COLUMN: If only these walls could talk

From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99 From Binyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99This used to be a railroad town. Long before realtors started selling "University City" homes to upwardly mobile professors, Philadelphia lived and died with its railroads -- no neighborhood more so than West Philadelphia. The present structure dates to a grand expansion of the Pennsylvania Railroad facilities in the area of 30th and Market streets, including the construction of the present-day 30th Street Station. Planned during the roaring '20s and built during the Great Depression, the terminal spawned a variety of factories and facilities, including a food distribution warehouse at the corner of 32nd and Chestnut. The station at 30th Street was the fourth built on the site, dating back to 1864. Like its predecessors, the grand building was the Philadelphia terminal for the Pennsy, America's greatest railroad in an age of railroads, and the starting point for a steel web that fed New York to the north and destinations from Detroit to St. Louis along the western strands. By the end of the 19th century, that web had made Philadelphia America's richest city. By 1957, the Pennsylvania Railroad had joined with its main rival, the New York Central. By 1970, the Penn Central was bankrupt and by 1976, it was government-owned. The slow death of the railroads went hand in hand with the decline of the east coast manufacturing base. And the combination meant hard times for West Philadelphia. It was an area that had always grown along with and because of the iron horse -- first an industrial zone centering around the railhead at 30th and Market, then expanding south and west as the streetcars pushed outbound, taking tired white-collar workers to their suburban homes. Now, West Philadelphia would die with the railroads, losing 33 percent of its population and leaving more than a few buildings barren. The GE building was one of the larger ones, to be sure, but it was the retail and residential losses that would gut the surrounding area. Seen through the eyes of the brick warehouse at 32nd and Chestnut, all those macrocosmic trends boiled down to a series of owners: the Pennsylvania Railroad, then General Electric -- part of the last hurrah for east coast manufacturing in the years after WWII -- and finally a parking company. Philadelphia was in decline. The parking company owned the GE building until 1996, probably for the adjacent three-acre asphalt lot. After all, there had to be somewhere for suburbanites to park when they came to visit the city their parents and grandparents had fled. The building's third chapter seemed like a conclusion, and a decrepit one at that. Then Penn bought the building, then Penn announced plans to build a luxury apartment complex and then, well, that's tomorrow's chapter. Penn was not a new player in the area, arriving on this side of the Schuylkill in 1871. But the University had never really been an economic motor for the surrounding area. To be sure, Penn helped drive housing demand in its surroundings, but the University also watched a street-car neighborhood flourish and then wither, all while it grew to national prominence. It simply wasn't the role of a research university to become involved in its surroundings. The world's problem awaited fixing on a much grander level. By the 1980s, what remained was a rich University surrounded by an embittered community; indeed, its facilities and residences sitting on more than a few of that community's old homes. Crime was rampant, buildings were vacant, industry was non-existent. Beyond Penn, the surroundings were bleak. The story of the 1990s, with 32nd and Chestnut again playing a bit part, is one we all know: revitalization, a booming economy and Penn asserting itself as a dominant and responsible economic engine for the surrounding area. It has always been the right of the powerful to build monuments to themselves. The temple at 30th Street is such a monument, to the power of iron and coal. But railroads no longer dominate the economic landscape, and so they no longer number among the builders. Today, our universities have become our builders, and today's construction efforts will be the longest-lasting contribution of the present administration to its surroundings. Projects like the apartments at 32nd and Chestnut will speak of us long after we can no longer do so.