BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER

In Philadelphia, the new Bartram’s Mile spans multiple periods of history.

From the March 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Concrete slabs refurbished as public plazas. Old Jersey barriers reconfigured into retaining walls. “Just about everything you see has been repurposed one way or another,” says José Almiñana, FASLA, of Bartram’s Mile, a greenway project along the western bank of the Schuylkill River being designed by Andropogon Associates, where Almiñana is a principal.

The 11.5-acre site wraps around the nearly 300-year-old landscape of Bartram’s Garden, the oldest surviving botanic garden in the United States. Created in 1728 by John Bartram, the historic garden became a public park in 1891. For decades, however, it has existed as a 45-acre island of woodlands and walking paths surrounded by a sea of heavy industry and neglected Philadelphia neighborhoods.

The new park will help connect the garden and the surrounding area with existing greenways. Perhaps most important, it will provide new opportunities for recreation in Southwest Philly, where, according to the 2010 census, a third of the population lives below the poverty line.

Although the new landscape, which should be open to the public by this fall, will stand in contrast with the character of the historic garden, the team’s approach honors Bartram’s spirit. Patty West, a landscape architect at Andropogon, recalls reading that “George Washington and Thomas Jefferson came over and were taken aback by how unkempt the [garden] was,” she says. “Because it was a productive landscape—it’s not a Monticello. We took some of those do-it-yourself attitudes to the rest of our site.”

Old artifacts will be scattered throughout the landscape, including boulders trucked in from the zoo’s old elephant enclosure. “It’s like nutrient cycling,” Almiñana says, “making sure you close the loop and take advantage of all the resources that you have.” Even topographic features, such as small coves that once held oil tanks, are being repurposed—as is vegetation. “Normally, I would never plant a paulownia,” West says, “but we had paulownia all over the site, so we kept them, and we’re using them.” (This, too, is in the spirit of Bartram, who planted natives and exotics indiscriminately.)

The designers didn’t limit themselves to the site. When they were given permission to browse the parks department’s recycling center, West says they were like kids turned loose in a toy store, nabbing reclaimed stone, broken sculptures, and granite monoliths salvaged from demolished buildings. They also hit the Streets Department’s former incinerator building, where they found an abandoned clamshell bucket they plan to display as a monument to the Schuylkill’s industrial past. “We’re peppering it with artifacts,” she says.

Timothy A. Schuler is the editor of Now. He can be reached at timothyaschuler@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timothy_Schuler.