Valleys, Walls, Divisions: Highways in Center City

Highways, freeways, expressways, or whatever you want to call them, have an apparent purpose when they are built: to get people from one place to another, and to do it in an efficient, streamlined manner. Modern urban infrastructure in America is in a large part defined by snaking, elevated, or depressed concrete megastructures that stretch across and around areas of high population density. Before the middle of the 20th century, though, most of America’s cities weren’t defined by these sprawling infrastructural projects. It was around this time that Philadelphia, like many important urban centers in the country, got swept up in a post-WWII rise of the interstate highway system as a means to address questions of urban revitalization in the age of the automobile and the suburb.

Philadelphia’s highway system was imagined over the course of several decades to be the key to revamping business and life into the heart of Philadelphia, saving the city’s urban livelihood from competing shopping and residential developments in the suburbs. New highways, city planners imagined, would accommodate for automobiles that would otherwise be clogging city streets, making the city inaccessible. Highways in Philadelphia were dreamed to be havens for connection. How, then, did they turn into such powerful forces of separation?

The Philadelphia highway system can only be understood by examining the history of the city’s organization, boundaries, and growth. The city today is still grounded in William Penn’s original 17th century vision of a gridded street system extending from the Schuylkill River to the Delaware River, with a northern boundary at Vine Street, and a southern one at Cedar Street (Now South Street). Even though Penn’s grid still exists in some form, the city’s growth has not been contained within the original borders. As neighborhoods began to straddle streets like Vine and South, and expanded along the riverfront, the city’s so-called limits became much more ambiguous. When the city’s highway planning began after centuries of residential and commercial expansion, the planners had to work with the reality of a city constantly growing and redefining its social and geographic landscape.

Despite the existence of culturally vibrant neighborhoods beyond Penn’s original grid outline, the Philadelphia Highway System was planned to direct traffic and visitors into the Central Business District by building highways along the city’s original boundaries: the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers as well as Vine Street and South Street. On paper, this plan probably seemed like an ideal way to efficiently and sensically organize the city around a newly revitalized center of life and commerce. But paper maps make it easy to forget about individual people, who, as these highway projects were rolled out, had their homes destroyed, their communities split up, and their sense of space and home redefined.

With “Walls, Valleys, Divisions”, I wanted to explore the implications of city planning as it is faced with the realities of urban life, where people often live in close proximity to each other. How can a neighborhood be defined on a local level when competing with reorganization and redefinition at the hands of the city’s bureaucracy? How can conceptual boundaries survive when faced with new and conflicting physical boundaries? How can utopia be dreamed on paper but face demise when it reaches the streets? These are the questions I wanted to explore through a multimedia presentation of a city that I myself am trying to learn more about. I spent a Sunday afternoon walking under and over the city’s central highway system, as well as along the South Street area, which survives today without the planned Crosstown Expressway running along its length. I documented my day-long journey with pictures and videos to assess how divisions are manifested physically and otherwise in response to the highways which were constructed about a half-century ago. This interactive map includes pictures and videos linked to specific points I visited during my walk, along with textual explanations of what I encountered and why it matters. I encourage readers to try to follow the same course that I walked, starting at Logan Square, continuing east along Vine Street until I-95, then traveling south along Front Street until turning back west on to South Street. Though each point has its own story to tell, together a rough narrative can be formed by the flow of my journey. The points highlighted in red have substantial textual accompaniment to photos or videos I captured, while green points have more simplified textual captions to the media.

Just like it’s easy to draw up plans for an urban landscape on paper in an office place, it’s easy to read maps and scholarly works at a desk or in a classroom, but in order to understand the interaction between physical boundaries and conceptual communities in a city, it’s important to experience the streets and highways personally and visually. The goal of “Walls, Valleys, Divisions” is to bring to life the separations and redefinitions that have taken place in and around Center City’s highway system. As you, the user, interact with the map in front of you, keep in mind that not even this project can fully characterize the lasting effect these infrastructural behemoths have on the city. I encourage you when you are personally experiencing Philadelphia or any complex urban environment to try to carry with you the questions I am trying to address. I ask you to consider this: is there a better way?