Closing Market Street
Jun. 3rd, 2022 08:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThe city of Philadelphia is laid out on a rectangular grid. The major streets running from east to west are numbered, with the smaller numbers being closer to New Jersey. The major streets running from north to south are named, in this order:
Market Street
Chestnut Street
Walnut Street
Spruce Street
Pine Street
South Street
These named streets are all holdovers from Ye Olden Tymes; and, with one exception, they’re all very narrow and only allow car traffic in one direction. The exception is Market Street, which has either four or six lanes at different points. Or at least it would if it had lanes. Which it doesn’t. How do people know where to drive on the road? That’s an excellent question!
People drive like maniacs everywhere in Philadelphia – and I say this coming from Atlanta, which has notoriously awful drivers – but Market Street is especially bad. It’s also covered in potholes, the size and audacity of which you’ve never seen. It is a hellstreet, the actual real-world equivalent of Tumblr dot org. The fact that it has so many lanes (“lanes” lmao) makes it even worse, as it’s almost impossible to cross on foot safely. It’s literally easier to walk across I-76 than it is to walk across Market Street.
(I-76 is the interstate that connects South Jersey to Western Pennsylvania, and I think it goes a bit into Ohio too. It runs through Philadelphia, separating Center City from North Philly. Because the interstate is lower than regular street level, the city streets form bridges over it. When I-76 flooded last summer, people used these bridges to jump into the floodwaters, which was fucking insane but also kind of epic.)
The University of Pennsylvania campus borders Market Street, and the university apparently wants to close the street along that border. What they intend to do is either reduce it to the same size as the other named streets – meaning one or two lanes with traffic going in only one direction – or close it to car traffic entirely.
The university wants to do this for three reasons.
First, because Philadelphia isn’t that large, and because the weather is nice for most of the year, most people commute by walking, biking, or riding those stupid electric scooters. The university is losing money on its parking decks. Not actual money, of course, but opportunity cost money. Being able to further reduce car traffic into campus and close the parking decks makes good financial sense.
Second, 30th Street Station (the main hub for Amtrak and regional rail lines in the tri-state area) isn’t that far away from campus, but it’s separated from the university by Market Street. Having the station be more accessible to campus would be a major draw for the university, as it would mean Union Station in Manhattan would only be about 50 minutes away. Currently, a lot of university employees do in fact commute through 30th Street Station, and a unfortunate but unsurprising number of these employees have been hit (and occasionally killed) by cars on Market Street. Which is not great!
The third reason the university wants to close Market Street is the interesting bit of this story.
Market Street is the main thoroughfare between West Philadelphia and Center City, meaning that it’s how a lot of people get from their homes to their jobs. What the university therefore wants to do is build an actual honest-to-god private underground railway line under Market Street.
The wild thing is that this infrastructure already exists, but the segment of the subway that runs under University City was abandoned before it was opened because the city ran out of money. True story! This means that (a) there are a bunch of creepy tunnels under West Philadelphia, and (b) the university wants to use them to make money.
If I understand what’s going on correctly, most of this money would come not from the railway itself, but from better access to the university hospital system, which is…… I’m not really sure how to describe it tbh.
The closest I can get is to make an analogy to Lovecraft. You know when Lovecraft talks about structures that are so large that their scale is incomprehensible, so much so that it literally hurts you to try to think about them? It’s like that. The other analogy I can make is to Shinjuku Station, which is so large and complicated that it’s infamously impossible to map. The university hospital system is like Shinjuku Station, except if there were ten Shinjuku Stations all right next to each other.
I don’t think there’s even a word to describe what it is. The “hospital” is a dozen extremely large buildings that are all connected to each other both aboveground and belowground. It has several vertical greenhouses, multiple helicopter ports, and also a facility dedicated to research on the nature of matter that I’m sure is not sinister at all. Its skyline is almost as impressive as the Center City skyline; except, while the Center City skyline is an elegant evocation of Art Deco “second empire” architectural stylizations, the UPenn Hospital skyline is like a mountain rising from the earth.
Anyway, the university wants to buy the old tunnels to set up a private subway that will facilitate access to the hospital system. And I mean, you can see how that makes sense. It actually makes so much sense that you have to wonder why it doesn’t exist already.
I sort of envision the university as a horrible person in a suit leaning back in a chair and crossing their legs and saying, “You know what would fix the problems of this city’s broken infrastructure? All of the money that we conveniently have lying around.”
On one hand, it’s a joke to say that the university is a nonprofit organization, and they really should be paying taxes to the city. Allowing an unimaginably wealthy private organization to do whatever it wants with public city property is undemocratic oligarchy bullshit.
On the other hand, it would be nice if the university were able to close Market Street, and honestly I kind of hope they’re successful.
Market Street
Chestnut Street
Walnut Street
Spruce Street
Pine Street
South Street
These named streets are all holdovers from Ye Olden Tymes; and, with one exception, they’re all very narrow and only allow car traffic in one direction. The exception is Market Street, which has either four or six lanes at different points. Or at least it would if it had lanes. Which it doesn’t. How do people know where to drive on the road? That’s an excellent question!
People drive like maniacs everywhere in Philadelphia – and I say this coming from Atlanta, which has notoriously awful drivers – but Market Street is especially bad. It’s also covered in potholes, the size and audacity of which you’ve never seen. It is a hellstreet, the actual real-world equivalent of Tumblr dot org. The fact that it has so many lanes (“lanes” lmao) makes it even worse, as it’s almost impossible to cross on foot safely. It’s literally easier to walk across I-76 than it is to walk across Market Street.
(I-76 is the interstate that connects South Jersey to Western Pennsylvania, and I think it goes a bit into Ohio too. It runs through Philadelphia, separating Center City from North Philly. Because the interstate is lower than regular street level, the city streets form bridges over it. When I-76 flooded last summer, people used these bridges to jump into the floodwaters, which was fucking insane but also kind of epic.)
The University of Pennsylvania campus borders Market Street, and the university apparently wants to close the street along that border. What they intend to do is either reduce it to the same size as the other named streets – meaning one or two lanes with traffic going in only one direction – or close it to car traffic entirely.
The university wants to do this for three reasons.
First, because Philadelphia isn’t that large, and because the weather is nice for most of the year, most people commute by walking, biking, or riding those stupid electric scooters. The university is losing money on its parking decks. Not actual money, of course, but opportunity cost money. Being able to further reduce car traffic into campus and close the parking decks makes good financial sense.
Second, 30th Street Station (the main hub for Amtrak and regional rail lines in the tri-state area) isn’t that far away from campus, but it’s separated from the university by Market Street. Having the station be more accessible to campus would be a major draw for the university, as it would mean Union Station in Manhattan would only be about 50 minutes away. Currently, a lot of university employees do in fact commute through 30th Street Station, and a unfortunate but unsurprising number of these employees have been hit (and occasionally killed) by cars on Market Street. Which is not great!
The third reason the university wants to close Market Street is the interesting bit of this story.
Market Street is the main thoroughfare between West Philadelphia and Center City, meaning that it’s how a lot of people get from their homes to their jobs. What the university therefore wants to do is build an actual honest-to-god private underground railway line under Market Street.
The wild thing is that this infrastructure already exists, but the segment of the subway that runs under University City was abandoned before it was opened because the city ran out of money. True story! This means that (a) there are a bunch of creepy tunnels under West Philadelphia, and (b) the university wants to use them to make money.
If I understand what’s going on correctly, most of this money would come not from the railway itself, but from better access to the university hospital system, which is…… I’m not really sure how to describe it tbh.
The closest I can get is to make an analogy to Lovecraft. You know when Lovecraft talks about structures that are so large that their scale is incomprehensible, so much so that it literally hurts you to try to think about them? It’s like that. The other analogy I can make is to Shinjuku Station, which is so large and complicated that it’s infamously impossible to map. The university hospital system is like Shinjuku Station, except if there were ten Shinjuku Stations all right next to each other.
I don’t think there’s even a word to describe what it is. The “hospital” is a dozen extremely large buildings that are all connected to each other both aboveground and belowground. It has several vertical greenhouses, multiple helicopter ports, and also a facility dedicated to research on the nature of matter that I’m sure is not sinister at all. Its skyline is almost as impressive as the Center City skyline; except, while the Center City skyline is an elegant evocation of Art Deco “second empire” architectural stylizations, the UPenn Hospital skyline is like a mountain rising from the earth.
Anyway, the university wants to buy the old tunnels to set up a private subway that will facilitate access to the hospital system. And I mean, you can see how that makes sense. It actually makes so much sense that you have to wonder why it doesn’t exist already.
I sort of envision the university as a horrible person in a suit leaning back in a chair and crossing their legs and saying, “You know what would fix the problems of this city’s broken infrastructure? All of the money that we conveniently have lying around.”
On one hand, it’s a joke to say that the university is a nonprofit organization, and they really should be paying taxes to the city. Allowing an unimaginably wealthy private organization to do whatever it wants with public city property is undemocratic oligarchy bullshit.
On the other hand, it would be nice if the university were able to close Market Street, and honestly I kind of hope they’re successful.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-03 09:26 pm (UTC)It's wild because like almost all of what UPenn would *do* with this space/infrastructure is stuff I'm actually pretty in favor of (trains yes! foot traffic yes! access, particularly non car access, to hospitals yes!) but it just has such a weird flavor of yikes because, you know, Ivies sitting on their giant piles of monopoly money (she says as if she didn't go to basically-an-Ivy, but at least my alma mater committed to using its endowment to fund first-gen students' tuition, which is still a hellscape but an attempt at good. perhaps like this?)
no subject
Date: 2022-06-04 12:11 pm (UTC)I'm not trying to one-up you or anything, but my school recently committed to using its endowment fund to snapping up property bordering campus in order to force affordable places to eat (like McDonald's) to close in an attempt to make the area unfriendly to the low-income people who work there. 🙃
It's always nice when large wealthy institutions do the right thing. Especially because they don't have to, as no one can really stop them from being evil. The situation reminds me of the church in medieval Europe honestly. I guess the upside is that at least the architecture is nice.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-07 05:05 pm (UTC)*deep sigh* at your institution's use of endowment. Just. Deep sigh.