Once upon a time, a city wanted to be beautiful. It wanted to look refined and important like Paris and Washington, D.C., who had cut through their grid of working class streets with wide, diagonal boulevards. So the city, Philadelphia, built its own grand Parkway, to be lined with important cultural institutions, to connect the congested city with the nature and purity of Fairmount Park.

But no sooner than the city created the Parkway did it realize this was a mistake. If the Champs-Élysées was the inspiration, Philadelphia’s Parkway looked like a copycat fail. Rather than glamorous buildings lining the street, Philadelphia got parking lots and barren parklands.

Rather than a direct line to nature, the Parkway teemed with cars and their exhaust. Though the vista from the Art Museum acro

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