It is a space that is as old as Philadelphia, named after the city’s most renowned inventor, but can Franklin Square successfully reinvent itself for sustained, present-day use? That is the question that looms behind the recent spate of good-vibes headlines for the eight-acre park at 6th and Race Streets. In early April, politicians, dignitaries, and urbanists alike gathered to celebrate the reopening of a PATCO subway station in the southwest corner of the park, the latest development in an ongoing effort to render progress in this historically-challenged space. For nearly two decades, the nonprofit development company Historic Philadelphia, Inc. has stewarded the park. To CEO Amy Needle, the momentum is all headed in the right direction. “We work really hard at Historic Philadelphia to make sure that Franklin Square is always a friendly, fun, safe place to be,” she said. “[The PATCO station] is another wonderful piece of all the development that’s happened around the square since we opened.”

Yet, a reading of the square’s history reveals that good vibes have come and gone before after butting up against physical realities borne from past city planning practices. The most recent analogue came 50 years ago when the PATCO station, originally constructed 1934, was previously reopened for bicentennial celebrations. By that time Franklin Square had declined from a 19th century heyday into the heart of Philadelphia’s notorious Skid Row. However, a May 1976 Philadelphia Inquirer article hailed the reopening of the subway station and other contemporary improvements, such as the construction of bathrooms and rehabilitation of landscaping and a historic fountain. “If William Penn were alive today he would be pleased with what has happened to the five public squares he envisioned,” the article declared. “[And] the greatest amount of work has been done at Franklin Square.”

Following bicentennial celebrations, ridership at the PATCO stop plummeted and it closed again just three years later. The park’s reputation as primarily the domain of people experiencing homelessness returned, as did its status as the most forsaken of Penn’s parks. “Four of the five squares in Penn’s original grid for Philadelphia have distinctive identities and character,” a 2004 Inquirer editorial offered up. “But the fifth, Franklin Square, sits nearly forgotten in the shadows of the bridge that bears the same name.”

Indeed, the 1920s construction of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge is one of just several major urban development projects that served to “disconnect” Franklin Square from its surrounding neighborhoods, noted Jeffrey Doshna, a planner and economist at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. While the foot of the bridge boxes in Franklin Square to the east, the mid-20th century hollowing out neighborhoods to the south, for Independence Mall and the Police Administration Building (aka the Roundhouse), to the west, for the former Metropolitan Hospital, and to the north, for the Vine Street Expressway, effectively placed the park in an urban no-man’s land. “These are all happening in a relatively small geography,” Doshna said. “There’s a long history of kind of wondering, what is the best use here?”

Inescapable is the park’s adjacency to Chinatown. While residential areas near Franklin Square perceived as “slums” were paved over in the 20th century to make way for modern highways and tourist districts, recent proposals like the doomed 76ers arena continue to raise the question: just who is this neighborhood, and its park, for?

A Wild Past

In all of Penn’s parks, quaint notions of some bygone peaceful era are the stuff of myth, explained Elizabeth Milroy, Professor Emerita of Art & Art History at Drexel University and author of a seminal book on the history of the city’s parks, The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876. “The notion persists that by the time Philadelphia achieved political and economic prominence in the mid-18th century, it was a ‘wholesome grid of streets and squares,’” Milroy has written. “City maps perpetuated this myth, when in fact the immediate needs of the new colony had precluded methodical building. From the start Philadelphians struggled to balance the demands of private entrepreneurship and public works.”

The land Penn set aside for his five parks proved particularly problematic. While they were meant to be public lands, little to no funding was set aside for their maintenance. As development reached the parks’ boundaries, so too did challenges of the commons. Burial grounds, livestock, vagrants, and even public hangings graced the city’s squares. “As the city grew the squares became vague marginalized spaces, vulnerable to abuse,” wrote Milroy in The Grid and the River.

What was commonly referred to as North East Publick Square–now Franklin Square–was no exception. After being laid out in the early 1700s, the park was slow to develop due in part to marshy conditions, according to a history compiled by John Milner Associates. In 1741, the German Reformed Church at 4th and Race Streets successfully obtained a lease from Governor Thomas Penn to bury its dead in the northeast quadrant of the park, a grant that led to the eventual interment of thousands of bodies. However, when Penn tried to give another piece of the park away just 10 years later to Pennsylvania Hospital, the institution’s reasons for declining indicated a burgeoning public attachment to this public space. “Our fellow citizens would tax us with injustice to them if we should accept,” the hospital’s managers wrote.

The push-and-pull of who controlled the park came to a head in the 1820s when City Hall approved more than $4,000 in improvements. Following a plan by famous sculptor William Rush, the park was to be relandscaped with gravel walkways winding their way through planted trees and centered around a decorative fountain that still exists today. To solidify this new era, the City formally renamed the five public squares in 1825, christening the northeast square after Benjamin Franklin. Yet, when the German Reformed congregation resisted requests to vacate, the City sued. The landmark case of Commonwealth Vs. Alburger reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where the City won and nullified the 1741 Penn agreement. The park was to be for the people, the court ruled, clearing the way for the development plans to become fully realized by 1850, topped by the donation of a resident live peacock by Adam Eckfeldt, chief coiner at the United States Mint.

This ostensibly created a golden era of the park, when primarily well-to-do Philadelphians occupied the neighborhoods nearby. However, even here the historical record suggests a more sordid reality. In 1877, a Philadelphia Times piece characterized the park as “infested with bad characters” believed drawn to the area by nearby variety shows. “Disreputable characters of both sexes [deprive] respectable residents of the neighborhoods of the use of the beautiful park by their children, who cannot resort there without being subjected to the vilest companionship and the hearing of the most profane and obscene language,” the paper reported, while quoting then-mayor William Stokley as calling Franklin Square “One of the worst and most troublesome neighborhoods in Philadelphia.”

Reports throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries tell a story of two parks: by night, a rough and tumble place where “thieves and thugs” roamed, while policemen chatted nearby with “soiled doves of that locality,” according to an 1894 Philadelphia Times piece. And by day, a place of “vagabond whimsy” where short-skirted ladies came and went and children sprinkled themselves in the fountain’s waters and played “hopscotch in the sun” according to a 1918 description in the Evening Public Ledger.

Whatever such charm graced Franklin Square would soon be lost.

Urban Renewal

By the early 20th, wealthy families were deserting neighborhoods adjacent to Franklin Square in favor of destinations such as Rittenhouse Square and Chestnut Hill. According to a history compiled for a walking tour by Calvin Nguyen, a former student of Milroy’s and now Indianapolis-based preservationist, some former residences were then converted into “taverns, hotels, and bordellos,” further attracting seedier elements. Even though much of the housing stock was still occupied by lower class residents, city planners turned to the concept of urban renewal that brought about the construction of the highways and tourist districts. “Urban planners saw the area as untreatable and opted to destroy the neighborhood altogether, displacing its residential community in favor of light industrial buildings, commercial spaces, and the Vine Street Expressway,” wrote Nguyen.

The efforts backfired. Cutoff from residential neighborhoods and foot traffic, a vacuum was created that further pulled in those with nowhere else to go. By 1961, famed urban theorist and author Jane Jacobs infamously described Franklin Square as Philadelphia’s Skid Row in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
“Where the homeless, the unemployed, and the people of indigent leisure gather amid the flophouses, cheap hotels, missions,” and similar sights, wrote Jacobs.

Yet, contemporary descriptions also gave nods to the humanity that called the park home. Jacobs herself called the regulars of Franklin Square “seedy,” but less threatening and criminal than in other sections of the city. Even as others in the press called for wide-scale renewal of Franklin Square at the end of the 20th century, Lawrence Houstoun, Jr., an urban development consultant, wrote in the Inquirer in 1991 that the state of the park was a simple reality borne of poor planning decisions, rather than the product of nefarious intentions by its regulars. “Franklin Square should be recognized for what city and highway planning have made it–an historic Skid Row park serving the only population that finds it useful and attractive,” wrote Houstoun.

Merry-Go-Round Again

Calls for a fresh start for Franklin Square were eventually answered. In 2004, the Inquirer published an editorial headlined, “Fix Philly’s Fifth Wheel,” which stated that “things are stirring near the fifth square of William Penn.” The Center City District had kicked off a conversation by putting forth a conceptual plan with suggestions including a ferris wheel. The Inquirer further mused of building pedestrian bridges over the surrounding roadways and holding historical reenactments in the park.

Just months later, then-Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell announced a concrete plan to transfer the park from the Fairmount Park Commission to Historic Philadelphia, which he formed while mayor in 1994, and invest millions of dollars in its redevelopment. “Credit goes to Ed Rendell for seeing the vision of Franklin Square for what it could be,” said Philadelphia Councilmember Mark Squilla, whose district contains the park.

That vision came together quickly. By the summer of 2006, the park reopened to the public with $6.5 million in new amenities, including a miniature golf course and carousel (both still in use today), updated landscaping and paving, and a fully repaired fountain, which was originally installed 1838 and believed to be the “oldest refurbished and functioning public water fountain in the United States,” according to Historic Philadelphia. Historical signage also called out the interesting uses of the park’s past: cattle pasture, horse market, military drill grounds, and Revolutionary War powder magazine. Noticeably absent, Nguyen noted, is any signage nodding to the park’s less-rosy 20th century. “Franklin Square should take steps to meaningfully contend with its whole history,” Nguyen wrote, “and think about history as more than a theme for consumption, but as an educational tool for learning about the city’s pasts, present, and possible futures.”

Before long, PATCO also took a renewed interest in the park. Franklin Square Station was originally opened in 1935 by the Delaware River Joint Commission, but closed in 1939 due to poor ridership. It ran again for just seven months in 1952, then three years following the 1976 Bicentennial. “Given the new developments of Independence Mall, the Police Headquarters, and the Metropolitan Hospital being seen as harbingers of good fortune, there was optimism in the air,” Nguyen wrote. “[But] opening for the bicentennial proved no difference in making the Franklin Square station permanent, again failing to get significant ridership.”

At the ribbon cutting for the latest revival in April, PATCO general manager John Rink said that history didn’t deter the agency from trying again and with renewed optimism. The old Metropolitan Hospital across the street has been converted to condos, he stated. The adjacent, currently unoccupied Roundhouse offers similar “big potential,” he said. The growth of residential development along Spring Garden Street and in Northern Liberties, along with continued activity in Chinatown and Independence Mall, add to potential foot traffic.

Prior to the station’s latest opening, PATCO operated just four stops in Philadelphia: one at 8th and Market Streets and three more in Center City along Locust Street. That compares to nine in New Jersey, stretching from Camden into its suburbs. As such, planners initially believed most of the ridership to the park would come from New Jersey, Rink said, but now believe a significant number of riders will visit the park from Center City, especially at just $1.40 a ticket. How well it pays off remains to be seen: the station’s rehabilitation required about $30 million. “The park itself has changed, and now we have the potential to connect our riders,” Rink insisted.

Historic Philadelphia also continues to make improvements to the park. New bathroom facilities should be completed this month. A complete overhaul of an aging playground is also in the works. Needle also pointed to Race Street, where a soon-to-be-completed “road diet” initiative has reduced the amount of car lanes and added a protected bike lane. Together, the projects cost an additional $7.8 million. Combined with a new Indego bicycle-sharing station at the park, she believes there will be more favorable connectivity for pedestrians and cyclists. Ultimately, she thinks Franklin Square can thread the needle as a place for nearby residents and children to come and enjoy the outdoors, while also serving as a worthwhile destination for tourists near and far. “That’s what all of our public spaces are intended to do, right?” she posed.

Doshna believes that is possible. He likens Franklin Square’s potential to something like the Italian Market, which provides both a real service to neighborhood residents and draws outside visitors. Even with a history of deep-pocketed proposals like the 76ers arena threatening to disrupt nearby residents, Doshna said regular investments in parks are a good sign. He particularly points to investments like the PATCO stop as providing a beneficial new service to those living nearby. “A train stop is actually much, much better than building a big parking lot for people to drive in,” Doshna said. “If somebody takes PATCO to Franklin Square and goes and eats at a restaurant nearby, there’s no extra car, right? There’s no traffic problems and cars idling.”

For Squilla, who recently caught a tiger by the toe when he threw his weight behind the 76ers arena plan, Franklin Square’s ongoing development is noncontroversial. “To me, it’s a worthwhile partnership that really could be an example of how we can restore and maintain a lot of our open areas in the city.”

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