Inquirer Editorial: More park, less lot in Parkway's Eakins Oval

Hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians and visitors filled the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and its environs during Independence Day celebrations earlier this month. But while the boulevard between City Hall and the Art Museum has hosted that and other major festivities, its hair-raising, multilane traffic discourages recreation at other times.

So it's a welcome development that starting this week, for the first time in decades, the parking lot within Eakins Oval, the eight-acre common at the foot of the museum, has been transformed into a "Park on the Parkway." For the next month, it will host live music, movies, yoga, art, sandboxes, and food trucks. The hope is that more of the 70,000 Philadelphians living within a 10-minute walk of the parkway will find rest and entertainment there.

The pop-up park is part of "More Park, Less Way," a plan by PennPraxis and the city Parks and Recreation Department to revitalize the Parkway at the center of the city's cultural district. In addition to the needed steps toward ending the oval's service as a parking lot, the plan entails further traffic-calming features, crosswalks, and three more parks along the boulevard. Given that 10,000 daily visitors to the Parkway's eight civic institutions have to contend with 30,000 cars that zoom along the roadway each day, these measures should increase the accessibility and popularity of the city's cultural gems and help to expand its recreational space.

At the other end of the Parkway, City Hall's Dilworth Plaza is getting a more lasting makeover, to feature a large lawn, groves of trees, a new fountain, and space for 400 benches and chairs. With that project and the revamping of the Art Museum's end of the boulevard, Philadelphia's homage to Paris' Champs-Élysées stands to gain more of the latter's charm.

The summertime greening of Eakins Oval follows the recent advent of other parks and recreational spaces, such as the Porch at 30th Street Station, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's pop-up beer garden on South Broad Street, and the Parkway's own Sister Cities Café and Visitor Center. Emerging from the era when cars were kings, Philadelphia is finding more room for its residents and visitors to walk and bike. With plans to add another 500 acres of green space by 2015, the Nutter administration is taking action to accelerate this beneficial trend.