Episode 182: The Life and Death of Love Park

one weird trick to destroy a beloved public space for the sake of parking june's bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rittsq.bsky.socialhttps://www.friendsofrittenhouse.org/ LINK TO BUY A VAN FOR LIAM’S COWORKER:https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24216/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liam McAnderson?

  I'm also entering sicko mode. I feel like such a fucking twat doing this with AirPods.

• 0:04November Kelly?

  It's fine. I mean, listen, we've only been doing this, what, 18 years or so?

• 0:10Liam McAnderson?

  A million.

• 0:11November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 0:12Liam McAnderson?

  I couldn't get the mic to, to, to work with the interface. It just will not do it. I assume it's a bad cable, but I don't have a replacement here.

• 0:20November Kelly?

  It's fine. Like, well.

• 0:22Liam McAnderson?

  So I'm on, I'm on.

• 0:24November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 0:24Liam McAnderson?

  Phantom power. My phantom power, I mean, just AirPods, AirPod Pros actually, that aren't even mine.

• 0:30Justin Roczniak?

  Put 40 volts into the AirPods and see what happens.

• 0:34Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, I'll try that.

• 0:37Justin Roczniak?

  Um, all right, we should do a sync point. Uh,

• 0:42Justin Roczniak?

  gonna do three, two, one, mark everyone clap. Three, two, one, mark. Okay, good. Uh, we're podcasting. Um, we're gonna talk about an exciting subject, uh, at least to June and I.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 0:57Justin Roczniak?

  Who knows?

• 0:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, we worked very hard on a 60s plus slide presentation.

• 1:02Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  Everybody be nice to us.

• 1:04Liam McAnderson?

  Did, did someone send me the, the PowerPoint?

• 1:08November Kelly?

  Uh, it's in the group chat.

• 1:09Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you.

• 1:10Justin Roczniak?

  It's in the group chat.

• 1:11Liam McAnderson?

  I'm on a foreign computer. Everything's very confusing to me. I'm like, I'm.

• 1:15November Kelly?

  I don't know, there's a reason to be xenophobic about it, like.

• 1:18Liam McAnderson?

  I, I will swear.

• 1:19Justin Roczniak?

  You have to put it in H.

• 1:21November Kelly?

  Gets 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene.

• 1:26Liam McAnderson?

  I hate all of you.

• 1:29November Kelly?

  Yeah, missed you too, buddy.

• 1:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:32Liam McAnderson?

  Hi.

• 1:36Liam McAnderson?

  We are actually recording. You are, you are now on work site.

• 1:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. You gotta put a caution tape around the room.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to secure the perimeter. You gotta get the, the, the flaggers, you know?

• 1:49November Kelly?

  One of the things that I, I really want to do, uh, is to set up, uh, like a, like a red recording light on the outside of a door that I can just like hit with a switch on the desk. Um, turns out that that's really difficult to do in a rental, so, um, that is, you know, I'm, I'm just not gonna do that. What I am gonna do, uh, is get like a little like 599 uh, sliding door sign off of Amazon, stick that to the door and be like, you know, recording in progress. Uh, and if it fucks up the door, it's not my door, it's my landlord's door, you know?

• 2:22Justin Roczniak?

  Well, there you go.

• 2:24Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you. Thank you for, thank you. I'm working. I'm doing work. Leave, leave me in peace.

• 2:33Liam McAnderson?

  Where's the car key? Ah, upstairs.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Liam, come back. Roz and I are about to torture you.

• 2:41November Kelly?

  This is, th- this is the problem with ever leaving the city of Philadelphia, the American Glasgow.

• 2:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Trees, everywhere, trees?

• 2:50Liam McAnderson?

  That's why I don't fucking leave Philly.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  No, November, I was thinking about that, like, um, Philadelphia is the Naples of America.

• 3:02November Kelly?

  Philadelphia is the Venice of America. No, I mean, what, uh, Glasgow, conversely, is, is wet Philadelphia.

• 3:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 3:09November Kelly?

  Or possibly wet Detroit? Hard to say.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 3:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 3:15Liam McAnderson?

  I, I do, uh, do we want to get into it if we have, I'm sorry, does this say, uh, oh boy, 66 slides?

• 3:23November Kelly?

  Yes. Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 3:26Justin Roczniak?

  It's okay. Some of them are like in place of animations. I really should have done them as animations.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:31November Kelly?

  Anyway. There better be one 60 frame video in here.

• 3:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. We got a sort of budget John Boyce thing going on later on.

• 3:42Liam McAnderson?

  Who's the guy I like that does the, the, the, do the baseball documentary?

• 3:46November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Liam McAnderson?

  And so, Ken Burns, Ken Burns.

• 3:49Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, Ken Burns, yeah.

• 3:50November Kelly?

  I mean, I like the John Boyce comparison better because that, that way, instead of pretty good, it's like best value pretty good. And it's just called okay. A show about stories that are okay.

• 4:00Justin Roczniak?

  Or they're okay, yeah.

• 4:03Justin Roczniak?

  So with that in mind, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rozneck. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 4:16November Kelly?

  I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

• 4:20Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God. He, him.

• 4:23November Kelly?

  You're doing okay, that buddy?

• 4:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  What's up, y'all? My name's June Armstrong, and my pronouns are she and her.

• 4:34Justin Roczniak?

  Why are you here, Jen?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Why am I here?

• 4:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, like existentially?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Oh, no. So why I'm here is because we were watching that. Okay, so the Franklin Institute OmniMax Theater that used to exist, used to play a short film about Philadelphia back when I was growing up. And we were watching that on YouTube the other day because that's the kind of shit that Roz and I get up into when we're four. And we saw a park in the middle of the city that I had forgotten about, which was the beautiful and tragic Love Park, AKA John F. Kennedy Plaza, reverse those.

• 5:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, what we see on the screen here.

• 5:16November Kelly?

  The like retreating from the microphone roar was really good. I really appreciated that.

• 5:24Liam McAnderson?

  No, I'm, I, I don't understand how AirPods work. Yeah, go ahead.

• 5:29Justin Roczniak?

  What we see on the screen here are three shots of the same space, but at different points in time. You can see a beautiful fountain, very large fountain in a nice basin with the love sculpture on a trapezoidal base. You can see an overview of JFK Plaza here. You can see the flying saucer. You can see the basin, all the nice, you know, sort of postmodern, you know, hardscape, big trees, everything else. And then you can see it more recently.

• 6:01Liam McAnderson?

  Where it looks like dog shit. Yeah.

• 6:03November Kelly?

  There are none of those things. They, they, they gentrified it, sort of.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  So this is one of those, what's happening here? Something has happened here. It's not supposed to be like that.

• 6:14Justin Roczniak?

  It's not supposed to be like that.

• 6:16November Kelly?

  A process has occurred to this park.

• 6:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:21Justin Roczniak?

  We're going to talk, first, we're going to talk about how the park was built, how it was good, why it was good, and then why and how they fucked it up, and like, how this was allowed to happen. Um, you know, because I have quite fond memories of this park back when I worked for the city. Um, you know, it was just a nice place, and it kind of isn't

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:43Justin Roczniak?

  anything comparable now.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  And just, and just on that note, um, with what's going on right now, you know, the people who work for Philadelphia Parks and Recreation are incredible. They do so much with so little. And this, this park is many, many, many layers of failures, but the people who run it do the best fucking job they can. And that, that I think is part of the sadness of this whole thing.

• 7:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I'm an expert in landscape and, uh, you know, landscape and urban, uh, you know, parks and things like that, uh, in my professional career, which we'll talk about during the course of the presentation.

• 7:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yes. June's in charge of the other park.

• 7:25Justin Roczniak?

  A different one, yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Leo Rosin, I spent like six hours working on this presentation once, one time, and then like, a whole.

• 7:33Liam McAnderson?

  I, I, my favorite thing that we, a question we often get is like, what's your process like? I'm like, oh, it's real bad. And people are like, but no, like, I learned so much. You guys are so funny and so interesting. I'm like, yeah, our process is real fucking bad. Go to my Google, go to my Google Drive.

• 7:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. What's your process? I wish I knew. Anyway, before we do that, let's talk about the goddamn news.

• 7:57November Kelly?

  Oh, shit.

• 8:07Justin Roczniak?

  Excellent. Excellent news on the Septa front, which is nothing is happening.

• 8:12Liam McAnderson?

  We know, we know, we know about the, uh, the big death bill, uh, that didn't make it into the news because they wrote this ahead of time. We'll, we'll put it in next time because the news office on like a six week delay anyway.

• 8:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. So, um, as of time of recording, the Pennsylvania legislature is still deadlocked on Septa, uh, public transit funding, you know, for. You know, our transit system here in Philadelphia. So the board approved the horrible doomsday budget that like knocks out, you know, a third of all bus service, service, service, um, half a regional rail. Lots of stuff is going away. They're gonna stop running the trolleys after 9pm.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  They're gonna stop running most of it after 9pm. Yeah.

• 8:55November Kelly?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's gonna be fine though, because anything that does run is gonna have to make its way through the heaps of trash.

• 9:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true. The sanitation strike is also happening right now. It's day four. I'm becoming an insane British bins guy.

• 9:11Justin Roczniak?

  The mayor finally did something and that something was bad and stupid.

• 9:15November Kelly?

  I've, I've seen bits and pieces of this. Uh, is, is this the opening that like waste disposal centers? Uh, that were just open dumpsters?

• 9:24Justin Roczniak?

  The thing the mayor did was not reach a deal with sanitation workers, so they went on strike.

• 9:32Justin Roczniak?

  This is the first thing she has done.

• 9:35November Kelly?

  To- total, total support to the sanitation workers who are the bedrock of human civilization.

• 9:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 9:42November Kelly?

  Without whom, as, as the city of Philadelphia is now learning, uh, is the deluge, is the chaos, is rat hell.

• 9:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we're about, you know, combined with sanitation strike and, uh, Septa going offline. We are probably about, I don't know, four weeks from anarchy. Um, just complete bedlam.

• 10:03November Kelly?

  Philly is about six days from it.

• 10:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I think so actually. Yeah, a lot of those places have like twice weekly trash pickup.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's gonna get, it's gonna get real bad. And speaking of, you know, like the trash people, all, all of the parks and rec workers who actually are like full-time maintenance employees. So all the people actually keep the, the system running on like, you know, bubble gum and, and ro- uh, all of the rodent control people are also DC 33. Like, you know, they really are the, the, the lifeblood of, of the city. They keep it working. All the streets crews, all the water department crews. Uh, it's, it's, it's such a shame.

• 10:38Justin Roczniak?

  And they do a great job because like unlike New York City, here in Philly, we don't have rats. We have mice, but we don't have rats.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  No, we have rats. That's gonna change. That's gonna change very quickly. We have rats now, Roz.

• 10:50November Kelly?

  Just a lot of rats down from New York City.

• 10:53Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my God. It's the fight. You were worried about the Antifa buses. Now the rats are coming down.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:00November Kelly?

  I think all rats by definition are members of Antifa.

• 11:02Justin Roczniak?

  I think so. Yeah. I mean, you know, everyone's they got a bus driver is being controlled by the rat in his hat.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Like a rat puppet. Yeah.

• 11:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 11:11November Kelly?

  Rat-a-tur bus.

• 11:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, that this is, um, you know, uh, I, this is a product of, uh, you know, dumbass legislators in Harrisburg who have, you know, too much interest in trying to, you know, just make the liberals miserable. Yeah. Cause that's all we do.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Bullshit. Yeah, exactly.

• 11:36Justin Roczniak?

  That's all we do in politics these days is punish people. Um, so, you know, this, I, I, I, I still think this will be resolved in some fashion because too many rich main line people are gonna be pissed off with the Thorndale line disappearing.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  I was in thought.

• 11:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. But who knows? Um, yeah.

• 11:59November Kelly?

  Amazing.

• 12:00Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone's gonna get stuck in traffic and then they're all gonna get fired by fired for getting late. It's gonna be impossible to employ anyone in Philadelphia and then we all die. If we haven't already died from diseases from garbage not being picked up. Yeah. So, yeah, that's, that's the status of the city.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  We're in the cool zone, folks.

• 12:20Justin Roczniak?

  City update.

• 12:22November Kelly?

  Hmm. Seems bad.

• 12:24Justin Roczniak?

  Bad. Yeah. In other news.

• 12:27November Kelly?

  Oh shit, I have to reload the thing.

• 12:31November Kelly?

  There we go. It's 11:37 PM. Yeah, so.

• 12:35Liam McAnderson?

  I was a little sarcastic. I'm sorry.

• 12:38November Kelly?

  So, so as of today, it is majorly illegal under anti-terrorism legislation to be a member of, incite, support for, or really make any kind of statement that tends to glorify or support a group called Palestine Action, who legally are now terrorists for the crime of sabotaging a bunch of, like, Albert Arms Manufacturing Facilities and also to RAF refueling planes.

• 13:17Liam McAnderson?

  385 to 26, you fucking cowards.

• 13:20November Kelly?

  This is, this is one of the dumbest things to have ever happened. It is, in many ways, unenforceable. I mean, there might be some interesting test cases for this, but it was kind of the case that a thinly veiled MI5 was briefing to newspapers that it was kind of making an impossible circus of their job of enforcing that, like, prescribed group thing. But it has now happened. And Palestine Action, who, again, it is illegal to support in the United Kingdom,

• 13:56November Kelly?

  responded to this by changing their name to Yvette Cooper, which is the name of the Home Secretary who prescribed them and who made it illegal to support them. So, as far as I know, it's not illegal to be a supporter of Yvette Cooper, so long as you only mean the person and not the group. And how someone is supposed to tell the difference, I'm not sure.

• 14:19Liam McAnderson?

  That's genius. That's really good. I like that a lot.

• 14:22November Kelly?

  It does not seem to have stopped them and I don't legally, I don't say that with any tone of admiration. I merely observe and report that it does not seem to have deterred them at all, which also I think maybe makes a mockery of the point of prescribing them in the first place.

• 14:36Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, plus the name is generic enough that, you know, I guess if they really wanted to, they could really start to go after a lot of people, you know, if they had the resources for it, which they don't because it's Britain and everything's defunded, you know?

• 14:49November Kelly?

  Just any kind of pro Palestinian speech, yeah?

• 14:51Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. If it was America, we now have the $35 billion ICE budget, you know, they could probably start, I don't know, put people into concentration camps, but Britain, I don't think they can do that.

• 15:02November Kelly?

  Well, except for maybe turning the whole country into one big concentration camp. We are our own alligator Alcatraz in a lot of ways.

• 15:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you're, you're, you're going children of men pretty quick over there.

• 15:12November Kelly?

  Oh, me? It feels like it, yeah. Um, every day there's a new little thing. This is a kind of the more obvious one, but it's little stuff or two. Like I, um, uh, checked the news the other day to find out that like trans women are effectively banned from donating blood in the UK now.

• 15:29Justin Roczniak?

  Weird.

• 15:30November Kelly?

  This one's a weird accidental thing where since they've legally defined trans women as men, that means the blood service has to like test against male ranges. So they, so like if you go in to donate blood, they'll be like, you are deeply, deeply anemic by male standards and therefore it would not be safe for you to donate blood. So you can't, right? Um, but practically, practically that's a sort of ban by accident. Um, and I think that that too is emblematic. If this is, if Palestine action being banned is the British state acting on purpose, then this is the British state acting by accident. Um, and somehow they both end up being repressive, which is, is curious about the sort of purpose

• 16:13November Kelly?

  and nature of, uh, you know, states and governments. Um, but yeah, as I say, it would be, it would be, uh, very illegal to support Palestine action in any way. Um, so.

• 16:25Liam McAnderson?

  How bafflingly stupid. Well done.

• 16:26November Kelly?

  Yes. Now, if you, Dev, if you can just insert like a, like a sort of 20 second beep here, um, while, while I say that like.

• 16:52Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, we're Americans. We can say it. This is very stupid. And, you know, I, I think that, uh,

• 16:57Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, everyone involved in your country's government should do us a favor, face the wall by themselves, put a shotgun in.

• 17:05Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, if you were a Republican at this point in your life, you should have the decency to do us all a favor.

• 17:10November Kelly?

  Look, pal, you might be able to say it in America, but you can't say it on YouTube.

• 17:14Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, the world will be a better place without you in it.

• 17:16November Kelly?

  The, the thing is, and this is, yeah, thank you. Uh, I, I, I think there's, there's an interesting kind of, uh, situation, which you might actually need legal advice on. As to, you guys are Americans, right? You can support Palestine action. I'm not sure if you can do it on here. And I will still get in trouble, even if we do that on the basis that like, you might support them. I couldn't possibly comment. And in fact, I don't, I don't know. That might still be illegal. I might still get to go to like men's terrorism prison for that. So.

• 17:54Liam McAnderson?

  We, I, I have a lot of confidence. If I have one thing, uh, what I confidence in one thing, it is that we have good First Amendment lawyers. We might not win, but we can make sure everybody else loses.

• 18:07November Kelly?

  You do. I, I don't know about me. And so, yeah, I, I just, I, I, I, I continue to urge people.

• 18:14Liam McAnderson?

  Possibly comment on it, of course.

• 18:16November Kelly?

  Yeah, I can't possibly comment on this. What I can do on a completely unrelated basis is say that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. I can say that Israel is committing a genocide. Um, I can say that it's a, a sort of like dangerous, um, uh, like state to, uh, like world peace. Uh, and I can urge everyone to continue to, to support and stand up for Palestinian rights, um, in the face of, uh, their, uh, continued occupation and genocide.

• 18:44Justin Roczniak?

  See, if you do that, you do that in, uh, in the United States right now, you, uh, you, you, you wind up, uh, with, uh, your surrogate Brad Lander going on television. And, uh, being accused of not taking antisemitism seriously.

• 18:59Liam McAnderson?

  The man's Jewish.

• 19:00Justin Roczniak?

  He's Jewish.

• 19:01November Kelly?

  Doesn't, doesn't, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Like.

• 19:04Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don't, I, I don't understand that. I really don't. I mean, listen, I understand that I'm not Israeli because I'm not cursed by God. But I just like, I don't get the like, well, did you selfie? Shut the fuck up. Pour up points us towards justice, not towards whatever bullshit involves killing Palestinian kids. You dumb motherfucker Nazis.

• 19:27Liam McAnderson?

  I hate these fucking people. I had to share a tent with them in the desert.

• 19:32November Kelly?

  I think, I mean, it strikes me as as someone who opposes antisemitism. That it's probably a bad thing to claim that antisemitism extends to a bunch of stuff that it transparently doesn't. I worry that that kind of

• 19:47Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 19:47November Kelly?

  Kind of discredits the the term for a lot of people. And I worry about the sort of like second order consequences of that, but.

• 19:55Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, yeah, something, something stupid might happen in the future. Yeah. Alas and a lack, we are not in control of these issues yet. Maybe one day, something will happen. I don't know. This, this, you know, seeing them try to Corbynize. Mamdami has been, you know, just crazy.

• 20:20November Kelly?

  It's, I mean, they're gonna, they're gonna try and do it. And all I can say is I hope it doesn't work this time.

• 20:27Justin Roczniak?

  I hope it doesn't work too. I mean, this is the same playbook over again. Yeah.

• 20:32November Kelly?

  Corbyn Corbyn is supposedly starting a new party, which is a very funny thing for him to do. The week after we on Trash Future were like, yeah, fuck it, roll the dice, join the green party. So, thank you, Jeremy, master of timing as always. Yes.

• 20:50November Kelly?

  But yeah, obviously I will be joining his his new party, whatever it's called, like day one. Unless it's called Palestine Action, because then that would be illegal.

• 20:57Justin Roczniak?

  No, that would be illegal then, yeah.

• 20:58Liam McAnderson?

  That would be illegal.

• 20:59Justin Roczniak?

  Well, if you started a new group called Palestine Action, which is distinct from the.

• 21:05November Kelly?

  Interesting. You're doing the kind of Twitter texts like circumvention thing where it's like, was called Palestine Action, but the A is the A from the Russian keyboard. So it doesn't trigger the same thing.

• 21:17Justin Roczniak?

  There you go. Grok, is this true?

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Well, if you're gonna talk to a lawyer or an AI lawyer, you can get the, you know, consult for free, so.

• 21:27November Kelly?

  God.

• 21:28Justin Roczniak?

  I use I use Grok as my lawyer.

• 21:32November Kelly?

  Oh my god.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  You shouldn't.

• 21:33November Kelly?

  As rock is my witness.

• 21:36Justin Roczniak?

  As rock is my witness.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Shaking your head as you erase the sign that says it has been this many days since a lawsuit.

• 21:47November Kelly?

  Anyway, I'd say British democracy was nice while it lasted. It was always a fiction, never been clearer than it is now.

• 21:54Justin Roczniak?

  It would have been a good idea.

• 21:56November Kelly?

  Yep. We just, we need, we need to be civilized by force, I think. That's the only option at this point. President Xi, my country, the United Kingdom, yearns for freedom. Please send J20 strike fighters.

• 22:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Justin Roczniak?

  All right, well, on that note, that was the goddamn news.

• 22:19November Kelly?

  Hey, I got it right, one time out of three.

• 22:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, good news, folks. We only start at the beginning, the beginning of all things.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:27Justin Roczniak?

  William Penn's land for Philadelphia.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Before you can talk about a specific place in Philadelphia and cover the entire history of that place, you have to cover the entire history of Philadelphia first, so buckle up, folks.

• 22:39November Kelly?

  I saw a video series about this. Wasn't it colonized by like Swedes or something?

• 22:43Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, yes.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Pretty much.

• 22:47Justin Roczniak?

  I remember that video series too.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  No, we can't acknowledge it on this podcast. Yeah, no, don't hurt his feelings.

• 22:55November Kelly?

  A for-hort advertifment upon the situation and extent of the city of Philadelphia and the ensuing platform thereof.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so a lot of people, especially, you know, Philly has all this like iconography for, for those of us who are locals, I think. But like the map of Philadelphia is what most people think of as like the William Penn map, and it's pretty widely publicized. But it actually has like, it's actually three documents and basically a real estate advertising map, right?

• 23:24Justin Roczniak?

  It's a timeshare.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're basically, you're, William Penn's basically saying, hey, you should come invest your land in my new, in my new thing, because this is the only way I'll recoup the debt that I, that my dad was owed. Um, so. Please, please help. Yeah, please, please, please help me become rich again, um, or more rich. I'm not really sure which one I, it's been a long time since I learned about Penn, but. Um, the, the, the, the weird thing about Philly is that, you know, this map is like pretty well known because it's basically the same map now. Um, and William Penn, you know, was one of the first, you know, post Renaissance people to fully plan out, design a city. And actually like, again, the weird part is that people actually listened to it.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  And probably the most listened to part of William Penn's plan. And, and it's actually the biggest description on the short advertised. So it was the short advertisement, the map, and then a list of the influencers, the, the, the, the, the cool people in England who were already subscribed to, to the, the William Penn.

• 24:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so the longest-

• 24:29Justin Roczniak?

  Look at all these cool people who bought plots on my land, which by the way, we should mention was purchased fairly from the Lenny Lanape, who still say to this time, yeah, Penn was fine. It was the other white guys who were the problem.

• 24:42Liam McAnderson?

  And his son was a, was a piece of shit, but the other-

• 24:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, sons were also pieces of shit. Yeah.

• 24:47Liam McAnderson?

  The Washingtonians were bastards.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Which incidentally is one of the reasons that Britain House Square wasn't developed until the later in the 19th century. But, um, like the longest description on this paragraph is the next slide, right?

• 25:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  And, and most of the paragraph is actually talking about the importance of public squares in Philadelphia. Um, public squares are near and dear to my heart and a lot of the other people who, especially in our presentation, were thinking about the city, right?

• 25:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. A square of eight acres to be for the like youths as the more dash fields in London and eight streets provides the fade high free. They run from front to front and 20 streets provides the broad free. Uh, yeah, the run cross the city from five to five. All the streets are of 50 foot breadth.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you missed the important part for our purposes today.

• 25:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm sure that I did.

• 25:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Um, today we're all gonna learn about the long S.

• 25:50Liam McAnderson?

  We did that. We did that in the newspaper episode, the print media episode. You're a goddamn newfman.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so the, the squares in each corner of the city have their own, uh, have their own use, which is for this, you know, the Moorfields in London during Penn's time was the original kind of public park. It was just grass field and walking paths that were tree lined. But the, the square in the center is kind of what we're talking about today. And instead of being this kind of open, green, public space, it's supposed to have all of the public buildings in it, right? So the Public Affairs Building, Meeting House, Assembly and State House, Market House, School House, and the other public concerns. So, so the idea really was that over time, Philadelphia would fill out, but all of the, you know, it's that Enlightenment era thinking where all of the ideas would come from the

• 26:42Speaker 03

  center of the city, or all the most important things from the center. And, and this was really revolutionary, right? Because before, before this city's grew up as spaghetti. And who's to say whether that's better than this? But, uh, this at least looks.

• 26:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I mean, it has sort of, uh, you know, it's from like the, the, the Roman, you know, plan for new settlements. You had the cardo, the decumanus, you had the bath in the middle, you know, all the, all that stuff. You know, it's very, uh, old fashioned in that sense, but it's the first one to be done in a while.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  It's the first one to be done in a while. And, and again, the, the craziest part is that, you know, unlike a major, most major American downtown cities with some exceptions, the urban renewal here was a lot different than this one. And it didn't get wholesale with a lot of other cities. So it, it still retains like a weird charm in that. But, but, but the important thing is that like these ideas.

• 27:38Liam McAnderson?

  Weird charm is how I do describe Philadelphia.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And like the ideas were durable, right?

• 27:42Liam McAnderson?

  Unless I don't feel safe, you're gone.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  So if you go to the next slide, like, yeah. So, so this idea was really durable, but this is it 100 years later, right? This is the first survey map of Philadelphia. And, and even though like what William Penn shows as his cool, perfect city, like it doesn't get filled in like that, obviously. And he envisions like orchard houses and like, you know, grand lots. Everybody moves in right on top of each other, right on the one river where you can actually get in and out of the city.

• 28:11Liam McAnderson?

  No one fucking lives here though, right? Because how could you? I mean, this is all still country at this point, right? As far as I know from really Philadelphia?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the, yeah, the city for the first hundred years. So that's from 1796. Like that part of the city isn't. Philadelphia doesn't extend past Washington and Franklin Squares, which are over by Sixth and Seventh Street.

• 28:31Justin Roczniak?

  Right, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so right af- right after that, uh, right around this time, they actually clear cut the city, which is its own whole story. And they also start to get rid of the elevation. So you see how they're indicated on this map with the shading. Um, they actually flatten the city and they clear cut it and they bring all the streets to the level so that it's easier to traverse here. Um, oh, and yeah, those ponds were, uh, for brick yards. Um, and, and they have like round portable brick kilns underneath them. Uh, or next to them. And that is actually also part of the story of Britain House Square, but we're talking about Love Park today.

• 29:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  But yeah, basically the idea for the center of the city being important, like really had legs. And so this is in 1796 and about a hundred years later, you really start to have like, the whole thing is just fucking filled in. Because Philadelphia goes through a huge explosion of, of residences and houses and it's just huge, huge expansion.

• 29:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So yeah, I guess we, we jumped forward about a hundred years here.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 29:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This is an exciting document. I love these. This is a fire insurance map. We need. You know? Yeah. This is, uh, the Bromley Atlas. I remember you showing these, yeah. Five. Yeah. Uh, everything in pink is made of brick. Everything in yellow is made of wood. Everything that's gray is made of stone. This is so they can, you know, when, when you get assessed for fire insurance, you know, the, uh, the, the assessor can look up and say, well, this building is good, but the one next to it might catch fire. We have to consider that. Um.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. And these were really measured drawings and documents because they had to assess the insurability.

• 30:12November Kelly?

  Really, really durable looking city in the sense that it's mostly like brick built though. I also really like the extremely prominent Masonic temple.

• 30:22Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah, that's, that's. Still right there. Yeah, I like it.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like, again, with this insurance atlas, like, it's hard to really get a sense for the scale of everything, because between 1796 and 1895, when this map was made, like, Philadelphia really does become the workshop of the world. The Industrial Revolution here.

• 30:46November Kelly?

  I'm seething in Glaswegian, like.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Well, you know, that's the thing. And like I was saying earlier, Philadelphia is the Glasgow of America. Philadelphia is the Naples of America.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  But yeah, so the really-

• 31:02Justin Roczniak?

  Philadelphia is the Ankara of America.

• 31:06November Kelly?

  Philadelphia is the Zagreb of America, surely.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  So the really, so if you look at some of these row houses, like, you can find this map online in a couple of different places. The Philadelphia, atlas.phila.gov has all of these that you can layer on top of each other. You can zoom in real close and you can see a regular sized row house. And that's the tiny little rectangles and squares in this image, because this was the downtown heart of the city. And again, because the city hall had been moved there, and they built the biggest city hall that has ever been.

• 31:40Liam McAnderson?

  At one point, the world's tallest building.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  At one point, right. So, but you don't get a sense of the scale of this city.

• 31:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, before we move on, I guess we're going to talk about a couple of areas here. Most notably, like, just about around here. But also, let's point out, we've got the Broad Street Station, huge terminal station, right up against City Hall, which is here. The public buildings, right? We're going to talk about this horrible block of buildings here, where something very stupid was built.

• 32:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we're going to briefly talk about the Watermaker Building here, but it's not that important. And then also, I think that's it.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, the Reading Railroad was also right there.

• 32:25Justin Roczniak?

  The Reading Railroad Terminal becomes, you know, this is up here. This is also a huge building, which is still there, but the trains don't go there anymore. So, anyway, you know, this is, when you look at this, and we're going to show some pictures that look very nice. We do have to remember this is 1895. You know, there's no electricity, there's horse poop everywhere. Everyone has gas lighting, right? There's steam trains coming in and out of Broad Street Station.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, till the 1950s, the entire city was just getting bathed on a daily basis with coal sun.

• 33:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Justin Roczniak?

  No one cleans these buildings.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  No, city hall didn't clean until like.

• 33:06November Kelly?

  Again, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's Glasgow's wet Philadelphia, like all of the, um, like 19th century Glaswegian, like tenement buildings and stuff. Very, very like black, uh, stone, uh, until the invention of the, uh, the power washer. And then you realize, oh, wait a second, this is sandstone under here. And they're actually like quite pressing.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Pressure washers destroy that shit too. So every time you do that, you just trim off a little bit of the top.

• 33:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Unless you're very careful. That's part of my job.

• 33:36Justin Roczniak?

  As that's the, that's the problem with it is you think you can do power washing. No, it's actually, you need scaffolding, water and soap.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  It's a science.

• 33:46Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, um, I, I think it's a good, good place to, uh, you know, start to talk about how various events unfolded is, you know, the centerpiece of the city is City Hall. It's right there, fucking in the middle of town.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Such a good.

• 34:00Justin Roczniak?

  Which is exactly where it should be.

• 34:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Justin Roczniak?

  This was a good idea.

• 34:04November Kelly?

  This is, this is the one that if you.

• 34:06Liam McAnderson?

  All three of us have worked here. June, me, Roz, yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  I have not worked in City Hall.

• 34:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I thought you had, June. Okay.

• 34:12November Kelly?

  So, so, so June, June and I need to get jobs in City Hall.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  I haven't.

• 34:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you can.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  My job is municipally adjacent.

• 34:20November Kelly?

  This is the building that if you look at it from the right angle, it looks like William Penn is like holding his dick in his hand, right?

• 34:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, he's pissing all over the Phillies 2025 season.

• 34:31Liam McAnderson?

  He's all over the Mets. Yeah, this, uh, I, I, I will say, I, I'm like, I'm, I'm fine with whatever the, the, the skating rink and all that, but like, be like, coming out of the, the, the Broad Street Station and just like looking up and seeing this building imposing its second empire will on me.

• 34:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 34:52Liam McAnderson?

  Absolutely stupendous. And it's one of my favorite things about Philly.

• 34:55November Kelly?

  Gigantic statue.

• 34:57Liam McAnderson?

  If you like Second Empire, you will like this building. Why did you put this line in? Was this simply to taunt me? I love Second Empire.

• 35:04Justin Roczniak?

  City Hall is very important to this story, right? So City Hall.

• 35:07Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, shit. Hang on.

• 35:10Justin Roczniak?

  It takes 30 years to build, 1871 to 1901.

• 35:15Liam McAnderson?

  Can't rush perfection.

• 35:16Justin Roczniak?

  It started to be occupied before they finished it, right? Because, you know, it's just such a big building, right? But even before it was finished, this style of architecture became extremely dated and deeply, deeply unfashionable. And so everyone wants an excuse to get rid of it for a long time.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and it's hard to, again, like, you're in a city where the sidewalk is normal and the tallest, one of the tallest buildings ever built is right next to you. It's the largest municipal, right? It's, it's still the largest municipal building ever constructed. It's, uh, it was the tallest building in the world. Like, it, it has one of the most, uh, like, it has a complete sculpture program with like over a hundred or 200, maybe even sculptures. Uh, the whole thing is just lavishly adorned. And it was, and, and all those windows, those are double story windows. So they did the thing where they made the building appear smaller than it is. When you're, when you're, when you're standing in front of it, it's whole, it's massive.

• 36:16Justin Roczniak?

  Huge, big, really big building.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  It's so good.

• 36:18Justin Roczniak?

  Very, very big building. Um, very, very big. Uh, yeah. And, uh, yeah, it, uh, it's really big. Um, it's hard to describe how big it is.

• 36:27Liam McAnderson?

  Colossal, yeah.

• 36:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Also, I believe it's still the tallest habitable masonry building. This tower is all, well, up to about here, it's all masonry. And then, you know, that is, uh, underneath that were some wooden pile foundations, which when they went to go build the subway underneath it, they found weren't there anymore. And they just rotted away. So, yeah, Billy has no foundation, but it's heavy enough that doesn't matter.

• 36:55Liam McAnderson?

  They're more gutter. Yeah, who gives a fuck?

• 37:00Justin Roczniak?

  So, uh, unless the Tartarians are right and there's another 70 stories buried in the mud underneath, I don't know.

• 37:09November Kelly?

  Like you're looking at the, the sort of like top third of this building, right?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Ross and I watched a video of City Hall under construction in a Tartarian architecture YouTube video. That was my favorite part of the whole thing.

• 37:23Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe this is all fake. Yeah.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  Right. And in, in the background, in the background of the city hall image, again, just for scale. So that's Broad Street Station.

• 37:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  And the same, it's the same fucking thing. Broad Street Station was the largest single spanned train shed ever constructed. Was also a huge building. Um, and if you look, it's ginormous. And so it had this big viaduct. The trains came in elevating. So it had this huge viaduct that spanned half of a city block, going all the way from the river into city hall. So it covered half of the city, you know, horizontally. And, and so that was, that was, they called it the Chinese wall because all the crossings looked, uh, like you were going to enter the hell death. Like you see those little tiny teeny verticals there? Those are guys.

• 38:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And, and so this is, um, Broad Street Station, um, if you remember from one of our Penn Central episodes, this is where they kept the rifles in the attic.

• 38:28Justin Roczniak?

  You know, this is big, old fashioned stub ended terminal. You know, you got steam trains coming in and out. You know, and this is, this is sort of something the railroad doesn't like. It's inefficient. If you have a train going from New York City to Washington DC, it has to come in and has to back out very slowly, the whole way to continue its journey. This is why 30th Street Station was built further across the river, um, in order to, uh, you know, stop that from being necessary, right? Train just continue through. It's a little more inconvenient if you're going to Philly. It's not that bad though. Um, the other thing is they built this building over here, suburban station,

• 39:08Justin Roczniak?

  as offices to replace the offices in the main terminal, uh, Broad Street Station. And they build it for the suburban trains, which were at this point mostly electric. So those are all in a tunnel underneath.

• 39:23Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, Broad Street Station hangs around for a while, but it's one of these things the city fathers and the railroad want to get rid of. And the main thing that they have problems with is, well, 30th Street Station can't really take steam locomotives. And, um, suburban station definitely can't take steam locomotives. Although M track tried running diesels in there for a while when they ran the Atlantic City trains.

• 39:47Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my God.

• 39:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, uh,

• 39:50Liam McAnderson?

  You like fumes?

• 39:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, uh, he thought it could be worse than, um, whatchamacallit, Back Bay Station? Yep.

• 39:58Liam McAnderson?

  It sure can be.

• 40:01Liam McAnderson?

  Die, motherfucker, die, you.

• 40:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the result of this was Broad Street Station hung around for a lot longer than it should have. You know, from a railroad operation standpoint, that's by the time suburban was built. You know, they had realigned most of the tracks to go directly into there. You still had the big viaduct, the big Chinese wall with all the tracks on it. They just all jammed down into one track at the end and went on a horrible spur to join the main line. Um, it's like a temporary thing where they're like, okay, sometime soon we can finally get rid of this thing.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Um, yeah. And, oh, and the, the other thing about the Chinese wall that's important is that, uh, you know, this, this whole impassable, cave that you had to walk through and hope you didn't, uh, die under, um, really separated the neighborhoods north of Market Street and south of Market Street. Um, I've heard and I want to believe it, but I don't, I doubt that it's a true, even if it's apocryphal, that this is where you get wrong side of the tracks from. Um, the whole neighborhood north of, um, Market on this west side of Broad Street. Logan's Logan Square really had a lot of heavy industry right next to houses in a really weird way. We're going to talk about that.

• 41:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and this is, um, uh, this is Frank Furness's biggest building. Um, which obviously is why it was demolished because everyone, you know, hates him. Of course. Yeah, and, you know, he was dead, he couldn't shoot you for saying that by this point. Uh, what else? There was one more thing I wanted to say. Um.

• 41:33Liam McAnderson?

  Chinese wall, you didn't cover that.

• 41:35Justin Roczniak?

  No, well, yeah, the Chinese wall is back here. It blocks off development. Unlike, uh, unlike Broad Street Station, the Reading Terminal, which also had a very large train shed. I think the largest extant one in, uh, North America.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 41:49Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, possibly the entire, like, Western Hemisphere. Uh, instead of having just a wall, a masonry foundation, they built a market underneath. That's one of the reasons it's still there. Reading Terminal Market is still very popular.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Oh, and that was another durable idea. There used to be a market there and they built the train station.

• 42:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So there's a few other buildings around City Hall, including a very stupid one, the Arcade Building.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  This one's so funny.

• 42:18Justin Roczniak?

  And the Arcade Building was built sort of speculatively. Another Frank Furnas building, but I think there was a lot of railroad offices in there. Essentially, rather than try and purchase the land on that one block, they just built a very thin building over the sidewalk.

• 42:37November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 42:37Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:38November Kelly?

  A spike building.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is so good.

• 42:40November Kelly?

  This gives me anxiety. The idea of walking under it gives me anxiety as well.

• 42:45Liam McAnderson?

  That's a good point, yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, and you could also take that-

• 42:48Justin Roczniak?

  Had a skybridge directly to Broad Street Station.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, just like one of the weirdo hulking skyscrapers that you had to contend with if you came to Philadelphia in the early, late 19th century.

• 43:00November Kelly?

  Hostile architecture, but writ large.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  Right. And the whole city was like kind of hulking like this, right? All those Frank Furnas buildings were the buildings.

• 43:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 43:10Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 43:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Come see our buildings. They're all weird like this. Also, the John Wanamaker's Grand Depot, which was a converted early freight depot.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:21Justin Roczniak?

  It was a freight station that was converted to a department store. This disappears shortly before our story really starts going when the Parkway gets built. But it is, I don't know, it's another weird building.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  No, and Wanamaker's was the first department store in the United States, right?

• 43:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  This whole, all of this stuff is happening all at once right in the heart of the city, but it's all really chaotic. Like, that building, that building is hugging row houses. You know, like, everything's happening all at once right here.

• 43:54Justin Roczniak?

  People are still dropping shit on the streets. You know, there's like dead horses. There's like live horses pulling horrible, you know, whatever.

• 44:02Liam McAnderson?

  More dead horses.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  Live horses pulling carts of dead horses.

• 44:06Justin Roczniak?

  People are getting run over by trolleys.

• 44:08Liam McAnderson?

  Scarlet fever, yellow fever, dead gay fever, West Nile virus, being alive, being dead.

• 44:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Don't forget like old timey diseases too. Those were rampant.

• 44:20Liam McAnderson?

  Just in Scarlet Fever.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  No, like I'm thinking like, uh, like, like Consumption to the park. Yeah, yeah, consumption. That's what I'm talking about.

• 44:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. So, um, this, you know, this sort of general congestion leads to, uh, movement I think a lot of people should be familiar with, which is the city beautiful.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 44:39Justin Roczniak?

  Um, and like, well, so how is this applied in Philadelphia? And the answer to start with is the Parkway.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, this is our major city beautiful project. Like it, it's, it's happening at this moment in American architecture, you know, right after the Colombian exposition, like the Chicago World's Fair, right? Eighteen ninety-three. All the cities go, oh shit, we gotta make all of our buildings look white and beautiful and linear and rigid and axial like, like this.

• 45:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Um, but

• 45:10Justin Roczniak?

  It's gonna be so much light in there, you won't notice the horse poop.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:13November Kelly?

  What if, what if we just like cut across this whole grid? And that's, that's a shortcut from, from William Penn, uh, and with his dick in hand directly to Paris. The city everyone wants to be like.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  And so exactly, because in the nineteen twenties, really Philadelphia did have, or in the nineteen hundreds, Philadelphia has had Parisian, you know, French trained architects working and designing all of their public parks and green spaces. So

• 45:41November Kelly?

  La Philadelphia, c'est le Paris de les États-Unis.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Wait.

• 45:47November Kelly?

  Wait. Trying to explain this with the like thickest Philadelphia accent you've ever heard to, to a guy who just got here from Paris. In exactly as halting a tone as I did.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  So Paul Philippe Cray design makes these plans for a park, you know, a parkway that leads to the entrance to Fairmount Park was, which was another like civil achievement, huge swath of park ground. And then also like the watershed protection mechanism. All, all of the park space in Philadelphia is really interesting, especially in this time, because there, there are firing parks. It's a bunch of real estate guys who are firing parks. And so they're not only doing it to like improve their own investments, but they're thinking entrepreneurially like that, which is like, oh, if we put a park here, we put a really, really good park here, we're gonna make a really cool section of the neighborhood that people would like. Fucking imagine that.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Who could, who could think that actually like well-funded, well-cared-for and beautiful green spaces would be something that people would like and wanna live next. Um. And so this this happens alongside the car, but it doesn't really prioritize the car at first. It really is prioritizing this like boulevard experience for pedestrians who are going to the big car. Um, and they also, they also propose an art museum at the other end of this boulevard. It turns out to be exactly one mile long, which is just kind of a weird cool thing. Um, the, the reservoir was obviously up on a hill, so they get to take advantage of that whole Greek temple thing.

• 47:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is, uh, this is, this was the reservoir for the Fairmount Water Works. Um, you know, so that, that, the, the museum is built on top of the Fairmont.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Right. Um, and, and it takes, it takes a while for them to build it. But like, you know, this, this wasn't really designed initially with cars in mind, but very quickly it becomes the road, the, the, the car soon. Right? The, the notion is how do we open up space and get more air into this part of the city? It's also partly slum clearance because this is the neighborhood where, uh, all the, the Irish Catholics live. Or sorry, just Catholics.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  And again, it was, it was the wrong side of the tracks in like Philadelphia.

• 48:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we're also like, there's like tanneries up here. There's like, you know, all kinds of nasty stuff. I mean, you know, somewhere right back there was the Baldwin Locomotive Works. Um, what else was up here? I'm, I'm not super familiar with all the.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  There was a, there was an iron works that existed. Yeah. Until like the, oh.

• 48:35Justin Roczniak?

  The smelly stuff you kept outside the medieval walls.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In fact, the Chinese wall in this case.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Right. And, and, and all of this is all of the toxic 19th century industry as opposed to the toxic 18th century industry. Because the, the Schuylkill River side of Philly only really becomes developed after they figure out that there's coal in the Lehigh Valley that they can ship straight to Philadelphia on the rip.

• 49:00November Kelly?

  Just the the 19th century kind of hysterical anti Catholicism as being the wrong side of the tracks. You know, a guy kind of like locking the doors on his carriage because he sees someone with a rosary. Like a priest.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Right. So in the in the lower, in the lower right hand.

• 49:17November Kelly?

  Philadelphia is just Glasgow. Those people still exist here.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Right. And this is also like Bozar architecture, right? Like the the architects were Paul Philippe Cray was studied at the A Cold Day Bozar. Like that had been around since 1671, creating these axial designs for buildings, right? They all form along, like they're all symmetrical. They all go along a major corridor. And that really explains and displays how you're supposed to go through this. And and that kind of that kind of planning continues to be a theme throughout throughout the 1960s and 70s and 80s in some respects.

• 49:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and there is some interesting things happened in that, you know, sort of vein, you know, like the the Free Library here and the not yet built in this image, Family Court Building, were direct copies of two buildings in Paris.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:08Justin Roczniak?

  Fronting a similar square.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  They were going whole hog for it.

• 50:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, sometimes people weren't that creative.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  No, they were like, how do we be more like Paris? Will we simply become Paris?

• 50:20Justin Roczniak?

  You just build the buildings. Yeah, exactly.

• 50:23Liam McAnderson?

  One for one, dupe. I love that. What a what a Paris but Sheen.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 50:28Justin Roczniak?

  And and the the one of the other interesting things about the Parkway is, you know, it was not intended to be quite the way it is today. I mean, obviously, they finish it, right? It takes a long time to get developed because, you know, there were more like comprehensive visions for this. This is an early one. I I forget the exact context of this one, but you can see it would have been flanked by much taller buildings, much more imposing, you know, museums, public buildings, so on and so forth.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  You got novelist in there.

• 51:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you got a novelist.

• 51:05Liam McAnderson?

  A big one.

• 51:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you've got some kind of museum here where the Municipal Services Building is. Broad Street Station has been refaced with some classical bullshit.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  It's so funny.

• 51:18Justin Roczniak?

  They can't quite get rid of the arcade building, apparently.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Oh, and those those blocks right behind the arcade building, that little narrow one is Mole Street, and that was like a famous bar block back in the 19 teens. But yeah, this is this is a model that they that they made for the Parkway when they first rolled it out in 1907 or whatever. And and apparently on opening day of the model, people just like went crazy around, which is a really funny piece of news. Nashing of teeth.

• 51:51November Kelly?

  Yeah. Taking psychic damage from this thing.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  But yeah, the whole notion wasn't that this was like.

• 51:56Justin Roczniak?

  Crazy good or crazy bad?

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Oh, no, crazy good. They were all excited for it.

• 52:01November Kelly?

  Oh, I was I was envisioning a kind of Lovecraftian kind of horror, you know, the model out of space.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  It just started screaming.

• 52:07Justin Roczniak?

  Started speaking in tongues. It's like a Pentecostal service. Someone gets out a box of snakes, you know?

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. No, and and it's just it the whole idea of it was to build a museum district and combine all these like disparate cultural institutions that were spread all over center city into one area and and really do like a totally beautif- beautifying treatment here, not not a like not the.

• 52:36Liam McAnderson?

  Idiots bullshit nonsense copy of Paris?

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not. It's not. It's not specifically for slum clearance, right? Like, that's like a that's like a side goal. The real goal is to make something that's actually gorgeous and like fills in this kind of whole angle of the city to the greatest art urban park that had been built to date in one place or, you know, no, no disrespect to Central Park. I have to be nice to all the parks equally.

• 53:03Liam McAnderson?

  They're all they're all my children.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  They're all beautiful.

• 53:07Justin Roczniak?

  They're all my beautiful children. So anyway, they build the damn thing, you know, you can see here some of the like the piecemeal construction, you know?

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can see the the image. That's an image of it under construction. They fucked up the alignment at first, so it costs like a couple 20 extra million dollars than they expected. That you can see right next to that up top. That's an image of the neighborhood before they started to actually demolish all the buildings. And because they had to realign it, they ended up taking out a shit ton.

• 53:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, also surprising that there's, you know, a lot of, you know, you, you can see the, some of these are really big, single family houses. Some of these are apartments, but some of these are like, you know, rich people live here.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's super fancy one on the bottom middle slide. That was actually the mayor's house. And like, the mayor's house is a funny thing in Philadelphia as a concept, but it's often tied like charismatically to the actions of that existing mayor. Blankenberg is not the only.

• 54:09Justin Roczniak?

  We'll talk about that later a bit. Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then, yeah, you can see a church that they actually moved on rails, but that was really rare. They, they mostly just tore these buildings down.

• 54:18Justin Roczniak?

  So, all right, we got, we got this parkway, right?

• 54:22Liam McAnderson?

  You can keep it. Yeah.

• 54:24Justin Roczniak?

  And we can start.

• 54:25Liam McAnderson?

  You can park on the.

• 54:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you, you park on the driveway. Oh, here you can see the horrible spur from the Chinese wall onto the new railroad bridge into 30th Street Station.

• 54:38Justin Roczniak?

  Logan Square becomes Logan Circle.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, like all these other plans, like they finish, they finish the demolition and then they're like, oh shit, we don't have any more money. What the fuck do we do?

• 54:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you'll notice, um, yeah, no buildings here. This is a vacant lot for development. Uh, this is a vacant lot for development.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Coming soon.

• 54:59Justin Roczniak?

  This is a vacant lot for development, so on and so forth. Here, uh, the Rodin Museum has been built already.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:06Justin Roczniak?

  Um, yeah. And then a lot of these remain vacant for 70 years.

• 55:10Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Right. And there's like, you know, again, that like the accessory parking lots that they have to demolish, uh, or that they just choose to demolish or whatever. Like it really does, it really does remove a lot of the city and then it's not really replaced until much, much later. You know, I mean, and, and Philadelphia like continues to be a manufacturing, uh, hub quite successfully, but then it, it shit like, you know, when World War One breaks out, they build a giant shipyard down on Hog Island, inadvertently creating the greatest sandwich known to, uh, humankind.

• 55:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Um, but, but that's a huge pork spending project. And then before the shipyard's even done.

• 55:51Justin Roczniak?

  Island.

• 55:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That might be why it's called that.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Um, but yeah, before they're even done building the shipyard, the war is over and the city sunk a shit ton of money. And just, just really bad financial mismanagement happens over and over again in the city and through the 19, but like till the 1950s.

• 56:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but that doesn't stop, that doesn't stop people from wanting to go further, which leads us to some of the other ideas for improving the civic center. Namely, let's demolish City Hall.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Right. These are, these are really early renderings. These are from 1924 and they're, they're both done by Paul Cray, who was the architect of all the Fairmount Park properties at the time. And he's already thinking, like, again, they have, imagine infinite money. Imagine that people are continuing to move to your city. Imagine that everything you want ever gets built. We're going to tear fucking City Hall down. Nobody likes that thing. It looks like shit, but we can't really figure out how to tear down the towers. So I guess we should.

• 56:49Justin Roczniak?

  It's just too big to kill.

• 56:51Liam McAnderson?

  I was a little too big. Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's what happens with City Hall.

• 56:55Justin Roczniak?

  City Hall is a focal point for the parkway they just built.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:59Justin Roczniak?

  Or the City Hall Tower. Um, so that's why all the proposals kept it.

• 57:05Speaker 03

  Right. But yeah, they want to get rid of the rest of the building and just turn it into a cool traffic circle.

• 57:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, this, this is, uh, you know, and you look here, you can see, um, okay, only a couple of cars are going to be used in this at a time, right? Traffic's going to flow great. This is a great idea. Guys, we should do this.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  This is awesome.

• 57:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Interestingly enough, we see another square, admittedly with the parkway going directly through it, has already been marked for clearing out.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Right. So that was the, that Cray calls that like the parkway for. So, you know, very early on in the development of the whole thing. The idea of really treating this square as special and important is like, is like a, a critical part of the design for this park. Um, and, and the other funny thing is that, you know, Cray is working in this really interesting time period, right? He, he goes on to design the, the Federal Reserve Bank building, like that very modern looking one, but it has the classical detailing. Um, he, he was like a leading figure in American architecture until the Nazis stole that shit and used it for themselves. And then you can't build anything that looks like that.

• 58:17Justin Roczniak?

  It's a reverse operation paperclip.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Literally, literally.

• 58:23Liam McAnderson?

  Take it, take it, you Nazi shrine.

• 58:25Speaker 03

  But, but yeah, this, this whole area was given specific attention and it, and it was part of this effort to re, you know, beautify and reimagine what the center of the city could and should look.

• 58:37Justin Roczniak?

  In this drawing as well. No one can get rid of the fucking arcade building. It's still there.

• 58:43Liam McAnderson?

  It's stalking November.

• 58:47November Kelly?

  My God. Have we considered that the arcade building might be a mimic?

• 58:50Justin Roczniak?

  Possibly, possibly.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  They should put it back.

• 58:54Justin Roczniak?

  They should just put it back. Yeah.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  People really liked it.

• 58:58Justin Roczniak?

  And now we skip directly to the 1960s.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:03Liam McAnderson?

  Oh boy.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Buckle up motherfuckers. It's time for some architectural theory.

• 59:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 59:10Justin Roczniak?

  So in the 1960s, you've produced some of the best and the worst architecture in the contemporary period, right? Often by the same architects, engineers and designers. There's this thought in the post-war era, we could have a different relationship with buildings as urban dwellers, right? Um, so, you know, for instance, we're not going to live in individual buildings anymore. We're going to live in some kind of mega structure.

• 59:38November Kelly?

  Streets in the sky.

• 59:39Justin Roczniak?

  Streets in the sky.

• 59:42November Kelly?

  The, the, whatever the fucking Corbusier, um, building is called.

• 59:46Justin Roczniak?

  Unitated habitation. Yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, and, and the other, the other funny thing that happens during this time is that architects start planning in section instead of plan. And so the elevation changes become like a big part of it. The, the, the drama of like movement through space up and down becomes like. Something they start to consider primarily instead of second.

• 1:00:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so like this, this guy down here is a sketch by a guy we'll talk about in a bit, Ed Bacon, for the Market East Development, right? You can see City Hall in the background here. You can't see if the arcade building is there, but I assume it is.

• 1:00:25Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and you see like, okay, this is going to be some kind of incredible office building. But then there's going to be a parking deck underneath it. Might not be offices, it might be apartments. Maybe it's both. Who knows? Then underneath that, there's a, there's a bus station, then at ground level, there's pedestrian circulation. Then you can see underneath, there is some kind of what we would call regional rail here. And then the Market Street subway is over here. And then you have, you know, malls and public areas over here, right? And this is all in one building, you know, you, you, you might live like weeks of your life without leaving this building, you know, if it's designed, if it's big as it is.

• 1:01:09Justin Roczniak?

  And like, you know, as, uh,

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, look how, look how long it's supposed to be. Like, it's supposed to be the whole, the whole side of the entire city.

• 1:01:18Justin Roczniak?

  People are build, trying to build essentially archaeologies, right?

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Justin Roczniak?

  Right. That's a win condition, though. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And yeah.

• 1:01:30Justin Roczniak?

  There's the thing, you know, we get close. Um, you know, obviously here's a picture of the barbeque can. That's, uh, that's, that's a, a good example of like the huge scale of structures people are thinking of. You know, Habitat, uh, sixty, sixty-seven, right?

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, up here in Montreal. Um, a smaller planned communities like Reston, Virginia up here. Um, you know, where we've, we were building these modernist row houses above a wonderful market square. No cars whatsoever while they're back there in a parking lot. Rest or the, the rest of Reston was not built this way, but the good part was.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  No, and, and, and the architects are kind of doing something akin to like city planning. And the city planning is kind of doing something similar to architect. You know, they, they, they, they flow much more evenly.

• 1:02:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. And you're not necessarily thinking in terms of I'm going to put a building on this lot. You're like, we're going to radically reshape the city in ways that were not possible without technology. We have this. Now that we have it, you know? Right.

• 1:02:38Justin Roczniak?

  Which I guess, yeah, you move into some of the more aggressive examples like Lower Manhattan Expressway. This is a Robert Moses project.

• 1:02:47Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, sweet Jesus. Okay.

• 1:02:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. A great place to put apartments is on top of a highway.

• 1:02:53November Kelly?

  Everyone can get carbon monoxide poisoning.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  The important part. The important part is that it looks badass.

• 1:03:00Justin Roczniak?

  It does look badass.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02November Kelly?

  That may literally be the important part.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then there's Kenzo Tonga's plan for the Tokyo Bay, which is a hugely scaled project, just rethinking, oh, well, we just don't even need to worry about building on land. We're gonna build a whole

• 1:03:20Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck it.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  New half of the city.

• 1:03:21Justin Roczniak?

  City on a bay, yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  And these are, yeah, these are all mega structures, like in the same kind of vein, their entire self-contained buildings that are cities.

• 1:03:31Liam McAnderson?

  Isn't this where the like the Tokyo, the super, the super tall tower project stems from?

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 1:03:38Justin Roczniak?

  Oceans are now housing developments.

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  And then you have the fun proposals.

• 1:03:46Justin Roczniak?

  They have the fun proposals, you have the parodies.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's the, you go.

• 1:03:52Justin Roczniak?

  Super, Super Studios Continuous Monument, where they, this is an Italian design collective and they're just like, wow. All these buildings are getting really big. What if we just built a building? That was a huge glass building that just encircled the entire earth.

• 1:04:08Liam McAnderson?

  Cover the earth.

• 1:04:09November Kelly?

  Make, make a lot of things simpler, make some more things more complicated, which in many ways is every piece of Italian design, you know?

• 1:04:16Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, it seems to have inspired the Saudis.

• 1:04:21November Kelly?

  So yeah, but the Saudis don't have the same kind of vision. This is, this is, you know,

• 1:04:24Liam McAnderson?

  No, they, yeah, they have whatever their, their vision is, it's, it's bad, folks.

• 1:04:29Justin Roczniak?

  And what Arkad Graham wanted to do, the walking city.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, they did a bunch of these fun proposals. Um, they're really good drawings. And the idea was, yeah, what if your, what if your city was like shaped like a weird little bug guy? And it could move around. It could do everything that you wanted it to, and it could go visit.

• 1:04:46Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you guys have seen Star Wars, right?

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Which is pretty much.

• 1:04:49Liam McAnderson?

  It hasn't come out yet, but don't worry about that.

• 1:04:52Justin Roczniak?

  What's the, what's the film with the, the, the cities that are mobile and eat other cities?

• 1:04:58Liam McAnderson?

  What the hell are you talking about?

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Not Howells moving castle.

• 1:05:02Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no, it's a, it was a book first. Ah, shit.

• 1:05:05Liam McAnderson?

  All right, hold on. Uh, this is gonna be a fun Google search. Cities that eat other cities movie? Question mark?

• 1:05:11November Kelly?

  This is great. This is, this is great podcasting.

• 1:05:13Liam McAnderson?

  Are you talking about mortal, is this mortal engines? Is that what you're talking about?

• 1:05:17Justin Roczniak?

  Mortal engine sounds about right. Yeah.

• 1:05:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why the fuck not?

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  Right. So, so this is the moment really in cities where like, you, you just have infinite ideas and like all of the guys are ideas guys.

• 1:05:38Liam McAnderson?

  Infinite LSD, which is.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  I mean, that's a, that's a critical training tool for the, uh, for the 1960s.

• 1:05:45Liam McAnderson?

  For the young architect, right?

• 1:05:47Justin Roczniak?

  And creatives back then, yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  Right. But so.

• 1:05:52Liam McAnderson?

  Not a creative type. Sorry, old man.

• 1:05:55Justin Roczniak?

  So, you know, the result of this is, okay, we've got lots of new ideas in architecture. We're gonna have different ways of relating to buildings, the city in general. And that's how we go from this to this.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, this is Lou Khan, crazy Uncle Lou Khan's traffic proposal for the city of Philadelphia. This is, this is done in the 1950s.

• 1:06:20Liam McAnderson?

  We are going to make the, the notes on this slide are fucking cold.

• 1:06:24November Kelly?

  Oh, it's so good. Enjoying the seeming electromagnets he's creating.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Right. So, no, so what he says is that we're gonna make Philadelphia pedestrian only in the William Penn part. We're gonna go all the way, we're, we're gonna tavern all the way back and we're gonna put canals in too. And if you wanna drive to Philadelphia.

• 1:06:44Liam McAnderson?

  Is the, is the Venice of America. I'm always saying that.

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  And if you, if you want to drive into Philadelphia, that's cool. What you're gonna end up at is one of these gigantic spiral shaped parking garages. And that's where you're gonna park your stupid fucking car and keep it out of my face.

• 1:07:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes, exactly. There's gonna be like electric trams to bring you around, or you can walk everywhere. I suppose there'd probably be something with the boats. There are still a few streets on here that seem to be allowing motor traffic, but far, far fewer than there are today. I guess the Vine Street Expressway gets built too. Also, the South Street Expressway.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Which didn't get built, but this is- Damn near close, right? Yeah.

• 1:07:31Justin Roczniak?

  Very close, yeah. That was successfully defeated, but yeah, this is an interesting proposal. It receives a lot of, there's a lot of artistic significance put on it. I know that much. I don't know that much about it, to be honest. It's a good idea, though.

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, crazy, crazy Uncle Luke Khan was over here making his crazy drawings and showing it to everybody. Yeah, you guys are like, Tim's the coils, right? Let's do this. Right. They're like, they're like, wow, this is cool. Nobody's ever gonna do this, but this is cool. Well, they actually did do one of them, right, Roz?

• 1:08:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, they did build this specific parking garage.

• 1:08:09Speaker 03

  So that's, that's cool. We got one parking garage out of this straw.

• 1:08:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's, that one was supposed to be, sort of, you were supposed to have direct access from the Vine Street Expressway to that parking garage. And then the feds came in and said, that's illegal for some esoteric reason. So they didn't do it. So you have to drive on surface streets to get there. But that was one of the parking garage proposed, and it is there. It's not spiral either. It's a boring square one. Which brings us to the subject of parking garages.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  My dog's yelling at me to go outside, so Roz, make your lecture extra long.

• 1:08:46Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, see what I can do here. So parking garages are the worst kind of structure. Number one, because they let people drive cars into cities.

• 1:08:56November Kelly?

  That's true.

• 1:08:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58November Kelly?

  They haven't found a way to make one look good yet, and they've tried.

• 1:09:01Justin Roczniak?

  They, some of the early ones, I think, looked good. But that was back when they put windows on them and stuff.

• 1:09:08November Kelly?

  Back when they were the temple of the automobile and then you would drive in and then die immediately of the fumes.

• 1:09:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:09:14Liam McAnderson?

  Smog inhalation anyone has ever experienced in the history of anything.

• 1:09:20Justin Roczniak?

  But these, these parking garages, they're generally just bad structures, right? They're not climate controlled, so they're subject to, you know, freeze thaw cycles. They're not weatherproof, so they're subject to weathering from precipitation or from road salt, which is another thing most buildings don't have to deal with. They're subject to these heavy loads in the form of cars. And those cars, those cars move around, right? They have to be built as cheaply as possible, so they make economic sense, right? Two parking spots is the same floor area as a studio apartment.

• 1:09:56November Kelly?

  Um, Jesus.

• 1:09:57Justin Roczniak?

  They usually can't be converted to higher and better uses just due to their sort of construction, you know, ceiling heights, things like that, right? Also, they're beat to shit by the time you want to convert them. Um, you know, and despite these parking garages being, you know, the first experience of a place you get when you go to a location, they are stupid ugly, like.

• 1:10:25Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Justin Roczniak?

  They're, it's, it's, it's a bizarre way for this. This is essentially your foyer to, you know, any, a, a, a, any sort of building or location. And it's like, no, you have to go into a horrible warehouse for cars to get here, right? They also tend not to be built correctly, especially the, the modern precast ones. There's lots of problems with the grout, lots of problems with the minimal, um, cast in place concrete that is usually put into them. Um, they are usually not well maintained. Right, um, underground garages have all of these problems as well, but they're, you know, not visible to the public and they have additional problems like runoff, right?

• 1:11:09Justin Roczniak?

  You know, so I, I can't imagine like a deep underground garage. Imagine if you had to clean out the sump. Oh, my God.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  I'm back, everybody.

• 1:11:24Justin Roczniak?

  And so.

• 1:11:24November Kelly?

  Did you, did you, did you have about the, um, cause you know automated like parking garages where your car just gets like lifted on a hydraulic thing and stored. There have been a couple of those, there was one in London that ate somebody's car. And by eight, I don't mean it destroyed the car. What I mean is it stored it irretrievably. And, and, and when they, when they sued to be like, I want my car back. It is trapped in your car labyrinth. You put it in the fucking car jail from A and O.

• 1:11:52Justin Roczniak?

  I'm sorry, it got eaten by the car minotaur or the minic, minic, minicar.

• 1:11:58November Kelly?

  Because, because it requires a series of like precise moves to get the thing out. You have to do basically the plot of the movie cube to get your car back. They had to tell that person, yeah, sorry, um, your car, we can get you your car back in four years time. And there, there's no way to get there ahead of that, other than just, I guess, demolishing the entire parking garage to, to like breach in and rescue your car. Your car is just trapped. Your car is going through a multi-year experience.

• 1:12:28Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God. I mean, yeah, I, I, I suppose that makes sense for that kind of garage. I mean, it's weird that they had a specific date on that, but I suppose that's, you know, another thing about parking garages is, you know, because of all these problems they have with them, they tend to have very short lifespans, right? You know, we're talking like 30, 40 years tops, cause they just get beat to shit and they're not necessarily built that well to begin with. And of course we're in a situation where everyone's getting electric cars and, you know, rather than doing the same thing, which is, well, maybe we make the cars a bit lighter. Maybe we, you know, we take advantage of some efficiency. Especially when energy is, you know, likely to be more scarce in the future.

• 1:13:13Justin Roczniak?

  It's like, no, everyone's buying electric SUVs. So the car parks are put under more strain. So, you know,

• 1:13:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, every SUV now, I just have a quick aside. The thing that really pisses me off about electric cars now is the the honking ginormous like electric SUVs with the Hummer EV and the Cadillac Escalade EV version that weigh 9,000 fucking pounds and yet can get from 0 to 60 in 4.5 seconds. It's like the F-150 Lightning that the guy used to do the terrorist attack in New Orleans. I am a, I am firm believer in going fast, recklessly fast. However, I am not a believer in endangering people besides myself to do it. I believe that I should be put in charge of the federal highway authority. Uh, and I will, I will regulate electric cars so that you get 20 horsepower.

• 1:14:02Liam McAnderson?

  Everyone drives an electric D'Chavot and the streets are made much safer.

• 1:14:05Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, there you go. Yeah.

• 1:14:06Liam McAnderson?

  You only need to go 60. What do you care? Except for me, I get an exemption.

• 1:14:11Justin Roczniak?

  Because you, you're, you're the safer driver. Yeah.

• 1:14:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yes. Thank you, November.

• 1:14:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. So, yeah, the result of this is these buildings tend to be, need to be replaced relatively frequently compared to a lot of other kinds of buildings which are climate controlled or, um, you know, otherwise have these sorts of, uh, you know, they're easier to maintain and they have less, less of a shelf or they have more of a, you know, a life to them. Um, so naturally, if you're going to build a grand civic plaza, you build it on top of an underground parking garage.

• 1:14:49Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So, you know, we've, we've now covered the two main constituent parts of our episode, right? We accidentally made the giant traffic car sewer and then we accidentally fucked up and forgot to put a, you know, place to put all the cars like, like Lou Con won. So.

• 1:15:08Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, crazy Lou Con.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  A crazy old Uncle Lou Con. So what happened? So it slightly before crazy Uncle Lou Con starts his drawing.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  In 1948, the newspapers start to like do the thing where they're like, surely all of the citizens agree that we simply must have more legal underground municipal parking garages in Philadelphia. And back in those days, like we'll talk about in a minute, like the process for getting anything done in Philly had to go through the state legislature. So in order to legalize the building of underground parking garages, it had to go through that. Where they originally had planned to site it was right next to that Parkway Four Court area from earlier. You can, you can see it. It was always supposed to be kind of like bisected by the road. This is what was called Rayburn Plaza, and it had a like a municipal bandstand on it.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  And later it's called Thomas Paine Plaza because Thomas Paine allegedly did common sense. But it was always this kind of place of public performance.

• 1:16:15Justin Roczniak?

  And then went on a podcast about Philadelphia sports.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Big shout out.

• 1:16:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, 10,000 losses. We're, I feel a little guilty because I told Tom I couldn't record today. And then I got pressed into service with fucking AirPods today. Like, because Ross DM'd us last night with like, hey, can we record today? I was just, motherfucker.

• 1:16:41Liam McAnderson?

  10,000 losses does not pay my bills. This slop does. Hello, Hogs. Thank you.

• 1:16:47Justin Roczniak?

  I really like doing this show.

• 1:16:50Liam McAnderson?

  Me too.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  I always have a great time.

• 1:16:53Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, man.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Right, so.

• 1:16:55Liam McAnderson?

  You were saying, I'm sorry.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. I'm on. So, okay, so they, they, they finally get the legislation passed. The city takes out a $2 million loan to start the construction of two 900 space parking garages. That's your return on investment there. They start to get to work and about a month later, they decide to pause the plan. And then a month after that. Uh, they just shelve it entirely.

• 1:17:20Justin Roczniak?

  What?

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  My favorite part is in the, in the one where they finally like, you know, say, okay, we're not, we're not going to do this right now. The second paragraph down here, the city traffic engineer stressed that but more parking by motorists at such outlying points as all of the transit terminals would really help because such drivers could board high-speed transit facilities at those locations and get to the center of the city area as quickly as they could their automobiles. Like, the guys are like, uh, did you think about taking the train?

• 1:17:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Fucking train, just take the fucking train. So we ran the numbers and I think you just need to take the fucking train.

• 1:18:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I, I mean, it's surprising how, you know, it took so long for the city fathers to become car-brained. It happened eventually, but, but here it was like, no, no. Put it, put it at 69th Street Terminal. Come on, what are you doing?

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, and so like this idea, like all other Philadelphia ideas is like horrifically durable. Right? So they actually end up excavating out this building's base in order to make this parking garage thing. But they don't ever get the money authorized to build the actual parking garage thing. It becomes the big cavern basement of the municipal services building.

• 1:18:40Justin Roczniak?

  Big, big home, big home.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Big hole.

• 1:18:43Justin Roczniak?

  I've been in it, it's a big hole.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a, it's a crazy space.

• 1:18:47November Kelly?

  You think, you know how the, you know, you look at, uh, like the Ottomans, for instance, having the huge like systems or whatever under, under Istanbul? Or, um, like any of the kind of like, uh, like Japanese, like, um, I like, uh, sort of like stormwater, uh, cavern things.

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06November Kelly?

  And, and you go, wow, that's incredible they built that. Do you think future civilizations will be like, ah, they probably just couldn't get the, uh, the appropriations to put, to put whatever they actually wanted to put in here in?

• 1:19:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:19:20November Kelly?

  We think this was some kind of, uh, storage basement, don't know.

• 1:19:25Justin Roczniak?

  So this is the state of the area coming into the 1950s and 60s.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Justin Roczniak?

  You have a.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  The one thing I just want to add about this is that this underground parking garage movement thing actually ends up creating the modern Philadelphia NIMBY movement on accident in because they proposed one for Rittenhouse Square, but that's a whole nother story.

• 1:19:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so we got, we got a big hole in the ground. We got a parkway, which is now jamming cars into Center City. We've got City Hall and Broad Street Station. Broad Street Station at this point, not necessarily useful. The Arcade Building is still there.

• 1:20:09Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, poor November.

• 1:20:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 1:20:13November Kelly?

  I'm never, I'm never gonna triumph over this building, you know?

• 1:20:18Justin Roczniak?

  And now we have to introduce our cast of characters.

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20:22November Kelly?

  At only an hour and 26.

• 1:20:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, these are the players of the story.

• 1:20:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, I don't recognize this tarot deck.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  Oh, Roz and I made this up the other night.

• 1:20:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  It's, it's really good.

• 1:20:38Justin Roczniak?

  Let's start with the priest.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:20:41Justin Roczniak?

  Edmund Bacon.

• 1:20:42Liam McAnderson?

  Boo.

• 1:20:45November Kelly?

  That's, that's an alarmingly shaped man.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  All right. You want to make your case, Liam?

• 1:20:51Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, so from what I understand of him, he's, he's, he's the intellectualization of what Robert Moses couldn't do.

• 1:21:00Justin Roczniak?

  Ah.

• 1:21:00Speaker 03

  See?

• 1:21:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes and no.

• 1:21:03Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, well, again, I don't understand as much as you do, or I'm spending some of my forte, but I'll kill you, Roz. So, so dead, buddy.

• 1:21:12November Kelly?

  That, that is, that is a shape of forehead I've never seen before. Could, could estrogen have saved her?

• 1:21:18Justin Roczniak?

  You have seen that forehead before if you've seen movie films.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Liam McAnderson?

  Movie films. Yeah, Kevin Bacon.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28November Kelly?

  No shit, really?

• 1:21:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, he's Kevin Bacon's dad.

• 1:21:32November Kelly?

  What the fu- the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon applies to urban planning?

• 1:21:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so, and Kevin Bacon likes to say the only reason he busted his ass being an actor was because his dad worked twice as hard, which means that Ed Bacon must have been crazy, as you can probably imagine.

• 1:21:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, all the people in this, all the people we're discussing today have alarmingly low Kevin Bacon numbers.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  But like, so Liam, I think the Robert Moses comparison is pretty like fair, right? In a lot of respects, right? They're both working with huge, huge swaths of land. They're able to really wield the concept of redesigning and redeveloping the city. But that's kind of where it starts and stops because Bacon wasn't an autocrat. He worked in collaboration with all of the people involved in the city from top to bottom, right? So that's not only like, you know, he actually gets kicked out of Flint, Michigan for being accused of being a communist. So he comes to Philadelphia.

• 1:22:42November Kelly?

  Not a difficult thing to do in those days.

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  Of course, as was the style of the time.

• 1:22:47Justin Roczniak?

  He was in charge of the housing association there, right? Trying to get public housing built, but not in like ways that were amenable to real estate.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think he was just head of city planning. Like he's a, you know, he was a classic Philadelphia Quaker in all of that conservative like that type of way. We went to the same high school, just so you know.

• 1:23:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the big thing about Bacon compared to Robert Moses is Ed Bacon is through and through, he's an academic, right? As opposed to Robert Moses, who got the opposite of an education, which is a PhD in political science from Columbia.

• 1:23:33Justin Roczniak?

  You know, he knows history, he knows theory, and he's very, very good at it.

• 1:23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so the two things that happen here, like, so Ed Bacon's senior thesis, when he's an architecture student at Cornell, is to design a civic center for Philadelphia. Like, he's taking this idea that started in 1907 with the Parkway, and he's thinking, okay, how do we actually finish this thing so that it becomes something much, much grand? And look here, Roz, he even just says, let's get rid of fucking City Hall.

• 1:24:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, he's also saying, yeah, we'll get rid of city hall.

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  He also draws one of the most phallic plazas that I've actually seen. And usually when I think people say like, the architecture is a dick metaphor thing. I'm like, you're full of shit. But this, this one's my.

• 1:24:19Liam McAnderson?

  No, it's just, it's not even a metaphor.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  No. So you see the, you see the black dot at the tip of it, right?

• 1:24:25Liam McAnderson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  That was a fountain. And the whole point was to be the central, central radiating pivot point from which one would spur up the Ben Franklin.

• 1:24:36Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, spurred up the Ben Franklin, uh huh.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Justin Roczniak?

  Uh huh, yeah.

• 1:24:39Speaker 03

  Um, and, and you know, just, uh, just create this beautiful, uh, canal of, of a public space that goes all the way to the, uh, you know, metaphorical art museum, eh?

• 1:24:49Justin Roczniak?

  Obviously, these, these colonnated arcades down here, these, that's the hair on the balls.

• 1:24:54Speaker 03

  Right. And that's, and that's actually, so it's a common misconception. That's actually where the municipal employees are stored in, um, in urban planning.

• 1:25:08Liam McAnderson?

  Civil deference, if you will, yes.

• 1:25:10Speaker 03

  Hi, Bruce. Sorry. Um, and, and, and so, yeah, like, just, just Bacon's been working on this whole notion of how do we actually fix Philadelphia? For his entire, his entire professional life. And he be, he becomes the head of city planning and he's suddenly in a position to actually do it. Thanks to some of the other characters. Um, you got anything else for this one, Roz?

• 1:25:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, you know, I, I, I, I mean, we're gonna, we're not see this, this project through in a bit, but yeah, he's, um, he's able to, he is able to see this project through over a very long period of time. Right? Um, but I think the, the big, you know, uh, one of the big things is, uh, the way he works is very radical in an era of like, the prevailing opinion in municipal planning is, you know, any building over 40 years old is unsalvageable in a shit box and it has to be demolished. Right?

• 1:26:03Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 1:26:03Justin Roczniak?

  You know, this is during a contemporaneously to this, the whole city of Denver demolishes itself, right?

• 1:26:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:26:12Justin Roczniak?

  Just for, for attention. There was no city of Denver for like 10 years. Um, cause they thought, you know, all we gotta do is wipe out these old buildings. And, uh, you know, private development will come in.

• 1:26:25Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 1:26:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. Private development will come in and build better buildings. And then that just didn't happen. Um, so you know, this, the bacon is much more like, we're going to come in, we're going to, you know, we're, we're going to fix what can be fixed. We're going to change what needs to be changed. Um, one of his big inspirations, you know, if you read his book, Design of Cities, which I couldn't find my copy of was, um, you know, the great Pope slash Mayor Sixtus the Fifth.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58November Kelly?

  Future, future, um, No Gods No Ma's episode, unless he's already been one and I just have blanked that from memory.

• 1:27:05Justin Roczniak?

  I think you did one who was in the same range of years, but it wasn't Sixtus the Fifth.

• 1:27:12November Kelly?

  We've done, we've done a Pope before, certainly.

• 1:27:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Sixtus the Fifth, uh, plans the renovation of Rome, right? I've just got to, this is a big inspiration for bacon. Um, and the whole idea are, you know, grand boulevards through the old city and they're anchored by various monuments. They're going to be churches. They're going to be obelisks. They're going to be, you know, uh, visual, visual points, landmarks, the Colosseum, so on and so forth, which are going to sort of let you know where you are in the city and how to get around without a map even.

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:50Justin Roczniak?

  Right?

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  It's a wayfinding system.

• 1:27:52Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty much.

• 1:27:53Speaker 03

  And, and, and the thing that, the thing that bacon does with Sixtus the Fifth is, well, the, the thing that he does in Philadelphia is he unites all the parts, right? The, the city, the, the city leaders, the architects, the planners, like the, the, the, the business leaders, like he figures out how to get them all aligned around a, a single idea. And he also gets them to believe the, the, the, the, the pithy line that Rome wasn't built in a day, because he walks through in agonizing detail, like, okay, Sixtus cleared out the, cleared out the streets. And he, he referred to them as highways, which I think is really interesting. But he's like, pick six, uh, Sixtus cleared out the streets and put down obelisks.

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  And then over the next hundred or 200 years, various other architects came in to finish the plan. And, and, and so, you know, connecting it back to this whole notion of like, okay, well, you exist in the context of all that has come before you and all that will, you know, will come to be. That that was very much a part of what he was selling to people and people were buying.

• 1:28:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's as opposed to Robert Moses who just fell out of the coconut tree. Yeah.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:29:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:05Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, so he's drawing on much of this old tradition, but he's also again, very modern. We go back to this market east plan. This is one of his drawings about like, okay, we're, we're doing something new and radical as well. We're doing something that, you know, is very much of the sixties, very much. It's, it is very much, you know, of its time. It's of, you know, contemporary architecture. You know, we're going to have modern rapid transit. We're going to have shopping centers. We're going to have offices. We're going to pedestrianize Chestnut Street or, or we're going to put, we're going to make it rapid transit only. It was only buses for quite a long time.

• 1:29:45Justin Roczniak?

  We're going to have these new kinds of row houses. We're going to renovate what can be renovated in Society Hill, but also encourage new development, Society Hill Towers, things like that. He plans like all of the great Northeast, so on and so forth. At the Northeast section of the city that was still largely undeveloped in the sixties.

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and Society Hill was a really, it predates this, this like intentional city planning process by a little bit. But he really did have just like total reign over redesigning the city and he took that responsibility very seriously. So like exactly Society Hill was one of the first urban redevelopment projects. And instead of doing the Pruitt Igoe, we knocked down three city blocks. We build a mega tower. It was selective site by site demolition of the homes that were actually in true disrepair. And.

• 1:30:40Justin Roczniak?

  Admittedly, you can see here, Society Hill Towers, they did do some really big buildings, but that was the exception, not the rule.

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  Right. And that was a, that was a centerpiece and that was a wayfinding point. And that was this, that, the other thing that goes back to these larger notions of how you see a city. There's also an interesting story here where that was the site of the Dock Street Market, which was the, you know, a, a market that set up contemporaneously with like colonial Philadelphia. And then guys were just driving trucks into it to get their growth, you know, to get their wholesale grocery. Bitch. Um, so that was totally crowded and fucked up.

• 1:31:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  And, and I really love the, the society hill. He, he puts a greenway in, so it's a pedestrianized, separate walking path through the city and, and they front up on the buildings. It's really, really, you know, different, interesting, eclectic. It takes you all through society hill and it separates you physically as a pedestrian from vehicular traffic in a way that wasn't really, um, in the, the kind of zeitgeist of urban planning for another 20 or 30 years.

• 1:31:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's very different from a Robert Moses proposal that would be, I shove a highway through it, it'll be fine. Yeah. Put some housing towers in. So that's Bacon. He's, he's, he's academic. He takes his responsibility seriously. He's good at getting people to work together over a very long period of time. Now we talk about our next guy, the alchemist.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:08Justin Roczniak?

  Vincent Kling.

• 1:32:09Speaker 03

  Vincent Kling, an architect, an architect who gets no respect today and

• 1:32:14Justin Roczniak?

  Absolutely none.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  And like Frank Furnas, almost all of his best works are torn down or modified beyond, uh, recognition. But, but Kling was, Kling was equally important to the design of the whole thing.

• 1:32:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  You know, Bacon doesn't think of himself as a, as a architect. He thinks of what like the city planning is, is like the, the, the stuff that puts a city to get, you know, that, that, that architecture follows.

• 1:32:41Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  Um, but Kling is actually the architect. So he's given license to actually make these projects around city hall.

• 1:32:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And you would think, you would think that you would, you know, go to at this time, Philadelphia's greatest living architect, Louis Kahn.

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  Crazy Uncle Louis Kahn. Who I just, I just

• 1:33:03Justin Roczniak?

  And they do. And he designs whatever this thing is.

• 1:33:10Speaker 03

  It's so fucking

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  Right, so Lou Khan actually did mostly speak in riddles.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  He would say stuff like, "The street is a room by agreement." Or, "In a small room, one does not say what one would in a large."

• 1:33:31November Kelly?

  Uh huh.

• 1:33:33Speaker 03

  He has a whole, he has a whole monologue about what a brick wants to be versus what you can do with a brick and what, how you.

• 1:33:39November Kelly?

  I mean, listen.

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  Of course. So he whoms the monus though.

• 1:33:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but, but he still puts those big post-tensioned, you know, slabs through the arch, you know? So is that brick really being an arch? I don't know. So, you know, he has a big thing about served and serve its faces. Anyway. The big, the, the big, uh, uh, uh, thing here is that, okay, you know, we, we need some buildings and some serious design for the civic center, which involves things like office buildings, right? As opposed to, again, whatever this thing is. So.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  And look how serious he looks talking about it. You could just imagine him being like, "This building will change the way that people go to buildings forever and ever and the rest of their lives." And I didn't make this in the last 24 hours with Ken.

• 1:34:36November Kelly?

  And, and, and you're looking at him like this man is.

• 1:34:39Liam McAnderson?

  I slept more in the last two, three days.

• 1:34:41November Kelly?

  Yeah, and you're looking at this like this man is dangerously insane.

• 1:34:46Liam McAnderson?

  There goes crazy Uncle Lou Khan again.

• 1:34:48November Kelly?

  He has made this out of, out of straws. This is not, uh, this is not a serious person.

• 1:34:52Liam McAnderson?

  I, I don't, I don't feel especially safer on this, man. Let's do it.

• 1:34:59Justin Roczniak?

  So, so, you know, Ed Bacon and the planning team are like, okay, let's.

• 1:35:03November Kelly?

  Can we get a normal lockers ex, please?

• 1:35:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, let's, let's go to a guy who could design a floor plate. Uh, fucking yeah.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  This bill, this building is so, is like every, like everything else from this movement. It's so, so goddamn good and it's so, so neglected by the people who are entrusted to maintain and provide. I, I, I've only been in municipal services building in one of them, in one of the office parts once. And it's got the flavor of fluorescent lighting that just immediately makes you go insane.

• 1:35:37Justin Roczniak?

  The municipal services, municipal services building, um, this is, I think, one of the greatest buildings we got. I mean, this is, this is also, this rendering goes really hard. I love it.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:35:49Justin Roczniak?

  Right across the street from city hall, um, municipal services is the one that used to have the big Frank Rizzo statue about, uh, in front of it. Um, anyway, you know, it's, it's, it's all like board formed concrete. Um, it has wonderful, like nice stone finishes inside, uh, in all the elevator lobbies, in the main lobby.

• 1:36:09Speaker 03

  Gorgeous finishes.

• 1:36:11Justin Roczniak?

  The basement is where there's all the, uh, because they excavated that whole area. That's where you go to stand in line to get permits from the city for building stuff or, you know, uh, change your water service or more frequently.

• 1:36:24Liam McAnderson?

  Don't worry, you can't do that.

• 1:36:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. More frequently you hire someone to stand in line for you because it's not the most efficient system down there.

• 1:36:32Liam McAnderson?

  It's down there, Ross. It's a fucking labyrinth of the minutes are that dorks you.

• 1:36:38Speaker 03

  But like, but like this is.

• 1:36:39Liam McAnderson?

  Welcome to MSP.

• 1:36:41Justin Roczniak?

  Welcome. The municipal services building, fuck you.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  No, and they literally, they literally print you off a piece of receipt paper with your number on it and it is the waiting room. It's, it's kind of fun if you, uh, have nothing to do all day. But, but like, like everything else with it, with this stuff, like the idea of, oh, you simply go to one place to get any kind of permit done or interface with any kind of city department customer service desk. That makes sense. The execution of it is, is, is hell.

• 1:37:12November Kelly?

  This is the kind of socialism I want and support. This is actually existing socialism is the basement that could have been full of cars, but is instead full of people waiting for permits.

• 1:37:22Speaker 03

  What kind of permit? All of them.

• 1:37:25Justin Roczniak?

  You know what, you know what else? You know what else? The elevators are really fast.

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  Oh yeah.

• 1:37:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:32Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, so this is, so anyway, municipal service is a very good building. And yeah, so Kling has given control over just a huge amount of space.

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. And again,

• 1:37:45November Kelly?

  All you, all you have to do to do this is not talk in riddles and be capable of designing a building that you can sell space in.

• 1:37:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about Kling, you know, Luke Khan was more like, you know, he gets into more radical architecture early. Vincent Kling is like, you know, I'm gonna go work for SOM for a while and design a couple of buildings and then start my own firm. And, you know, that they, that works out for him.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and again, Kling has given full reign of all the parts that Ed Bacon has been like salivating over, trying to like un-fuck you.

• 1:38:27Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast

• 1:39:08Justin Roczniak?

  is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com/typpod. Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  Hey, look, Roz, what's there? The arcade building.

• 1:39:33Justin Roczniak?

  The arcade building.

• 1:39:34Speaker 03

  The arcade building is still there. So, yeah.

• 1:39:39Justin Roczniak?

  Guess what? Kling is the only man who can do battle with it. And he kills it.

• 1:39:43Speaker 03

  And he does.

• 1:39:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:39:45November Kelly?

  All right, this man is my knight errant now. I'm gonna bestow upon him like a favor, like a little ribbon or something out of my hair. Ideal.

• 1:39:54Justin Roczniak?

  You see, this huge atrium here is on the location of the arcade building.

• 1:40:01November Kelly?

  Hitler dead, what new?

• 1:40:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  No, and so he designs all these giant civic spaces and the buildings that are in between them, right? So the clothespin right below that is the... That's the way you get into the underground concourse, right? So it follows this whole thing that Ed Bacon's been trying to get done. Where you have these monument obelisk type shapes that draw you to a specific place if you need wayfinding. And it's the same thing with the fountain in Love Park. It's very, very tall because it creates this, it's this point of axis between the parkway and the city hall complex. Um, and, and, you know, then after that, that's what the artwork is, right?

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  Then you, then you get to fill the space in with artwork that then sustains itself, like the love sculpture, the clothespin. But my, my favorite, and it's one of my, like, most mourned pieces of Philadelphia public art. But this, this sculpture series called Your Move, all the game pieces. Oh, yeah, me too.

• 1:41:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  It was, so it is an intentional reference to this notion of Rayburn Plaza, that place with the bandstand on it, being a place of performance and play and entertainment. Like, it, it, those, the, the specific pieces they have, they have some checkerboards that are supposed to be bandstands. Um, and it's so much fun. You know, you have all these giant household trinkets lying around, and it's really beautiful artwork. And they're really beautiful public plazas that are simply not well-maintained as public spaces.

• 1:41:42Justin Roczniak?

  This is one of my favorites here was Dilworth Plaza. Big sunken plaza. You can see it fronts Municipal Services Building. There's a big waterfall here that drops down a story. You got some public art, all of these arcades here. These interface with the concourse, which was, you know, sort of a big underground series of pedestrian walkways. That linked basically every building, um, you know, in, in the, uh, you know, in the civic area, but also all the way down Market Street for quite a ways.

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  And it only, they only started to close it up during the saddest thing. You used to be able to just walk it.

• 1:42:21Justin Roczniak?

  And again, it's on alignment with Municipal Services Building. This is, uh, this is Bozar Architecture. It's just executed in concrete.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  Right. All, all of this stuff is about creating a grand axis and grand viewpoints and really highlighting and celebrating parts of your city. It, it, it, it, it sounds, it sounds kind of stupid and it sounds hokey because it's aspirational. But like, I don't know, maybe I just think it's neat, but I think this is like beautiful.

• 1:42:50November Kelly?

  It is. It's, and, and you know, the, the, the game sculptures are kind of whimsical, you know? And I, I appreciate some whimsy.

• 1:42:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Justin Roczniak?

  So, but at this time, all of this is, you know, theory, right? So we have to introduce our next character, Richardson Dilworth.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:43:07November Kelly?

  I beg your pardon. I'm sorry. Richardson Dilworth. Okay. Sure.

• 1:43:12Justin Roczniak?

  Richardson Dilworth.

• 1:43:14November Kelly?

  Which is a certified Richardson Dilworth moment.

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  The last WASP mayor of Philadelphia.

• 1:43:19Liam McAnderson?

  Certified Dilworth, banger, banger, banger.

• 1:43:23Speaker 03

  Certified Dilworth bangers were all over the place in the 1950s.

• 1:43:28Liam McAnderson?

  I don't like the sound of that.

• 1:43:29Speaker 03

  No, because, because you know, you have the, you have the, the vague two types of mayors in Philadelphia theory that I've been cooking on. Where you have the, you know, you have the autocrat, you know, the charismatic leader and cheerleader and guy who gets stuff done. And then you have, uh, basically like the, the, the fixer and the, you know, the, the technocrat, right? Somebody who's trying to figure out how to fix all these things and just keep things going. And then, you know, unfortunately like Jim Kenny, sometimes you just get burned out and never want to be mayor ever again.

• 1:44:02Justin Roczniak?

  So sad sometimes.

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  So sad sometimes. But yeah, so Dilworth really, so you know, Roz, you should talk about the city charter part, but Dilworth was always at the ribbon cutting. He was always making new big projects happen. And you know, all these, all these civic leaders in the 1950s were all, you know, full throated gung ho support of each other. So they weren't, they weren't like having these kind of intra group disputes. They were all on the same page and they all worked with each other to make these things.

• 1:44:34Justin Roczniak?

  It didn't hurt that there was a lot of money for these projects available.

• 1:44:37Speaker 03

  Oh, a ton of money. And the city can still borrow shit tons of money.

• 1:44:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. One of the things that helped that was something strange that happened in 1951, which was the Philadelphia Home Rule Charter, right? And this essentially changed- He finally got rid of the British yoke. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The British in this case lived, lived in Harrisburg. Brits out of Philadelphia. Yeah. This is, this essentially-

• 1:45:01Liam McAnderson?

  Ironically, yes.

• 1:45:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. From this, essentially what the Home Rule Charter does is it changes the legal status of the city, uh, city government from, you know, you can only do what the Commonwealth explicitly allows to the converse of that. You can do anything the Commonwealth doesn't explicitly disallow, right? So over time, this results in sort of this political situation where suddenly, you know, State Senator Jim Shitman from Arthasville Crawford County suddenly takes, you know, extreme interest in the local politics of Philadelphia, which is a city he hates, except that when it's, you know, politically convenient to

• 1:45:44Justin Roczniak?

  like defund orphanages or something in the name of working people or, you know, say that, I don't know, uh, bus drivers are essentially chauffeurs for wealthy Philadelphians, right? You know?

• 1:46:00Speaker 03

  We're coming here to do crime.

• 1:46:01Justin Roczniak?

  But that takes a while to happen. Um, for the moment when Dilworth takes charge, he's the second mayor under the Home Rule Charter, um, you know, and the Home Rule- Charter does something very funny and I don't understand why it happened. Um, which is the city had elected consistently Republican mayors and city councils. Right up until nineteen fifty one and the whole thing just flips instantly to the Democrats. Um, you know, and

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  It's because they got this done. They they got done something big and exciting and that that they were saying was gonna change people's lives.

• 1:46:38Justin Roczniak?

  And there'd been a lot of like, uh, focus on suburbanization at that point, you know, people were still leaving the city. They were going to Levy Town. They were going to the main line. They were going to, I don't know, like C Kane or somewhere, right? Um, you know, Dilworth's is like, you know, we're gonna build a new mayor's residence. I don't know if it was a mayor's residence or just his house.

• 1:47:00Speaker 03

  No, it's always, it's always a personal home. There is no Philadelphia mayor's residence. So so Dilworth. Moves into the section of the city that they're gonna redevelop next, which is now called Washington Square West.

• 1:47:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, he has very, very strong show, a strong show of confidence by building a brand new seventeen century house.

• 1:47:25Justin Roczniak?

  Or eighteenth century, excuse me. Um, right on Washington Square where they're about to do all this redevelopment and it's like, okay, you know. Listen, I'm gonna deal with all the construction noise as well. Um, but we're gonna do this, we're gonna do these fucking projects. This is going forward.

• 1:47:42Speaker 03

  Right. And so Jane Jacobs, who writes about the Philadelphia Public Squares in nineteen sixty one. Uh, refers to Washington Square specifically as a pervert park. And so that's, you know, after this house was built.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  So that that that bet took a little while to pay off.

• 1:48:01Justin Roczniak?

  Then also, uh, uh, shown here is one of the earliest parts of this, um, whole scheme to get completed. This is within the by, uh, confines of Love Park is the Welcome Center, which is this big UFO shaped thing.

• 1:48:13Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:14Justin Roczniak?

  Right. It's pretty cool. It's the only thing that's still there.

• 1:48:17November Kelly?

  Greetings, Earth from Philadelphia.

• 1:48:20November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was inspired by like those World's Fair buildings in the 1960s.

• 1:48:26November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 1:48:28Justin Roczniak?

  Dilworth is the guy who kicks this all off, but then we need the mechanic, James Tate.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. So James Tate is the other kind of Philadelphia mayor, the one that comes in and fixes everything. And we barely have any photographic evidence that he even existed because he was probably too busy just putting out fires every day.

• 1:48:47Speaker 03

  All the, all the, all the Home Rule Charter stuff, you know, that's like six years old now. It's just long enough to create some like serious structural problems with the, the, the stuff that he's got to fix. Um, but he's really good at what he does and he keeps carrying on the work. So a lot of the projects that get proposed under this, uh, first city, city plan that Ed Bacon puts together in the, in 1954, those actually start to get done now.

• 1:49:14Justin Roczniak?

  You can see like the sports complex starting and you can see the sports complex getting finished down here.

• 1:49:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:49:21Justin Roczniak?

  You can see the Broad Street line getting extended. You can see, you know, I think that happens a bit later or they don't lay the trackways for a long time. Um, you can see here's finally they're excavating Love Park so they can finish this design with, you know, five stories of parking underneath it, which is a good idea.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Justin Roczniak?

  And you can see municipal services under construction and nearing completion at this point. Um, I don't know much about James Tate at all, other than he was our first Catholic mayor in what had always been a very Catholic city.

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's hard to get information about this guy. He, I mean, he was, he was part of the same movement. So, you know, like, like many other municipalities, when, uh, Dilworth was mayor, Tate was the, uh, head of city council. They had the plan of succession and they're all working collaboratively together to make Philadelphia pretty goddamn cool.

• 1:50:17November Kelly?

  The, the, the Wasps did damn Nasha Memorial to him.

• 1:50:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, so Tate is, you know, he's out here, he's pulling the levers, he's, you know, twisting the dials, he's making sure this project is just gonna, it's gonna keep going forward through this whole time. But Tate is also like, you know, he has an appointed successor, um, you know, and no one could have stopped this from happening.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 1:50:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll tell this, I'll tell this story. So, um, so what happened, so what happens is, uh, James Tate actually ends up serving 10 years. You're, you're supposed to be term limited to two terms as a Philadelphia mayor.

• 1:50:57Justin Roczniak?

  It sounds like he was in prison.

• 1:50:58Speaker 03

  No. Let him out of being mayor only for good behavior. Back in, okay, so back in the, back in the-

• 1:51:04Justin Roczniak?

  You walk into City Hall with the sash and the first guy's like, what'd you get?

• 1:51:08Speaker 03

  Back in the 1700s, back in the 1700s, being mayor of Philadelphia was a punishment that your friends gave you because it was a, it was not a salaried position. You had to do it and not get paid for it. And so there were guys who were like, yeah, you know what? I'm just not gonna do it. I'm gonna pay the fine instead.

• 1:51:28Liam McAnderson?

  So the guy who didn't want to be pope.

• 1:51:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And no, and there's one guy, there's one guy who keeps getting re-elected over and over and over and over. So, yeah, anyway, when, when Tate is wrapping up his, uh, term, which included two extra years from, from Dilwar, he, he, about a month before, uh, the election is supposed to happen, uh, he, he talks about, no, wait, Roz, I'll, we should save this for later, right? Okay, no, we can do it now, or whatever. He's nothing. So, so what happens is there's a chief, there's a chief of police named Mayor Frank Rizzo, who will come into our story very soon. Future No Gods, No Mass episode, of course. And so, so James Tate-

• 1:52:11Justin Roczniak?

  And a chief of the fire department, who was his brother.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  So Tate hosts a press conference a month before he, the election happens and he goes, "Hey, yeah, so, um, I'm gonna retire and, uh, Frank Rizzo's in charge now, a month before the election happens." And so all the news reporters start asking all of the procedural parliamentarian questions like, "Wait a minute, sir, is that really how that works? That can't be what's happening." And he's like, "Haha, yeah. Well, anyways, I'm retiring now."

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  And so that's how he gets out of political office.

• 1:52:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, he's like, dang, give it to Frank. Yeah.

• 1:52:52November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:53Justin Roczniak?

  Which leads us to.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  The fool.

• 1:52:56Justin Roczniak?

  The fool, the king, the king slash fool.

• 1:52:59November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:53:00Justin Roczniak?

  Frank Rizzo.

• 1:53:01November Kelly?

  The man himself.

• 1:53:03Justin Roczniak?

  The world's widest man.

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:08November Kelly?

  The worst to ever do it.

• 1:53:10Speaker 03

  No, tr- truly.

• 1:53:11Liam McAnderson?

  I am going to say, do we want to continue? Uh, I may have to drop soon. Corinne's going to be home soon and I would like to hang out with my wife.

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  We can do that.

• 1:53:20Liam McAnderson?

  You want to keep going?

• 1:53:20Speaker 03

  The decline is gonna be pretty quick.

• 1:53:22Liam McAnderson?

  All right, let's just keep going.

• 1:53:23Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. Yeah, okay.

• 1:53:25Liam McAnderson?

  I'll drop if I have to.

• 1:53:26November Kelly?

  Just giving up on podcasting to hang out with your wife. I sacrificed so much wife time for this podcast.

• 1:53:33Liam McAnderson?

  That's true.

• 1:53:33November Kelly?

  And the reason why, the reason why is because this, uh, pays for me to get my wife nice things. Which is, which is a joy beyond imagining. So.

• 1:53:42Justin Roczniak?

  My, my hands look like this. Yeah. Hands look like this, so her is gonna, my hands look carp, just carpal tunnel.

• 1:53:50November Kelly?

  My hands look like completely normal, so that her hands could look like this. And it's just like festooned with rings.

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  Go fund my wife.

• 1:54:02November Kelly?

  Stop funding my wife, please.

• 1:54:04Speaker 03

  Funding my wife.

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  Right. So Rizzo's a terrifying and incredible figure in American politics.

• 1:54:12Justin Roczniak?

  Rizzo redefined, I think, what a mayor is.

• 1:54:17November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:54:17Justin Roczniak?

  Rizzo is, I mean, he is, I, in my mind, the epitome of a mayoral archetype, which is the strong man.

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:54:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:54:25Speaker 03

  Right. So he, he comes up through the police department. There's a really great documentary. Yeah, there's a really great documentary called Amateur Night at City Hall, The Frank Rizzo Story. I highly recommend.

• 1:54:37Justin Roczniak?

  It's so good.

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  It's so good. And, and so Rizzo's rise comes up from him being a strong man cop who knew how to get in front of the camera at all of the crime scenes. So in that lower left-hand image, that you, right in the, right in the crook of his tuxedo jacket, that's a nightstick. He left the social function to go see what the cops were doing when they, when the news cameras were. The one above that, he, he, he got to star on a copaganda TV show from the 1960s called Law Break. And he, he just knew how to play the, the news media. And, you know, it's almost one of those things where he's the blue, the blueprint for Donald

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  Trump, but he's also like, thank God Donald Trump didn't know about the Frank Rizzo blueprint.

• 1:55:26Justin Roczniak?

  You thank God he wasn't that good. Yeah. I mean, he, he was, he was incredible at like, just, you know, bullshitting in such a way that the media would listen to him.

• 1:55:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so he would, and he would say like, uh, crazy press quotes that, you know, activated all the people in South Philadelphia who were scared, uh, dealing with, dealing with all of the, you know, depopulation that happens because of white flight in the 1960s. Uh, you know, um,

• 1:55:53Justin Roczniak?

  And, uh, and, and also bizarre quotes like, I never saw my mother naked.

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  Right. And, and on his, on the, on the campaign, on the campaign trail, he says, you guys just wait and see, I'm gonna make a till of a hun look like a fat Like, just, just crazy shit.

• 1:56:10November Kelly?

  He can be saying that Frank Rizzo.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  Frank Rizzo, and see Nova, that's the thing. Frank Rizzo says whatever he wants. He speaks in the third person and Frank Rizzo loves it. And all the people who Frank Rizzo loves, love it too. Um, the, the funniest part about all this is, um, he, he does these crazy long news, uh, press conferences, you know, he'll, he'll just do these constantly and then the radios will just play him talking for three hours. And so during one of these press conferences, he makes like a, a, I forget what the lie is about, um,

• 1:56:45Speaker 03

  But he he pulls the old Donny Trump on, right? So he says like, you know, I'll go down justifying that to my grave. I would, I will always say that. I definitely, I definitely, you know, said that and I meant the truth by it. And, and if anybody wants to catch me on it, I'll take a lie detector test and it'll show that I wasn't, that I was telling the truth. And so they strap him to a lie detector test.

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  And he loses.

• 1:57:14Liam McAnderson?

  Frank Rizzo.

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  But this, but you know, all these scandals, even the, the, the, um, the group of, you know, uh, Democrat, you know, young student Democrats who are trying to get him, uh, recalled in the election. The, the only thing that actually makes him unpopular as a mayor and makes him, uh, you know, lose his mayor, mayorship, uh, is he switches parties, uh, to try to become a member of Richard Nixon's cabinet. And that's finally the thing.

• 1:57:45Justin Roczniak?

  He switches to becoming Republican. He supported, um, Nixon, even when he was a Democrat. He was pals with Nixon. One of the things that he gets done as a result is he manages to get the last of the funding out of the urban mass transit, uh, administration to, uh, get the center city commuter connection built. You can see, uh, the groundbreaking down here, which is the thing that unified all the, um, uh, the commuter railroads in Philadelphia into, uh, through running S-Bon type service. Also is this, what's his face?

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's Thatch.

• 1:58:20November Kelly?

  So, so, so, okay. So Frank Rizzo was the, the only rat to try and climb a border sinking ship.

• 1:58:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. And he, yeah, he, he did to some, but the ship still sank.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Justin Roczniak?

  But he, uh, he, I, I mean, the other thing, we had to talk about Rizzo, extremely racist, major police beat downs.

• 1:58:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:41Justin Roczniak?

  Everything. He's the mayor who shot up the move house and then had it demolished.

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  No, no, he's not.

• 1:58:47Justin Roczniak?

  First move house, not the second move.

• 1:58:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, right. Excuse me. Thank you.

• 1:58:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, my bad. Yeah.

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, he shoots.

• 1:58:54Liam McAnderson?

  Ready to go with that shit.

• 1:58:55Speaker 03

  He shoots up, he shoots up the Palatin Village move house.

• 1:58:59Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, yes. Thirty second and Spring Garden, right?

• 1:59:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it doesn't get better from there. And, and you know,

• 1:59:04Justin Roczniak?

  The police get very aggressive and violent during this era. Um, and the city is not better off for it. I mean, this is,

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy how it doesn't work.

• 1:59:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  So the police, you know, and it's, it's this cyclical thing, right? The police become violent. And then the, the, you know, and then the people who are reading the news or listening to these radio broadcasts think, holy shit. It's so scary out here because Frank Rizzo is telling me how terrified I should be. And so it, it, it, it pretty much rapidly accelerates what was a slow depopulation of Philadelphia. Um, which of course leads to lower tax revenues and lower abilities to take things. Um, oh, and then he hired like a shit ton of people just to have like random make work jobs. Like if anybody called him and was like, I knew you when I was, when you were a police officer, could I have a job, please? He'd be like, yeah, sure. Which again, I don't disagree with as a theory, but it completely bankrupted the city. Cause we

• 2:00:00Speaker 03

  I disagree with the asshole doing it, right? Yeah, exactly.

• 2:00:04Justin Roczniak?

  Um, yeah.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so he really, he really just, uh, creates this, this bad situation in the city where it's like every year is worse than the last year. Every year the city gets more dangerous. Every year the cops get more violent and unhinged. Um, and they're, and they're empowered too. And, you know, it doesn't lead to any better outcomes. But he also guts the Fairmount Park Commission, which is like the first in a long, long line of cuts. He slashes their budget by 50% because he didn't like that they had their own, uh, guard police force that was outside of his purview when he was, uh, police. And so this leads to a rapid decline in Philadelphia parks and public spaces.

• 2:00:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Inter-police conflicts, police on police violence.

• 2:00:51Speaker 03

  Well, and the Fairmount Park Guard weren't, they weren't gun carrying cops. So they were, they were nightstick cops. They, they were, they were park rangers, you know? Like they, they weren't really, they, they weren't really beat your ass cops like everybody else was in the city.

• 2:01:06Justin Roczniak?

  But, you know, Rizzo comes in and so much of this groundwork has been done. Uh, in order to build this great civic center and he gets to open it.

• 2:01:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:01:19Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and, and, and let's look at this. Um, we have our, you know, beautiful diagonal viewpoint straight through city hall, the fountain and the parkway. You know, we have our, our view shed through municipal services building and also the fountain.

• 2:01:36November Kelly?

  I just think this, this all could have been under the purview of a bunch of park rangers. You know what? Here's the thing, right? Moderate position. This is going to appeal to Democrats, right? Police abolition, you wind up, uh, like the Philly Police Department. And instead of that, instead of just having like nothing, you reinstitute the Fairmount Park Guards. And they just do everything. It's, it is now all park ranger territory.

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  They all get horses. It's great. Yeah.

• 2:02:03November Kelly?

  It's like due south. It's great. Like.

• 2:02:05Justin Roczniak?

  No National Park Service Guards though. Those guys are scary.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  No, those are different guys. No. And, and, and the sad thing now is like, you know, again, when you have people who are dedicated and committed to a specific public space, they really get to understand all of its ebbs and flows.

• 2:02:21Liam McAnderson?

  And dynamics. Yeah.

• 2:02:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, and like today, so like today in Philadelphia, the park ranger program are seasonal employees who are usually moved around from site to site. Just, just randomly ad hoc. Most places they really just open up the athletic court, athletic fields and then leave and then come back and close them back up. Because they're going to 30 or 40 different sites. They just get eyes on them. And public spaces need to have continuous maintenance and vigilance and eyes on the street in order to be successful. But I'm starting to get on my high horse here. We've got lots to cover.

• 2:02:55November Kelly?

  More park rangers.

• 2:02:57Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, and this overall, this is a fully realized project. This is, um, and I, I was lucky enough to have arrived here early enough to have seen it in its full majesty.

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, they did it. They did the entire thing.

• 2:03:12Justin Roczniak?

  They did the whole thing and it was really good.

• 2:03:14Speaker 03

  And you think about how critical this is. So this is transportation infrastructure, right? It's not just the parkway, but it's all of these transit connections that all meet in the heart of the city. And it's always, yeah, you've got these viewpoints.

• 2:03:28Justin Roczniak?

  You get the subway through here. You have the Broad Street line, which has to go around the tower because it was too heavy to tunnel under and goes there. And then you have the Center City commuter connection, which goes through here, I want to say.

• 2:03:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, I think it's pretty much straight down market.

• 2:03:50Justin Roczniak?

  And then you, no, it's not down market, it's down JFK. Yeah. And then you have the, the trolleys, which sort of go around here. And then there's a station here and then they make a curve. And then I'm pretty sure there's some kind of extra dimensional space. Somehow it winds up here because I've never successfully navigated to the station that's somewhere in this location.

• 2:04:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Right. So they brought this visual coherency above ground, below ground. It, it, it was actually a working shopping center for a while. It was like the Montreuil Underground City. But in the last couple of years, it's really declined.

• 2:04:30Justin Roczniak?

  There were three Dunkin' Donuts right over here. I used to take the L into 15th Street. And then I could walk directly underground. Well, I would, I would walk over to suburban and then just cross the street and get in. My building was 1515 Arch up here.

• 2:04:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:50Justin Roczniak?

  But I spent like on my commute from 40th Street, which is where I lived at the time. It was, you know, I spent all of like two and a half minutes above ground before I got to my office.

• 2:05:02Speaker 03

  No, and, and this is how, this is how Ed Bacon solves for the, the, the ill of cars in the city. Right? Because he doesn't really love them. He realizes that they're a necessary evil. And so he says, okay, how can we split up as much pedestrian activity from the vehicular activity as possible?

• 2:05:20Justin Roczniak?

  Again, there were so many Dunkin' Donuts down there. I don't know why, but it worked.

• 2:05:25Speaker 03

  It worked and it was beautiful and you could walk straight through it.

• 2:05:28November Kelly?

  And again, weeping, we don't know how to do this anymore.

• 2:05:30Speaker 03

  We don't know how to do this anymore.

• 2:05:32Justin Roczniak?

  We don't know how to do this anymore. And keep in mind over on, on the east side here, there was also the East Market development, you know, the, the concourse extended another mile that direction.

• 2:05:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. It was unreal.

• 2:05:47Justin Roczniak?

  I can't believe they, they did all of, all of it happened.

• 2:05:51Speaker 03

  All of it happened and was working until 2019 or 2020.

• 2:05:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:55Speaker 03

  That's the sad, that's the crazy part.

• 2:05:57Justin Roczniak?

  And it was a fantastic space. It was cool in the summer. There was so much, you know, because the basin does a lot to cool the air, as does the huge fountain.

• 2:06:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:08Justin Roczniak?

  The trees were big. It was, you know, there's lots of elevation changes. The materials were good. There were lots of places to sit. All of this was good. It was really good.

• 2:06:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's the thing where you have all these human, you know, human scaled spaces that, you know, that's not a sitting, that's not a sitting wall. That's not a laying wall. It's not a walking path. It's all of them at the same time, right? You have, yeah, yeah. You have these changes through space where you have steps that you have to walk through because that creates these processional movements. And the park was really have, like heavily utilized despite the fact that like it was very, very poorly maintained. You know, from an infrastructure standpoint, and then also just from a general ongoing upkeep of cleanliness and maintenance.

• 2:06:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you got lots of colors in the pavement.

• 2:07:02November Kelly?

  Oh, this is beautiful. It's, it's, it's hitting the like SimCity 3000 aesthetic, you know?

• 2:07:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:07:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:09November Kelly?

  I'm hearing the soundtrack in my head right now.

• 2:07:12Speaker 03

  And like, you know, a park like Love Park has to serve, it serves a generally limited use set, right? You don't have, in this time period, you don't have residences around. So it really becomes a park that doesn't have a destination of its own to it, other than as a place where office workers eat lunch and, you know, sometimes people hang out. And it starts to develop this reputation as, you know, kind of a scuzzy park.

• 2:07:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yeah. Fairly early on, it's like, yeah, this is also combined with, you know, municipal disinvestment, which is, you know, all over America at the time, like.

• 2:07:51November Kelly?

  Can you imagine?

• 2:07:52Justin Roczniak?

  I mean. To some extent, you can't like blame individual mayors or political decisions for what happened. There was just massive disinvestment in general and a general decline and, you know, it was just harder to live in cities. It was, you know, more people got poor and more people got homeless. You know, this is, you know, also a result of like eviscerating the welfare state. This is as a result of eviscerating public housing. You know, Love Park fairly early on became like, kinda, yeah, yeah, yeah, don't want to go there.

• 2:08:30Speaker 03

  Well, and the, and the thing is like despite that or in spite of that or because of that, you know, these places still draw tons of people. They're still beautiful spaces for many months out of the year.

• 2:08:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:08:42Speaker 03

  But the people who have to live around them constantly, uh, or the people have to work around them constantly. You know, these are municipal leaders and now they've got a big plaza that's architecturally cool. But if you can't maintain it or you don't pay to maintain it, it becomes an eyesore.

• 2:08:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So this is what this is opened in time for the bicentennial in 1976.

• 2:09:03Liam McAnderson?

  Will we embarrass ourselves?

• 2:09:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, Rizzo comes out to like, he says a bunch of racist things that introduces Frank Sinatra. Yeah.

• 2:09:13Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:14November Kelly?

  It's Italian American excellence.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and Rizzo, ahead of the bicentennial, asks, uh, to call in the National Guard to Philadelphia.

• 2:09:25November Kelly?

  Not for any particular reason, just for vibes.

• 2:09:27Speaker 03

  Literally, in case there might be riots, there might maybe be riots.

• 2:09:32November Kelly?

  I mean, at least in the, at least in the seventies, like the weather underground might like blow up a garbage can outside your work or whatever.

• 2:09:38Speaker 03

  Right. So.

• 2:09:39Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point, you know?

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  So because everybody sees, you know, because this gets picked up in all the newspapers all over the country, nobody comes to Philadelphia for the bicentennial.

• 2:09:49November Kelly?

  We're gonna have a firm hand with crime, right? Like, we're gonna advertise everywhere. If you come to Philadelphia for the bicentennial, we'll kill you.

• 2:09:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. Our cops or gangs will kill you. Cops and other gangs, etc.

• 2:10:06Justin Roczniak?

  That's also when the actual love statue by Robert Indiana is put in, right?

• 2:10:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Hi, Andy. Sorry about Andy. She's a very... No, I'm not upset. She's a very angry senior dachshund, and I'm sitting on my chair, which is far away from her couch.

• 2:10:22Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, so this is, you know, I'd overall, I think architecturally successful, that no, no maintenance for a long time, no like, you know, active disinvestment by the city, which brings us to the saviors, the punks.

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the punks... Oh, that's good.

• 2:10:44Speaker 03

  So the punks love to skate, and they also like to shake things up a bit.

• 2:10:48November Kelly?

  And they're not deterred by scuzziness. If anything, they're attracted by it.

• 2:10:51Justin Roczniak?

  They're attracted to it, yeah.

• 2:10:53Speaker 03

  Exactly, and you know, what ends up happening is kind of the worst possible problem for a municipal leader, but the best thing for literally everyone else. Love Park becomes a park that's a haven and an awesome place for skateboards.

• 2:11:10November Kelly?

  All of that concrete, all of those angles.

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  It's all granite, Nova. It's even better than concrete.

• 2:11:15November Kelly?

  Wow, yeah.

• 2:11:16Speaker 03

  And, and the thing that...

• 2:11:18Justin Roczniak?

  It holds up really well, the grinding, like, you could visibly see, you know, the gunk that came off the skateboards, because people, you know, were grinding so much on it.

• 2:11:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:28November Kelly?

  I'm not, I'm not thrilled about the idea of somebody in a t-shirt and baggy jeans sliding across a granite slab at speeds, like...

• 2:11:37Justin Roczniak?

  Now, you know, people did get injured every...

• 2:11:40November Kelly?

  Yeah, I bet.

• 2:11:41Justin Roczniak?

  More than once in a while. And it kind of comes with the, that comes with the sport.

• 2:11:48Speaker 03

  Right, and, and so Love Park finally gets a reason for people to go there and not just take a picture with the nice, pretty love statue, but actually spend time in it. But the people who figure that out are skateboarders, which in the 1990s and 2000s were the lowest scum of the municipal earth.

• 2:12:08November Kelly?

  Yeah, I, I, I don't personally remember this, but like I know from my study of history that before 9/11, these guys were public enemy number one. I mean, they were like-

• 2:12:19Justin Roczniak?

  Skateboarders, yeah.

• 2:12:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They, they, they were Osama bin Laden.

• 2:12:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:24November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 2:12:25Justin Roczniak?

  ISIS.

• 2:12:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, they were ISIS, yeah.

• 2:12:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, ISIS, right, of course.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  So because of this, Love Park becomes known as a skateboarding park, not just across the east coast, but nationally and internationally. Skateboarders hear about it, they watch videos of it. I, I, I read a lot with-

• 2:12:45Liam McAnderson?

  We hosted the X Games a lot as a kid, yeah, we talked, yeah.

• 2:12:47Speaker 03

  Two times. The X Games were hosted twice, and in between them, the city decides to ban skateboarding in Love Park. Fuck off!

• 2:12:57Justin Roczniak?

  I was, I, I watched a bunch of skateboarding videos just to find, you know, images of the park that were old, and I didn't realize all of the skateboarding culture, which was like, you know, at the time, it was like you go to the skate shop, and people would have VHS tapes of them doing sick tricks that they just sold to the skate shop that you could then buy.

• 2:13:20November Kelly?

  The human desire to show off a video of you doing some cool shit has been around for a long time.

• 2:13:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And I was like, oh, I understand the, the secret tapes from, uh, Tony Ochs Pro Skater 2 now.

• 2:13:35November Kelly?

  Yeah!

• 2:13:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the other, the other thing that I, I read about these skateboarding, or that I read about in the skateboarding videos is that because Love Park was a curved plaza, fisheye camera lenses looked really good in it. So that's what you see in that lower left-hand corner.

• 2:13:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, uh huh.

• 2:13:56Speaker 03

  It just it and and and with the statue right next to the big impressive jump that you would do. It was like the most cinematic spot in skateboarding history. And again, it was right in the heart of downtown. You got to see City Hall in the background.

• 2:14:10Justin Roczniak?

  Center city, don't say downtown.

• 2:14:12Speaker 03

  I can say downtown because I live in center city. Downtown. So over there is downtown. Downtown. You know this Roz, I'm allowed to say it.

• 2:14:22Justin Roczniak?

  I don't believe you.

• 2:14:24Speaker 03

  Oh god. Next slide, please. Yeah.

• 2:14:28Justin Roczniak?

  Sick.

• 2:14:28Speaker 03

  More pictures of skateboarding. The other really great thing that happens is because again, this plaza is not taken care of in any meaningful way. Skateboarders learn that you can use a thing to pick up the granite slabs that make up the pavement. And they stuff shit underneath it to make ramps.

• 2:14:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:47Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 2:14:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, every time I walked around this park, all those slabs were loose.

• 2:14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. You could, you could jump over the trash can, you could move the trash cans and jump over them.

• 2:14:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that was a big one, jumping over the trash can. Uh, the other big one is you had the fountain gap.

• 2:15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:05Justin Roczniak?

  Right, where, you know, the fountain was drained for the winter. So you jump off the highest stairs next to um, the love statue. And um, what happened in this case, this man appears to have made it. In most cases, you eat shit and bleed a lot.

• 2:15:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it was just so good.

• 2:15:27Justin Roczniak?

  That is really good. And then this was uh, cited, you know, cited as a contribution to making the, the, the whole area was safer because, you know, there's always people.

• 2:15:37Speaker 03

  There's a tradition of that all the time, right?

• 2:15:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  Right, like the skateboarders realized that they were in a municipal plaza that had office workers walking through it. They would respectfully wait while people pass. Like it was, it was like any other public space. You treat everybody. By March. If everybody's given an opportunity to respect everybody else, they'll usually take. And and and so despite all of this, the bad thing.

• 2:16:05Justin Roczniak?

  The bad thing happens. Yeah.

• 2:16:06Liam McAnderson?

  The bad thing happens.

• 2:16:08Justin Roczniak?

  They got the X Games twice, you know, they, they, they, um, you know, it brings in a huge amount of tourism money. They banned skateboarding and then, you know, they, they try and do a renovation to prevent it, which is where Ed Bacon comes back.

• 2:16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:25November Kelly?

  Accidental Renaissance art here.

• 2:16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Ed Bacon's like, what, 93, 94?

• 2:16:32Justin Roczniak?

  He's 93 years old.

• 2:16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:36November Kelly?

  He doesn't look a day over 85.

• 2:16:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. When they, when they finally banned skateboarding in Love Park. And you see here, the sign that says skateboarding prohibited at all times in JFK Plaza, which was its government.

• 2:16:49Liam McAnderson?

  Orbiture of fucking.

• 2:16:52November Kelly?

  I love that it has a government name.

• 2:16:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:16:54November Kelly?

  I, I also love that, um, like again, skateboarders, you, you, you may have been, uh, if you're kind of of the generation that I am, downstream of skateboarders believing themselves to be the most oppressed people in the world.

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:17:08November Kelly?

  That's because they were, they used to be.

• 2:17:12Speaker 03

  Right. So, so what, so what they do is instead of having uniformed cops standing next to the sign and yelling at people, they'll, they had undercover plainclothes cops just tackle you if you had a skateboard and were doing tricks.

• 2:17:28November Kelly?

  I'm the skateboarding surfer coat. Wearing, wearing a fucked up bucket hat and like tackling a kid.

• 2:17:37Liam McAnderson?

  Those revolver that old issues nerve bullets.

• 2:17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Vincent Kling, I think was also at the protest, but I couldn't find the video.

• 2:17:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This is like, uh, there were a few big protests. Um, you know, this, this one where there's video of this, Ed Bacon coming out and saying, I am going to skateboard my beloved Love Park. You know, in, in defiance of, you know, the city council that outlawed this. There's a few rallies where, um, of all people, uh, councilwoman Jenny Blackwell comes out to support the skateboarders who I mostly know.

• 2:18:14Liam McAnderson?

  The one, the one good thing she ever did.

• 2:18:17Justin Roczniak?

  Honestly, yeah. I mean, I mostly know her as like, oh yeah, we did this pilot bike lane. I think we should rip it out now. But, uh, no, she supports the skateboarders.

• 2:18:29Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Cause Jenny Blackwell knew how to party, man.

• 2:18:31Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point. Yeah. And they do some light renovations to the park, right? They add some benches and inconvenient locations for skating to make it harder to, you know, do like sick grinds and stuff like that. And this is taken poorly, also doesn't work very well. A lot of people, a lot of people are still skating and the park is also not being very well taken care of. And so, you know, this is a globally recognized, you know, skate skating area, right? It's not a skate park, but it's a plaza that's very easily skateable. And so, you know, skateboarding is getting big.

• 2:19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:17Justin Roczniak?

  As like an extreme sport at this point. So of course, DC Shoes comes in, is like, if you reopen this park to skateboarding, we will give you a million dollars.

• 2:19:31Liam McAnderson?

  Unless it doesn't take it because they're cowards.

• 2:19:34Justin Roczniak?

  And this, this here is.

• 2:19:36November Kelly?

  We will not negotiate with skateboarders.

• 2:19:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is CEO of DC Shoes here, Ken Block with a million dollar check. If you know Ken Block, he's the guy who drove the cars sideways on YouTube very fast.

• 2:19:51Speaker 03

  Oh shit, yeah.

• 2:19:52Liam McAnderson?

  He departed us unfortunately, but he was really fucking cool.

• 2:19:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, he was really good at driving a car sideways. Like the city passed up so much here for no reason other than they hated skateboards.

• 2:20:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like, I'm sure there's liability considerations here. I'm sure there's like other issues to be mindful of. But if your tourism is shifting towards younger people who have money to spend and you take away the cool thing in the middle of the city that they all love to see and do, you send a bad message.

• 2:20:28Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 2:20:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yep. So in the meantime, you remember there's a five story underground parking garage under this. I don't know if it's five stories, might be four. There's some amount of underground parking.

• 2:20:41Liam McAnderson?

  Who gives a shit? Yeah.

• 2:20:42Justin Roczniak?

  And the roof membrane goes kaput.

• 2:20:45November Kelly?

  Oh boy. Too, too many ollies landing on it.

• 2:20:48Justin Roczniak?

  Apparently, yeah.

• 2:20:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:20:51Liam McAnderson?

  Do a kickflip, you fucking pussy to just like Mayor Parker.

• 2:20:55November Kelly?

  You do the kickflip and eighty, uh, uh, like a ninety five year old man does a kickflip for the first time in his life, lands it perfectly, disappears down a massive basement.

• 2:21:05Justin Roczniak?

  Immediately turns to dust.

• 2:21:09Liam McAnderson?

  Seatbelt raiders.

• 2:21:10November Kelly?

  Four stories, straight down through.

• 2:21:15Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, he's, he ascends into heaven.

• 2:21:20Justin Roczniak?

  So the parking garage roof membrane goes kaput. The roof membrane is what is preventing the rest of the parking garage from, uh, water intrusion, which is a big problem in an underground parking garage. There's, uh, the problem with the roof membrane going kaput is there's only one way to access it, which is to dig up the entire park.

• 2:21:39Speaker 03

  Yep. So when, yeah, when this, when this is announced, I mean, and, and basically when they, when they announce this, the, the, the goal is made very clear that Love Park will not be going back. Uh, they will not have Love Park there and they're designing a new park that will solve the skateboarding problem once and for all.

• 2:22:01Justin Roczniak?

  We will never host the X Games again.

• 2:22:05Justin Roczniak?

  We will never be a globally recognized skateboarding park.

• 2:22:10Liam McAnderson?

  We could have been.

• 2:22:11Justin Roczniak?

  We, this is a problem which was literally worse than nine 11 and we will solve it.

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  And so what they, what they find, after a lot of back and forth, the only part and a lot of, you know, specific targeted activism towards saving this saucer. That is the only part of this plan of the original love park that ends up getting saved. Um, and it's kind of done begrudgingly, but that whole building, that whole building is eventually restored, is currently awaiting a future use, which I've heard is potentially, they might have somebody promising it's gonna go in there, which would be cool, but like all architectural projects that are announced, architectural projects start with the rent.

• 2:23:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This is also buoyed by the great success of demolishing Dilworth Plaza, the sunken plaza we saw before, in order to kick out Occupy Wall Street.

• 2:23:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:15Justin Roczniak?

  Which was also replaced by a very inferior space, I think.

• 2:23:20Speaker 03

  Right. So you get this notion, especially in like the capital planning part of the projects, that we're just, every time we redesign a space in Philadelphia, it's, it's gonna be this weird flat land thing.

• 2:23:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:23:33Speaker 03

  Because we simply do not have the money for maintenance, the way that these spaces really, really need them and deserve. So we're just gonna get rid of the parts of the park that make it hard to have it be anything other than.

• 2:23:47Justin Roczniak?

  Stone, no, no nice little stone walls, no elevation changes. It's gonna be a lawn.

• 2:23:53Liam McAnderson?

  Crap.

• 2:23:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It's gonna be a lawn. In these early renderings, you can see the fountain seemed to have a basin, you know.

• 2:24:00Liam McAnderson?

  It'd be so cool if it ended up looking like this. Oh, great.

• 2:24:04Speaker 03

  And, and there's so many people. They're all having a great time in the direct sunlight.

• 2:24:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you, you can do a lot of things with Entourage that real people don't do.

• 2:24:15Justin Roczniak?

  Entourage here being the happy cutout people you put into architectural renderings. I learned, I learned a ton.

• 2:24:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. I learned something to that.

• 2:24:24Speaker 03

  They're having a great time either standing or sitting in a bench in direct sunlight, or just standing around in the middle of the grass, as, as we do in parks.

• 2:24:35Liam McAnderson?

  Of course.

• 2:24:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:24:36Speaker 03

  And yeah.

• 2:24:37Justin Roczniak?

  Another, another part of the reason for, you know, going for a design like this is something that's very popular at the time, which is the P word.

• 2:24:46Liam McAnderson?

  Privatization?

• 2:24:47Justin Roczniak?

  Programming.

• 2:24:48Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, fuck off!

• 2:24:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, people love to have a space which is easy to program.

• 2:24:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:24:56Justin Roczniak?

  You can, you can have some kind of street market that happens once a weekend. You can have a farmer's market. You could have some kind of little cultural festival. You could have, I don't know, anything. You can program the space. Use the lawn to program the space.

• 2:25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then you never have to worry about skateboarders again.

• 2:25:17Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 2:25:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, what are they gonna do? Skateboard through the farmer's market?

• 2:25:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, they're gonna pull a Nicolas Cage jumping through, um, fucking, uh, what should we call it? Uh, Reading Terminal Market? No. But I, yeah. So, they're gonna solve this problem once and for all. Wednesday, February 10th, 2016, at 11 o'clock in the morning. Groundbreaking for the new love park occurs. They pull out a box full of dirt and the gold shovels.

• 2:25:49Liam McAnderson?

  Where do they keep these gold shovels, do you think? Just in like a closet somewhere?

• 2:25:53November Kelly?

  Broad Street Station next to the rifles.

• 2:25:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I have seen the gold shovel closet. It's at the Department of Public Property on the 11th floor of 1515 Arch. They're not really gold.

• 2:26:06November Kelly?

  The national treasure, I'm gonna steal the gold shovels.

• 2:26:14Justin Roczniak?

  If you steal the floor of 15, I know for a fact it's in 1515.

• 2:26:18Speaker 03

  If you steal the gold shovels, they'll never be able to do this again.

• 2:26:25November Kelly?

  Like, critical strategic infrastructure that you can, you can degrade, you know?

• 2:26:31Speaker 03

  The machine that removes a park's aesthetic features.

• 2:26:36Justin Roczniak?

  Now you see back here, wonderful, mature trees, you know? You can see, everything's in like basically fine condition, you know? To the point where they did have to haul in a box with dirt in it to do the groundbreaking.

• 2:26:49Speaker 03

  That's my favorite part.

• 2:26:51Liam McAnderson?

  So fucking stupid, man.

• 2:26:53Speaker 03

  Because-

• 2:26:54Justin Roczniak?

  Everybody digging this trough.

• 2:26:55Speaker 03

  I'll just say again, the, the current trash strike happening in Philadelphia, that box of dirt was-

• 2:27:01Liam McAnderson?

  It's stinky.

• 2:27:02Speaker 03

  Was handcrafted by members of District Council 33, who had to do that crap for this press conference.

• 2:27:11Justin Roczniak?

  You would see, of course, here, one of the, one of the most enthusiastic guys, Mayor, Mayor Jim Kenny. But for the rest of us, so sad sometimes.

• 2:27:21Speaker 03

  So sad sometimes.

• 2:27:23Liam McAnderson?

  Me too, Jim.

• 2:27:24Speaker 03

  This is, this is, this is Jim Kenny's greatest tweet ever. Unfortunately, he was banned from posting early on in his mayorship.

• 2:27:36November Kelly?

  Did he send too spicy a tweet? What the fuck?

• 2:27:38Speaker 03

  His, his, his comms team took away his phone after, after he would post too hard during Sixers games.

• 2:27:46November Kelly?

  So sad sometimes.

• 2:27:48Speaker 03

  This is real. And he was actually.

• 2:27:51Liam McAnderson?

  Sixers too, yeah.

• 2:27:53Speaker 03

  And he was a great poster. And then I, I sympathize very deeply with Jim Kenny as somebody who's just trying to do the right thing and gets overwhelmed when people get mad at you. And that's exactly what happened during pandemic.

• 2:28:08Liam McAnderson?

  He just did not want to be mayor anymore.

• 2:28:10Speaker 03

  No, why would you? After everybody hates you and all your political enemies think you're, you're, you're garbage. All your political friends too.

• 2:28:17Justin Roczniak?

  Well, then we got, I, I often think about the, the onion Bill de Blasio one. Well, well, well, that's not so easy to find a mayor who doesn't suck shit. But in terms of Jim Kenny.

• 2:28:30Liam McAnderson?

  My favorite bit about that is that Bill de Blasio, like, knows and references that.

• 2:28:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:37Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you guys have seen that, right? Like, I've read multiple interviews where he's like, yeah, I think that's funny and accurate.

• 2:28:45Justin Roczniak?

  So they take this whole park and they just demolish it. Throw it in the trash. They threw all of it in the trash. Well, he didn't quite throw all of it in the trash. We'll get to that. But they threw it in the trash.

• 2:28:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:56Justin Roczniak?

  And, um, these are some photos.

• 2:28:59November Kelly?

  Still do that.

• 2:28:59Justin Roczniak?

  These are some photos that June and I took a few days ago. This is when they are doing programming, of course.

• 2:29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:08Justin Roczniak?

  So there's stalls where people can sell their wares.

• 2:29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what I'll, what I'll say about this, right, we did, we, we did our site visit. If we're gonna get mad at something, we might as well look at it in person before

• 2:29:20November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:21Speaker 03

  cast final judgment. And, you know, back to, back to what I'm saying, right? The, the, they took the park out of this park and they put the programming as the major feature. And I think, I think they actually successfully achieved their goals. The park is actually pretty populate, populated. There's people hanging out there. That wasn't necessarily the case back with Old Love Park because it wasn't maintained at all.

• 2:29:48Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 2:29:48Speaker 03

  They, they've also removed all the features that make it difficult, like that make it a park in any real sense of the word, right?

• 2:29:55Liam McAnderson?

  Maybe for capacity, right?

• 2:29:56November Kelly?

  I would, yeah. I would call this a square, for instance, maybe.

• 2:30:00Liam McAnderson?

  Maybe a plaza of some kind.

• 2:30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:02Justin Roczniak?

  It is JFK. Well, they changed it to JFK Park instead of

• 2:30:05Liam McAnderson?

  I know they did.

• 2:30:06Justin Roczniak?

  Plaza.

• 2:30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:07Liam McAnderson?

  Which is a lie, a lie to the pit of hell, Roz.

• 2:30:11Speaker 03

  November, you are correct that this is listed on the city's, like, internal documents as a square slash plaza.

• 2:30:17November Kelly?

  They didn't want to get hooked up to the, the Frank Rezo lie detector by calling it a park.

• 2:30:21Speaker 03

  God, no.

• 2:30:22Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 2:30:22Speaker 03

  But, but any parts of it, but the parts of it that were so successful and strong were about that contrast between the park-like elements and the harder escape elements that were all, you know, the two flavors of monotone and Vincent Clings. This is just chaotic in a totally different way. And it's not because there's 10 by 10 tents up. Like, the, the, there's no rationality to the park's actual layout or its design. And then the areas, like, in the next slide, right? The areas that don't have the street market going on, like, that's a tent from the market right there.

• 2:30:55Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:56Speaker 03

  Nobody's hanging out.

• 2:30:57Liam McAnderson?

  This is just desolate, man.

• 2:30:59Speaker 03

  It's a huge swath of space, too.

• 2:31:02Liam McAnderson?

  In, in the middle of Center City, right? Sorry, downtown, so I'll just go fuck myself.

• 2:31:06Speaker 03

  No, oh, yeah, yeah. Congratulations.

• 2:31:09Justin Roczniak?

  Presumably gonna just barely be able to grow out by the next time they have to replace the

• 2:31:15Speaker 03

  Well, and so that, that is one of the big issues with these parking garage parks, right? You can never have tall trees there. Because the tall, because trees only get as big as their root structure and the root then there's not enough soil to actually have like a decent root structure in any of these parks. So, so people go to parks in Philadelphia to reconnect with that William Penn flavor of nature. That never will happen. Every 50 years, they're gonna have to tear up at least all of

• 2:31:45Justin Roczniak?

  And you have.

• 2:31:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but.

• 2:31:46Justin Roczniak?

  More, more programming.

• 2:31:48Speaker 03

  But, but again, the program, the programming stuff was really good. So they didn't just have a street festival going on. They had the big Lego blocks. They had ping pong set up. Th- this is the, this is the Parks and Recreation seasonal employees that staff the place, putting the blocks away at the end of the night. But that's the thing is that all these, th- this isn't a park. This is a bunch of Lego blocks. You gotta put them away afterwards. You can't just leave them out.

• 2:32:13Liam McAnderson?

  Right. And there's no, and there's like, you were talking about the, I forget the name of the, the piece, but, uh, the old like sorry pieces and chess pieces that used to be.

• 2:32:23Speaker 03

  Your move.

• 2:32:24Liam McAnderson?

  Your move. And like, that was hardscaping that could actually be used to play on and like, invited feelings of play and people actually playing on them. And I have this bullshit and these kids are getting paid, well, not getting paid at all because everyone's on strike, but.

• 2:32:36Speaker 03

  No, those are, no, they're not, they're not on strike because they're seasonal employees. They're not covered by the union. So they were there two days ago when I went back.

• 2:32:45Liam McAnderson?

  Dump your trash at Sherrell Parker's house.

• 2:32:48Justin Roczniak?

  The good news is they are also getting rid of your move. So.

• 2:32:53Speaker 03

  Oh, they already got rid of that.

• 2:32:55Justin Roczniak?

  They got rid of it.

• 2:32:56Speaker 03

  No, and that's the same thing. That was an iconic piece of artwork in the nineties and two thousands in Philadelphia. They let it, they let it go to waste.

• 2:33:06Liam McAnderson?

  They let it rot, yeah.

• 2:33:07Speaker 03

  They let it rot out and now it can't be rehabilitated. It has to be all remade if they want to remake.

• 2:33:13Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 2:33:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:16Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:16Justin Roczniak?

  And then we have to talk about the state of the fountain.

• 2:33:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. So spray grounds. So, so this, this is, the fountain is still in the same place, right? From a wayfinding Ed Bacon theoretical view, they threw him a bone, but they didn't build a fountain. And one of the reasons for that goes back to the way that these spaces interact with like ADA laws. Because a spray, because a spray ground is something you can allow children to play in, a fountain you cannot.

• 2:33:44November Kelly?

  That fucking sucks aesthetically, though. This is a puddle.

• 2:33:46Speaker 03

  Oh, it's so bad. No, no, this isn't a puddle.

• 2:33:50Justin Roczniak?

  The basin helps a lot with cooling down the area around, but also you got nasty, dirty water in there. It'll give you a disease. The thing is, this is a recirculating fountain. You know, as far as I know, where all this water goes and slides down the pavers into a drain. And then is recirculated from, I don't know if that's cleaner.

• 2:34:14Speaker 03

  I would, I would assume there's some better filtration in it, but it's an interesting question.

• 2:34:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:19Speaker 03

  I, I just know that this is, this is quote unquote healthier for whatever that's worth. And, and also like, again, something that you can legally make happen in the 20th century. But, but the problem with it, so you said this is the puddle?

• 2:34:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:33Speaker 03

  No, this isn't the puddle. This is the puddle. So.

• 2:34:37Liam McAnderson?

  That's not a knife. This is a knife.

• 2:34:39Speaker 03

  Right. So you have, you have this giant spray ground.

• 2:34:43Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 2:34:43Speaker 03

  And the way that they, the way that they graded and sloped the surface, which I'm sure you have to do all at once. It doesn't, you can't like refix it piecemeal. It creates this stream that goes to a section of, you know, the grass dirt zone.

• 2:34:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The, the cigarette swamp.

• 2:35:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:04Liam McAnderson?

  The great dismal swamp.

• 2:35:06Speaker 03

  Right. And then it's caught by a different, yeah, this is a grover park.

• 2:35:12Speaker 03

  Right. This is totally code compliant. It follows all of the rules and regulations. And you can build it yourself in a couple of weekends.

• 2:35:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:35:20Speaker 03

  Um, no. So then that water just creates this constant puddle on the ground and in the garden, which I'm sure is not great for the plants. Or you have to make, you have to figure out the planting program, right? The membrane that they're worried about.

• 2:35:35Justin Roczniak?

  The membrane is probably not doing good. Yeah. Um, that's probably very bad. Yeah.

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  Well, and then all these, all these public parks, right? They, they have to, because again, they're understaffed. They have to drive road salt trucks. You can't, it's not hand shoveling, like except in really rare circumstances. Almost, almost always it is just simply a giant truck drives around and dumps road salt everywhere. And then that goes somewhere.

• 2:36:00Justin Roczniak?

  Into, into the fountain, which is good for the kids.

• 2:36:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, for the children.

• 2:36:05Liam McAnderson?

  Let your kids lick it.

• 2:36:09Liam McAnderson?

  Hang on, I gotta shut my door because we're all shouting in the hallway.

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:36:13November Kelly?

  You have such an audio beset life, you know?

• 2:36:17Liam McAnderson?

  I do. I do, November. My life is so hard.

• 2:36:21Liam McAnderson?

  No one can hear that. There's isolating mics.

• 2:36:24Justin Roczniak?

  And then we, uh, we, we, we didn't talk too much about it, but, uh,

• 2:36:27Liam McAnderson?

  Flying saucer.

• 2:36:28Justin Roczniak?

  The saucer.

• 2:36:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:30Justin Roczniak?

  The welcome center. That was preserved.

• 2:36:32Liam McAnderson?

  That doesn't feel very welcoming. I'll tell you that shit right now. Well, it's just hard scaping around it with nothing nice to look at.

• 2:36:39Justin Roczniak?

  Also, the two big barriers in front of the entrance.

• 2:36:42Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. Also, you get nothing.

• 2:36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:44Liam McAnderson?

  Welcome to the hole of the world champion Philadelphia Eagles. Then just, just get your face slammed into a curb.

• 2:36:50Speaker 03

  Right. So.

• 2:36:51Liam McAnderson?

  By Cheryl Parker, who could suck shit.

• 2:36:53Speaker 03

  Yes. So despite this building being intended for a visitor's center, a couple of years back, they, they, they said to themselves, actually, a restaurant should.

• 2:37:03Liam McAnderson?

  No, you don't need, oh my God.

• 2:37:06November Kelly?

  And so. It looks kind of like the Pitts Gloria.

• 2:37:09Speaker 03

  Again, I've been, I've been told by reliable sources that a promising deal is in the works, but I don't understand how you put enough tables in here to make it revenue generating in a permanent way.

• 2:37:20Liam McAnderson?

  People. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:37:22Justin Roczniak?

  Where does the kitchen go?

• 2:37:23Liam McAnderson?

  In your butt, Roz. It goes in your butt.

• 2:37:25November Kelly?

  Underground in the enormous cavern.

• 2:37:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, in the car park. Yeah.

• 2:37:29Speaker 03

  Or maybe it's just a hot dog roll. You never know. But, but.

• 2:37:34November Kelly?

  Famous those extremely live electrified hot dog grills.

• 2:37:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:37:39Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37:40Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, shit, yeah.

• 2:37:41Speaker 03

  And, and so this building being disused is even more kind of sad and frustrating when you, you know, there was a hard fought preservation battle to redo it. That like the whole thing was gutted and all the glazing was taken off. The whole thing was put back together again. And they still can't find a tenant for this building that is supposed to be the welcome center for the entire Fairmount Park system, right? Which was at one point the largest municipal park system in the entire world. Um, then those definitions got all messed up. You know, the, the fact that it doesn't have a, a tenant in it is made even more infuriating by the buildings in the park that do have their own tenants.

• 2:38:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, like the visitor's center.

• 2:38:26Speaker 03

  Right. So they took the welcome center and they built something like directly next to it that sells, you know, stuff, toys and stuff like that. Um, a gift center for, for.

• 2:38:37Justin Roczniak?

  You know, uh, tourists.

• 2:38:39Liam McAnderson?

  Well, my fam ambassador adventure starts here and I signed the pledge to be a fam ambassador and I joined the PHAM. I guess that means I'm not allowed to throw bricks at Cowboys fans anymore because they would be more welcome.

• 2:38:50Justin Roczniak?

  No, and you're definitely not allowed to skate. AM.

• 2:38:53Liam McAnderson?

  They're the fam dude.

• 2:38:55Justin Roczniak?

  Fam?

• 2:38:56Liam McAnderson?

  The fam ambassador. It's, it's, it's to throw, represent Philly with pride, I guess.

• 2:39:01Justin Roczniak?

  It's like a Philadelphia version of flan? No, yeah.

• 2:39:05Liam McAnderson?

  I don't know. I.

• 2:39:06Justin Roczniak?

  It's a delicious dessert.

• 2:39:08Liam McAnderson?

  To harness civic pride and show the world how Philadelphia shines. Do we? We can't pick up our trash because Mayor Parker is a fucking moron.

• 2:39:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we should just throw batteries at Mayor Parker.

• 2:39:20Liam McAnderson?

  We should throw, we should throw a truck at her. A whole fucking garbage truck. Pick it up. We'll get like a hundred and thirty dudes. We'll like, we'll all lift it once. We'll do a clean and jerk and we'll just throw it on her fucking house, dude.

• 2:39:32Justin Roczniak?

  I, I don't know if that's an actionable threat or not. Um.

• 2:39:36Liam McAnderson?

  Pick up my trash.

• 2:39:40Liam McAnderson?

  Get your ass here, Sherrell. I got a lot of it.

• 2:39:42Justin Roczniak?

  No, we got the, the car park too. The car park, the biggest, I think this is a riff on the Robert Venturi plan for, uh, Love Park way back in the day. Which is the fart fountain would have been significantly weirder. And there'd be a structure around it in such a way that if you approached by car, it would say parking. But if you approached by foot, it would say park. Yeah. Um.

• 2:40:09Justin Roczniak?

  Very strange structure.

• 2:40:11Liam McAnderson?

  It used to be so much fun.

• 2:40:12Justin Roczniak?

  It was so much fun.

• 2:40:14Liam McAnderson?

  I, I could saw crazy. I could both, I, I could saw the ghost of crazy Uncle Louis Con.

• 2:40:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:22Liam McAnderson?

  But. Media, but only for Ghost of Crazy Uncle Louis Con.

• 2:40:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The biggest sign in the park used to be, uh, the love sign. Now it's the parking lot sign. Yeah. Um. Extremely cool. And you know, so far, I, I mean, again, when, uh, on days when this is not like a programmed space, you know, it's a little more vacant, especially on hot days. Yeah. Um, you know, I, the spray garden works, you know, it's not a total disaster show. I will say the one good thing that happened was the portal.

• 2:40:54Speaker 03

  Right, and this is the whole, this is the whole story of like, what happens when you aren't actively aggressively programming this park at every single hour of every single day. You, you give, you give Philadelphians an opportunity to engage with cities around the globe.

• 2:41:11Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, don't you let us do that.

• 2:41:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and only, OnlyFans models come from New York, the flash.

• 2:41:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:41:17Speaker 03

  Quite sad.

• 2:41:18Liam McAnderson?

  As you do.

• 2:41:19Speaker 03

  As you do.

• 2:41:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, she had very nice boobs.

• 2:41:22Speaker 03

  Oh, gorgeous, absolutely.

• 2:41:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:25Liam McAnderson?

  My dear, we are a family-friendly podcast.

• 2:41:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:29Justin Roczniak?

  You couldn't see them in the video. I mean, you could, you could see enough, you could see enough to imply the rest of it.

• 2:41:37Liam McAnderson?

  I, I take an approximation and I simply fill in the rest with my large language model, which I call my imagination.

• 2:41:46Speaker 03

  Do you have any idea how much brain power Roz needs to use to imagine a nice city?

• 2:41:53Liam McAnderson?

  It's like a crate too, Jesus Christ.

• 2:41:57Speaker 03

  It uses a lot of water. It uses a lot of energy.

• 2:42:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:00Liam McAnderson?

  We're boiling the oceans for Roz to imagine boobs.

• 2:42:06Liam McAnderson?

  Alright, my chair's getting uncomfortable, hurry this up.

• 2:42:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're almost.

• 2:42:10Liam McAnderson?

  I know.

• 2:42:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so this, this was also taken away from us for some reason.

• 2:42:14Speaker 03

  Well, it was moved, it was moved to the center of City Hall, which again, is legally distinct from Delaware.

• 2:42:21November Kelly?

  Harder to get your tits out in.

• 2:42:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:42:23Liam McAnderson?

  I think speak for yourself.

• 2:42:25Speaker 03

  Well, no, no, but the bigger thing is they lock it up at night now.

• 2:42:28Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:29November Kelly?

  In the closet next to all the golden shovels.

• 2:42:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:42:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:32Liam McAnderson?

  Can you imagine having to roll this fucking thing?

• 2:42:34Justin Roczniak?

  I've taken the stairs in 1515 Arch and I would not want to roll that thing up there.

• 2:42:40Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 2:42:40Justin Roczniak?

  They won't fit in the elevators. Those elevators are bad. They would trap people like once a week.

• 2:42:47Liam McAnderson?

  Like that you and I have just have horror stories and sitting together. One time I was eating my lunch, I just saw a big ass mouse run across our desk and I was like, okay. That's my coworker, Brandon.

• 2:42:57Justin Roczniak?

  The three fundamental buildings, city hall, municipal services and 1515 arch.

• 2:43:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:06Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 2:43:07Justin Roczniak?

  And then, uh, what happens to Love Park? Well,

• 2:43:10Liam McAnderson?

  Sucks.

• 2:43:11Justin Roczniak?

  They saved some of the granite and it's re-erected as a skate park in the city of Malmö, Sweden.

• 2:43:20Liam McAnderson?

  Wow, that's cool that they get to have that. We don't.

• 2:43:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you can see there's even a propped up piece of granite here and an original trash can. So you can do sick tricks over it.

• 2:43:32November Kelly?

  Sweden's the only one still preserving American values.

• 2:43:36Justin Roczniak?

  These are the, the, this is, this is what's left and it's designed specifically as a skate park for skateboarders. We also did a skate park. It's called, I think Payne Park.

• 2:43:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:47Justin Roczniak?

  Up by the art museum, um, which

• 2:43:51Speaker 03

  That was the compromise.

• 2:43:52Justin Roczniak?

  I don't skateboard. I, I don't, it's probably fine. Um, you know, but it's not this, uh, you know, and, you know, you can see that, well, obviously this thing went over the ocean and with proper maintenance, it still works. Granted, this is just on the side of a sidewalk in Malmö, but, uh, someone appreciated it. It wasn't us.

• 2:44:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it, it lives on and people cared about it enough to get it over there. I mean, that's, that's, that's an insane amount of weight.

• 2:44:25Speaker 03

  Transporting granite across the globe two or three times.

• 2:44:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:29Speaker 03

  Those, uh, those trash cans, by the way, that those things are indestructible, but they're $6,000 a piece.

• 2:44:35Liam McAnderson?

  I was gonna say 900, 900 pounds a second. Yeah.

• 2:44:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And, uh, you know, this feels like, you know, uh, a, a warning story. I, I, I remember when this was happening. I remember having discussions on the The urban P H L Facebook.

• 2:44:53Liam McAnderson?

  Don't say its name. Don't say its name.

• 2:44:57Liam McAnderson?

  John Gieding will pop up from behind you with a knife, ready to go.

• 2:45:01Speaker 03

  Only if you do it three times.

• 2:45:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:03Justin Roczniak?

  There's, I can say there's nothing wrong with John Gieding, but I would prefer to have friend relate- relations with him.

• 2:45:11Liam McAnderson?

  I didn't take a moral stance on John Gieding. I just, I just said his name. I just, much like November, I couldn't.

• 2:45:16Justin Roczniak?

  Don't say his name. Don't say his name three times into a C M X two and a half parcel.

• 2:45:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:45:26Speaker 03

  No, but it's.

• 2:45:27Liam McAnderson?

  I like that eventually, every episode of Well, Those are Probably End with Local Beef.

• 2:45:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:45:35Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:35Justin Roczniak?

  You kind of look at this, there was not sufficient outrage to prevent this from happening.

• 2:45:40Liam McAnderson?

  No, you're right.

• 2:45:42Justin Roczniak?

  Um, cause it, it, it looked like, like a lot of things, we were walking like zombie-like into a much worse situation. I mean, after seeing Dilworth Plaza go, you know, it should have been obvious that yeah, this is going to also be fucked up. And it's currently happening with Thomas Paine Plaza. They're gonna fuck that one up.

• 2:46:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:46:05Justin Roczniak?

  If I had a guess, you know, if this is going to happen again to like Washington, or excuse me, Franklin Square or something.

• 2:46:14Speaker 03

  Well, Franklin Square, you know, the, all the public squares still have their own special flair, right? But, but Franklin Square is already heavily programmed and so, and for some of the year, pretty heavily privatized.

• 2:46:28Justin Roczniak?

  That's true. They, yeah, this is another, another way to go is.

• 2:46:31Speaker 03

  They have to operate as a tourist destination for people from New Jersey, which is real. Uh, they've got, you know, a carousel there. They've got mini golf. It's, it's actually pretty great. And it's, it's ran by the same people as the Betsy Ross House.

• 2:46:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it fucks.

• 2:46:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do. They do a good job of it, but I got, you know, from my perspective on patty corner from this one. Uh, you know, these public spaces were granted by William Penn to be publicly open and publicly available and publicly accessible.

• 2:47:02Speaker 03

  As places of respite and refuge, not of programming and party. That's him, that, that, that, that's something you can do sometimes, but once you rely on it, it.

• 2:47:11Liam McAnderson?

  I'll buy that and put up barriers so people can't see into the Chinese Lantern Festival.

• 2:47:15Speaker 03

  The barriers, you know, you, you, and, but the thing is like, it creates this opportunity for, okay, let's just, let's just think in a, in a theoretical future, Franklin Square grows through redesign. Are they going to prioritize the revenue generating capabilities of that Lantern Festival? When they redesign this park to make it much more of a flat land than it already even is? You know, those are the kinds of things that we have to worry about. Public spaces and the programming challenges. And some, and some public spaces need them, need, need programming 24/7. But, you know, you have to balance that with all these other community needs and considerations, like, like Franklin Square is right next to a huge Asian American, like low income Asian American.

• 2:48:00Speaker 03

  It needs a public park.

• 2:48:01Justin Roczniak?

  They don't have a lot of parks up there.

• 2:48:03Speaker 03

  Totally bereft of green space. The only other one near Chinatown is on top of an active I.

• 2:48:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And then, you know, yeah, just in terms of like contemporaneous spaces, uh, we just trashed another one.

• 2:48:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:48:17Justin Roczniak?

  Um, which was, uh, Penn's Landing, which I always thought was a very exceptional, um, sort of post-modern space. You know, fantastic, you know, uh, fantastic brickwork, you know, all this stuff. I mean, admittedly it's great that they're, um, covering up the freeway. Now, what you will also see here is that they are planting a load of trees in an elevated space, which is, you know, yeah, in 30 years, they're going to have to rip all those out so they can redo the membrane. You know, right before they're about to provide proper shade.

• 2:48:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And those trees, those, again, those trees will never get taller than the 10 or 15 feet of topsoil they already have. So you're just setting yourself up for failure. I mean, that part really doesn't make any sense.

• 2:49:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So.

• 2:49:05Liam McAnderson?

  And it also scaled up way the hell back. So it's just like a block and a half now. Oh, I was just like, do, do it with your chest, man.

• 2:49:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is, we've learned nothing. Nothing's been learned. We're going to keep doing it.

• 2:49:19November Kelly?

  Nothing new under the sun.

• 2:49:20Justin Roczniak?

  Um, yeah.

• 2:49:21November Kelly?

  You, you, you build the park on a membrane, the park collapses through the membrane.

• 2:49:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was hoping to land on a positive note, but. Well, that's this show.

• 2:49:32November Kelly?

  You, you, you must, you must fight. You must fight for your right to park.

• 2:49:38Justin Roczniak?

  You must fight for your right to park.

• 2:49:40Speaker 03

  Should I do my commercial here? That's a positive note.

• 2:49:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you should do your commercial for the greatest park in Philadelphia.

• 2:49:46Speaker 03

  Right. So unlike most of Philadelphia's public spaces, Rittenhouse Square in the southwest quadrant of Center City has continuously served the public since its creation by William Penn in 1682. It was never a public gallows. It was never a public burial site. It was never leased off for any private interests and it hopefully never will be. I think the difference between these public spaces and what we have in Rittenhouse Square, which has been for many, many decades now widely regarded as one of the most beautiful and wonderful public spaces in Philadelphia, is that the community has always provided for it for the benefit of everybody in the city.

• 2:50:29Speaker 03

  When the redesign of Rittenhouse Square happens in 1913, the neighbors come together to create a formal garden that will bring the most joy to the most people. And then later in the 1950s, when this parking garage nonsense is proposed for Rittenhouse Square, it's an idea so powerful that it creates a NIMBY movement in Philadelphia. Now, that has largely changed in, in my neighborhood. Um, and Rittenhouse Square remains as vibrant a public space as it ever has. Um, I am very proud to help run the nonprofit called Friends of Rittenhouse Square that has made many tremendous changes over the last few years. Um, we take care of all of the square's needs from landscaping and beautification

• 2:51:14Speaker 03

  to, you know, replacing the benches and calling in problems that, uh, that arise every single day of every single year. I just found out that a light was broken right before I came. And it really is my pleasure to do it and it's the pleasure of my team because beautiful, dynamic, vibrant, public spaces create so much joy and bring so many wonderful people to the spaces that they have. And if you care for them, if you make sure that they have dedicated people who are in there every single day watching the place, making sure that it's taken care of, it works out right. So if you ever like Rittenhouse Square or ever want to, if nothing else,

• 2:51:55Speaker 03

  please stop by. If you could leave a Google review, that's always nice. And then, you know, everything in that park is donor-supported. The city has never fully or carefully or well-funded Rittenhouse Square. So the nonprofit that I work for is Friends of Rittenhouse Square, and we run all of Rittenhouse Square through member donations, all the parks operations, all the landscaping, all the ongoing, in close partnership with Philadelphia Parks and Recreation and the fine people at D C.

• 2:52:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:52:28Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you, Mayor Parker. Join the union, go on strike, burn trail, Parker's house. That's my ad. That's probably an actionable threat. My fault.

• 2:52:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I do a recurring donation to Friends of Rittenhouse Square because I support patrician interests. You know, yeah, no, if I do it, so can you. You know, to prevent it from, I don't know, in 20 years, they turn it into sort of a, I don't know, a lawn with some swooshes on it, you know?

• 2:53:00Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, it'll just be Nike swooshes. We gotta be really careful.

• 2:53:04Justin Roczniak?

  I fucking hate like the like swoosh.

• 2:53:07Speaker 03

  It's so bad.

• 2:53:08Justin Roczniak?

  Like, yeah, the pathway thing. Yeah, that's so popular right now. Yeah, so, yeah,

• 2:53:16Justin Roczniak?

  parks are good. We should make them better.

• 2:53:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:53:20Justin Roczniak?

  And not worse, which seems to be the trend right now.

• 2:53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they can be spaces of great architecture that impact millions and millions.

• 2:53:27November Kelly?

  What did we learn? That we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. This is true.

• 2:53:32Liam McAnderson?

  No, we have to play the music.

• 2:53:33November Kelly?

  No, I was setting you. Okay, fine, whatever.

• 2:53:39Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Jesus. Oh, the delirium has set in.

• 2:53:42Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, well, we're, we're, we're using an older one, which didn't quite make the cut earlier, even though it's very good.

• 2:53:50Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, we got it in five minutes.

• 2:53:51November Kelly?

  By the way, send these into [email protected]. Uh, danger that happened to you at work. Keep them light.

• 2:53:59Justin Roczniak?

  Keep them light, you know, keep them about a page worth, worth of text. Um, but this is ideal, dangerous stuff that happened to you at work, ideally stuff that was not your fault.

• 2:54:09November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 2:54:10Justin Roczniak?

  But was your boss's fault.

• 2:54:11November Kelly?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 2:54:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:15Justin Roczniak?

  Hello, Liam, Justin, November, Garrett, and other qualified,

• 2:54:20Justin Roczniak?

  other qualified individuals on the podcast.

• 2:54:22Liam McAnderson?

  I got to go first this time, though.

• 2:54:25Justin Roczniak?

  Been listening since the beginning, but it's my first time submitting, first time, long time. Today I would like to tell you the story of how I witnessed a near catastrophic event caused by insensitivity to foreign languages, improper safety barriers.

• 2:54:39November Kelly?

  Better still.

• 2:54:40Justin Roczniak?

  And the enigmatic temperament of sheep.

• 2:54:43November Kelly?

  Ideal. This is the register you should be hitting.

• 2:54:48Justin Roczniak?

  At the age of 16, I was a part-time historical interpreter at a historic farm in New York State. Think of it as a less fun version of Colonial Williamsburg.

• 2:55:00Liam McAnderson?

  I love Colonial Williamsburg.

• 2:55:01Justin Roczniak?

  Which actually talked about slavery.

• 2:55:04November Kelly?

  Cancelled.

• 2:55:05Justin Roczniak?

  Doesn't Colonial Williamsburg talk about slavery now?

• 2:55:08Liam McAnderson?

  Now they do, yeah.

• 2:55:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:55:10November Kelly?

  I mean, by, by now, they might not have, due to the total defeat of woke on all fronts by chat.

• 2:55:15Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point. It's a good point. Um, I don't know. We gotta, we gotta take Colonial Williamsburg to task.

• 2:55:25Justin Roczniak?

  This property would recreate the experience of Dutch colonial farmers in the 18th century, complete with wool costumes and wooden soled shoes.

• 2:55:35November Kelly?

  Oh, cursed, miserable.

• 2:55:37Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy. Okay.

• 2:55:38November Kelly?

  Hanging around in my clogs in a, in a New York summer.

• 2:55:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:42Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you, Derek, and a 98 degree heat. Yeah.

• 2:55:47Justin Roczniak?

  To add to the authenticity.

• 2:55:49Liam McAnderson?

  Trying to do it all in blackface too.

• 2:55:52Justin Roczniak?

  Jesus. Oh, God. Cause it's a Dutch.

• 2:55:56Liam McAnderson?

  The Dutch.

• 2:55:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, to add to the, oh, no, I'm not gonna make that joke. To add to the authenticity, there was a functioning farm on the property, which included a small flock of about thirty heritage breed sheep. The patriarch of this flock of sheep was an eight-year-old ram named Wilbur, who's the main character of our story.

• 2:56:20Speaker 03

  Oh, only one, only one main character, not six. Okay.

• 2:56:25Justin Roczniak?

  Before I go any further, I want to quickly remind the audience of three facts about sheep. Number one, sheep are much stronger than you think they are. I can hear Devon chiming in with the like, personal experience of rams. Yes. Number two, sheep are much faster than you think they are.

• 2:56:49Justin Roczniak?

  Number three, sheep are much dumber than you think they are. True of all animals, I think. Yeah. Wilbur was exemplary of these three qualities. A three hundred and twenty pound behemoth with horns the size of your head and testicles the size of grapefruit.

• 2:57:09Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:57:12Justin Roczniak?

  Like most sheep, he would get extremely aggressive during the spring. And when I say aggressive, think bull levels of aggressive. He would charge anyone, me, my boss, children, chickens, even his own lambs.

• 2:57:28Liam McAnderson?

  What a douchebag.

• 2:57:31Justin Roczniak?

  I have seen him charge his own shadow on no less than ten occasions. As such, during the spring, we usually kept him penned up during open hours so he would not murder guests. We kept them in our old wooden barn behind a waist-high wooden barrier with the laminated sign in English explaining why Wilbur was in the pen and not enjoying the sunshine with his lambs and his eight wives.

• 2:58:00November Kelly?

  Laminated sign that says, "This ram is a piece of shit."

• 2:58:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:58:05November Kelly?

  The real asshole.

• 2:58:07Justin Roczniak?

  One fine Saturday, I was instead tending to a flock of children near the old barn, teaching them how children in the 1700s filled their free time, which in fact was stick and hoop.

• 2:58:21November Kelly?

  Although they're Dutch children, so it's like steek and hoopin'.

• 2:58:23Justin Roczniak?

  Steek and hoopin', steek and hoopin'. The weird thing is, the stick is made of metal, but the hoop is made of wood.

• 2:58:33Justin Roczniak?

  All of a sudden, I hear a frantic voice on my walkie-talkie yelling for all available employees to immediately report to the barn.

• 2:58:42November Kelly?

  Uh, we have a code, Wilbur.

• 2:58:46November Kelly?

  Code dub.

• 2:58:49Justin Roczniak?

  Code wool.

• 2:58:53Justin Roczniak?

  I abandoned my post and ran. When I reached the barn's open doors, I stood stunned with two of my coworkers. We saw a young mother with a camera taking photos of her toddler. Her toddler was at that very moment in Wilbur's pen. And had just pet Wilbur on the nose when I arrived.

• 2:59:14November Kelly?

  Oh, buddy, god. That must have been such an unfamiliar sensation to him that he was just too angry to do anything for a minute. Remy, get your gun.

• 2:59:27Justin Roczniak?

  As I stood frozen, contemplating how I would explain this to the police or medical examiners, presumably the coroner, I was quickly nudged into action by my more experienced colleagues. Wilbur was staying completely still, eyes locked on this child.

• 2:59:48November Kelly?

  It's sort of like going into prison on your first day and finding the biggest, meanest dude there and giving him a really nice hug.

• 2:59:57November Kelly?

  Like, he's gonna kill you, but he's, like, stunned for a second.

• 3:00:03Justin Roczniak?

  The mother stopped taking pictures and was instead staring blankly at my boss as he tried to explain the peril her child was in. It didn't occur to us until later that, of course, she did not speak a word of English. Oh, boy. Okay. This was even more complicated by the fact that we could not make loud noises or sudden movements, so as to not spook Wilbur. This is a woolly bum. You have to go in with the bomb suit.

• 3:00:44Liam McAnderson?

  The little robot claws. Nice, nice shoot.

• 3:00:51Justin Roczniak?

  The thing is, if I do my job wrong, I don't have to worry about it anymore. Instead, me and my two colleagues, excuse me, my two colleagues and I quietly entered into the empty pen. They probably weren't thinking about, um, order when they were, you know, in this situation. Entered into the empty pen next to Wilbur's.

• 3:01:16Liam McAnderson?

  You tell them, Ross.

• 3:01:17Justin Roczniak?

  All at once, we hopped in, hopped the barrier into Wilbur's pen, just as it began to get agitated.

• 3:01:25Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, fuck, okay.

• 3:01:27Justin Roczniak?

  We tackled the beast while my boss jumped into the pen and grabbed the toddler, thankfully saving him from any harm. Those of us who tackled Wilbur were not as lucky, each of us receiving multiple nasty bruises from the flailing animal.

• 3:01:46November Kelly?

  Wilbur, the angriest he has ever been in his life, trying to kill everything around him.

• 3:01:52Liam McAnderson?

  Except maybe this toddler.

• 3:01:55Speaker 03

  Finally, surrounded by things to kill.

• 3:01:59November Kelly?

  This is Wilbur in the target-rich environment.

• 3:02:06Justin Roczniak?

  And and and Wilbur wept for there was nothing left to kill.

• 3:02:14Justin Roczniak?

  The child and the mother both left the property unharmed with the mother claiming via translator that she thought that because it was so easy to put her toddler in the pen with the ram that she was allowed to do so.

• 3:02:28Speaker 03

  Harambe defense.

• 3:02:32November Kelly?

  You said that so authoritatively that that was like a known thing like a Nuremberg defense. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, you claim the Harambe defense, of course.

• 3:02:41Speaker 03

  It's not the Harambe defense, but it should be.

• 3:02:45Liam McAnderson?

  They should have shot that kid.

• 3:02:49Justin Roczniak?

  For the duration of my time on the farm after this, Wilbur was kept in a less publicly accessible area during open hours.

• 3:02:57November Kelly?

  Metal free prison that they kept Magneto in.

• 3:03:04Justin Roczniak?

  But Wilbur did still attack people whenever possible.

• 3:03:10November Kelly?

  Just a being of pure untrammelled malice. That incredible work.

• 3:03:15Justin Roczniak?

  While I would love to paint myself and my coworkers as the heroes of the story, it has never escaped me that if Wilbur had wanted to, he could have killed this child in seconds. He didn't, and in fact, did not behave aggressively at all that day until three people tackled him.

• 3:03:33Liam McAnderson?

  Fair enough, right?

• 3:03:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I'm still not sure why Wilbur showed restraint that spring day. Like I said, he did not have a soft spot for children.

• 3:03:43November Kelly?

  Define providence. I don't know. Audacity.

• 3:03:49Justin Roczniak?

  It'll remain a mystery. I like to believe he spent the rest of his life doing what he loved, eating corn, attacking inanimate objects, and shitting in front of passersby.

• 3:04:05November Kelly?

  Heroic.

• 3:04:06Speaker 03

  It's what we all want.

• 3:04:07Justin Roczniak?

  Beautiful. Thanks for putting on a good show. Hope that not too many people died in whatever disaster you talked about.

• 3:04:14November Kelly?

  Technically none, unless you count, uh, Kling going through the floor of the park and dying in the basement.

• 3:04:21Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, Ed Bacon died and so did Ken Block.

• 3:04:24November Kelly?

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:04:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:26Speaker 03

  Vincent Kling too.

• 3:04:27Justin Roczniak?

  That's two. But that was not related to the disaster.

• 3:04:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And Vincent Kling's dead now, but that's a whole nother.

• 3:04:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, Vincent Kling is dead now too. Yeah, that's true. So is Rizzo.

• 3:04:36Speaker 03

  Thank God.

• 3:04:36Justin Roczniak?

  So is Stillworth.

• 3:04:37November Kelly?

  All, all this will pass away, you know, where are the snows of yesteryear? Where are the, where are the parks of yesteryear?

• 3:04:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Uh, they're, they're concrete now.

• 3:04:46Speaker 03

  They're in, they're in Rittenhouse Square. We have a park at home.

• 3:04:49Justin Roczniak?

  Bunch of, bunch of, bunch of, bunch of new gray pavers, bunch of gray pavers everywhere.

• 3:04:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:04:54Justin Roczniak?

  It's gonna be gray pavers.

• 3:04:55Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, God.

• 3:04:57Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was Safety Third.

• 3:05:01Justin Roczniak?

  Shake hands with danger. Our next episode will be about Chernobyl. Does anyone have any, uh, commercials before we go?

• 3:05:09November Kelly?

  Thank you for listening to this for three hours and 19 minutes.

• 3:05:12Liam McAnderson?

  Three hours, 20, baby. We hit it. We hit 320.

• 3:05:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I am not sorry. And given the opportunity, I would do it again.

• 3:05:20Liam McAnderson?

  No, I am unapologetic. You deserve to suffer. Thank you for the money. Yes.

• 3:05:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, come on. Every, every six months I get to harass you with, uh, three hours of architecture information.

• 3:05:31Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, it's the best day of my life, June. I don't give a shit. I, I could listen to Ross talk about, Ross and you talk about anything for any amount of time.

• 3:05:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 3:05:38Liam McAnderson?

  That said, I would like to go get drunk. So can we wrap this up?

• 3:05:41Justin Roczniak?

  No, we're gonna do another three hours about Logan Circle now.

• 3:05:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:05:45November Kelly?

  It's a quarter to three in the morning. I'm good to go. I'm good to go for another one. Let's go.

• 3:05:51Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Thanks, folks. Bye.

• 3:05:53Speaker 03

  Thanks, everybody.

• 3:05:54Justin Roczniak?

  Good night, everyone.

• 3:05:55Speaker 03

  Good night.