Philadelphia's Franklin Square will require admission in the evening this spring, for the duration on a Chinese lantern festival. A critic faults the "philosophy of privatism" for robbing the park of its democratic qualities.
Philadelphia Inquirer Architecture Critic Inga Saffron establishes the stakes in a controversy over an ongoing festival in Franklin Square:
Urban parks are the physical embodiment of our democratic system, maybe the only place in our increasingly lopsided society where rich and poor can come together as equals. Anyone can walk into an urban park, sit on a bench, and enjoy the sunshine, gratis. At least, that's how it is supposed to work.
Those ideals run counter to the current state of Franklin Square, according to Saffron, which until June 12 is surrounded by a chain-link fence and a black curtain. "The enclosure, which looks like something you would find at a top-secret construction site, was installed last week so the park's nonprofit manager, Historic Philadelphia Inc., could lease the public square to a private company for a nightly Chinese lantern festival," explains Saffron.
Saffron argues that "parks exist to provide city-dwellers with a green respite, not do yeoman's work for the economy" before providing a brief history of how it came to be that cities turned parks into test beds for public-private partnerships.
Stephen Salisbury, culture writer for the Inquirer, also wrote about the event's effects in Franklin Square earlier in April.
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