It’s hard to find someone with anything bad to say about the High Line, the abandoned elevated train track that reopened in 2009 as a park after years of organizing by advocates in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. In 2019, before the pandemic, the High Line drew 8 million visitors a year. It has been a critical
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Flooding is the reason for the FDR Park master plan. It also could be its undoing. No one denies that FDR Park has been growing soggier over the years. Paths that once led walkers around the “lakes” now run through marshy ground at the edge of the water. Stormwater flows off of I-95 and the
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Grid has been hearing a lot lately about FDR Park. After our series of articles on the development of the Cobbs Creek golf courses, Philadelphians concerned about the fate of the South Philly Meadows got in touch to defend the park’s former fairways against a plan to develop the beloved greenspace into a complex of
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Ted pickett counts himself lucky. He and his wife were home when the flooding started. As Hurricane Isaias dumped rain over the Delaware Valley and Darby Creek crested its banks on August 4, 2020, he and his wife got to work. “We were able to mitigate a real nasty thing,” Pickett says. For five hours
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On October 11, 2021, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a worker in an excavator arrived at the Sedgley Woods disc golf course and began clearing a road along the boundary with the Strawberry Green driving range next door. “On the first day of the destruction I happened to be on my lunch break in my car at
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The Far Northeast of Philadelphia isn’t the friendliest cycling landscape the city has to offer, with intimidating arterial roads like Roosevelt Boulevard and lots of residential streets that don’t connect. The proposed Lower Poquessing Creek Trail aims to change that, at least along the creek that serves as the city’s boundary with Bucks County. The
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Who expected the fossil fuel industry to fight fair? In 2021 12.2% of the energy used in the United States came from renewable sources, as did 20.1% of our electricity generation, according to the US Energy Information Administration. And that is projected to grow. Facing a shrinking share of the energy pie, the fossil fuel
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Water flows from North Philadelphia’s Juniata Park neighborhood into Tacony Creek Park. It joins the wooded creek corridor to the rowhouse and asphalt streetscape above, but the connection can be hard to notice. This summer the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership — TTF for short — will work with partners to transform East Cayuga Street near the
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Have you ever hit a tree root on a multi-use path and barely managed to stay on your bike? Have you ever wanted to tell someone about it? The City of Philadelphia is working on a plan to improve trail and sidepath maintenance and wants to hear from you. Philadelphia boasts a growing network of
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Water quality has been a hot topic in Philadelphia from the beginning. Early promotional materials for William Penn’s new city hyped the many streams that would carry away waste, and in the 1730s the likes of Benjamin Franklin tried to regulate industry to clean up the horribly polluted Dock Creek. (These efforts failed, and later
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