Where Philadelphia's Other Future Is Being Written: The Northeast

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by Clark Park

Having been born in Queens (Flushing, to be exact ... remember The Nanny?) myself, I must agree that many parts of the Great Northeast does indeed remind me of Queens. Especially those tidy and kept up residential neighborhoods of post-war middle class townhouses ("twins") built mostly in the '50's and '60's.

However, Queens does have some upscale affluent neighborhoods such as Jamaica Estates, Hollis Hills, and even Garden Hills; upper-middle neighborhoods like Fresh Meadows and Douglaston, too. I do not think there is any thing comparable in the Great Northeast.

The closest Northeast analogues are in its northwest corner, in particular Pine Valley and Morrell Park.

The latter, by the way, was supposed to be a walkable community with shops at its center under a plan put forth by Edmund Bacon. When the bulldozers started, however, the plan got trashed.

[MarketStEl]

FamousBlueRaincoat stumbles across the reason why the new city zoning code includes a new commercial mixed-use district, CMX-2.5:

Originally Posted by FamousBlueRaincoat

Many census tracts hugging Frankford Avenue and the Boulevard are 25-30k - although a few are closer to 15k. The Castor Avenue corridor reaches as high as 36k per square mile - like I said, not drastically different than much of South Philadelphia. Many of the shortcomings of the NE (i.e, "suburban" or not walkable) are based on perception perhaps more than reality - and in the cases they are based on reality, they could be fixed relatively simply (building commercial storefronts to the sidewalk - really simple solution that could be very gradually solved over a generation).

One reason I developed an interest in the Northeast was the 18 months I spent living just off Oxford Circle, one street west of Castor Avenue.

But I'd been coming up to that stretch of Castor well before I moved there, mainly because of the really good Brazilian churrascuria at 6501 Castor (corner Hellerman; the place was a diner before the Brazilians moved in), so I had an inkling already.

Anyway, when the City Planning Commission posted on its blog an explanation of what the CMX-2.5 zoning district was created to do, the illustration that accompanied it was one of an imagined future Castor Avenue, lined with office/retail buildings of about four stories in height.

And thank you for demonstrating with figures how analogies are inexact at best.

One big difference between Philadelphia and New York is that New York built most of the subways that made it on to planning maps. The Second Avenue line is the exception. In Philadelphia, the opposite happened; the Boulevard subway is the rule.

[freddok]

Update on my situation. There was a bump or two with our financing that caused some delays, but we are finally "clear to close" on our mortgage for our new home in Wissinoming/Tacony and we will be going to settlement tomorrow afternoon and moving in over the weekend.

Looking forward to occupying our new home! My wife and I are first-time buyers and we're excited.