During the day, the 1500 block of Sansom looks like an outdoor festival frozen midway through setup — popup tents and police-style barricades are mixed in with wooden sheds custom built for outdoor dining.
By night, it’s one of Philadelphia’s biggest successes in an experiment with converting conventional city blocks into “streeteries,” or outdoor dining areas burnished by the closure of parking or traffic lanes. The experiment has attracted throngs of diners and bargoers and sustained restaurants and bars hit by the pandemic.
But now, as the city’s street closure pilot turns one year old, even some advocates for pedestrianizing more of the city say a lack of leadership or planning has turned areas like the Sansom Street block into a cluttered mess.
“What they’ve done by shutting down the whole street is really made it inaccessible,” Dena Driscoll, a member of the urbanist PAC 5th Square, said. “I would love to see the street shut down to cars all the time. But we don’t just want to swap out private cars for private business.”
The issues were cast in starker relief last week. Several businesses on Sansom recently sought and received a permit from the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections to pack even more table space into the narrow street by constructing larger and more permanent sheds that span the entirety of the roadway. But that permit conflicted with another issued by the city’s Streets Department that shut the street to traffic in the first place — under the condition that at least 10 feet of contiguous space be left clear for emergency vehicles.
Read the full article on Whyy
Author: Ryan Briggs
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