Quote:
Originally Posted by Knight Hospitaller
And trucks have to make deliveries, and people will still take cabs/Uber... If we learned anything from the transit-ways and superblocks of the seventies, it's that a lack of connection and traffic flow kills a neighborhood. This thing will be like an island in the sky if it's floating above the tracks with a few "tethers" connecting it with the rest of the city grid.
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There are significant grade concerns and that will muck with connectivity.
Unless you want to regrade 32nd all the way from Market to Powelton, you're not getting Race all the way across the railroad tracks as a full street. It might look flat, but there's a short section of intolerable grade right before you hit the intersection. That's why it's planned to be a pedestrian walkway: you can use a stairway with an embedded ramp for that short stretch of steep grade.
That also implies that Summer Street would be the first possible full street easement all the way across the Powelton Yards. The problem with that, though, is that Summer is a narrow interstitial street (but that doesn't mean it can't be used as a service way!).
Any cap over the bottom of Powelton Yards will be a full
forty feet higher than JFK. That is one of the site's most significant long-term challenges. The planners have elected instead of link the bottom to the station area and the top to Mantua and Powelton Village, leaving the part of the yards with the greatest grade and landing challenges to be developed last.
I did gather one interesting little tidbit from the Brandywine rep (sorry, Philly-Drew, I was there when Jim Saksa and the Sic Transit Philly guy were there -- too early for you): the 950' tower is planned to be the last part of Phase 1. And that is precisely because Drexel needs to move its engineering labs before it can happen.