Butt-Fugly Public Art of the Week-- August 16th

Unnamed 9/11 Memorial

Schuylkill Banks just south of Chestnut Street Bridge

              Well, we all knew something like this was coming. For the last 10 years, pieces of the World Trade Center have been sold by the NY/NJ Port Authority for use as memorials in cities, towns, and villages across America. Supposedly, over 400 memorials have been created from the structural steel of the WTC. This doesn't really make any single piece of WTC steel special-- yet here we are, a brand new not-yet-dedicated 9/11 memorial using structural steel in Philadelphia in 2012.
             Worse yet, its in the Schuylkill River Park/Trail, one of the city's best amenities. The first time I saw this thing, I didn't know it was a 9/11 memorial.. I had seen it from the Chestnut Street Bridge and that little flag wasn't there. From that vantage-point, it just looks the pedestal for some unfinished piece of public art.

From the Chestnut Street Bridge.

               Only when you get close to it do you know what the fuck its for. Its a sad piece... a short girder of steel sinking into a granite slab with the names of some locals who died in the incident. That's pretty much it.
              Look, I'm not saying that a 9/11 Memorial should be this big bombastic ostentatious thing with penises everywhere, but anything's gotta be better than this.. especially since there's so many similar memorials elsewhere. On their website, the Schuylkill River Development Corp says that they had acquired the steel and had the memorial designed by the Wells Appel firm.

Pics from the Schuylkill Banks website showing construction of the memorial.

                   But that's not all... there's ANOTHER 9/11 Memorial in the works for Philly, and yet AGAIN it will be using structural steel from the WTC. This one will take up the southeast corner of Franklin Square and will be a great clash of two cliches-- steel from the WTC and yet another depiction of the Liberty Bell.

Rendering from the Philly 9/11 website.

                    In this one, the pedestal will be a giant Pennsylvania keystone shape with steel from the WTC, limestone from the Pentagon, and soil/stone from the PA crash site. The towers will be depicted in stone. In the middle will be a half-size replica of the Liberty Bell. The crack of the bell will be filled with WTC Steel. A non-profit called Philly 9/11 is in the midst of collecting donations for the memorial, calling the concept "Mending Liberty". I don't know how long they've been trying to get this built, but their website looks like it was made on 9/12.
                 As corny as the Philly 9/11 version of a memorial seems, its leaps and bounds more interesting than that single short piece of steel on a granite pedestal at the Schuylkill Banks. The Philly 9/11 website also says that the piece's design is subject to change-- so hopefully it changes alot. The victims of 9/11 deserve a proper memorial in Philadelphia, lets hope we get a better one some time soon. 

Parking Garage of the Week-- August 15th

Five Star Parking 7th and Market

618 Market Street

            What a sad-looking dreary-ass cement dungeon this piece of shit is. This crappy parking garage has been infecting the corner of 7th and Market with its tarnished facade and shitbag storefronts for nearly 50 years. Its time to put this pile of shit out of its misery.
             What kind of thing is this to have in our primary tourist area? You walk half a block past Independence Mall on Market Street and you can already see Market East-level shittyness. What a disaster. Eliminate this shit!! What happened to that zoning bill for large lit-up signage on Market Street buildings from 7th to 13th Street? It was approved in June of last year... this crap garage qualifies for some big obnoxious ads-- DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!
           In 1964, the Redevelopment Authority was sitting on a bunch of old buildings at the corner of 7th and Market... there were the ruins of the theatre, a few unremarkable commercial buildings, and a very very lost Willis G. Hale building.

Willis G. Hale aint nuthin to fuck with.

                     That building was the Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger Publishing Company. William Weightman, super-rich motherfucker extraordinaire, paid for the design and construction of this kick-ass structure just because he was friends with Edmund Claxton and the publishing company needed more space. Weightman got his favorite architect, Willis G. Hale, to design it. By the time the RDA had a hold of it, the building was probably all jacked up and barely recognizable.
                   Three groups of folks were into the available space. The Atwater Kent Museum (now Philadelphia History Museum, still has that shitty logo) next door proposed an expansion that would reach all the way to the corner of 7th and Market, a Society Hill developer wanted the land on which to... well, develop, and the Rohm and Haas International HQ Building under construction next door wanted the land for a parking garage. Guess who won?
                   Ever since, this shitbag garage has made the southeast corner of 7th and Market a pile of orangutan ballsweat. In 2003, in an attempt to de-uglify the side and back of the garage, Rohm & Haas paid for a mural illustrating the tree-named streets. It is known as Tree Walk.

It goes around the back too... you get the idea.

                Rohm & Haas hasn't owned the garage for a long time-- they don't even own themselves anymore, they are now part of Dow Chemical. The current owner of the garage is based in NYC and spent $6,655,000 on it in 1997. I wonder if this owner knows anything about the lit-up advertising bill? Either way, its gonna take one hell of an ad to make this crap garage look good. 
              In short, fuck this garage. This thing is currently zoned C-5, which means its taking up the space that should be used by a tall-ass skyscraper. Under the new zoning code, the site will be zoned Super CMX-5, which means it will be taking the place of an even bigger tall-ass skyscraper. DESTROOOOOYYYYYYYYYY!!

Dead-Ass Proposal of the Week-- August 14th

First Version of Station Square

2900 block of Market Street

                     This proposal isn't exactly dead-- it was just executed in a very shoddy and half-assed way. The little area between 30th Street station and the old post office/current IRS Building has always been a pile of shit. There's not much that could be done with it-- the entire section is a gigantic bridge deck with railroads running underneath. Though the Porch isn't half bad, its not 1/10th of the original plan.
                      Read more at the Philadelphia Citypaper's Naked City Blog!

Mystery Building of the Week-- August 13th

!!!??!?!?!?!? Building

132 North 10th Street

This pic is from a few months ago-- a new storefront is now on the 10th Street side.

                     Chinatown is chock full of mystery buildings and this one is no different. While other matching buildings from the same neighborhood are lost but known, this one still stands and is unknown. What a pain in the ass.
                    The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has nothing about this building except that it was once a factory and it MIGHT HAVE been built in 1885. Other than that, nothing-- nobody else ever mentions this thing, other than some of the old storefront tentants. The design looks right for that time period but no architect linked with this address can be found. The building looks more or less unaltered (except for having storefronts running down all sides) but the cornice looks muted as if there was once something up there.

Pretty much the only old pic of the !?!?!?!? Building, behind that parking kiosk in this pic from 1954.

                The ?!?!!?!?!?!?! Building has had the same owner since 1971, who bought the place for $1. The place looks like it might have apartments up top but I think they might actually be commercial offices, at least on the second floor. The architect did a pretty good job for a building of this type... too bad we'll never know who the fuck it was!!!
             Seriously, I have nothing else to say about this motherfucker. Its so much of a mystery that I have pretty much nothing else to offer in the way of info. Does ANYONE know where the fuck this building came from? What it was for? Who designed it? and What the fuck!?!?!?!?

Butt-Fugly Building of the Week-- August 9th

Seven Penn Center

1635 Market Street

                    

                   You know, maybe I was too tough on Vinny Kling over 1601 Market... maybe I should have focused on the building next door, Seven Penn Center. This piece of garbage had a chance of being an ok-looking building until some dumbass decided it would be a good idea to have a blank stone wall facing Market Street.
                 What the fuck were they thinking? Were blank walls all the rage in 1964? The other three sides of this motherfucker are covering in glass-- why is the blank side on Market Street? At least they had enough sense to have the blank side of 1601 Market face the Penn Center plaza. What a bunch of morons.
                 Back in 1963, IBM was at the forefront of American technology. They were proud of their room-filling magnetic tape computers and two-year-old invention of sort-of mobile storage devices (the first swappable disks). They were getting ready to move their international HQ to Armonk, NY (trying to be like Reader's Digest or something) and they had just launched the first data-moving satellites. Among this bit of success, IBM was in search of a new Philadelphia office.
               Enter Kling and friends. They were in the midst of designing Five Penn Center and IBM latched on as the anchor tenant. Even when the building's first renderings came out, it was being called the IBM Building.

The rendering. Is the south-facing side supposed to be the front? I like how those rendering people are like "WTF?!"

                 The 21-story building was considered quite the big deal at the time. Construction began in May of 1963 and was rife with problems. A fire in December of 1963 put a dent into the construction time. The building finally opened in February of 1965.

It looks better like this.

Shiny and new (and ugly).

                  Once open, IBM didn't stay there very long. After only 2 decades, the building was surrounded by highrises and the only full facade of the building you could see at one time was that big stone wall. In 1985, IBM signed up to be the anchor tenant for upcoming One Commerce Square. The building at 1635 Market would then just be called "Seven Penn Center" and hold offices for various companies that are too shitty to rent better offices in the surrounding buildings.
                 IBM eventually moved the bulk of their Philly operation out to West Chester and keeps one crappy office in the Central Business District. There's not much else to say about this building except to say that IT SUCKS. I don't expect any new commercial buildings to be built in the CBD any time soon so demolishing this thing wouldn't make much sense... we're just stuck with it. That's crap.

The um... front? of the building-- only viewable from the side.

Lost Building of the Week-- August 8th

Dr. David Jayne Residence

1826 Chestnut Street

Already 35 years old in this picture from the PAB.

                 In the very first Philaphilia article, I talked about the Jayne Building... one of Philadelphia's lost landmarks and all-around shit-kicking super-building. Well the guy who made that crazy-ass building possible also had a big fucking mansion taller than the cool-ass building that currently sits on its site.
              Dr. David Jayne was about as badass as badass motherfuckers are capable of being. Born in rural Pennsylvania from a long line of clergymen, Jayne broke the family tradition by entering Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania. This was a pretty big deal considering the guy might not of ever went to school as a kid. Supposedly, he was only taught by a tutor and only in his teen years. Not bad, Jayney.
             Once he became a doctor, Jayne practiced in southern NJ. About six years in, he started concocting his own medicines capable of curing pretty much anything. Back then, you didn't have to prove shit to say a medicine worked. You could poor your own piss into a bottle, mix it with vegetable oil, and call it Uncle GroJLart's Golden Cure-All. According to history, you would then become a rich-ass motherfucker.
            That's exactly what happened to Jayne. He came up with all kinds of chemicals and called them goofy-ass names like Carminative Balsam and Tonic Vermifuge. That's not a joke-- those are the real names of his medicines. He sold so many of these things so fucking fast that he had to open a store in Philadelphia just to keep his South Jersey town from becoming mobbed with snake oil customers from all over the region.
          

Dr. Jayne about to inject a patient with lead-based medicine.

                 Jayne's Philadelphia success grew so fast that he was forced to move from larger building to larger building until there was no commercial building in the city large enough to hold him. That's what made the Jayne Building possible. Note that he went from dinky storefront drugstore to largest commercial building in America (briefly) in only THREE YEARS. I told you this guy was a badass.
               After his big-ass building was constructed, Jayne allowed his son and nephew to run the drug business (and fail miserably) while he focused on real estate development. That's right, Dr. Jayne was also a slimy-ass Philly developer. Jayne's developments were usually marble or granite commercial buildings that dotted Old City, most notably Philadelphia's mid-19th Century Post Office. Pretty much all of them are gone now.
              When Jayne was ready to retire, he decided to build a fancy-ass mansion for himself at 19th and Chestnut, at the time a brand-new rich-ass neighborhood where Philadelphia's elite were building big fucking houses for themselves. Jayne was so powerful at this point that he was able to get the city to eminent domain a bunch of adjacent properties for him so that he could reserve the land to build a massive-ass house. He found a spunky young architect named James McArthur Jr. and commissioned a grand house the likes of which no Philadelphian had ever seen.
            McArthur came back with a mansard-roofed mega-castle of imperial cocksmacks, meant to stand at 19th and Chestnut FOREVER. The marble was shipped in all the way from Massachusetts and was special as fuck. People called the house the "Marble Mansion". The motherfucker took so long to build that Dr. Jayne died before it was complete. McArthur would go on to design a little-known building called Philadelphia City Hall.
           Jayne's spoiled-ass descendents lived in the house after that for the next three decades. Dr. Jayne's son Horace would go on to build his own mansion, this time designed by Furness, a few blocks away. It still stands.
          By the 1910's or so, the mansion was considered an out-dated looking piece of shit. The particular kind of marble used for the facade was considered quite weak (it was rejected as a facade material for City Hall), and was dirty, cracked up, and falling apart. The mansion finally went up for its final sale in 1921, about to fall the fuck over. 

While the mansion was for sale. Image from the PAB.

                     The site was considered perfect for a theater. The property was first offered to Oscar Hammerstein with hopes that he would build a new opera house. Hammerstein made a point of telling the New York Times that had had enough of Philadelphia real estate and that his answer was a big "FUCK NO!" The mansion was then purchased by some dudes named Fred D. and M.E. Felt, who built a pretty cool-ass movie theater there that now pitifully serves as a CVS/Pharmacy. They named it after the Aldine Hotel nearby. (Thanks to Philaphile Howard B. Hass for the correction)
                     Jayne's Mansion was considered quite the Rittenhouse landmark for its entire 55 year existence. The building that replaced it may be pretty cool, but there's plenty of other corners it could have been built. If the Mansion was never sold, it is likely that it would have been preserved by neglect (a la Society Hill) and still be standing today. It would be a great reminder of the lost gigantic mansions that dwarfed the already gigantic houses found in this area. Though a handful of the others survive, none come close to the badassery of this thing. Bollocks.

Empty Lot of the Week-- August 7th

Lot of Lots of Lost Uses

Northwest corner of 23rd and Walnut

                    Does this count as an Empty Lot? Its an active surface parking lot for a 24-hour Rite Aid. Well, of course it does. This dense and well-used part of the city shouldn't have a crappy pharmacy's surface lot occupying valuable-ass land like this.
                  Read more later today at the Philadelphia Citypaper's Naked City Blog!