A citywide wave of green-space investments unseen for at least a
generation is now underway in Philadelphia. Scarcely a week goes by but
another project is announced.
Yesterday's announcement at the site of future Hawthorne Park at 12th &
Catherine in South Philadelphia provides an interesting measure of
several big questions about park renewal work in Southwest and West
Philadelphia. The first totally new city park for a while sheds light on
how park-making goes on nowadays.
Hawthorne, for many generations a largely working-class Black community,
emerged from under the tall shadow of the MLK housing project. A few
years ago PHA demolished it and replaced it with an attractive
mixed-income townhouse community. The area is feeling upward pressure on
real-estate prices just as other inner-ring neighborhoods have been over
the last 10 years, but it remains a bluecollar African-American bastion.
Hawthorne Park will be about one-half a city block, or 0.75 acre, which
is a vacant City-owned parcel. It will cost $2.15 million, of which the
Penna. Dept. of Conservation & Natural Resources will pay a little more
than half. State Rep. Babette Josephs pitched in another $300,000
community development grant from the State. Councilman Frank DiCicco
found $250,000 in City money. Private partners the Pew Charitable Trust
and the William Penn Foundation also contributed $250,000 each.
So in this case it'll take three public partners and two private
partners to pay to get an inner-city park built from scratch, while a
fourth public partner, Fairmount Park, and a third private partner,
Penna. Horticultural Society, do the building.
Suppose we run this kind of math on Clark Park, our neighborhood's
largest chunk of community parkland.
At 9 acres, Clark Park is 12 times bigger than Hawthorne Park. So if you
were to build it all over again today, it'd cost $25.8 million.
That's not counting land-acquisition costs. That's harder to estimate,
because big patches of urban land suitable for park development come on
the market much more seldom than smaller parcels like Hawthorne Park do.
And where they pop up is largely subject to chance; you can't just order
one when you want one. But 9 acres of developable land are worth
millions in University City, for sure.
So a huge community park like this is a rare and costly tool: hard to
find, hard to create and hard to maintain. Does start-up work cost more
or less than rehab work? That depends on the problem you're rehabbing.
If it took seven public-private partners to start up Hawthorne Park,
then it'll probably take more partners to rehabilitate Clark Park, and
more years to carry it off.
-- Tony West
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