Grid Magazine, Philadelphia, PA (2026)

09/10/2026

Since May, the 13th Street bike lane has sported some new protective infrastructure: a series of plastic modular curbs. Between Locust and Chestnut streets, 18 of these curbs have been installed along the bike lane, stationed between existing flex posts, which have lined many of the city’s bike lanes for years.

The new protectors were inspired by a trip to Mexico City. When Prema Katari Gupta, president and CEO of Center City District (CCD), vacationed in Mexico’s capital, she noticed bike lanes protected by small, sturdy plastic modular curbs.

“Seeing this really simple curb product they installed, it seemed like something that Philadelphia could do and scale quickly and maybe save some lives,” Gupta says.

CCD bought and donated the curbs to the City, and after working with the Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems and the Department of Streets, they began a pilot phase ahead of potential wider use throughout the city. With just anchor bolts required to secure them to the pavement, the curbs are easy to install, says Andrew Jacobs, the vice president of planning and public realm at CCD.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2026/09/01/new-13th-street-bike-lane-barriers-are-an-upgrade-from-flimsy-flex-posts/

✍️ Rusty Gorelick
📸 Julia Lowe

09/09/2026

The front door of Chris Hytha’s 1857 Fishtown-area rowhome opens to face a spotlit shelf cabinet — a “house museum” of artifacts: the house’s old lead water main, a hunk of its original stone foundation and a block of termite-hollowed wood. The artifacts catalogue the house’s history — and the hurdles of Hytha’s now two-year renovation project.

“There were so many surprises when I bought the house. I thought it was all made of brick, and I thought it was built in 1930,” Hytha says. When he started opening up walls, he learned that the house was 70 years older than he had thought, and that about half of its timber frame had been eaten by termites.

Despite being advised to tear the entire home down and start from scratch, Hytha kept as much of it intact as possible. He’s salvaged all kinds of materials over the course of the rehab, from old growth lumber ceiling joists he exposed in his living room, to a basement door he saved from his neighbor’s trash, to a collection of vintage ornate door locks. They are a testament to Hytha’s effort to save old stuff, not only to build sustainably, but also to give his rowhome its history back.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2026/09/01/local-designer-emphasizes-salvage-in-historic-rowhome-renovation/

✍️ + 📸 Julia Lowe

09/08/2026

Imagine if developers quietly acquired and developed a few acres of Fairmount Park every year, carving them off into luxury housing. Philadelphians would rightly be outraged.

And yet: One building at a time, spaces that were designed for public assembly — churches, cultural centers, former schools — are being converted into private apartments or condominiums. And because each sale is treated as an isolated real estate transaction, it’s easy to miss what’s happening to the city as a whole.

These places are mostly privately owned, and because we’ve never recognized them as part of the same civic ecosystem, their disappearance barely registers.

During the Nutter administration, when our libraries and recreation centers faced closure after years of deferred maintenance, public outcry pushed the City not to accept their slow decline. It ultimately chose another path through the Rebuild initiative in 2017, investing in the places where neighborhood life happens.

Perhaps what we need now isn’t another Rebuild, but a broader conversation about how we revitalize and steward the places that make community possible — regardless of who currently owns them.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2026/09/01/what-we-lose-when-civic-spaces-are-converted-into-housing/

✍️ + 📸 Jacques-Jean “JJ” Tiziou

09/07/2026

While Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s ambitious Housing Opportunities Made Easy initiative (H.O.M.E.) sets out to close the city’s affordable housing gap, some area nonprofits have begun working against an unintended consequence they foresee: the illegal act of short dumping demolition waste, often in known dumping hotspots in Black and Brown neighborhoods.

The community “collaboratory” Trash Academy is one such group that has devised a proposal for how to manage the construction and demolition waste produced by the proposed 30,000 homes that Parker has committed to.

Trash Academy proposes that H.O.M.E. contracts require contractors to prove that they have brought demolition waste to a recycling center or repurposing facility in order to receive funding and count as one of the 30,000 builds. The group also wants oversight from the mayor’s office to ensure compliance by developers.

“[The proposal]’s not setting anything new up. It’s just saying use the recycling facilities … to ensure that it’s not dumped somewhere random or just everything sent to the incinerator,” says Dallas Herbert Sr., a longtime member of Trash Academy and 215 People’s Alliance. “This is something the City already wants to do — everything we say is about clean and green. It’s about safety. It’s about what the mayor says she wants.”

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2026/09/01/nonprofits-seek-to-leverage-home-initiative-to-curb-illegal-dumping/

✍️ Gabriel Donahue
📸 Photo courtesy of Trash Academy

09/06/2026

Two hundred and fifty years ago, as a new nation was being born in Philadelphia, botanist William Bartram was on the Altamaha River in Georgia — the edge of the infant United States — nearing the end of a three-year plant-collecting expedition.

In addition to Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, he had traversed the “powerful empire or confederacy” of the Muscogee. He spent time in the Cherokee Nation and found its people, not unlike the authors of the Declaration, committed to “the liberties and natural rights of men.” He learned about local flora and fauna from the Choctaw and Seminole.

Though he hadn’t gone farther than the Mississippi River, Bartram had traveled internationally. When he returned to Philadelphia with a wealth of scientific knowledge, much of it gleaned from Indigenous sources, he also carried a conviction that his new nation had to do more to protect the “well being of our Indian brethren.”

In “Botany of Nations,” an exhibit at the Academy of Natural Sciences that brings Indigenous perspectives to the storied Lewis and Clark Expedition, Bartram is a minor character: A copy of a botanical textbook from Meriwether Lewis’s traveling library sits open to Bartram’s illustration of a to***co plant. But Bartram’s story — that of the botanist and explorer whose journey was made possible by collaboration with Indigenous peoples — resonates with the version of the Lewis and Clark tale that “Botany of Nations” aims to tell.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2026/09/01/botany-exhibit-reimagines-lewis-and-clark-plant-discoveries/

✍️ + 📸 Tasso Hartzog

09/04/2026

Events happening in and around Philadelphia this weekend!

SATURDAY, 9.5
Philadelphia Literacy Day 2026: Page Turners and Legacy Builders is our 2026 theme for Philadelphia Literacy Day. Join us for free books, fun, and community!

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/philadelphia-literacy-day-2026/

SATURDAY, 9.5
The Story Is in the Seed With True Love Seeds: Join us for an interactive, hands-on, seed storytelling circle followed by a seed swap. We will begin by shelling seed pods and hearing from four expert seed keepers from our region about the seeds they steward for their families, communities and diasporas. Participants will also have a chance to share about the seeds they hold dear.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/the-story-is-in-the-seed-with-true-love-seeds/

SUNDAY, 9.6
Cobb’s Creek Monthly Clean Up: Join the Philadelphia Mycology Club for some community oriented land stewardship in Cobbs Creek Park! We will provide everything you need.

➡️ Learn More: https://gridphilly.com/event/cobbs-creek-monthly-clean-up/

09/03/2026

Surrounding nearly every suburban business center and office park are swaths of manicured grass, occasionally interrupted by ornamental landscaping. Unlike green space at schools or residential complexes, it’s rare to see this outdoor space used for recreation or sunbathing. In fact, it isn’t really used for anything.

Up Top Acres, an agricultural startup based in Washington, D.C., is looking to change that. The company designs, installs and maintains raised-bed gardens at corporate centers and on urban high-rise rooftops, planting edible crops for tenants and local food pantries. So far, Up Top Acres has installed gardens in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, New Jersey and now Pennsylvania.

As of April, there are three Philadelphia-area sites: Radnor Financial Center, Radnor Corporate Center and 620 Freedom Business Center in King of Prussia. All are managed by the Philadelphia-based real estate firm Brandywine Realty Trust.

Ron Becker, senior vice president of operations and sustainability for Brandywine Realty Trust, first encountered Up Top Acres a decade ago while working in Washingon, D.C. After joining Brandywine Realty Trust, he saw an opportunity to collaborate with them again. In his opinion, the benefits of activating the properties’ green spaces far outweigh the cost of establishing and maintaining the gardens.

“It is another way, as a committed environmentally sustainable company, to engage with our tenants and bring fresh produce right inside our buildings,” he says. “Here, it’s less than 1,500 feet — not the United States average of 1,500 miles — from farm to table.”

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2026/09/01/urban-farms-help-suburban-office-parks-tap-unused-green-space/

✍️ Emily Kovach
📸 Jeff Fusco

09/02/2026

At Re:Vision Architecture’s Manayunk headquarters, energy-saving features are everywhere. Exterior walls are carefully sealed and insulated to keep the building warmer in the winter. Windows and skylights admit plenty of sun, reducing the need for artificial lighting. Those same skylights and windows can be opened on warm days to flush hot air up and out of the building.

But perhaps the most important energy-saving equipment of the building, which sports a Platinum rating in LEED’s Operations and Maintenance (O+M) certification, sits on the wall of the building’s garage: three electrical boards. These flat gray boxes with cables and wires snaking in and out are about the least sexy sustainable design features imaginable — but on a visit in July, Scott Kelly, founding principal of Re:Vision architecture, and Kristie Broussard, senior associate with Re:Vision’s High Performance Consulting Studio made sure to point them out.

One board is for wall plugs, one for HVAC and one for lighting. Having three lets the firm track electricity usage carefully to make sure that their building, designed to be energy-efficient, actually uses power efficiently.

“You can’t understand what you don’t measure,” Broussard says. Reducing the environmental impact of buildings might start with sustainable design, but as mounting research and Re:Vision’s experience shows, it can’t end there.

➡️ Read the full story at https://gridphilly.com/blog-home/2026/09/01/saving-energy-in-green-buildings-is-harder-than-it-looks/

✍️ Bernard Brown
✏️ Illustration by James Olstein

09/01/2026

Philadelphia is changing all around us. Fresh off a tourism season celebrating our city’s colonial history, our building boom is racing to meet a housing crisis and is, in turn, reshaping the very fabric of our neighborhoods.

As that transformation pushes forward, developers, designers and community groups are wrestling with what it means to build responsibly in a city defined, in part, by the historic structures increasingly forgotten or replaced with modern, boxy builds.

So what makes a building green? For years, we’ve pointed to energy savings, materials and certifications. But green is also what we choose not to tear down, what we find new uses for and what we refuse to throw away.

In this issue, we look at sustainable building not just as a checklist of features, but as a set of choices about how a structure, new or old, will shape the people and spaces around it for generations to come. How do we meet housing demand without burying neighborhoods in construction waste? Can corporate patches of lawn become productive farms? Are the standards we’ve relied on to define “green” buildings still ambitious enough? And how do we honor Philadelphia’s iconic rowhomes, churches and libraries as the city keeps building?

What we preserve, reuse, build from scratch and decide to demolish — these choices will separate Philadelphia’s architectural past from its future.

➡️ Read the full Green Building Issue now at gridphilly.com

✏️ Cover illustration by James Olstein

Grid Magazine

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