The Triangle

Issue date: 2/6/09 Section: Ed-Op

Media Credit: Michael Perez Philadelphia Inquirer/KRT

It's been bruited lately that the planned casinos in downtown Philadelphia, having been chased from waterfront to local neighborhood to shopping mall, won't be built after all. As we all know, gamblers, like other addicts, will spend their last nickel on their passion. But banks won't - those that have any nickels left - and the casino business has become a sinkhole lately.

Welcome to the Great Depression of '09. Sometimes there's good news in all the bad news.

More good news could, and should, be coming to that other giant sinkhole of the City of Brotherly Love, the Barnes on the Parkway.

Three months ago, the City establishment staged a circus at the site obligingly leased (at $10 a year) to what is still laughingly called the Barnes Foundation - now, through the legal legerdemain of a corrupt state administration and an obliging shill of a local judge a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts, which has designated a majority of the seats on its board - to "break ground" for a new museum to house the Barnes art collection. Actually, no ground was broken, because the new museum has yet to be designed, or the money to build it raised. Instead, a couple of feeble whacks were taken at the building that still occupies the site, the Youth Detention Center, a spritz of fireworks went up, and canapés were served. Then the site was veiled in mufti, to avoid further inquiry or embarrassment.

Tell me, why we are proceeding with this farce, or pretending to?

The Barnes collection isn't out in the cold. It is very comfortably housed in Lower Merion, thank you, exactly five miles away from its proposed new site, in the splendid and recently refurbished building established for it by its founder, Albert C. Barnes. The new Parkway site is actually more difficult to reach by bus and train from 30th Street Station than the existing one. The Parkway site wouldn't even give the collection a new look, because the terms of the move stipulate that it replicate exactly the existing display arrangement.

So, what are we missing here, besides a rationale for the whole shenanigans?

Money would be the correct answer. Derek Gillman, the Barnes' director, has recently assured The Metro that the Barnes not only has the $150 million in pledges it claimed had been made to finance the move as of 2006 (including $25 million of taxpayers' money, courtesy of those former blood brothers, Vince Fumo and Ed Rendell), but the actual cash itself.

Continued...

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