Grays Ferry Avenue is already a speedway. CHOP’s mammoth garage will make it even worse.

When the Schuylkill Banks’ spectacular new boardwalk opened in mid-May, it didn’t just provide better access to the waterfront; it also gave Philadelphians new ways to see the city.

As you cross the dramatic cable-stayed bridge, West Philadelphia’s glistening skyline rises up, seemingly rivaling Center City’s in scale. Farther south, you get fresh glimpses of the lush Woodlands cemetery, which has presided over the river’s West Bank since the 18th century. What once felt distant has been made close.

That’s especially true for the Grays Ferry neighborhood, an isolated and mistreated pocket at the end of the trail, a place sometimes known as “Forgotten Bottom.” Although Grays Ferry served as a major river crossing in colonial times, it has been steadily severed from its neighbors by highways, rail tracks, and noxious industrial uses. Now, many hope the new bridge linking Grays Ferry Avenue to Center City will bring the neighborhood back into the fold.

Unfortunately, that transformation could be undermined before it even begins by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which plans to build a thousand-car garage at 3000 Grays Ferry Ave. Never mind that the hospital’s main campus is nearly a mile away and on the other side of the Schuylkill. CHOP has decided that this prime block between 30th and 31st Streets is the perfect spot to build remote parking for hospital employees.

Like many low-income neighborhoods, Grays Ferry has long been treated as a dumping ground for undesirable land uses. Grays Ferry Avenue should be a walkable, mixed-use street with plenty of housing. Instead, it is home to a city trash depot, a FedEx warehouse, a large storage facility, and a barren, autocentric shopping center.

Part of the reason it’s been junked up is the avenue’s daunting width, which, at 82 feet, is wider than Broad Street. For years, the city has allowed the stretch between Washington Avenue and 34th Street to function like an extended entrance ramp for I-76. Not surprisingly, that neglect encouraged poor land uses and deterred better development. (In 2023, the University of Pennsylvania also announced plans for a 10-story garage at its Pennovation campus on Grays Ferry Avenue, but that project is on hold.)

CHOP’s garage would both continue and reinforce this pattern of abuse. It’s not just the thousand employees — many of them shift workers — who would drive through Grays Ferry every day. Because the garage is so far from the hospital’s main campus, CHOP will need to send shuttle buses into the neighborhood to transport them to the main campus. Those buses will add to the traffic congestion at 34th and Grays Ferry Avenue, a deadly intersection where several cyclists, scooter riders, and pedestrians have been killed.

CHOP officials point out that the hospital already operates an employee parking lot in Grays Ferry, on Warfield Street. But that lot is in a more isolated industrial zone, west of I-76. The new, 70-foot-tall garage would face two thriving rowhouse streets and disgorge cars across from the neighborhood’s main playground. It would also waste a terrific development site that could be more productively used for housing.

One reason CHOP zeroed in on this site is that its CMX-3 zoning allows garages to be built “by right,” which means the hospital won’t have to go through a long approval process. The hospital still needs to make a final presentation to the city’s Civic Design Review committee before starting construction, but that’s really a formality because the committee’s comments are nonbinding.

But even if the garage is by-right legally, from a planning and equity point of view, it is very wrong.

An internationally renowned institution today, with a growing collection of architecturally distinguished buildings, CHOP owes its early success to the support it received from Philadelphia’s government. In the late ‘60s, the city helped kick-start CHOP’s expansion by demolishing two public facilities in West Philadelphia — the Philadelphia General Hospital and Blockley Almshouse. That created a 19-acre site that became the nucleus for the self-contained West Philadelphia hospital district that also includes the University of Pennsylvania’s hospital and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Putting the three institutions in one place was a brilliant planning strategy. While hospitals and medical research are essential to the life of any city, their buildings do not typically make good neighbors. Besides generating enormous amounts of traffic, their campuses tend to be sprawling monocultures, lacking the eclectic mix found on city streets.

Grouping the hospitals together limited their impact on West Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. As the hospitals grew, the city made more land available for expansion by demolishing the storied Civic Center.

The three hospitals benefited from shared resources, such as parking garages and SEPTA’s Regional Rail station, while drawing on the synergy that comes from being in a dense medical cluster. In a way, the hospital district was the medical equivalent of the sports complex, which similarly isolates good (exciting games) and bad (acres of surface parking) activities from residential areas.

Despite the benefits of this approach, CHOP has expanded well beyond the confines of the hospital district.

Since acquiring a former industrial site next to the South Street bridge in 2015, CHOP has erected two towers and a large parking garage, thus exporting congestion to a residential area on the east side of the Schuylkill. Although the 200-foot buildings are clearly interlopers, they do at least have a relationship with the street that allows them to be easily accessed by pedestrians and cyclists. Their landscaping helps soften the disconnect between the buildings and the neighborhood.

That won’t be the case with the garage, which has been designed like the kind of purely autocentric structure you might find at an airport. The Design Advocacy Group (DAG), which conducted a detailed planning study of Grays Ferry’s potential in 2021, has urged CHOP to include retail spaces on the ground floor to make it look more like an urban building.

Although that would be a modest improvement, shops won’t alter the garage’s true nature. Nando Micale, an urban planner at LRK (and former DAG board member), argues that “it’s wrong to have remote parking anywhere,” but especially in a residential neighborhood.

The urbanist advocacy group 5th Square has started a petition to stop the project, noting that the volume of car exhaust will worsen air quality in Grays Ferry.

“A thousand cars a day is not what the doctor ordered for Grays Ferry Avenue,” complained Matt Skahill, whose Titan Street house will face the back of CHOP’s garage.

Skahill, a Penn employee, was able to buy the house two years ago thanks to the city’s Turn the Key program, which helps first-time homebuyers qualify for mortgages.

In an effort to cushion Grays Ferry against the shocks of gentrification, the city has built nearly 85, subsidized Turn-the-Key homes in the neighborhood, many within view of the garage. Several new apartment buildings have also gone up on Grays Ferry Avenue, near Washington Avenue, radically improving the character of the street. Now residents will have to deal with the downsides of CHOP’s garage.

Skahill was attracted to the neighborhood partly because he believed he would be able to commute to work by bike on Grays Ferry Avenue, which has a protected bike lane. But he says there is so much debris in the bike lane from speeding trucks, he often has to detour onto the sidewalk.

Skahill worries about his elderly neighbors, who struggle to cross Grays Ferry Avenue to reach the Fresh Grocer supermarket. Although CHOP has negotiated a community benefits agreement with neighborhood groups, Skahill considers the payments — $10,000 for the community organizations and $100,000 for Finnegan playground — as “little more than a rounding error.”

In a statement, CHOP said it had considered other locations for its employee garage, both in the hospital district and elsewhere, but was unable to find an appropriate site.

While the number of available development sites in the district has indeed dwindled, that’s partly because CHOP has been on a building spree. The hospital actually demolished a 767-car garage to make room for the new Roberts Children’s Health Tower, which just received a $125 million gift from Comcast’s Brian and Aileen Roberts.

There’s no doubt that this is a difficult time for institutions like CHOP because of President Donald Trump’s assault on funding for medical research. Still, that doesn’t mean the hospital deserves a pass on this garage.

In fact, it’s not even clear there is a parking shortage in the hospital district. According to the city’s latest University City survey, there is a modest surplus.

If CHOP insists on having a new employee garage, it should be built as close to its campus as possible. One way to do that would be to partner with one of West Philadelphia’s other big institutions.

The Science Center, for instance, controls several vacant lots on Market Street. Why not incorporate CHOP’s garage into the base of a larger building? It could be built without disturbing a residential neighborhood.

Another option would be to lease blocks of spaces from underused garages on Market Street in Center City.

CHOP wouldn’t even need to send a bus to pick up its employees, since the University City District’s Lucy Shuttle runs between Market Street and the hospital district. A shared garage would probably save the hospital money.

In the best case, CHOP wouldn’t build a garage at all and instead adopt a transit-first policy and offer employees incentives to take SEPTA and PATCO.

CHOP declined to release the expected cost of its new garage, but experts say an aboveground parking typically costs $50,000 a space. That would make the Grays Ferry garage a $50 million project.

In contrast, taxpayers spent $48 million to build the new Schuylkill Banks connector trail. Unlike CHOP’s garage, it promises to make the adjacent neighborhoods better, healthier places to live. It’s time CHOP saw Grays Ferry for what it can be, rather than what it was.