A friend of Rail Park
On his off time, museum designer works to turn old rail corridor into city park
MUSEUM-EXHIBITION designer Aaron Goldblatt's feathered fedora and rainbow-colored Converse kicks aren't getting near as much sun they should this Sunday.
As his wife, Please Touch Museum president Laura Foster, walks into their Logan Square home, she tells him how beautiful it is outside.
"I wouldn't know!" Goldblatt says.
Goldblatt, 58, a partner at Metcalfe Architecture & Design, has spent his day inside, talking about what he hopes to do outside with 50 city blocks' worth of the old Philadelphia and Reading Railroad.
One of just three members of the board of Friends of the Rail Park, Goldblatt spends his day off from planning museum exhibits by planning a lecture on the proposed Rail Park with his fellow board members, Leah Murphy and Liz Maillie.
The Friends of the Rail Park are working to turn two branches where the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad once ran into a nearly three-mile garden and recreation path, in the same vein as High Line Park in New York City.
Goldblatt talks of how he used to walk over a part of Rail Park's potential home near his house and marvel at the "magic garden" below.
"I knew this is feral, that this is just planted by God and birds' asses," he says. "It's a feral garden, and we want to make it so people can walk, so we can use it."
Goldblatt slips on his crazy Converses, which he designed himself online, and puts on his black fedora. He walks to a bridge on 18th Street near Callowhill that looks down on the site of the proposed park.
He overlooks the discarded tires, the traffic cones and the mounds of garbage and, instead, pulls the branch of a tall tree to him, pointing out a tiny bud.
"There's some depressing parts about it but it's real," he says of the park. "It's real and then in the spring it starts to come alive. There are beautiful flowers that appear and then in the middle of the summer you can't even see into it because it's so alive."
-Stephanie Farr