After 50 years of talking about it, will Philadelphia finally connect their now-revitalized riverfront Navy Yard to their subway system?
Today, traffic during the morning and evening rush hour is a mere annoyance for the 11,500 workers at the yard, but it will grow to an insufferable pain if the number of jobs down there increases to the 30,000 anticipated by the Navy Yard’s master plan. “You need to have a facility like a subway to address that kind of a need,” says William Agate, PIDC’s Senior Vice President of Navy Yard Management and Development.
That’s why the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, which has overseen the Navy Yard’s redevelopment from shuttered military base to corporate office park, wants to extend SEPTA’s Broad Street Line.
Note from Storm: Reconnecting assets and places is one of the surest and most cost-effective paths to revitalization. Often, two distressed places (whether neighborhoods or ecosystems) can be brought back to life without actually changing them: simply by (re)connecting them.