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ONCE THE BLACK BOTTOM BY JOHN L. PUCKETT
To understand fully the glittering West Philadelphia panorama of today, it is necessary to explore its complicated backstory, which includes the destruction of a viable African American neighborhood as well as the creation of the University City Science Center (UCSC), the nation’s first and largest urban research park. Beginning with its incorporation in 1963, the Science Center was part of the larger history of postwar urban renewal. It was the centerpiece of “Unit 3,” an urban renewal zone established by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (RDA) that extended south from Lancaster and Powelton Avenues to Chestnut Street and from 34th to 40th streets. In creating Unit 3, the RDA acted in the interests of the School District of Philadelphia and the West Philadelphia Corporation (WPC). The latter was a non-profit consortium of higher education and medical institutions in which the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) was the dominant partner/majority shareholder and whose junior partners were the Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University), the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science (now the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia), Presbyterian Hospital
PHOTO: QUATREFOIL CONSULTING
24 SPRING 2022 | context | AIA Philadelphia
THE UNIVERSITY CITY SCIENCE CENTER
ADAPTED BY J.M. DUFFIN, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ARCHIVES.
Philadelphia is now re-centering itself to the west. Building on Penn’s and Drexel’s spectacular turn-of-the-Millennium commercial developments along Walnut and Chestnut streets, the Market Street corridor between 34th and 38th streets is filling with the University City Science Center’s new, eye-catching buildings. Here are incubated small business startups in life sciences, clean technologies, IT, bioinformatics, nanotechnology, and diagnostics and devices. Also under development is uCity Square (ZGF Architects), a megaproject undertaken by the Science Center and Wexford Science and Technology, which is constructing an enclave of postmodernist buildings that co-locate working, living, shopping, recreation, and fitness on a single site — all designed for young, workaholic high-tech entrepreneurs. On the north side of this site, the Drexel-Wexford Partnership has constructed a two-story, 87,000-squarefoot building for the Samuel Powel Elementary School and the Science Leadership Academy Middle School (Rogers Partners), and on the south side they are now building the fourteen-story Drexel College of Nursing and Health Professions (Ballinger).
