thank you. My bad, yeah.

We were both ready to go with that shit. He shoots up the Palleton Village move house. Yes, yes, 32nd and Spring Garden, right? Yeah, and it doesn't get better from there. 32nd and Spring Garden, right? Yeah, and it doesn't get better from there. And you know, the police get very aggressive and violent during this era, and the city is not better off for it. I mean, this is, this ultimately doesn't work.

Yeah. So the police, you know, and it's the cyclical thing, right? The police become violent, and then the, you know, and then the people who are reading the news or listening to these radio broadcasts think, holy shit, it's so scary out here because Frank Rizzo is telling me how terrified I should be.

And so it pretty much rapidly accelerates what was a slow depopulation of Philadelphia, which of course leads to lower tax revenues and lower abilities to pay for things. Oh, and then he hired like a shit ton of people just to have like random make work jobs. Like if anybody called him and was like, I knew you when I was when you were a police officer. Can I have a job, please? He'd be like, yeah, sure. Which, again, I don't disagree with as a theory, but it completely bankrupted the city because we just do the ass.

We're doing it right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so he really he really just creates this this bad situation in the city where it's like every year is worse than the last year. Every year, the city gets more dangerous. Every year, the cops get more violent and unhinged. And they're and they're empowered to and, you, and it doesn't lead to any better outcomes. But he also guts the Fairmount Park Commission,

which is like the first in a long, long line of cuts. He slashes their budget by 50% because he didn't like that they had their own guard police force that was outside of his purview when he was police commissioner. And so this leads to a rapid decline in Philadelphia parks and public spaces. Yeah, interpolice conflicts, police on police violence. Well, and the Fairmount Park Guard weren't they weren't gun carrying cops.

So they were they were nightstick cops. They were they were park rangers, you know, like they weren't really they weren't really beat your ass cops like everybody else was in the city But you know Rizzo comes in and so much of this groundwork has been done In order to build this great Civic Center and he gets to open it. Yeah You know and and and now let's look at this we We have our beautiful diagonal viewpoint, straight through City Hall, the Fountain, and the Parkway. We have our viewshed through Municipal Services Building, and also the Fountain.

ALICE I just think this all could have been under the purview of a bunch of park rangers. You know what, here's the thing, right? Moderate position, this is gonna appeal to Democrats, right? Police abolition, you wind up, like, the Philly Police Department, and instead of that, instead of just having, like, nothing, you reinstitute the Fairmount Park Guards. And they just do everything. It is now all park ranger territory. RILEY They all get horses, it's great. ALICE Yeah, it's like, do south, it's great. Yeah, it's like due south, it's great.

Like, everyone loves it. No National Park Service guards, though, those guys are scary. No, those are different guys. And the sad thing now is, again, when you have people who are dedicated and committed to a specific public space, they really get to understand all of its ebbs and flows. Like the nuance and dynamics, yeah. Yeah, and today, in Philadelphia, the Park Ranger program, our seasonal employees who it's absolutely the nuance of dynamics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like today. So like today in Philadelphia, the park ranger program are seasonal employees who are usually moved around

from site to site, just just randomly ad hoc. Most places they really just open up the athletic court, athletic fields and then leave and then come back and close them back up because they're going to 30 or 40 different sites that they just get eyes on. And public spaces need to have continuous maintenance and vigilance and eyes on the street in order to be successful. But I'm starting to get on my high horse here. We've got a lot to cover. More park ranges.

Yeah, I know. I mean, and this, overall, this is a fully realized project. This is, um, and I was lucky enough to have arrived here early enough to have seen it in its full majesty. Yeah, no, they did it. They did the entire thing and did the whole thing and it was really good. And you think about how critical this is. So this is transportation infrastructure, right? It's not just the parkway, but it's all of these transit connections that all meet in the heart of the city.

Yeah, and it's all these. Yeah, you've got these viewpoints. You get the subway through here. You have the Broad Street line, which has to go around the tower because it was too heavy to tunnel under and goes there. And then you have the Center City Commuter Connection, which goes through here, I want to say. Yeah, it's, it's true I think it's pretty much straight down market and then you know it's no it's it's filbert yeah yeah and then you have the the trolleys which sort of go around here and then there's a station here and then they make a curve and then I'm pretty sure there's some kind of extra dimensional space, somehow it winds up here. Because I've never successfully navigated to the station that's somewhere in this location.

Yeah. Right, so they brought this visual coherency above ground, below ground, it was actually a working shopping center for a while, it was like the Montreal underground city, but in the last couple years it's really declined. JUSTIN There were three Dunkin' Donuts right over here. I used to take the L into 15th Street, and then I could walk directly underground, well, I would walk over to Suburban and then just cross the street and get in... My building was 1515 Arch up here. But I spent, like, on my commute from 40th Street, which

is where I lived at the time, it was, you know, I spent all of, like, two and a half minutes above ground before I got to my office. No, and this is how Ed Bacon solves for the ill of cars in the city, right? Because he doesn't really love them, he realizes that they're a necessary evil, and so he says, okay, how can we split up as much pedestrian activity from the vehicular activity as possible? Again, there were so many Dunkin' Donuts down there. I don't know why, but it worked. It worked, but it worked.

It worked, and it was beautiful and you could walk straight through it. And again, this is- Weeping. We don't know how to do this anymore. We don't know how to do this anymore. We don't know how to do this anymore. And keep in mind, over on the east side here, there was also the East Market development, you know, the concourse extended another mile that direction. Yeah.

It was unreal. I can't believe they did all of it. All of it happened. All of it happened and was working until 2019 or 2020. Yeah. That's the sad, that's the crazy part. And it was a fantastic space. It was cool in the summer.

There was so much, you know, because the basin does a lot to cool the air as does the huge fountain Yeah, the trees were big It was you know there's lots of elevation changes the materials were good There were lots of places to sit all of this was good. It was really good Yeah It was good. It was really good. Yeah, it's the thing where you have all these humans, you know, human scaled spaces that, you know, that's not a sitting that's not a sitting wall. That's not a laying wall. It's not a walking path.

It's all of them at the same time. Right. You have. Yeah. Yeah. You have these changes through space where you have steps that you have to walk through because that creates these processional movements. And the park was really have to walk through, because that creates these processional movements. And the park was really heavily utilized, despite the fact that it was very very poorly maintained, from an infrastructure standpoint, and then also just from a general ongoing upkeep of cleanliness and maintenance.

ALICE Yeah, you got lots of colors in the pavement. And... ALICE It's beautiful. It's hitting the SimCity 3000 aesthetic, y'know? ALICE Yes. Yeah. ALICE I'm hearing the soundtrack in my head right now.

RILEY And, y'know, a park like Love Park has to serve... it serves a generally limited use set, right? In this time period you don't have residences. So it really becomes a park that doesn't have a destination of its own to it, other than as a place where office workers eat lunch. And, you know, sometimes people hang out and it starts to develop this reputation as you know, kind of a scuzzy. Yes. Yeah, fairly early on. It's like, this is also combined with, you know, municipal

disinvestment, which is, you know, all over America at the time. Like, can you imagine? I mean, to some extent, you can't like blame individual mayors or political decisions for what happened. There was just massive disinvestment in general and a general decline, and, you know, it was just harder to live in cities. It was, you know, more people got poor, and more people got homeless. You know, this is also a result of, like, eviscerating the welfare state.

This is as a result of eviscerating public housing. You know, Love Park, fairly early on, became like, kinda, eugh, eugh, you know, Love Park fairly early on became like, kind of, eugh, eugh, eugh, don't wanna go there. Well, and the thing is, like, despite that, or in spite of that, or because of that, you know, these places still draw tons of people. There's still beautiful spaces for many months out of the year. But the people who have to live around them constantly, or the people who have to work around them constantly, y'know, these are municipal leaders, and now they've got a big

plaza that's architecturally cool, but if you can't maintain it or you don't pay to maintain it, it becomes an eyesore. JUSTIN Yeah. So this is, what, this is opened in time for the bicentennial in 1976. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Will we embarrass. ALICE Yeah. LIAM Yeah. ALICE Yeah. Because of Rizzo.

JUSTIN Yeah, Rizzo comes out, like, he says a bunch of racist things, then introduces Frank Sinatra. Yeah. ALICE Oh yeah. JUSTIN It's Italian-American excellence. RIZZO Yeah, and Rizzo, ahead of the Bicentennial, asks to call in the National Guard to Philadelphia in case there might be riots. There might maybe be riots.

I mean, at least in the 70s, like, the weather underground might blow up a garbage can outside your work or whatever. Yeah, that's a good point. So because everybody sees it, because this gets picked up in all the newspapers all over the country, nobody comes to Philadelphia for the bicentennial. ALICE We're gonna have a firm hand with crime, right, like we're gonna advertise everywhere, if you come to Philadelphia for the bicentennial, we'll kill you.

RILEY Exactly! Our cops or gangs will kill you. Cops and other gangs, etc. JUSTIN That's also when the actual love statue by Robert Indiana's put in, right? ALICE Yeah. Sorry about Andy. She's a very... ALICE Oh, I'm not upset.

RILEY She's a very angry senior dachshund and I'm sitting on my chair which is far away from her couch. JUSTIN But yeah, so this is, y'know, overall I think architecturally successful, no maintenance for a long time, no like, y'know, active disinvestment by the city, which brings us to the saviors. The punks. LIAM Yeah! Yeah!

Oh, that's good! RILEY Yeah, so the punks love to skate, and they also like to shake things up a bit. And they're not deterred by scuzziness, if anything they're attracted by it. They're attracted to it, yeah. Exactly. And, y'know, what ends up happening is kind of the worst possible problem for a municipal leader, but the best thing for literally everyone else. Love Park becomes a park that's a haven and an awesome place for skateboards.

ALICE All of that concrete! All of those angles! RILEY It's all granite, Nova. It's even better than concrete. ALICE Wow. RILEY And the thing that- RILEY It holds up really well, the grinding, like, you could visibly see, y'know, the gunk that came off the skateboards, because people

were grinding so much on it. ALICE I'm not thrilled about the idea of somebody in a t-shirt and baggy jeans sliding across a granite slab at speeds, like... Now, y'know, people did get injured every... more than once in a while. And it kinda comes with the it kinda comes with the sport. Right. And so, Love Park finally gets a reason for people to go there and not just take a picture with the nice pretty love statue, but actually spend time in it. But the people who figure that out are skateboarders, which in the 1990s and 2000s were the lowest

scum of the municipal earth. ALICE Yeah, I don't personally remember this, but like I know from my study of history that before 9-11, these guys were public enemy number one. I mean, they were like... LIAM Skateboarders, yeah. ALICE Yeah, yeah. They were Osama Bin Laden.

LIAM Oh yeah, absolutely. They were ISIS. ALICE Yeah, they were ISIS, yeah. LIAM ISIS, right, yeah. Right. They they they were Osama bin Laden. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. ISIS. Yeah, ISIS. Yeah. ISIS. Right. Of course. So because of this, Love Park becomes known as a skateboarding park, not just across the East Coast, but nationally and internationally. Skateboarders hear about it.

They watch videos of it. I read a lot of the games as a kid. Yeah, we talked to you two times. The games were hosted twice and in between them, the city decides to ban skateboarding in love. Our fuck off. I watched a bunch of skateboarding videos just to find, you know, images of the park that were old.

And I didn't realize all of the skateboarding culture, which was like, y'know, at the time, it was like you'd go to the skate shop and people would have VHS tapes of them doing sick tricks that they just sold to the skate shop that you could then buy. ALICE The human desire to show off a video of you doing some cool shit has been around for a long time. And I was like, oh, I understand the secret tapes from Tony Ox, Bro Skater 2 now. Yeah!

RILEY Yeah, and the other thing that I read about in the skateboarding videos is that, because Love Park was a curved plaza, fisheye camera lenses looked really good in it. So that's what you see in that lower left hand corner. And with the statue right next to the big impressive jump that you would do, it was like the most cinematic spot in skateboarding history. And again, it was right in the heart of downtown. You got to see City Hall in the background.

Center City. Don't say downtown. I can say downtown because I live in center cities. So over there is downtown. You know this, Roz, I'm allowed to say it. I don't believe you. Oh, God. Next slide, please. I'm allowed to say it. I don't believe you. Oh god. Next slide please. Sick.

More pictures of skateboarding. The other really great thing that happens is because again this plaza is not taken care of in any meaningful way. Skateboarders learn that you can use a thing to pick up the granite slabs that make up the pavement and they stuff shit underneath it to make ramps. Yeah. Nice. Yeah, every time I walked around this park, all those slabs were loose.

Yeah. Yep. You could jump over the trash can, you could move the trash cans and jump over them. It really was set up right. Yeah, that was a big one, was jumping over the trash can. The other big one is you had the fountain gap,

right? Where, you know, the fountain was drained for the winter, so you jump off the highest stairs next to the love statue, and what happened, in this case, this man appears to have made it. In most cases you eat shit and bleed a lot. Yeah. Yeah, but it was just so good. cases you eat shit and bleed a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but it was just so good. That is really good. And then this was sighted, you know, cited as a constitution to making the the whole area was safer because, you know, there's always people.

So there's a lot of the time, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. Like the skateboarders realized that they were in a municipal plaza that had office workers walking through it. They would respectfully wait while people passed. Like, it was like any other public space. You treat everybody- Puncturize, by and large. If everybody's given an opportunity to respect everybody else, they'll usually take it.

And so, despite all of this, the bad thing happens. JUSTIN The bad thing happens, yeah. ALICE The bad thing happens. JUSTIN They got the X Games twice, y'know, they... It brings in a huge amount of tourism money, they ban skateboarding, and then, y'know, they try and do a renovation to prevent it. Which is where Ed Bacon comes back. ALICE Yeah.

ALICE Yeah, this is the coolest thing anyone's ever done. ALICE Accidental renaissance art here. RILEY Yeah. So Ed Bacon's like, what, 93, 94? ALICE He's 93 years old. RILEY Yeah. He doesn't look a day over 85. RILEY Yeah.

When they finally ban skateboarding in Love Park. And you see here this sign that says skateboarding prohibited at all times in JFK Plaza, which was its government. ALICE I love that it has a government name. I also love that, like, again, skateboarders, you may have been, if you're kind of of the generation that I am, downstream of skateboarders believing themselves to be the most oppressed people in the world? That's because they were! They used to be!

Right, so what they do is, instead of having uniformed cops standing next to the sign and yelling at people, they had undercover plainclothes cops just tackle you if you had a skateboard and were doing tricks. ALICE I mean, the skateboarding Serpico? Wearing a fucked up bucket hat and tackling a kid? LIAM Stop those revolvers, that old-ish shit's nerve-balling. RILEY Yeah, and Vincent Kling I think was also at the protest, but I couldn't find the video.

Yeah, this is like, there were a few big protests. You know, this this one was where there's video of this at bacon coming out and saying I am going to skateboard my beloved love park, you know, in defiance of, you know, the city council that outlawed this. There's a few rallies where, of all people, councilwoman Janie Blackwell comes out to support the skateboarders who I mostly know. Yeah, Janie Blackwell, the one good thing she ever did. Honestly, yeah, I mean, I mostly know her as like, oh yeah, we did this pilot bike lane, I think we should rip it out now.

But no, she supports the skateboarders. Yeah, cause Jenny Blackwell knew how to party, man. That's a good point, yeah. And they do some light renovations to the park, right? They add some benches and inconvenient locations for skating to make it harder to, you know, do like sick grinds and stuff like that. And this is taken poorly, also doesn't work very well. A lot of people, a lot of people are still skating and the park is also not being very well taken care of. And so, you know, this is a globally recognized,

you know, skate, skating area, right? It's not a skate recognized, you know, skate skating area, right? It's not a skate park, but it's a plaza that's very easily skatable. And so, you know, skateboarding is getting big. Yeah. As like an extreme sport at this point. So of course, DC Shoes comes in, it's like, if you reopen this park to skateboarding, we will give you a million dollars to keep the park maintained. And the city doesn't take it because they're cowards!

And this here is uh, CEO- We would not negotiate with skateboarders. Yeah. This is CEO of DC Shoes here, Ken Block, with a million dollar check. If you know Ken Block, he's the guy who drove the cars sideways on YouTube very fast. Oh shit, yeah. He was departed us, unfortunately, but he was really fucking cool. Yeah, he was really good at driving the car sideways.

Like the city passed up so much here, for no reason other than they hated skateboards. Yeah. And like, I'm sure there's liability considerations here. I'm sure there's like other issues to be mindful of. But if your tourism is shifting towards younger people who have money to spend and you take away the cool thing in the middle of the city that they all love to see and do you send a bad message Yep. Yep. So in the meantime you remember There's a five-story underground parking garage under this. I don't know if it's five stories might be four

There's some amount of underground parking. Who gives a shit? Yeah, and the roof membrane goes kaput. ALICE Oh boy. Too many ollies landing on it. Apparently, yeah. LIAM Exactly. ALICE Do a kickflip, you fucking pussy, to just, like, Mare Parker? LIAM You do the kickflip. Like a 95 year old man does a kickflip for the first time in his life, lands it perfectly,

disappears down a massive basement... IMMEDIATELY TURNS TO DUST. FULL STORIES STRAIGHT DOWN THROUGH. Uh, he ascends into heaven. So, the parking garage roof membrane goes kaput. The roof membrane is what is preventing the rest of the parking garage from water intrusion, which is a big problem in an underground parking garage. There's the problem with the roof membrane going kaput is there's only one way to access it, which is to dig up the entire park. Yep. So when this is announced, I mean, and basically, when they announce this, the goal

is made very clear that Love Park will not be going back. They will not have Love Park there. They're designing a new park that will solve the skateboarding problem once and for all. We will never host the X Games again. We will never be a globally recognized skateboarding park. We could. We we this is a problem which was literally worse than 9 11. And we will solve it. And so what they what they find out after a lot of back and forth the only part and a lot of you know

specific targeted activism towards saving this this Saucer that is the only part of this plan of the original love part that ends up getting see um and it's kind of done Begrudgingly, but that very begrudgingly that whole that whole building is eventually restored, is currently awaiting a future use, which I've heard is potentially they might have somebody promising it's gonna go in there, which would be cool. But like all architectural projects that are announced, architectural projects start with the rent. Yeah. This is also buoyed by the great success of demolishing Dilworth Plaza, the sunken Plaza

we saw before, in order to kick out Occupy Wall Street. Which was also replaced by a very inferior space, I think. Right. So you get this notion, especially in like the capital planning part of the projects, that we're just every time we redesign a space in Philadelphia, it's it's going to be this weird flat land. Yes. Because we simply do not have the money for maintenance the way that these spaces really, really need them and deserve. So we're just going to get rid of the parts of the park that make it hard to have it be anything of it.

No, no, no nice little stone walls. No elevation changes. It's gonna be a lawn. No, you're gonna get trapped. Yeah, it's gonna be a lawn in these early renderings. You can see the fountains seem to have a basin. You know. Oh, it'd be so cool if it ended up looking like this. Oh, great. Yeah, and there's so many people. They're all having a great time in the direct sunlight.

Yeah, you can do a lot of things with entourage that real people don't do. Entourage here being the happy cutout people you put into architectural renderings. I learned a ton. They're having a great time either standing, or sitting in a bench in direct sunlight or uh, just standing around in the middle of the grass. As we do in parks. Of course. Yes.

And yeah. Another part of the reason for, you know, going for design like this is something that's very popular at the time, which is the P word privatization programming Fuck off Yeah, people love to have a space which is easy to program Yes

You can you can have some kind of street market that happens once a weekend You can have a farmers market. you can have some kind of little cultural festival, you can have, I don't know, anything, you can program the space. Use the lawn to program the space. Yeah. And then you never have to worry about skateboarders again. Exactly. Yeah, what are they gonna do, skateboard through the farmer's market?

Yeah. Yeah, they're gonna pull a Nicolas Cage jumping through Fucking what you would call it? Redding terminal market? No But yeah So they're gonna solve this problem once and for all Wednesday February 10th 2016 at 11 o'clock in the morning groundbreaking for the new love park occurs they They pull out a box full of dirt, and the gold shovels. ALICE Where do they keep these gold shovels, do you

think? Just in like, a closet somewhere? JUSTIN Broad Street station next to the rifles. ALICE I have seen the gold shovel closet. It's at the Department of Public Property on the eleventh floor of 1515 Arch. They're not really gold. They're okay. The national treasure, I'm gonna steal the gold shovels. If you steal the gold- I think it's the eleventh floor of 1515.

I know for a fact it's in 1515 Arch. If you steal the gold shovels, they'll never be able to do this again. Like, critical strategic infrastructure that you can degrade, you know? The machine that removes a park's aesthetic features. You see back here, wonderful mature trees, you know, you can see everything's in basically fine condition, to the point where they did have to haul in a box with dirt in it to do the groundbreaking. That's my favorite part. This is so fucking stupid, man. Because everybody diggin' this trough.

I'll just say again, the current trash strike happening in Philadelphia, that box of dirt was handcrafted by members of District Council 33, who had to do that crap for this press conference. You can see, of course, here one of the most enthusiastic guys, Mayor Jim Kenny. So sad sometimes. So sad sometimes. So sad sometimes. So sad sometimes.

Me too, Jim. This is Jim Kenny's greatest tweet ever. Unfortunately, he was banned from posting early on in his mayorship. ALICE What? Did he send too spicy a tweet, what the fuck? JUSTIN His comms team took away his phone after he would post too hard during Sixers games. ALICE So sad sometimes.

JUSTIN This is real. And he was actually- SEAN That's how I feel about the Sixers too, yeah. JUSTIN And he was a great poster, and then I sympathize very deeply with Jim Kenny as somebody who's just trying to do the right thing and gets overwhelmed when people get mad at you. And that's exactly what happened during pandemic. He just did not want to be married anymore.

No, why would you after everybody hates you and all your political enemies think you're garbage? All your political friends too. I often think about the onion Bill de Blasio one. Yeah. Well, well, well. Not so easy to find a mare who doesn't suck shit, huh? But in terms of Jim Kenny.

My favorite bit about that is that Bill de Blasio, like, knows and references that. Yeah. And they're like, yeah, you guys have seen that, right? Like, I've read multiple interviews where he's like, yeah, I think that's funny and accurate. So they take this whole park, and they just demolish it. And throw it in the trash. Throw it in the trash, yeah, they threw all of it in the trash.

Well, they didn't quite throw all of it in the trash, we'll get to that. But they threw it in the trash. And these are some photos. It's like when you could still do that. These are some photos that Jun and I took a few days ago. This is when they are doing programming, of course. Yeah. So there's stalls where people can sell their wares.

Yeah, so what I'll say about this, right, we did our site visit. If we're gonna get mad at something, we might as well look at it in person before we cast final judgment. And, you know, back to what to what I'm saying, right? They took the park out of this park and they put the programming as the major feature.

And I think I think they actually successfully achieved their goals. The park is actually pretty populate populated. There's people hanging out there. That wasn't necessarily the case back with Old Love Park, because it wasn't maintained at all. They've also removed all the features that make it difficult, like, that make it a park in any real sense of the word, right? ALICE I would call this a square, for instance, maybe. ALICE Maybe a plaza of some kind.

ALICE Yeah, not in JFK. Well, they changed it to JFK Park instead of JFK Plaza. ALICE I know they did. Which is a lie. A lie for the pit of hell, Roz. RILEY November, you are correct that this is listed on the city's internal documents as a square slash plaza. ALICE They didn't want to get hooked up to the Frank Rezo light attack by calling it a park.

RILEY God, no. But any parts of it, but the parts of it that were so successful and strong were about that contrast between the park-like elements and the harder scape elements that were all, y'know, the two flavours of monotone and Vincent Clink's. This is just chaotic, in a totally different way, and it's not because there's ten by ten chancel. Like, there's no rationality to the park's actual layout or design. And then the areas, like, in the next slide, right? The areas that don't have the street market going on, like, that's a tent from the market

right there. Yeah. Nobody's hanging out. This is just desolate, man. It's a huge swath of space, too. In the middle of Center City, right? Sorry, downtown, so I'll just go fuck myself. No, oh yeah, yeah, congratulations.

Presumably gonna just barely be able to grow out by the next time I have to replace the membrane. That is one of the big issues with these parking garage parks, right? You can never have tall trees there because trees only get as big as their root structure and the root then there's not enough soil to actually have like a decent roof structure in any of these parks. So, so people go to parks in

Philadelphia to reconnect with that William Penn flavor of nature that never will have every 50 years, they're going to have to tear up at least all of the trees. And you have. Yeah. But more programming. But but again, progress. The programming stuff was really good. So they didn't just have a street festival going on. They had the big Lego blocks.

They had ping pong set up. This is the this is the parks and recreation seasonal employees that staff the place, putting the blocks away at the end of the night. But that's the thing is that all these this isn't a park. This is a bunch of Lego blocks. You got to put them away afterwards. You can't just leave them out. Right. And there's no and there's like you were talking about the

I forget the name of the piece, but the old like sorry pieces and chess pieces that you to be your move and like that was hardscape that could actually be used to play on and like invited feelings of play and people actually playing on them. I don't have this bullshit and these kids are getting paid well I couldn't pay it at all because everyone's in strike but no those are no they're not they're not on strike because they're seasonal employees they're not covered by the union so they were there two days ago when I went back.

Don't your trash at Sheryl Parker's house. The good news is they are also getting rid of your move. So they already got rid of that. They got rid of it. No, and that's the same thing. That was an iconic piece of artwork in the 90s and 2000s in Philadelphia. For sure. Let it they let it go to waste. They let it rot out.

And now it can't be rehabilitated. It has to be all remade if they want to remake. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then we have to talk about the state of the fountain. Yeah. So spray grounds. So so this this is the fountain is still in the same place, right? From a wayfinding, Ed Bacon theoretical view, they threw him a bone.

But they didn't build a fountain, and one of the reasons for that goes back to the way that these spaces interact with, like, ADA laws. Because a spray-ground is something you can allow children to play in, a fountain you can not. ALICE That fucking sucks, aesthetically, though. This is a puddle. RILEY Oh, it's so bad. ALICE This is a puddle.

RILEY No, no, this isn't a puddle. JUSTIN The basin helps a lot with cooling down the area around, but also, you got nasty dirty water in there that'll give you disease. The thing is, this is a recirculating fountain, y'know, as far as I know, where all this water goes and slides down the pavers into a drain, and then is recirculated from... I don't know if that's cleaner. Um, I would assume there's some better filtration in it, but it's an interesting question. I just know that this is, quote unquote, healthy or whatever that's worth and and also like again something that you can legally make happen in the 21st century but but the problem

with it so you said this is the puddle yeah no this isn't the puddle this is the puddle so that's not a knife this is a knife right so you have you have this giant spray ground okay and the way that they the way that they graded and sloped the surface, which I'm sure you have to do all at once, you can't like, refix it piecemeal, it creates this stream that goes to a section of, you know, the grass dump zone. The cigarette swamp. Yeah. The great dismal swamp.

Right. And then it's caught by a different. Grover Park. Right. This is totally code compliant. It follows all of the rules and regulations. And you can build it yourself in a couple of weekends. Yes.

No. So then that water just creates this constant puddle on the ground and in the garden, which I'm sure is not great for the plants. Or you have to make you have to figure out the program, right? The membrane that they're worried about the membrane is probably not doing good. Yeah. That's probably very bad. Yeah.

Well, and then all these all these public parks, right? They they have to because again, they're understaffed. They have to drive road salt trucks. Well, it's not hand shoveling, except in really rare circumstances. Almost almost always, it is just simply a giant truck drives around and dumps road salt everywhere. And then that goes so into the into the fountain, which is good for the kids.

Yeah, for the children. Yeah. Let your kids lick it. Hang on, I gotta shut my door. Kids were all shouting in the hallway. You have such an audio beset life. I do, I do November. My life is so hard. No one can hear that, there's isolating mics. And then we didn't talk too much about it, but...

The saucer. The welcome center. That was preserved. That doesn't feel very welcoming outside of that shit right now. It's just hardscaping around it with nothing nice to look at. Also the two big barriers in front of the entrance. You get nothing. Welcome to the home of the world champion Philadelphia Eagles! And just get your face slammed into a curb. By Sheryl Parker, who could suck shit. Yes.

So despite this building being intended for a visitor's center, a couple years back they said to themselves, actually a restaurant should be. No, you don't need- oh my god. If you squint it looks kind of like the Pittsburghia. Again, I've been told by reliable sources that a promising deal is in the works, but I don't understand how you put enough tables in here to make it revenue generating in a permanent way. That's like 15 people, yeah, exactly.

Where does the kitchen go? In your butt, Roz, it goes in your butt. On the ground in the enormous cavern. In the car park, yeah. Or maybe it's just a hot dog roll. You never know. But- But- One of those extremely live electrified hot dog grills?

Yeah. Oh yeah. Ah, shit, yeah. And so, this building being disused is even more kind of sad and frustrating when you, you know, there was a hard fought preservation battle to redo it. Like, the whole thing was gutted and all the glazing was taken off and the whole thing was put back together again. And they still can't find a tenant for this building that is supposed to be the welcome

center for the entire Fairmount Park system, right, which was at one point the largest municipal park system in the entire world. Then those definitions got all messed up. You know, the fact that it doesn't have a tenant in it is made even more infuriating by the buildings in the park that do have their own tenants. Yeah, like the visitor center. Right. So they took the welcome center and they built something like directly next to it that sells, you know, stuffed toys and stuff like that.

A gift center for, you know, tourists. Well, my fan ambassador adventure starts here and I signed the pledge to be a fan ambassador and I joined the PHAM. I guess that means I'm not allowed to throw bricks at Cowboys fans anymore to be able to work welcome. No, and we're definitely not allowed to see Am this the fam dude fam. It's like an ambassador. It's it's it's to represent like pride I guess like a Philadelphia version of flan? No, yeah.

I don't know. It's a delicious dessert. To harness civic pride and show the world how Philadelphia shines. Do we? We can't pick up our trash because Mayor Parker is a fucking moron. Yeah, we should just throw batteries at Mayor Parker. We should throw we should throw a truck at her. A whole fucking garbage truck. Pick it up We'll get like a hundred and thirty dudes. We'll like we'll all lift it once

We'll do a clean and jerk. I will just throw it on her fucking house, dude I don't know if that's an actionable threat or not Get your ass here Sherelle I got a lot of it No, we got the car park, too. The car park, the biggest. I think this is a riff on the Robert Venturi plan for Love Park way back in the day, which is the Fart Fountain would have been significantly weirder. And there would be a structure around it in such a way that if you approached by car, it would say parking.

But if you approached by foot, it would say park. Yeah. Um. Very strange structure. Architecture used to be so much fun. It is so much fun. I can solve crazy- I can solve the Ghost of Crazy Uncle Louiscon. Yeah.

But uh- I'm a media but only for Ghost of Crazy Uncle Louiscon. Yeah, the biggest sign in the park used to be the love sign, now it's the parking lot sign. Yeah. Extremely cool. And, you know, so far, I mean, again, on days when this is not like a program space, you know, it's a little more vacant, especially on hot days. Yeah.

Um, you know, I, the spray garden works, you know, it's not a total disaster show. I will say the one good thing that happened was the portal. Right. And this is the whole, this is the whole story of like, what happens when you aren't actively aggressively programming this market every single hour of every single day. You give Philadelphians an opportunity to engage with cities around the globe. Uh, don't you let us do that. Yeah, and only fans models come from New York to Flash.

Yes. Quite sad. As you do. As you do. She had very nice boobs. Oh, gorgeous. Absolutely. Yeah. My dear. We are a family-friendly podcast. You know, it's very nice boobs. Oh good Yeah

My dear we are a family-friendly podcast Oh, yeah couldn't see them in the video. I mean you could you could see enough Oh my god enough to imply the rest of it. I Take an approximation and I simply fill in the rest of my large language bottle, which I call my imagination the rest of my large language model, which I call my imagination. Do you have any idea how much brainpower Roz needs to use to imagine Nice City? It's like a crate too, Jesus Christ. It uses a lot of water. It uses a lot of energy.

We're boiling the oceans for Roz to imagine. Alright, my chair's getting uncomfortable, hurry this up. NORRIS Yeah, we're almost. SEAN I know, we betcha. NORRIS This was also taken away from us for some reason. NORRIS It was moved to the center of City Hall, which again, is legally distinct from Dolores Blossom.

ALICE Hard to get your tits out in, I think. SEAN You can speak for yourself, Nova. ZACH Well, no, Nova, the bigger thing is they lock it up at night now. ALICE Yeah. ALICE In the closet next to all the golden shovels. ZACH Yes. ALICE Yeah.

LIAM Can you imagine having to roll this fucking thing? ALICE I've taken the stairs in 1515 Arch, and I would not want to roll that thing up there. They won't fit in the elevators. Those elevators are bad. They would trap people like once a week Like that you and I have just have horror stories and sitting every time I was eating my lunch I just saw a big-ass mouse run across my desk, and I was like okay

That's my new co-worker Brandon. The three fundamental buildings City Hall Municipal Services and 1515 Arges City Hall, Municipal Services, and 1515 Args. Yup. Yup. And then, what happens to Love Park? Well, they saved some of the granite, and it's re-erected as a skate park in the city of Malmö, Sweden.

Wow, that's cool that they get to have that, we don't. You can see there's even a propped up piece of granite here, and an original trash can, so you can do sick tricks over it. You know? Swede's the only one still preserving American values. These are the, this is what's left, and it's designed specifically as a skate park for skateboarders. We also did a skate park, it's called, I think, Pain Park, up by the art museum.

Which... That was the compromise. I don't skateboard, I don't... it's probably fine, you know, but it's not this. You know, and, you know, you can see that, well, obviously this thing went over the ocean, and with proper maintenance it still works. Granted, this is just on the side of a sidewalk in Malmo, but uh, someone appreciated it. It wasn't us.

Yeah, it lives on, and people cared about it enough to get it over there. I mean, that's an insane amount of weight transporting granted across the globe two or three times. Yeah. And those those trash cans, by the way, that those things are indestructible, but they're six thousand dollars. I was just saying nine hundred nine hundred pounds a second. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, this feels like, you know, a warning story. I remember when this was happening, you know, a warning story. I remember when this was happening, I remember having discussions on the urban PHL Facebook

group. Don't say its name! Don't say its name! John Geding will pop up from behind you with a knife ready to go. Only if you do it three times. Yeah. I'm, there's, I can say there's nothing wrong with John Gieding, but I would prefer to have friend relations with him.

I didn't take a moral stance on John Gieding, I just, I just said his name. I just, much like November, I couldn't possibly take it. Don't say his name, don't say his name three times into a CMX two and a half parcel. No. No, but it's... I like that eventually every episode of All Those Are Possible simply ended with local beef. Yeah. Yeah, but that's... You kind of look at this, there was not sufficient outrage to prevent this from happening. No, you're right. Because it looked like a lot of things we were walking like zombie-like into a much

worse situation. I mean, after seeing Dilworth Plaza go, you know, it should have been obvious that yeah, this is going to also be fucked up. And it's currently happening with Thomas Paine Plaza. They're gonna fuck that one up. Yes. currently happening with Thomas Paine Plaza, they're gonna fuck that one up. If I had a guess, you know, this is going to happen again to like Washington or excuse me Franklin Square or something. Well Franklin Square, you know, all the public squares still have their own special flair,

right? But Franklin Square is already heavily programmed and so and for some of the year pretty heavily privatized That's true. They yeah, this is another another way They have they have to operate as a tourist destination for people from New Jersey, which is real They've got you know a carousel there. They've got mini golf It's it's actually pretty great and it's it's ran by the same people as the Betsy Ross house. Yeah, it fucks. Yeah, they do a good job of it. But from my perspective on Patty Corner from this one,

these public spaces were granted by William Penn to be publicly open and publicly available and publicly accessible as places of respite and refuge, not of programming and party. That's something you can do sometimes, but once you rely on it... I'll buy that. And put up barriers so people can't see into the Chinese Lantern Festival. The barriers, you know, but the thing is, it creates this opportunity for, okay, let's just think in a theoretical future, Franklin Square

grows through a redesign. Are they going to prioritize the revenue generating capabilities of that lantern festival when they redesign this park to make it much more of a flat land than it already even is? You know, those are the kinds of things that we have to worry about with these public spaces and the programming challenges. And some public spaces need them, need programming 24 seven, but you know, you have to balance that with all these other community needs and considerations like, like Franklin square is right next to a huge Asian American, like low income Asian American that needs a public park.

They don't have a lot of parks up there. Totally bereft of green space. The only other one near Chinatown is on top of an active eyewear. Yeah, and then, you know, just in terms of like, contemporaneous spaces, we just trashed another one. Yep. Um, which was Penn's Landing, which I always thought was a very exceptional sort of postmodern space, you know, fantastic, you know, fantastic brickwork, you know, all this stuff. I mean, admittedly it's great that they're covering up the freeway.

Now, what you will also see here is that they are planting a load of trees in an elevated space which is, you know, yeah, in 30 years, they're going to have to rip all those out so they can read the membrane. Yeah. Right before they're about to provide proper shade. Yeah. And those trees, those again, those trees will never get taller than the 10 or 15 feet of topsoil they already have. So you're just setting yourself up for failure. I mean, that part really doesn't make sense. Yeah. So I also scaled it way the hell back. So it's just like a up for failure, that part really doesn't make any sense. ALICE Yeah, so...

SEAN They also scaled it way the hell back, so it's just like a block and a half now. I dunno, just like, do it with your chest, man. RILEY Yeah, this is... we've learned nothing. Nothing's been learned. We're gonna keep doing it. ALICE Nothing new under the sun. You build the park on a membrane, the park collapses through the membrane.

JUSTIN Yeah, it was hoping to land on a positive note, but... ALICE Wow. That's this show. That's not this show. I can have a show. I can have a show. ALICE You must fight for your right to park.

You must fight for your right to park. JUSTIN Should I do my commercial here? That's a positive note. ALICE Yeah, you should do your commercial for the greatest park in Philadelphia. RIght, so, unlike most of Philadelphia's public spaces, Rittenhouse Square in the southwest quadrant of Center City has continuously served the public since its creation by William Penn in 1682. It was never a public gallows, it was never a public burial site, it was never leased off for any private interests,

and it hopefully never will be. I think the difference between these public spaces and what we have in Rittenhouse Square, which has been for many, many decades now, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful and most wonderful public spaces in Philadelphia, is that the community has always provided for it for the benefit of everybody in the city.

When the redesign of Rittenhouse Square happens in 1913, the neighbors come together to create a formal garden that will bring the most joy to the most people. And then later in the 1950s, when this parking garage nonsense is proposed for Rittenhouse Square, it's an idea so powerful that it creates a NIMBY movement in Philadelphia. Now, that has largely changed in my neighborhood. And Rittenhouse Square remains as vibrant a public space as it ever has. I am very proud to help run the nonprofit called Friends of Rittenhouse Square

that has made many tremendous changes over the last few years. We take care of all of the squares needs from landscaping and beautification to, you know, replacing the benches and calling in problems that arise every single day of every single year. I just found out that a light was broken right before I came. And it really is my pleasure to do it and it's the pleasure of my team because beautiful, dynamic, vibrant public spaces create so much joy and bring so many wonderful people to the spaces that they have. And if you care for them, if you make sure that they have dedicated people who are in there every single day watching the place, making sure that it's taken care of, it works out

right. So if you ever like Rittenhouse Square or ever want to, if nothing else, please stop by. If you could leave a Google review, that's always nice. And then, you know, everything in that park is, everything in that park is donor-supported, the city is never fully or carefully or well-funded written house square, so the non-profit that I work for is Friends of Written House Square, and we run all of Written House Square through member donations, everything, all of the park's operations, all the landscaping, all the maintenance,

all the ongoing transactions. In close partnership with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation and the fine people at DC. JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Fuck you, Mayor Parker. Join the Union, go on strike, burn Cheryl Parker's house. That's my ad. That's probably an actionable threat, my fault.

JUSTIN Yeah. I do a recurring donation to Friends of Rittenhouse Square, because I support patrician interests. So, y'know. ALICE Yeah, if I do it, so can you. Y'know, to prevent it from, I don't know, in twenty years they turn it into sort of, I don't know, a lawn with some swooshes on it, y'know? RILEY Oh yeah, it'll just be Nike swooshes, we gotta be really careful.

JUSTIN I fucking hate, like, the swoosh. It's so bad! You're like, yeah, the pathway thing, yeah, that's so popular right now. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah. Parks are good, we should make them better. Yes.

And not worse, which seems to be the trend right now. Yeah, they can be spaces of great architecture that impact millions and millions of people. What do we learn? That we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. This is true. Nobody have to play the music. No, I was setting your... Okay, fine, whatever.

Shake hands with danger. Oh, Jesus. Oh, the delirium has set in. Oh. Well, we're, we're, we're using an older one, which didn't quite make the cut earlier, even though it's very good. Okay, we got five minutes. By the way, send these in to WTYPpod at gmail.com.

Danger that happened to you at work. Keep them light. Keep them light, you know, keep them about a page worth of text. But this is ideal. Dangerous stuff that happened to you at work. Ideally stuff that was not your fault. Yes. But was your boss's fault.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hello, Liam, Justin, November, Gareth, and other qualified individuals on the podcast. I got to go first this time, though. Been listening since the beginning, but it's my first time submitting. First time, long time.

Today I would like to tell you the story of how I witnessed a near catastrophic event caused by insensitivity to foreign languages, improper safety barriers, and the enigmatic temperament of sheep. Ideal. This is the register you should be hitting. At the age of 16, I was a part-time historical interpreter at a historic farm in New York State. Think of it as a less fun version of Colonial Williamsburg.

I love Colonial Williamsburg. Which actually talked about slavery. Canceled. Doesn't Colonial Williamsburg. Which actually talked about slavery. Canceled. Doesn't colonial Williamsburg talk about slavery now? Now they do, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, by now they might not have, due to the total defeat of woke on all fronts by Chas.

That's a good point, that's a good point. Um, I dunno, we gotta take colonial Williamsburg to task. This property would recreate the experience of Dutch colonial farmers in the 18th century, complete with wool costumes and wooden-soled shoes. ALICE Oh, cursed. Miserable. ALICE Oh boy, okay. ALICE To hanging around in my clogs in a New York

summer. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Thank you, Dür, Durgan, 98 degree heat. To add to the authenticity... Trying to do it all in blackface, too. Jesus. Oh god. Cause it's a Dutch.

It's a Dutch. Yeah. To add to the... Oh, no, I'm not gonna make that joke. To add to the authenticity, there was a functioning farm on the property, which included a small flock of about thirty heritage breed sheep. The patriarch of this flock of sheep was an eight-year-old ram named Wilbur, who's the main character of our story.

Oh, only one main character, not six. Okay. Before I go any further, I want to quickly remind the audience of three facts about sheep. Number one. Sheep are much stronger than you think they are. I can hear Devon chiming in with the personal experience of rams, yes. Number two. Sheep are much faster than you think they are.

Number three. Sheep are much dumber than you think they are. True of all animals, I think. Yeah. Wilbur was exemplary of these three qualities. A 320 pound behemoth, with horns the size of your head and testicles the size of grapefruit. Like most sheep he would get extremely aggressive during the spring and when I say aggressive

think bull levels of aggressive. He would charge anyone, me, my boss, children, chickens, even his own lambs. What a douchebag. I have seen him charge his own shadow on no less than 10 occasions. As such, during the spring, we usually kept him penned up during open hours so he would not murder guests. We kept them in our old wooden barn behind a waist-high wooden barrier, with the laminated sign in English, explaining why Wilbur was

in the pen and not enjoying the sunshine with his lambs and his eight wives." ALICE Laminated sign that says, this ram is a piece of shit. Yes! The real asshole. One fine Saturday I was instead tending to a flock of children near the old barn, teaching them how children in the 1700s filled their free time. Which in fact was... stick and hoop. Although they're Dutch children, so it's like stiekenhoepen.

Stiekenhoepen? stiekenhoopen. JUSTIN Steek and hoopen? Steek and hoopen? The weird thing is, the stick is made of metal, but the hoop is made of wood. All of a sudden I hear a frantic voice on my walkie talkie, yelling for all available employees to immediately report to the barn. ALICE Uh, we have a code Wilbur. LIAM Code dub. to immediately report to the barn. We have a code Wilbur. Code wool.

I abandoned my post and ran. When I reached the barn's open doors, I stood stunned with two of my co-workers. We saw a young mother with a camera taking photos of her toddler. Her toddler was, at that very moment, in Wilbur's pen. And had just pet Wilbur on the nose when I arrived. That must have been such an unfamiliar sensation to him, that he was just too angry to do anything for a minute? Rami, get your gun! As I stood frozen, contemplating how I would explain this to the police, our medical examiners,

presumably the coroner, I was quickly nudged into action by my more experienced colleagues. Wilbur was staying completely still, eyes locked on this child." It's sort of like going into prison on your first day and finding the biggest, meanest dude there and giving him a really nice hug. Like, he's gonna kill you, but he's like, stunned for a second. He's confused, yeah. For a second. He's confused, yeah. The mother stopped taking pictures, and was instead staring blankly at my boss as he tried to explain the peril her child was in.

It didn't occur to us until later that, of course, she did not speak a word of English. Oh boy. Okay. JUSTIN This was even more complicated by the fact that we could not make loud noises or sudden movements, so as to not spook Wilbur. JUSTIN This is a woolly bum. You have to go in with the bomb suit. A little rollback flaw. Nice. Nice suit. Nice suit.

The thing is, if I do my job wrong, I don't have to worry about it anymore. Instead, me and my two colleagues, excuse me, my two colleagues and I quietly entered into the empty pen, they probably weren't thinking about order when they were in this situation, entered into the empty pen next to Wilbur's. You tell him, Rosalyn. All at once we hopped the barrier into Wilbur's pen, just as it began to get agitated. ALICE Oh, fuck it, okay! JUSTIN We tackled the beast while my boss jumped into

the pen and grabbed the toddler, thankfully saving him from any harm. Those of us who tackled Wilbur were not as lucky, each of us receiving multiple nasty bruises from the flailing animal. ALICE Willbur, the angriest he has ever been in his life, trying to kill everything around him. LIAM Except maybe this tarp, though. RILEY Finally, surrounded by things to kill, and be...

ALICE There's Wilbur AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING.

ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. ALICE, LAUGHING, AND WILL, LAUGHING. that she thought that because it was so easy to put her toddler in the pen with the ram that she was allowed to do so. HURAMBE DEFENSE. ALICE LAUGHS. ALICE LAUGHS. You said that so authoritatively that that was like a known thing, like the Nuremberg

defense. It's like, oh yeah yeah yeah, you claim the Hurambe defense, of course. Yeah yeah. It's not the Hurambe defense, but it should be. ALICE LAUGHS. They should've shot that kid. ALICE It's not the Harambee defense, but it should be. LIAM They shoulda shot that kid. JUSTIN For the duration of my time on the farm after this, Wilbur was kept in a less publicly accessible area during open hours. ALICE Yeah, they put him in a metal free prison that

they kept Magneto in in X-Men. But, Wilbur did still attack people whenever possible. ALICE Just a being of pure untrammelled malice. That incredible work. JUSTIN While I would love to paint myself and my co-workers as the heroes of the story, it has never escaped me that if Wilbur had wanted to he could have killed this child in seconds. He didn't, and in fact did not behave aggressively at all that day, until three people tackled

him. ALICE Fair enough, right? JUSTIN Yeah. I'm still not sure why Wilbur showed restraint that spring day. Like I said, he did not have a soft spot for children. ALICE Divine providenceICE I don't know. Audacity. JUSTIN It'll remain a mystery.

I like to believe he spent the rest of his life doing what he loved. Eating corn, attacking inanimate objects, and shitting in front of passersby. ALICE Heroic. JUSTIN That's what we all want. projects, and shitting in front of passersby. heroic. That's what we all want. Beautiful. Thanks for putting on a good show, hope that not too many people died in whatever disaster you talked about.

Technically none, unless you count Kling going through the floor of the park and dying in the basement. No, no, Ed Bacon died, and Sona Ken Block. Yeah, okay. ALICE Two people. JUSTIN Yeah, two people. ALICE But that was not related to the disaster. JUSTIN Yeah.

Yeah, and Vincent Kling's dead now, but that's a whole other story. ALICE Oh, Vincent Kling is dead now too, yeah, that's true. So is Rizzo. So is Stillworth. ALICE All this will pass away, y'know, where are the snows of yesteryear? Where are the parks of yesteryear? LIAM Ah, they're concrete now. JUSTIN They're in Rittenhouse Square, we have a park at home.

JUSTIN Bunch of new grey pavers. Bunch of grey pavers everywhere. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN Bunch of grey pavers. ALICE Ugh, God. JUSTIN B Well, that was Safety Third. ALICE Shake hands with danger. JUSTIN Our next episode will be about Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME!

TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME!

TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME!

TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! TURN UP THE GAME! I am unapologetic you deserve to suffer Yes, yeah, come on every every six months I get to harass you with three hours of architecture June I don't give a shit. I could listen to Ross talk about rosin you talk about anything for any amount of time Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that said I would like to go get drunk. So we wrap this up Yeah, we're gonna do another three hours about load and circle now. Yeah So can we wrap this up? No, we're gonna do another three hours about Logan Circle now. Yeah.

The course is at three in the morning. I'm good to go. I'm good to go for another one. Let's go. Alright. Thanks, folks. Bye. Thanks, everybody.

Good night.