Last Sunday Ashley and I decided to visit the nearby Washington Avenue Green on the newly developed pier 53. We'd heard that this was similar to the Race St Pier redevelopment that we visited a few weeks ago.
It was a sunny day so we decided to take a picnic.
The pier is located behind some industrial buildings to the side of the busy South Columbus Boulevard. To access it we walked along a bike lane and into the redeveloped area.
The first thing we saw was a "dendritic garden" with plants growing in between the cracks in tarmac:
We carried on and admired the flowers and plants that had been carefully layed out. It seems that the development has not been going long enough for the plants to have properly established themselves and take on a more wild appearance.
The pier now came into view:
and we saw that it was blocked off from visitors and was being used as a wildlife reserve. I read that this pier used to be the Washington Ave immigration station for people immigrating to America.
We found a nice bench and ate our picnic:
and admired the view across the Delaware River to Camden, NJ:
The overall theme for the redevelopment was to keep hints of its industrial past. This meant keeping a lot of concrete and tarmac and interspersing the plants in between. We decided that, although it was nice that the redevelopment had been done, it would have been even nicer to have more plants and less concrete.
After we'd eaten in the sunshine we walked back through the gardens, stopping to admire a glittery gemstone addition to the tarmac:
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