Philly Painting progress | ATVs wrecking Tacony Creek Park | Park Towne Place goes dark | Goldberger on Venturi | Dilworth reflections
City Paper’s cover story visits Haas & Hahn’s Philly Painting project along Germantown Avenue and unpacks the challenges of this massive mural project. The Philly Painting crew is slowly moving along the Avenue, weaving together designs and color choices building-by-building, and say that Philly bureaucracy is more challenging to work with than a Brazilian drug lord.
Illegal dirt bikers and ATV riders continue to tear up Tacony Creek Park even as the city works to stabilize the creek’s banks and protect the watershed, the Daily News reports. “When you have these vehicles running around in there, it not only ruins it for the park visitors, but it degrades the ecosystem, it destroys regeneration, it creates storm water management problems, it tears up trails we put in for the walkers and bikers,” said Michael DiBerardinis, commissioner of the parks and recreation department. “We’re on a limited budget, and yet we’re spending lots of money correcting the damage from illegal vehicles.”
There is no word yet why Park Towne Place, the large apartment complex on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 22nd Street, lost power overnight. PECO checked its equipment and says the problem is with the building, reports philly.com.
In Vanity Fair Daily, architecture critic Paul Goldberger reflects on the career of Robert Venturi on the occasion of Venturi’s retirement. “He never got the big jobs he deserved in his home town of Philadelphia,” Goldberger laments. “Venturi was never a celebrity architect. In the end, his buildings didn’t wow you. They made you think.”
As Dilworth Plaza is being remade, look back at the evolution of this public space over the last century on PhillyHistory. The Buzz is Eyes on the Street’s morning news digest. Have a tip? Send it along.
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