Philadelphia’s Center City (which I recently visited for the first time in more than a decade) is one of the United States’ finest pedestrian spaces. It’s possible to walk comfortably just about anywhere within its roughly twelve square kilometers, and, when you do, not only do you get to see a physically appealing zone of high-density urbanity,1 you’ll also have plenty of company. Nearly 200,000 people are said to live in Center City, and, since Center City incorporates Philadelphia’s CBD and tourist sites like Independence Hall, its daytime population is considerably higher. Center City’s population skews young and well-educated, factors that contribute to its “vibrancy” (and safety).2
Center City doesn’t, however, do very well by the substantial part of its population that would like carfree places to bicycle, run, or walk long distances. One might think the Delaware would be an excellent site for a long recreational path, but its shoreline is hugged by Interstate 95, and it wouldn’t be easy to insert an agreeable trail along it. Except very early in the morning, the one exception—Penn’s Landing just south of Market—tends to be too jammed with tourists to be usable as a recreational path, and it isn’t very long in any case. The northward extension of the path (shown on the map below) consists mostly of bicycle lanes running through predominantly industrial districts not far from I-95, and the short recreational path to the south isn’t connected to anything.
Center City, Philadelphia, and vicinity, showing passenger rail lines, parks, and recreational paths. GIS data from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap (edited a great deal) and the OpenDataPhilly Website.
Fairmount Park—Philadelphia’s big city park—would seem to be an obvious place for recreational activities, and in fact it’s full of cyclists, runners, and pedestrians at all hours of the day and early evening, many of them surely from Center City, which isn’t far away. The southernmost part of Fairmount Park—near the Philadelphia Museum of Art—abuts Center City. The catch is that, perhaps more than any other big city park in the United States, Fairmount Park has been mutilated by facilities for automobiles. The Schuylkill Expressway (Interstate 76) runs the entire length of its West Bank portion, and busy Kelly Drive on the East Bank and King Drive on the West Bank are right next to the otherwise fine Schuylkill River Trail. I once (1979) ran a marathon in Philadelphia that consisted of three loops around Fairmount Park, almost all of which lay next to busy roads, and I felt I’d ended up absorbing more pollutants than on any day of my life. There is of course also an aesthetic problem with running or walking next to a busy highway. In the years since 1979, Philadelphia’s created a “city marathon” that uses city streets for part of its course, and it’s instituted some weekend road closures in Fairmount Park. Still, an awfully large part of Fairmount Park remains devoted to automobile use, and it’s an imperfect place for exercise that requires moving substantial distances along recreational paths.
Over the last few years, “Schuylkill Banks,” a short but much more attractive extension of the Schuylkill River Trail, has been built south of Fairmount Park.3 This new trail is not only closer to Center City, but it also lies further from major traffic arteries. It mostly runs along the narrow space between the Schuylkill and a CSX Railroad branch used only for freight.
One of the few places along Schuylkill Banks where there is room for much more than a trail.
For the next-to-most-recent extension (2014), there really was no space at all, and the trail at some expense was run on a “boardwalk” over the river. This segment is quite striking.
The Schuylkill Banks boardwalk early in the morning.
You get wonderful views of Philadelphia’s modest but distinctive skyline, of the 30th Street Station, of new apartment buildings along the river, of the athletic facilities at the University of Pennsylvania, and of a few remaining factories. It’s not that Schuylkill Banks runs through a pristine environment. The Schuylkill Expressway on the West Bank is extraordinarily noisy, and users must also contend with the sounds of construction, of speedboats showing off on the river, of Amtrak and SEPTA trains, and of traffic on the bridges that cross the river. There are also occasional freight trains along the CSX line that lies right next to the Trail. But to me all of this visual—and aural—complexity adds up to a pleasantly intense spatial experience. Like many of the other successful urban recreational trails that have been built in American cities in recent years, Schuylkill Banks works in part because users of the trail are reminded constantly of just where they are. The trail provides an extraordinary sense of place. If it had been built in a national media center like New York or even in Boston, Washington, or Chicago, it would have received a huge amount of favorable publicity. It has been covered pretty well by the Philadelphia edition of Curbed and by the Philadelphia Inquirer, and of course it has a good Website.
Since the latest segment opened in February of this year, the trail has ended awkwardly at a power plant run by Philadelphia’s electric company, PECO. The plan is to run the trail all the way to the Delaware, perhaps 9 km away along the winding river. Two isolated segments south of the PECO plant already exist, but a bridge across the Schuylkill and additional land acquisitions will be needed to join everything together and to extend the trail south. It’s taken something like ten years to build the existing 2.5 km trail, and it will no doubt take many more years to reach the Delaware. But, even incomplete, the trail provides a striking view of part of central Philadelphia to those who bicycle, run, or walk along it.
- Among American urban places, only Brooklyn has a larger number of renovated 19th-century row-houses, and there is probably no northeastern U.S. city with a larger number of 18th-century buildings left, although most have been altered so often that there is some question of how “authentic” they are. Still, they look terrific, as do all the 1920s apartment buildings around Rittenhouse Square and many other features of Center City. ↩
- Philadelphia’s real-estate prices remain much lower than in, say, New York, Boston, or Washington. I can’t prove it but suspect that this is a factor in the survival of numerous small, specialized shops—independent bookstores, for example—the discovery of which is one of the pleasures of walking in Center City. ↩
- One reason for adopting the distinctive name “Schuylkill Banks” was apparently to aid fund-raising. Signs along the trail ask for contributions. State and city funds have helped but haven’t been sufficient. ↩