Healthy urban neighborhoods need vibrant commercial districts with employment opportunities, convenience shopping, and restaurants and shops that bring people into the community. In 2004, the Community Design Collaborative awarded five grants to community development corporations (CDC's) participating in the Philadelphia Commercial Corridor Redevelopment Initiative, a program of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation.
The Design Collaborative's design assistance ranged from individual design consultations with merchants to "big picture" concepts for establishing neighborhood identity. Here's a sampling of last year's commercial corridor projects:
Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corporation: Facade Improvements
Design Collaborative volunteers consulted directly with the owners of a hair salon, laundry, drycleaners, and funeral home along Ogontz Avenue in West Oak Lane. With a fresh eye and design expertise, the volunteers were able to recommend simple measures for improving commercial visibility while respecting the basic integrity of storefronts dating from the 1920's.
Roxborough Development Corporation: Conceptual Landscape Design
Our team of volunteers dealt with a common condition along Ridge Avenue, parking lots that run up to the sidewalk. The volunteers developed a design approach and palette of materials for the streetscape adjacent to the Roxborough Memorial Hospital parking lot that can be applied at other places along "The Ridge". This demonstration project will incorporate granite cobbles and wrought iron fencing, two elements drawn from the architectural details found along Ridge Avenue.
Fairmount CDC: Neighborhood Identity Strategy
A neighborhood gateway project evolved into Discover Fairmount, a system of markers celebrating the heritage and connections shared between Fairmount, Spring Garden, Francisville, and Brewerytown. Each marker would consist of a mounted bracket with a strong graphic element based on the neighborhood name and a hanging element fabricated from fiberglass or aluminum to mark a unique neighborhood place. In one of the witty examples developed by the design team, a running pig marks a street in Fairmount that was once called Pig's Alley.
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