The first is LOVE Park, a park that reached icon status in the 1990s and 2000s with the skateboarding community and which has been under attack by city officials ever since. Ironically (or not,) I wrote in 2014 about Philadelphia’s missed opportunity with LOVE Park when I made my first case for preserving Graffiti Pier, the other space now under threat.

The old LOVE Park was a gem, in spite of its aging infrastructure. As Ashley Hahn wrote about the original design in 2014, “LOVE Park may be tired, its granite slabs loose and clanky, but it works remarkably well as a truly public space…its diversity of casual use is a beautiful, rare thing.” I am still baffled that the city would completely raze arguably the only park in our city known by people around the globe, and it did so primarily to update the parking garage it sits on. Interesting priorities.

When it comes to LOVE Park’s new redesign, alas, many (including myself) perhaps too optimistically saw the recent and smart redesign of Dilworth Park, the newly opened Cira Green, and even the beautiful reuses of pop-up spaces like Spruce Street Harbor Park as signs that the city was at least moving in the right direction when it came to updating our public spaces for the 21st Century. So while I would have certainly rather have seen the old LOVE Park remain as it was or even turned into a legal skate park with perhaps a few updates including making it more accessible, I have been trying to remain hopeful about its redesign nonetheless. But, as LOVE Park’s construction fences came down earlier this year and with its official reopening date of late May quickly approaching, I am no longer feeling so positive. The park is flat and dull with its most prominent feature a bright green sign advertising that parking garage underfoot.