With a huge brushstroke, work begins on Lenfest Plaza at Broad and Cherry

Marguerite Lenfest wielded her six-foot paintbrush with authority Wednesday, sloshing a squiggly sweep of yellow across a broad canvas laid out on the floor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

"We have a big project," said David R. Brigham, academy president and chief executive. "We need big brushes."

So began the academy's indoor take on the traditional groundbreaking ceremony - a paint-in marking the start of construction of the $7.5 million Lenfest Plaza, a revisioning of the portion of Cherry Street that runs from Broad Street west to 15th Street.

No silver shovels and hard hats on this wet morning; it was paint all the way.

The plaza's presence on Broad Street, directly across from the new entrance of the expanded Convention Center, will be visually announced by a site-specific Claes Oldenburg sculpture, a 53-foot-high paintbrush, and an accompanying six-foot blob of dripped "paint" at street level.

Brush bristles and paint blob will be illuminated.

A restaurant will go into the academy's Hamilton Building, on the north side of Cherry Street; a space for changing exhibitions of work by academy students, teachers, and alumni will grace the west end of the plaza at 15th; and a series of curvy benches will run along the plaza's south side.

H.F. "Gerry" and Marguerite Lenfest are the major donors to the project, along with the city. Philadelphia's Olin landscape architecture firm created the design.

The Lenfests donated $2 million to the fully funded plaza project. An additional $1 million came from the city. Funding for the Oldenburg sculpture came from the academy's acquisitions fund and private donations; its cost was not disclosed.

The academy first came up with the idea for a plaza about a decade ago, believing it would unite the institution's two buildings - the Hamilton Building on the north side of Cherry Street and the historic Frank Furness-designed building on the south side.

Now it is also seen as a kind of "gateway" that will draw convention-goers across Broad Street and propel them westward, to explore the array of museums along the Parkway.

"For those who come to the Convention Center and who aren't from Philadelphia, it's a portal," Gerry Lenfest said.

For Marguerite Lenfest, an academy board member, the project has personal significance. Her grandfather James R. Fisher attended the academy in the late 1880s, until health issues led him to withdraw from artistic studies. And a great-great-grandfather, the painter Moses Wight, known for his portraits, exhibited at the academy.

After wielding her groundbreaking paintbrush, she lauded the academy's past as a bastion of American art, but emphasized that the work done there now was "training the future."

Brigham said the project would probably be complete in the fall. The Oldenburg sculpture is being fabricated in San Francisco and street work will commence immediately.

Brigham agreed that the completion of the plaza will enable the academy to attract convention-goers and, theoretically anyway, direct them west to the new Barnes Foundation and on to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other cultural venues.

Whether that will work is difficult to say, particularly because a new Family Court building has been approved that will back onto Cherry Street between 15th and 16th Streets.

Family Court loading docks aside, Mayor Nutter, who made an appearance at the groundbreaking ceremony, certainly believes the plaza is a worthy addition to the streetscape.

He hailed the Oldenburg paintbrush, which will stand only a few blocks from the artist's iconic Clothespin at 15th and Market Streets, as an instant landmark, a sign that the city's own canvas is far from complete.

"We have seen some tough times," Nutter said. "We are on our way back."