LOVE Park renovation breaks ground, skateboarding ban temporarily lifted

The city sold the garage below JFK Plaza / LOVE Park to Interpark in 2014. The impetus for the park project was actually born from the need to peel back the park to waterproof the leaky garage roof below. That presented an opportunity to rethink the mid-century plaza on top and make the garage ADA accessible. That opportunity also prompted public conversations about what LOVE Park should become, including a proposal from Council President Darrell Clarke for a heavy presence of revenue-generating uses. So Philadelphia Parks and Recreation and the Fairmount Park Conservancy embarked on deeper conversations with City Council, a civic engagement process, and economic study to inform the design team led by Hargreaves Associates.

“It’s a project about public-private partnership. It’s a project about political will and vision. It’s a project about public participation. It’s a project about making a place more civic, more democratic, more open, more welcoming,” said Mary Margaret Jones, principal at Hargreaves. “The process was not just our design process, it was yours.”

In the coming weeks more of LOVE Park will be fenced off and its surfaces peeled away. Robert Indiana’s sculpture will be moved and conserved and the old granite pavers will be salvaged for reuse (including in skateparks across the city), making way for repairs and waterproofing of the garage roof. The new park is expected to open in spring 2017. The combined cost of renovating the park and the saucer-shaped Fairmount Park Welcome Center is $16.5 million.

“I hope today’s groundbreaking is the first of many as we make bold plans to invest in parks and recreation facilities across the city,” said Parks and Recreation Commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell, who began work on this project in her tenure as director of the Fairmount Park Conservancy.