MANAYUNK

Originally Published In Manayunk.com Magazine

Lower Venice Island’s about to become Philly’s showpiece for eco-savvy development. And it was only three decades in the making.

When lower Venice Island opens in mostly-full-bloom this spring, it’ll launch the start of a new era in Manayunk. But few will appreciate how long the journey was like Kay Sykora will.

“A friend of mine, about a year ago, sent me a letter that I had sent out in the mid-eighties,” Sykora says. Its purpose was to draw attention to the island and gauge the neighborhood’s interest in developing it into a park, complete with a performance center.

Which means the seed was planted almost 30 years ago. Sykora was a volunteer at the time, but now works as the director of Destination Schuylkill River, an arm of the Manayunk Development Corporation (MDC) that’s dedicated to improving Manyaunk’s public infrastructure.

Sykora and MDC have overseen every phase of the park’s disjointed evolution, from the feasibility studies that went nowhere in the nineties to the daunting news in the early 2000s that the Philadelphia Water Department planned to build a four million- gallon, underground, stormwater basin on the island. And because her faith was tested so often, it’s difficult for even her to grasp that its completion is near.

“I think when you do public projects, you begin to wonder if you’ll ever see the end of them,” Sykora says. “And it’s not just this project, but all projects of this scale. They take a long time. And when you’re along the river, they get complicated by the type
of stuff that goes with it.”

Ironically, it was the pressing need for the basin that finally jolted the plans for the park forward, when it appeared as though nothing else would. The water department’s initial rendering proposed building the basin and an accompanying three-story pump house. All that would remain of the aging playground and rec center that was there—and any hope for a full-fledged park in the future—was a basic path that would wind through the space in between.

“We all just felt, there’s so much investment in this area, and this could be so much more,” Sykora says.

The Manayunk Development Corporation responded by reaching out to Andropogon Associates, a Manayunk landscape architecture firm that specializes in ecological design, which developed a concept that harmoniously incorporated the park into the water department’s plans, or vice versa, depending on the perspective. (Destination Schuylkill River wasn’t yet founded at that point. It came into existence in 2006. Prior to then, Sykora was the founding executive director of the MDC.)

Not long after, the Philadelphia Department of Parks and Recreation, which oversaw the Venice Island rec center, approached MDC with the idea of rekindling the performance center. The structure would enable the parks and rec department to shift some programming away from the overcrowded Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in University City. Impossibly, the seed was beginning to sprout roots, 20 years later. Just as remarkably, the catalyst was a sophisticated compromise among three very separate and strong-minded factions, the water and parks and rec departments and MDC.

Construction on the basin and pump house began in 2011 and are now completed and functioning.

The 250-seat performance center is the obvious centerpiece. It’s designed to function as both an indoor and outdoor theater. But the natural elements that will surround it—and likely go largely unnoticed—are what will transform the island into a showpiece for the entire city.

The pump house is sheltered beneath a green roof. Rain gardens are installed throughout the park to channel runoff from the stretches of permeable paving. And all of the plantings—all $1.2 million worth of them—are native and self-sustaining. The vegetation also lines the steep river banks, along with walls of caged rocks, acting as a barrier against flooding and erosion.

Coupled with the housing that’s being constructed adjacent to the lower end of the island, Sykora envisions a shift in Manayunk’s landscape, with the canal eventually becoming the focal point, instead of an afterthought.

“It has the opportunity to be a great public space,” she says. “We envision it basically as a watered street.”

Studies are being conducted to determine how exactly it would work. The plan hinges on the Lock Street bridge, which needs to be rebuilt, and will, in turn, keep the park, at the easternmost tip of the island, from being completed for the time being. (Though the park and the performance center will open officially in June.) Construction, Sykora says, is expected to start sometime in the spring and last between six months to a year. Once it’s done, it’ll broaden the entrance to the park and make it much more visible to people walking nearby, Sykora says. In the meantime, Destination Schuylkill River’s exploring options for distinguishing the other two ways onto the lower end of the island in an effort to blend more seamlessly the urban and natural worlds that locals have long coexisted in and coveted.