Quote:
Originally Posted by Justin7
Are you actually familiar with the space? I'm guessing not.
If you can't picture a successful park here you lack imagination. Instead we get a "private garden."
|
You honestly don't need a lot of imagination to imagine a cool park in the rail cut. A lot of handsome stone down there, could be a very cool vibe and pretty unique. But just because you can do something, does not mean you should.
This is not an area of the city in need of more green space. There is so much underutilized green space around here. There are giant sports fields and eakins oval and largely wasted open green space scattered with public art everywhere. Even the very design of the parkway creates tons of unused public space with those giant overgrown medians separating the completely unnecessary extra four lanes from the interior 6 lanes. That's not even mentioning all the well utilized excellent green space with paine park and the Schuylkill river trail.
The combined width of the two big medians and the 4 completely unnecessary extra 4 lanes is way wider than the rail cut. Wouldn't it make a million times more sense to spend any money you would on the rail cut park to make the public space that we already have in spades in the area more appealing and better utilized? At the same time considering something like a rail cut would be incredibly expensive to create from scratch today, doesn't it make sense to take the rail cut we already have and use it for the actual purpose it was designed for and put a type of public transit down there?
If this was an area well served by mass transit that was in desperate need of public green space, then by all means, I'd love the idea of an underground park here. But there is no better use for the rail cut than mass transit and there are plenty of better places to spend money improving already existing green spaces in the area.
It looks like this building has really tried to become invisible behind the rodin museum. That's less interesting than creating a great work of architecture to deserve to stand behind the rodin, but it's acceptable. The rail cut space should be preserved for future mass transit, but I could care less about the rail park. Go ahead and build it.