Street closings set along Thanksgiving Parade route
The price of gas is down to less than $2 a gallon this week for the first time in nearly four years, and the drop couldn't come at a more opportune time.
The price of gas is down to less than $2 a gallon this week for the first time in nearly four years, and the drop couldn't come at a more opportune time.
AAA, which announced that national average over the weekend, predicts that this Thanksgiving week will bring its usual flurry of travel.
But don't get too excited about those prices just yet. Though Thanksgiving travel this year may be cheaper, it's never quite easy.
The city's Thanksgiving celebration always is accompanied by extensive traffic delays and three-day street closures in Center City and some West Philadelphia areas.
Beginning this evening, Eakins Oval in front of the Art Museum will close at 6 for the painting of a Thanksgiving street mural. It will reopen at 5 a.m. tomorrow, then close again from 6 to 10 p.m.
On Wednesday, Eakins Oval will close twice during the day for parade rehearsals - from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and again at 6:30 p.m. When the oval closes Wednesday evening, it will not reopen again until the conclusion of the parade late Thursday.
Traffic on Spring Garden Street will be detoured Wednesday between 9:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. and again from 6:30 p.m. until the conclusion of the parade Thursday. Westbound traffic will be directed into the Spring Garden Tunnel, and eastbound traffic will go to Pennsylvania Avenue.
The parade on Thanksgiving Day will kick off at 8 a.m. at 20th and Market streets. Floats and festivities will travel east on Market for five blocks, then up 15th Street to Arch before heading west to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The parade will wrap around Logan Circle and end at the south side of Eakins Oval near the reviewing stand in front of the Art Museum.
Parade participants departing the parade will spill onto Kelly Drive and extend up to Sedgley Drive.
Closures on the holiday will begin at 4 a.m. and include the entire parade route and Martin Luther King Drive from the Art Museum to Falls Bridge.
The Parkway also will be closed from 20th Street to Binswanger Triangle, and Kelly Drive will be closed from Fountain Green Drive to Eakins Oval.
Drivers are asked to follow posted detours for southbound Kelly Drive through Fairmount Park and on Spring Garden Street. John F. Kennedy Boulevard will be detoured from 19th Street to Schuylkill Avenue.
All detours and closings will last until parade participants and crowds have dispersed. Police anticipate delays in the area surrounding the parade route as well, in addition to holiday-travel traffic jams.
