Barrier. Obstacle. Divider.

Nobody at last week’s Every Place Counts meeting had anything nice to say about the Vine Street Expressway when asked for one-word descriptions of the submerged highway.

But everyone in attendance, from Mayor Jim Kenney and his staff, to representatives from Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation (PCDC) and community activists, to PennDOT and U.S. DOT staff signaled optimism that the Expressway’s worst impacts on the neighborhood could be mitigated through interventions of varying intensities and price-tags.

As PlanPhilly reported a few weeks ago, four cities were selected through U.S. DOT’s recent Every Place Counts competition to host an intensive two-day workshop focused on areas severely impacted by federal highway infrastructure, attended by local, state, and federal decision-makers and technical experts. (Notably, the Congress for the New Urbanism, which has long advocated for highway teardowns, is consulting on this initiative providing technical expertise.)

And so it was that local officials spent all day last Thursday trudging along an unshaded Vine Street in the sweltering July heat, taking in the landscape at its most brutal. The first part of the day was limited to decision makers and experts, and there was a meeting in the evening for community members to offer their feedback, followed by another public meeting on Friday afternoon where some initial design concepts were presented.

In his remarks at the first meeting, Mayor Jim Kenney called the Expressway “monstrous” and jokingly referred to it as “the not-so-great wall of Chinatown.” While not calling explicitly for a full cap, he said changes were needed to increase mobility for residents of Chinatown and Callowhill, to stimulate job creation north of Center City, and to create more public spaces and improve access to existing ones like Franklin Square.

Councilman Mark Squilla was more explicit about his interest in working toward a full cap, saying that covering or capping the Expressway would be “a great opportunity…to make it more accessible for people on both sides of Vine Street” and “to build private development and interest in this area because [investors and developers] know something’s going to happen.”

Capping the Expressway has long been a priority for PCDC, and that position appeared to have near-universal appeal among the sixty or so attendees of the public meeting on Thursday.

“It was good to continue the conversation that we’ve been having for 50 years now, and to update it and prepare ourselves for the future planning processes that are right around the corner,” said Sarah Yeung, Director of Planning at PCDC, “I think the valuable part was having all the decision makers in the room, and having the spotlight cast on this section.”

Yeung was referring to the Chinatown neighborhood plan that PCDC will embark on this year, and which they expect to hire a consultant for later this month. The eventual report and recommendations from U.S. DOT will most likely be folded into that plan and refined through deeper community engagement.

Funding a full or even partial cap would be costly to say the least. But one of the presenters, Peter Park, formerly the chief planner for Milwaukee and Denver, ran through a number of different scenarios for local revenue streams that could complement state or federal funding, such as a tax-increment financing (TIF) district, value capture from nearby private land, or capping the cuts with buildings through some type of air rights deal. One example project in Columbus, OH featured a partial cap of a submerged highway, obscured by buildings fronting the highway bridges.