On a cold Monday morning, Yihua Liu sat on a bench with a friend at the Rail Park. Now a student at Drexel, he’s lived in Chinatown all his life, and he’s noticed the neighborhood changing.
Washington has a consensus: American infrastructure is overdue for capital improvements and maintenance. The most fervent debates on this topic have focused on how much funding should be allocated. But the most important discussion, even when it comes to hard infrastructure (e.g., rail, bridges, roads, and sidewalks), should be about how funding should be spent.
I’ve heard the same refrain from both friends and strangers, over and over, ever since the pandemic hit: “COVID has upended life as I know it. But I’ve found peace along the Detroit Riverfront.”
The “Site/Sound” festival, created by Friends of the Rail Park and Mural Arts Philadelphia, begins Saturday and runs until Oct. 19. It spotlights parts of the old trackbed that are not yet developed into the public park.
Civic spaces across Philadelphia are changing. The ways these spaces are contributing to a stronger and more inclusive city include: providing compensation to community members who participate in the design process, grounding the design to serve local needs, supporting equitable growth measures when civic assets increase property and real estate values.
High-impact design was a recurring theme for parks that opened in 2018, and so was the hope that parks can unite and invigorate cities. Tulsa’s Gathering Place, Toronto’s Bentway, and Detroit’s Riverfront Conservancy are all being transformed into green spaces exhibiting the latest in equitable and resilient design.
Urban Engineers, the group behind the Rail Park, announced that they’ve won the 2018 award for Outstanding Engineering Achievement from the Pennsylvania Society of Professional Engineers’ Philly Chapter.
With similar public space projects being increasingly scrutinized for fueling gentrification in surrounding neighborhoods, the real challenge for Philly’s Rail Park is not just fundraising enough to build a crown jewel park for the city, but one that equitably serves the surrounding community.
Despite a series of delays, the first section of Philadelphia’s highly-anticipated Rail Park will open to the public on June 14th. This phase stretches along a quarter mile of the former Reading Viaduct rail line, from Callowhill to North Broad and Noble Street.
Friends of the Rail Park’s Michael Garden confirmed that a quarter-mile stretch of Philly’s highly-anticipated elevated park will open to the public this spring, despite ongoing construction delays.
