It's not uncommon for visitors to come to Philadelphia and rejoice at its remarkably easy-to-navigate grid layout -- that is, until they hit the navigational wrenches that are Passyunk, Germantown and Point Breeze avenues (among others). It begs the question: Why did the layout ever stray from its grid-based conventions?
We asked PennDesign urban design and landscape architecture lecturer Nicholas Pevzner for some historical context.
Why does Philadelphia have diagonal avenues like Passyunk, Germantown, Point Breeze and Moyamensing when the city is on a predominantly grid-based system?
I love gridded cities, and I think [the reason for the avenues is] fairly similar to the reason why New York has a Broadway: They pre-dated the grid. So, in the case of New York, Broadway was this Native American trail that became a road and was important enough to keep when the commission laid the grid on New York, and in Philly, it's the same thing, where a variety of streets were natural fixtures -- pikes, trails or turnpikes. And when William Penn in 1682 overlaid the grid on Center City, they were either in place or the grid was not fully formed, so the grid kind of became the spines around which the city coalesced.
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