Dilworth Park opens today as a new 'town square'

An artist's rendering of the remade Dilworth Plaza on the west side of City Hall
Credit: Kieran Timberlake

The new Dilworth Park, the revived urban space that had been an uninviting apron of concrete around City Hall, opens open today as a tree-filled center of civic life in the heart of a bustling Center City.

The new park honors the legacies of legendary planner Edmund Bacon and city founder William Penn, and was designed, too, with a big celebration in mind — just the place to host a boisterous crowd celebrating a Phillies World Series win.

Under construction for more than two-and-a-half years, the plaza on the west side of City Hall is scheduled to reopen with a ribbon-cutting by Mayor Michael Nutter and a daylong series of concerts that are designed to show off its chops as a performance space. The Center City District will oversee maintenance and programming at the park under a 30-year lease from the city.

No longer the dour expanse that repelled passersby and consigned Occupy protesters to its outer margins in the fall of 2011, the plaza has been remade, at a cost of $55 million.

The lawns, terraces and glass canopies that have been taking shape behind chain-link fencing since January 2012 are designed to give Philadelphians a new central location to meet, relax, assemble and connect, said Richard Roark, a partner with OLIN, the landscape architecture, planning and urban-design firm that headed the project.

The new plaza reuses 120,000-square feet of the space in a way that will allow people to gather, for social, artistic or political reasons, in a way that they could not in the old space, said Roark, who managed the project in conjunction with principal designer Susan Weiler. The team set out to understand why the old space failed, and what would make the new one succeed.

"Landscape architects have to be students of human behavior and what people like to do, not just what you want them to do," he said.

One early idea about adding a Speakers' Corner, a la the original in London's Hyde Park, and restricting protest to a single part of the park never made it past the proposal stage. Those who want to stage protests at Dilworth Park will need to request permits for demonstrations via the city Managing Director's Office under the same procedures that govern all public spaces in Philly, according to Linda K. Harris, a spokeswoman for the Center City District.

The old plaza's shortcomings were especially visible when fans gathered in the thousands to celebrate the Phillies winning the World Series in 2008, Roark said. While people gravitated toward City Hall at the center of their victorious city, they couldn't do so in big numbers on the plaza because of its awkward split-level design.

"When we won the World Series, everybody assembled around City Hall, but nobody could be in the center of Dilworth Plaza at the heart," he said. "It wasn't a place that you could actually assemble, it was a series of spaces."

So Roark and his colleagues, with extensive input from design professionals and the public, created a space that could become a real town square.

"It's supposed to be the front yard of the city, and we designed a place where you could celebrate the World Series," Roark said.
For those who just want to meet friends, drink coffee, listen to music, watch movies or ice-skate, the new plaza will offer a range of spaces and events that are designed to bring a new vitality to the long-neglected area.

"It's going to be a phenomenal contribution to the social life of the city," Roark said, arguing that it will make City Hall a lot more approachable. "It's a place where a lot of civic events can happen."

Other designers — including the Design Advocacy Group, the Community Design Collaborative and the Philadelphia Historical Commission — who weighed in on the plan were especially concerned that the new construction should not impact the view of City Hall from the end of Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Roark said.

One result of those discussions was the "demure" design of the new café on the plaza's north side, he said. Chef Jose Garces will operate the park's café as another iteration of his Rosa Blanca concept.

The plaza's redesign is based, in part, on Bryant Park in New York City, an OLIN project that turned a place known for an open-air drug trade into a popular meeting and event space. Roark says that Bryant Park works because it was redesigned to eliminate confined spaces, in the same way that Dilworth Plaza now has a single level without the lower area of the old design.

Aesthetically, the planners sought to ensure that the new Dilworth Park didn't compete with the exuberant presence of City Hall.
Any attempt at ornamentation, or bold patterning in the new plaza would have risked "cognitive dissonance" between that and City Hall, Roark said.

So it was landscaped with clean, low lines that would not distract from the ornate architecture of Philadelphia's center of government, he said, praising the "serene and precise" new architectural contributions of Kieran Timberlake.

"I think the relationship between the historic architecture and the plane of the plaza is a really nice interplay," he said.
Roark and other planners hope the new plaza can return to its role as one of William Penn's original five squares, which functioned first as open areas for grazing livestock but also as lively meeting spaces and links to other areas of the city.

And while Dilworth won't be hosting any sheep, Roark hopes its lawns will recall the green spaces that were featured in the 17th-century squares — Rittenhouse, Logan, Franklin, Washington and Center Square at City Hall.

With its emphasis on restoration rather than demolition, the new plaza also continues the legacy of Edmund Bacon, who headed the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, and led the redevelopment of city landmarks that include Market East, Penn's Landing and Society Hill.

The planners set out to "bring life to something that was so much a part of that historic legacy," Roark said.

He predicted that when the fences come down, it will be an exciting moment for Philadelphians to see a place where "they can celebrate the life of the city."