Last Chance Landscape
The Schuylkill Marshes: A Natural Urban Gateway,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
New billboard construction threatens a natural visual gateway to
Philadelphia.
The Landscape: The Schuylkill Marshes, in the southwestern
corner of Philadelphia, provide a surprising visual welcome to users of
the Philadelphia International Airport and to people traveling on
Interstate 95. Despite previous compromises and incursions, the marshes
remain an oasis of natural beauty surrounded by wide expanses of hard-edged development. Among the diverse wildlife are ducks, swans, turtles,
ospreys, and red foxes. Two facilities of the municipal water department
located on the site represent an extraordinary effort to maintain a
symbiotic relationship between an indigenous ecosystem and water-treatment
uses. Against a backdrop of the downtown skyline, this natural landscape
offers significant educational, recreational, and economic opportunities,
if executed with sensitivity to the existing habitat.
The Threat: The foremost threat is a perception of this site as
a wasteland, because of its
co-existing municipal-sanitation use. The
direct consequence is an unprecedented proposal to lease public land for
placement of eight new double-sided, 70-foot-high billboard structures
along Interstate 95. The zoning board, which frequently fails to enforce
the City's 1991 billboard-control ordinance, has granted a variance for
signs in the Schuylkill Marshes. This outdoor advertising would mar a
scenic gateway to Philadelphia and create a dangerous precedent for other
entryways to the city. In addition, construction of an access road for
building and maintaining the billboards would substantially disturb the
marshes' vegetation and wildlife.
