$17 million to beautify Parkway
A $17 million mix of government and foundation funding has been put together for landscaping and other improvements as part of the effort to revitalize the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, sources familiar with the project say.
A $17 million mix of government and foundation funding has been put together for landscaping and other improvements as part of the effort to revitalize the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, sources familiar with the project say.
An additional $2.1 million is earmarked for a long-awaited, eco-friendly park at 12th and Catharine Streets, in the city's Hawthorne neighborhood, where a high-rise public-housing complex once stood.
Gov. Rendell's office is keeping details of the Parkway work under wraps until an announcement tomorrow. But insiders say the money is coming from the state, the city, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Knight Foundation, and the William Penn Foundation.
The improvements will coincide with the move of the Barnes Foundation art collection from Merion to a new home on the current site of the Youth Study Center on the Parkway.
The Catharine Street Park is to be built on a plot created by the implosion of the Martin Luther King towers in 1999.
Properties in the area have been at the center of a development dispute involving the Philadelphia Housing Authority during former Mayor John F. Street's administration, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Kenny Gamble, the music-legend-turned-developer.
Patricia Bullard, president of the Hawthorne Empowerment Coalition, a neighborhood group that has been working to overcome the post-demolition blight, said the park site was not part of the dispute.
Still, she said, "it's been a long time coming."
"We're delighted the park is going to happen," Bullard said.
Plans for the nearly one-acre park, based on a design by University of the Arts students, call for a small amphitheater and a fountain, said Joan Reilly, senior director of Philadelphia Green, which will coordinate the project.
The park, with a good view of the Center City skyline, is intended as a "passive" green spot where people in a built-up, gentrifying neighborhood can gather, relax, and get to know one another, Reilly said.
She praised the neighborhood group, saying, "There's never been a more dedicated friends-of-a-park group that didn't have a park."
"It's going to be turned into a wonderful, 21st-century park," Reilly said, adding it will incorporate elements to handle storm-water runoff.
