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By BENJAMIN FORGEY
Washington Post Staff Writer PHILADELPHIA — There is a splendid view of Independence Hall from the second-floor terrace of the National
Constitution Center, an inventive, educational tourist attraction opening today at the northern end of Independence Mall.
The familiar image appears reassuringly in the distance, the white-painted clock tower and domed cupola foursquare atop the elegant pile of bricks in which the United States was born 227 years ago.
The Constitution Center, a private organization dating to an act of Congress passed in 1988, is an ingenious complement to Independence Hall. It both celebrates
and explicates the document composed in that building 11 years after independence was declared and six years after the end of the Revolutionary War.
Housed in a cool, spacious, high-modernist building designed by Henry N. Cobb, of the redoubtable New York architecture firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, the center is, first of all, an exposition hall with an inspirational message. "It's not a frozen-in-time, 1787 moment," says President Joseph M. Torsello. "It's an
attempt to give contemporary meaning to what is represented here, to acquaint people in a fresh way with their constitutional rights and obligations."
"Enter as a visitor, leave as a citizen," exhorts a news release. To that end, visitors are treated, first, to "Freedom Rising" -- a 17-minute, in-the-round dramatization about the creation and evolution of the Constitution. Afterward, they are set free to ramble through a barrage of challenging information.
Designed by the New York firm of Ralph Appelbaum Associates in the layered, multimedia style made familiar by Appelbaum in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the exhibits encourage viewer participation in various ways.
You can position yourself to be instantly imaged as you are inducted as president; or get involved in a supervised half-hour discussion of a constitutional issue with other visitor-citizens; or perform a computer search of the Constitution and be introduced to
interpretations of key concepts across the years. All in all, Appelbaum points out, there are 17 hours of interactive learning programs in the display. Who said there isn't much to do in Philadelphia?
The culminating experience of the tour is Signers Hall, a high room containing life-size bronze statues of the 39 delegates who signed the document on Sept. 17, 1787, and the three who refused. The idea is, you circulate among these figures and then make up your own mind to sign or not to
sign. Large books are provided to record your choice.
Say what you will about this sophisticated, populist form of info-tainment, it does put you in a question-asking mood, and the question that first occurred to me as I emerged from Signers Hall and stood, awed by that wonderful view of Independence Hall, was: What's all that messy stuff out there on Independence Mall?
Or, to put it another way: Symbolically, this is one of the nation's most important civic spaces, which means
it ought to be one of the most beautiful.
Some of the disarray, clearly enough, is associated with construction. The vista makes it evident that big changes are underway in the setting for the symbolic centerpiece of the nation's founding. In addition to the Constitution Center, there is the Independence Visitors Center, which opened in 2001, and a still-under-construction pavilion for the Liberty Bell.
Yet even the last-minute press of getting things built can't account for
the dispirited look of much of the intervening land. It turns out that the $314 million effort to recast Independence Mall came up $17.5 million short, and the shortfall was taken out of the budget for landscape improvements.
Thus, only a minor portion of an imaginatively reconceived landscape has been built, a plot so small you can hardly see it from the second-floor perch in Constitution Center. The intention behind the overall plan is to create an attractive urban amalgam of busy
buildings and parkland, but so far the park part has been largely left undone. Hmmm.
And then there is the visual clutter of ad hoc security paraphernalia. Independence Hall and the existing Liberty Bell pavilion have been ringed by fences since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and a temporary tent and wood-frame shack have been erected for security checks of all visitors.
In this section of Philadelphia, as in much of central Washington, the discussion continues
about how much security is necessary and what permanent forms it might take. Here, too, definitive answers are hard to come by.
Phil Sheridan of the National Park Service, caretaker of Independence National Historic Park, says that the Park Service will soon make public a set of recommendations. How these plans will mesh with the idea of an open urban park celebrating the values of democracy thus remains to be seen.
The current remake of Independence Mall, which stretches for
three long blocks north of Independence Hall, has its roots in the failures of the mall as it existed for nearly four decades. The original idea for the mall dates to the 1950s, a classic case of so-called urban renewal that laid waste to several acres of the city, demolishing hundreds of residential, commercial and industrial buildings, including a fair sampling of Philadelphia's finest 19th-century architecture.
What Philadelphia got out of this audacious, if misguided, urban plan
was a big park that seemed, in retrospect, doomed to fail. Partly, it was a fault in the design for high-maintenance parkland -- lots of hardscape, lots of fountains -- in a low-maintenance environment. But mainly it was a strategic mistake.
When the planners took away such a large part of the center city, there wasn't enough city left to give life to the urban park. What had been intended as a noble open setting for Independence Hall became, in its northern reaches especially, a zone
that most folks took pains to avoid. The story goes that then-Mayor Ed Rendell (now governor of Pennsylvania) used to head over to this portion of the park whenever he needed to be alone to think.
Rendell, as you might expect, became a major backer of the plan to do something about Independence Mall. He became a force, too, behind the Constitution Center, recognizing the good that another big tourist attraction could do for Philadelphia's flagging economy. The National Park Service
also was interested in change -- a visitor center erected to the east of Independence Hall in the mid-1970s hadn't worked as expected. Despite a nearby freeway exit and convenient parking, the great majority of visitors continued to arrive from the north and west.
Eventually, a consensus was reached that a drastic remedy was needed to invigorate the mall: Bulldoze it and start over. Four buildings, each an attraction in itself, would be built on former parkland -- the Constitution and
visitor centers, the Liberty Bell pavilion and a rather small educational facility called the Independence Park Institute (the only one of the four buildings for which ground hasn't been broken). To pay for the ambitious undertaking, a potpourri of funds would be sought: federal, state and city monies combined with contributions from foundations, corporations and individuals.
The Olin Partnership, a Philadelphia landscape architecture firm, was selected to head up a team to redesign
the mall -- all locals, lead partner Laurie Olin notes, "who can walk to the site anytime we need to meet there." The design this team came up with is at once daring and sensible, at least in theory.
It is a daring design in that it proposes an asymmetrical layout in a place where straight, parallel lines of trees or buildings or both would be the conventional way to focus on the main object -- Independence Hall. (That certainly would be the Washington way.) And it's sensible
because the daring move makes a great deal of sense, once you look carefully.
There are two very long buildings (visitors center and bell pavilion) on the western edge of the site, with a central open greensward and a curving border of shade trees and other plantings on the eastern side. Constitution Center takes up most of the northern block.
As the view from Constitution Center proves, this combination of building with both formal and informal landscape elements actually would
serve Independence Hall quite gracefully. Furthermore, the shaded areas in the east, with pathways where city streets used to be, would make lovely places for a cafe and other pleasant outdoor diversions. This could become, in short, quite a splendid urban park, accomplishing both practical and civic goals.
In practice, one significant flaw in the plan has become apparent. In the west, this supposedly inviting park doesn't appear all that accessible -- those long buildings form
something of an impenetrable wall. However, this is not a fatal flaw. If the powers that be would build the rest of the park in the way it was designed by the Olin team, Independence Hall would get a worthy setting and Philadelphia would possess a fine urban park.
Constitution Center certainly forms a promising frame for such a park. One of the big faults of the original Independence Mall was that, in the north, it lacked a proper end; it just dropped off unceremoniously in the smog of
a submerged superhighway. Architect Cobb recognized this problem and consciously designed his building as a dignified visual terminus.
This is a horizontal building with a flat frontal plane that rambles across the site, announcing its purpose with a memorable quotation engraved on a limestone wall: the Constitution's "We the People" preamble. And, although it is in fact a lot bigger than Independence Hall, the new building responds respectfully. The large rectangular opening
in the facade corresponds in shape and size to the older, more important building -- it is a polite 21st-century reflection of 18th-century scale.
Constitution Center's subdued modernist style, its time-honored architectural abstraction, is appropriate both to its subject and location. Low-key elegance is what the site called for, and what it got. The building sets the stage for Independence Hall and for a superb urban park. Now, then, is the time for the powers that be to build that
park and build it right.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company. Reprinted by Permission.
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