April 22-28, 2004

cityspace

Our Field of Dreams

Banking on a good future: With Citizens Bank Park and Lincoln Financial Field now up and running, Pattison Avenue should become a thriving corridor. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

All the new Phillies park needs is a neighborhood around it.

by Harris Steinberg

Full disclosure: I’m not a sports fan. I like going to games from time to time, but I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool fanatic. Not even close. In fact, I’ve never read a sports section front to back. You get the picture.

That said, I love the new Citizens Bank Park.

One-part Disney World, one-part airport and two-parts theater, the Bank is a joyful venue to watch baseball. It's a shrine, yes, to a team that all too often disappoints, but as with families, this is our family team and Philadelphians were at the park in droves one recent sun-dappled, mid-April Sunday afternoon.

Let's get the topic of location out on the table at the get-go. OK -- we all agree that the Bank was built in the wrong location. Or do we? I'm not so sure. Sure, it would have been great downtown on the edge of the business district. But, let's look at where it is now, how it's designed and what it might suggest in terms of an enhanced urban design for the whole sports complex.

The Bank is aching for a city. It's arcaded southern and western flanks scream Franklin Field and call for -- no, insist -- that the city be brought to it. It's a marvelously transparent structure both outside and within. While the Vet was foreboding as part nuclear bunker and part impenetrable DNA double helix, the Bank is an inviting, street-level public building that acknowledges its position and placement as part of a wider world.

Here's a not-too-distant future that a day at the Bank painted for me:

All of the open surface parking lots that surround the Bank and the adjacent stadiums have been developed with marvelous, mixed-use facilities that include residential, retail, cultural and office spaces. Parking is discreetly underground, and a fabulous new 21st-century urban district has arisen from the rubble of the Vet. A high-tech light-rail system connects 11th and 12th streets with Center City -- via the old Route 23 trolley tracks -- and parts as distant as Germantown and Chestnut Hill. The Broad Street subway extends to the vibrant new Naval Yard neighborhood. Heck, there are even bike racks.

A new high school for students interested in professional sports careers -- journalism, medicine, psychology -- draws on the real-world synergies associated with adjacent world-class sports organizations. Penn has opened a sports medicine campus here. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has created a new academy dedicated to advancing Thomas Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking 19th-century work with the human figure.

Pattison Avenue is an energetic and exciting 24/7 cross-city boulevard, lined with shops, apartments and cafes, linking the Marine Terminal on the Delaware with fabulously reclaimed parkland in the former tank farms on the Schuylkill.

Far-fetched? I don't think so. The Bank and its sister sites -- the Linc, Wachovia Center and the Spectrum -- form a first-class collection of sporting venues. Rather than leave them as disjointed elephants winking at each other across vast oceans of surface parking lots, knit them together with first-class buildings and public spaces that make a day at the Bank a week to remember.

The designers of the Bank went to great efforts to pay homage to Shibe Park -- the Phillies old ballpark at Lehigh Avenue and 20th Street. Like Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago, Shibe -- cum Connie Mack -- was smack in the middle of a working-class neighborhood and benefited from the density and buzz of its setting.

Here at the Bank, the architects EwingCole and HOK Sport had to re-create the "homey" neighborhood feeling in a scale-less, barren landscape of parking, parking and more parking that only a team owner could love. A small section of bleacher seats atop concession stands is a reference to the bleachers that adjoining homeowners built on their roofs. The arcades on 11th and Pattison are reminders of the vertical syncopation of Shibe's street-front architecture. The diamond-patterned, red-brick-and-copper roofs with plum-red painted steel all allude to our collective Philadelphia textural subconscious.

This is all well and good, and the feel of the park is spacious, generous, ample; it's a park for the SUV generation with cupholders at each of the 43,500 seats. There are games for children to play and plenty of concession stands with comfortable Philadelphia fare -- Pat's cheesesteaks and Schmitters from McNally's in Chestnut Hill being two of our hometown favorite victuals served.

It's a wonderfully pleasant place to watch sports, watch people and engage in the time-honored custom of booing your favorite players. It is the most solicitous of ballparks.

Ambling the broad main concourse with a continually unobstructed view of the field is a delight. Landings on stair towers double as balconies so that at every turn you can view the city or the surroundings. The architects have learned well and applied important lessons from Disney as well as recent airport design in both people moving and merchandising. The Bank is more than a ballpark. It's a total experience.

What's refreshing is that the Bank is not trying to be an architectural icon -- a stand-alone "look at me" structure. No, it aspires to be a good neighbor. So let's answer back by building it a vibrant new neighborhood that is multifarious and truly urban. Make this our field of dreams.

Harris M. Steinberg is the executive director of Penn Praxis of the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Design Advocacy Group of Philadelphia.