Posted in CITIES, FORWARD, GARDENS, HEALING GARDENS, IN THE ISSUE, PARKS, PEOPLE, PHOTOGRAPHY, PLANNING, POLLUTION, REAL ESTATE, RECREATION, REGION, REGULATIONS, RESEARCH, RESILIENCE, STREETS, STUDENTS, UNIVERSITY, WATER, tagged Adam Levine, Anne Raver, Anne Whiston Spirn, Aspen Farms, Award, Ben Turpin, Black Bottom, Boston, Boston Urban Gardeners, buried river, Charlotte Kahn, Chelsea Bruck, Clean Waters, combined sewer overflows, community gardens, Cooper Hewitt, Design Mind, Design with Nature, disinvestment, Dorchester, ecological urbanism, floodplain, Frances Walker, funeral procession, gentrification, Green City, green infrastructure, Harvard, Hayward Ford, Howard Neukrug, Ian McHarg, Janice Trap, John Widrick, landscape architect, Landscape Architecture, landscape design, Lucien E. Blackwell Homes, Merion Botanical Park, miniature golf, National Design Award, Netter Center for Community Partnerships, outdoor classroom, Penn, Pennsylvania General Assembly, Philadelphia, Philadelphia City Planning Commission, rain garden, real estate speculation, Robert Trap, Roxbury, Sahar Coston-Hardy, segregation, Sewer, Shaping the Block: Redesigning Small Urban Neighborhoods, Smithsonian Design Museum, Social Justice, stormwater retention, Sulzberger Middle School, The Eye Is a Door, The Granite Garden, The Language of Landscape, U.S. Geological Survey, University of Pennsylvania, urban studies, vacant land survey, Vacant Land: A Resource for Reshaping Urban Neighborhoods, vacant lots, Wallace McHarg Roberts & Todd, West Philadelphia, West Philadelphia Landscape Plan: A Framework for Action, West Philadelphia Landscape Project on November 16, 2018|
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As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish. For a full list of translated articles, please click here.
Click above for a full PDF of the translated text, with English text available below.
BY ANNE RAVER / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY, AFFILIATE ASLA
We were driving around west Philadelphia when Anne Whiston Spirn, FASLA, stopped at the corner of Walnut and 43rd Streets to recall the moment of discovery that still drives her work. It was 1971. She was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, on her way to the supermarket, when she was stopped at a gaping hole where the street had caved in over the Mill Creek sewer. “I looked down and saw this big, brown rushing river, and all this masonry that had fallen in. I thought, ‘My God, there are rivers underground. We’re walking on a river.’”
She was looking at Mill Creek, buried in the brick sewer pipe in the 1880s. Historic photographs show workers dwarfed by its size, constructing the pipe, about 20 feet in diameter, snaking along the creek bed. Drawings depict horse-drawn carts loaded with soil—millions of cubic yards dug with pickaxes and shovels—to cover up the pipe. Row houses were built right on top of the fill.
That buried river would become the heart of Spirn’s work when she came back to Penn 15 years later to chair the landscape architecture department and to launch the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP), but also in her larger vision of (more…)
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