Coming to the Commons
Growing Community Connections at Philadelphia’s Bartram’s Garden
Now that 2018 is in full swing, we’re taking a peek at each of the five Reimagining the Civic Common’s demonstration cities to highlight one thing to keep your eye on in the year ahead. We’ve already made stops in Akron, Memphis, Detroit and Chicago. Today we pay a visit to Philadelphia.
Bartram’s Garden and Bartram’s Mile: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Bartram’s Garden, the oldest surviving botanic garden in North America, stretches across a 46-acre patch of land that hugs the banks of the Schuylkill River in southwest Philadelphia. Renowned for its collection of native and exotic plant life — as well as a community farm, an orchard, an arboretum, a boathouse and plenty more — the garden is a city treasure. But to the community closest to it — Bartram Village, a public housing complex that’s home to many lower-income residents — the garden grounds have often seemed off limits and out of reach.
This is something Maitreyi Roy, the Garden’s executive director, knows well.
Roy recalls a neighborhood meeting she held soon after joining Bartram’s Garden five years ago. Thirty or 40 residents from the surrounding community showed up. Roy and her staff couldn’t wait to hear about their favorite ways to get involved in the Garden and their ideas on how to improve the space. What she found instead was that only a few of them had ever been to Bartram’s Garden. “They said it was a private space for people who loved plants — not for us,” she recalls. “This was a real wake-up call.”
Since that meeting, there’s been a significant shift, thanks in large part to a concerted effort to involve the community in defining what Bartram’s Garden is and what it should become.
One of the most apparent manifestations of this dialogue is Bartram’s Mile, a 1.1-mile greenway that opened along the banks of the Schuylkill River in 2017. The Mile, which was first conceived as part of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation initiative in 2010, has been designed to renew the sense of access and ownership that neighbors feel toward Bartram’s Garden, as well as increasing their connection to the river and other city neighborhoods.
“It’s really a dynamic change for this community,” says Roy.
Dynamic, yes. But easy? Not by any means.
“It’s been a long road for [the residents of] Southwest Philly,” says Patrick Morgan, a Knight Foundation program director who’s been involved with Philadelphia’s Bartram’s Mile project since its nascent stages. “They are the ones who have been historically cut off from the only green space in their neighborhood — and the river — by railroad tracks, a mix of industries, and a feeling that neither the Garden nor river was really for them.”
That’s why the opening of Bartram’s Mile, which was christened on a wet April day in 2017, was such a momentous occasion. Not only did the community celebrate a new (and impressive) patch of recreational space, but they turned the page to a new era of partnership between southwest Philadelphia’s residents and the civic assets that surround them.
Roy says that 2018 is going to be a great year for people who visit Bartram’s Garden and Bartram’s Mile. A vast collection of partners — from citywide organizations like the Schuylkill River Development Corporation and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation to hyperlocal and specialty groups like John Bartram High School, Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, Mural Arts Philadelphia and many more — is coming together to ramp up the activities and engagement. And a forthcoming “leadership circle” composed largely or neighborhood residents, leaders and organizations, will contribute to near- and long-term decision making.
Over the next year, visitors should keep an eye out for a new (and free) bike rental service, expanded boating opportunities and a wider variety of community programming. And they should walk to the northern end of the Mile, where the greenway comes to an abrupt end at the Schuylkill Crossing swing bridge — this is where the next phase of construction picks up, as an abandoned steel structure that once carried trains across the river will be refurbished and repurposed as a pedestrian bridge. This means that residents in Bartram Village, who’ve long been hemmed into their community by swaths of industrial refuse, fencing and unkempt urban wilderness, will suddenly have easy access to the east bank community of Grays Ferry — and beyond.
Most important, though, Bartram’s Garden will forge a deeper sense of trust with its surrounding neighbors by “planning with, not for,” as Roy puts it. And as this engagement increases, Bartram’s Garden will continue “morphing from being a historical site to a classroom and a living room for the southwest community.”
Michael DiBerardinis, City of Philadelphia’s managing director, captured the significance of this evolution well when he spoke at Bartram’s Mile’s opening ceremony: “This is a living symbol of the promise of American cities,” he told the crowd. “This is more than a trail and its physicality and its design elements; it welcomes every Philadelphia citizen to this place.”
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and local partners.
