Highway to Hell: Inside PennDOT’s Plan to Widen I-95 Through South Philly

Everyone knows the construction of the interstate along the Delaware River waterfront 60 years ago was a catastrophe of urban planning. So why is the state planning to make the road even bigger?

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The Southeast Youth Athletic Association is wedged into a small square block in South Philly. On some level, the location is fitting: From the blacktopped parking lot, you can see the lights from Citizens Bank Park peeking out in the distance a few blocks away. But if the field for the professionals dominates its surroundings (which is to say its parking lots) like a church looming over a plaza, SEYAA’s fields feel as though they’re boxed in on all sides. To the north is Bigler Street, with its line of modest rowhomes; to the south, there’s the rumbling stretch of the Schuylkill Expressway. To the west are the four lanes of 7th Street and an off-ramp for the highway, while to the east there’s a shopping plaza and a set of vermicular highway ramps leading to and from the Walt Whitman Bridge and Interstate 95.

All told, there are five fields at SEYAA: two youth baseball fields with 60-foot basepaths and one 90-foot regulation-size baseball field, plus two additional spaces that are used for soccer, flag football, and T-ball, depending on the season. Upwards of 1,000 kids participate in SEYAA’s various leagues, which run nine months of the year and cost between $35 and $90 to join. Joann McAfee, the 61-year-old volunteer leader of the league, has been overseeing the programming in this unique stretch of open space in deep South Philly for nearly 30 years…

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