Inquirer Editorial: New pier leads to future

The planned ribbon-cutting Thursday for a whimsical finger-pier park at the foot of Race Street represents a triumph for the city's vision of a thriving, pedestrian-friendly Delaware River waterfront.

The Race Street Pier - designed by its landscape architects with all the flair they used to create New York City's High Line Park along a defunct railroad viaduct - promises to be as great a draw as Penn's Landing, if not greater.

It will offer a boardwalk, benches, a small performance space, a meandering line of trees, and a generous slice of lawn nestled against the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

In contrast to Penn's Landing, the pier developed by the city's new waterfront agency, the Delaware River Waterfront Corp., will be a more quiet refuge than the festival pier.

In the same way that an interim trail along the central Delaware has brought casual visitors back to the river, the pier will be a departure point for a new way of experiencing the waterfront.

That's all part of Philadelphia's focus on linking the city with the river once again - a concept to be fleshed out in greater detail in June with the release of a new master plan for the seven-mile stretch of waterfront. The hope is that the plan embraces proposals to create as many as 10 parks along the river.

With I-95 remaining in place as a hideous gash on the landscape that separates the city from the river, it's no small challenge to breathe life into this area on a human scale.

In fact, it's a challenge that has resisted such attempts for decades, as missteps by officials hatched one grand development scheme after another.

The strategy has to be to create inviting spaces - like the Race Street Pier - and also to make it easier for people to access them.

Toward that end, planners need to extend the city street grid to the river as much as possible and enhance what's there already, as with the plan to paint and relight the Race Street/I-95 underpass.

Yet unknown is whether the city's developers will go along with the new vision for the waterfront, adding their own creative ideas rather than offering more big-box projects that have no business being there.

Along a waterfront long-marred by industrial decay, the Race Street Pier appears for now to be a stunning debut in a game-changing effort to reconnect the city to the Delaware.