A new landscaped median under construction for months in front of the Kimmel Center has reached completion — the down payment on a promised major redo of the Avenue of the Arts streetscape.
The leafy ribbon down the middle of Broad Street from Spruce to Pine Streets was officially unveiled Wednesday morning with speeches and a ceremonial sprinkling from blue watering cans onto the new plantings.
“We aimed high and we met our lofty expectations, and we’re off and running,” said Carl Dranoff, chair of Avenue of the Arts, Inc., which is spearheading the project.
There’s a practical, traffic-calming intention behind the raised median: it leaves less space for drivers to make U-turns on the block occupied by the arts center and residences, and creates a barrier to thwart pedestrians jaywalking across Broad Street.
But the slender, shapely strip of trees, shrubs, and ground cover atop a granite base with metal skirt signals a larger transformation to come.
In spring of 2027, work is expected to begin on an ambitious beautification of the heavily trafficked block. Sidewalks will be landscaped, sculptures installed, and pop-up performance space carved out; creating what planners say will be a markedly different vibe.
That will give the project’s leaders something tangible to point to when raising money for the entire streetscape project, which is envisioned as eventually stretching from City Hall south to Washington Avenue.
“The idea of a beta block was to get everybody on board and excited about what can be accomplished — the doability and to create buzz,” said Dranoff, who said the median was the first step in turning South Broad Street into “one of the great streets of the world.”
That larger, 10-block effort is expected to cost about $150 million and take years to design and complete, with funds anticipated from both government sources and philanthropy.
The design of each segment will vary, said Oliver Schaper, an urban designer for the project with the New York office of architecture/design firm Gensler.
“The requirements of adjacent buildings are different on every block, the left turn lanes are different, even the length of the median is different from block to block,” Schaper said. “We wanted to make sure that all the design elements can act as a kit of parts and adjust, so each design of a block will be an application of that kit of parts so they feel like cousins, but specific.”
Some design professionals have criticized the median as intrusive to sightlines, but the design and landscaping was chosen to preserve sightlines, Dranoff said.
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“All of the trees were specifically selected to have long trunks and very narrow canopies, all the vegetation.” The designs adhere to standards for safety, he said, “so we are very confident that we will not block views.”
The flora — about three dozen kinds of native and adaptive plants — were chosen by OJB Landscape Architecture to withstand “the abuse that they will be subject to in terms of the winters and the salt and all that,” said Schaper.
Looking ahead, the blocks farther north from Spruce Street are anticipated as having fewer trees, to preserve the view of City Hall.
“We even designed, as you get closer to City Hall, standing areas for brides and photo opps, so that we’re not taking anything away from people,” said Dranoff. “We have parade areas so that Mummers and other parades have performance areas between the medians.”
But more immediate is the work from Pine to Spruce, where Dranoff’s 47-story Arthaus residential condo tower sits. The $5 million needed to pay for the median and work on the infrastructure beneath the street “is accounted for and that was utilized,” said Dranoff, “and of the $10 million for the sidewalks, we have several million lined up and more to go, and we’ll have it all by the end of the year.”
Construction on the sidewalk portions is expected to begin in 2027 and be completed by the end of the year “or thereabouts,” he said.
Schaper said part of the goal is to rebalance the dynamic between pedestrians and other factors.
“I think as designers at some point we take a position, and our position was, ‘let’s design for pedestrians.’ There are of course very specific requirements that we need to adhere to — for example, it’s reflected in conversations that we had with the Kimmel Center about their bus queuing, and we made adjustments to continue to allow that to happen.”
But, he said, the plan sets out to be “an advocate of the pedestrian experience, and not think that private car access is the model of the future for cities.”
Dranoff said construction of this first median phase, that runs much of the block from Spruce to Pine, was delayed by the unusually harsh conditions of this past winter, but workers made up for lost time.
“Philadelphia’s going to be a hotbed this summer, and the whole point of this was to show what we can do and be more beautiful and more attractive and more compelling to Philadelphians and to suburbanites and to the world.”
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