Neighborhood Mystique: Wynnefield

This is a new series, called Neighborhood Mystique. Here I document some underappreciated neighborhoods in the city with excellent "bones". This is not about neighborhoods such as Northern Liberties or Manayunk; instead, this is about the neighborhoods that could be the next Northern Liberties or Manayunk.

I, like, totally want to live in a house like this.

A true gem. Wynnefield is one of the two Philadelphia neighborhoods traditionally associated with City Line Ave. Developed primarily in two major phases, the bulk of the neighborhood is a late picturesque suburb built for Philadelphia's Jewish population, back when the major Jewish neighborhoods in the city extended around Fairmount Park's west side. Luxuriant mansions in various styles were built along Parkside Avenue, while a beautiful mélange of turn-of-the-century houses stretched back all the way to City Line Avenue.

And this house. Ooooooooh.

Later, in the 1920s, the less-desirable southern third of the neighborhood was developed as a series of Tudor airlites. However, as this was Wynnefield, a neighborhood that at the time was the most desirable Jewish neighborhood in the city, the quality that went into these airlites was far greater than in most other parts of the city. More houses keep getting added--all the way down to the present day--in the relatively few lots left after these two major phases of development.

Another beautiful picturesque estate

Its beauty, however, didn't stop it from changing, as the Jewish population left for more suburban neighborhoods during the 1950s. By 1960, Wynnefield had become a middle-class African-American neighborhood, and in the 1980s the crack epidemic hurt it hard. Even today, the more urban Tudor airlites of lower Wynnefield are home to a lot of drug problems, even though the earlier picturesque suburban areas have cleaned up and are once again a major bastion of African-American financial security.

A Colonial-style from upper Wynnefield

Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia's premier Jesuit college, stretches along City Line Avenue through Wynnefield, all the way from 52nd Street out past Overbrook Station. Its existence provides Wynnefield with its major economic anchor, and also with the neighborhood's most recent changes, as housing close to the college gets repurposed into student apartments for those who wish to live nearby--a change occurring in nearly every campus-proximate neighborhood in Philadelphia. These changes are starting to shift Wynnefield's demographics again, but the bedrock of wealth, whosoever owns it, in this neighborhood, isn't changing.

Once upon a time this was what a suburb would look like

Basics: Landscape Urbanism?

New Urbanism's grand don, Andrés Duany, and Landscape Urbanism's nascent patriarch, Charles Waldheim, debated at CNU 19  this past week. While readers of this blog will note that I tend to fall somewhere between New Urbanism and another nascent challenger (Old Urbanism), I have said in the past that Landscape Urbanism is most ideally suited to park design, and landscape design techniques have become substantially more sophisticated* since Landscape Urbanism's spiritual forefather Olmsted's day.

But what about habitable space? Landscape Urbanism would, I think, hold Radburn, NJ, up as the exemplar, the community to be emulated.

Radburn, NJ. Credit: The Urbanerds

Radburn is actually not Landscape Urbanist at all but was rather built under the theory and ideals of the Garden City. The Garden City ideal actually comes from the late Victorian period, and stressed escape from the dingy, filthy, dark, polluted cities of the Industrial Age. Garden Cities were, above all else, self-sufficient, and was the first major example of urban planning executed on sociological principles rather than the aesthetic ones which had defined Baroque and City Beautiful planning. Radburn, as a Garden City, was designed and executed such that the primary entrances opened into a series of pedestrian malls or pseudo-parks, while services (of the automotive kind) were located at the back of the houses--along the street. Since the yard space, become amentized, was later privatized, Radburn is a unique historical look at how the postwar suburb developed...every suburb, somewhere in its heart, wants to look like Radburn, but without the uniquely strong and careful planning that went into it, no suburb can ever be Radburn**.

Just the same with Landscape Urbanism. Waldheim denies that he's defending the suburbs, but if one looks at their loftiest living-space ideals, and the history of those ideals, there can be no doubt that a Landscape Urbanist mentality will lead us right back into traditional suburbia. Waldheim may be a new Ebenezer Howard, and James Corner Frederick Law Olmsted, but it was the catch-22 Mumford noted: without careful planning, landscape planning devolves into something else, something much worse.

This isn't to say that Radburn is a bad sort of place--but with the resources needed to get Radburn right, a certain rarity value is needed--and with that rarity value, expense. The lowest common denominator of the Levittowns and their progeny is unsustainable. A handful of Radburns can be--but that's the key--a handful. There are not enough resources available in this country, or even on this earth, to sustainably house the United States' population in a way befitting Landscape Urbanism's Radburn ambitions; to do it quickly would involve a coarsening of design that would be indistinguishable from Levittown and benefit no one.
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* Pretty as Central Park, Prospect Park, the Emerald Necklace, and other assorted Olmsted parks are, they are extremely unsophisticated in light of today's landscape design techniques. They discount the natural "lay of the land" in their settings and are instead highly engineered green sculptures. Indeed, the weaving of ecology in has been one of landscape design's most stunning successes over the past century.
** Also, Radburn is a rail-oriented design. The town focus is the train station, and the main retail strip is centered on it.