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Changing Skyline | World Class Club
By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic
Oct. 8, 2004
The neighborhood is still grungy and so are the musicians, but Philadelphia's new shrine to indie rock, the World Cafe Live, checks its grit at the front door. Located in a former toilet factory on what used to be the wrong bank of the Schuylkill is a $15 million culture palace as lavish as any new hall on the Avenue of the Arts.
The World Cafe Live, at 3025 Walnut St., has come a long way from those storied, shoebox music joints where the air was marinated in stale beer and heartache. The generous two-tiered space features a restaurant with music upstairs and a 350-seat music hall with food downstairs, as well as studios and offices for WXPN-FM. The two public venues are outfitted with silky blue banquettes, designer lighting fixtures, and white modernist dinner plates practically the size of doormats.
Unlike the dives of yore, the smoke-free World Cafe Live sprang full-grown from the mind of its creator, Hal Real. A former real-estate lawyer who helped Willard G. Rouse 3d build suburban office parks, Real conceived of the venue as a "music club for grown-ups," a demographic that is fed up with having its clothes smell like an ashtray after attending a concert. It's a group, Real believes, that won't mind paying $8 for a glass of smooth Pinot Noir while listening to the sandpaper voices of a Tom Waits or Lyle Lovett.
The design of the World Cafe Live feels like a mixed marriage - she's a vegan follower of Nader's Raiders, he's a carnivorous venture capitalist. Yet like a lot of inexplicable unions, this alloy of rebellion and luxe might just take. As part of the general upscaling of America, people have come to expect style and comfort almost everywhere, from sports stadiums to rock clubs. World Cafe Live aims to be the Kimmel Center for listeners of WXPN-FM in both acoustics and ambience, and in these regards it more than succeeds.
If anything, the World Cafe Live is too deluxe. The interior designers, DAS of Philadelphia, previously created the look for the Cosí cafe chain, and they applied the same aesthetic here, writ large. Every surface in the restaurant is treated with eye-popping colors and textured materials, prompting visual overload, especially in the bright light of day. DAS no doubt designed the space for evening, but the effect is the same as wearing gala makeup to brunch. The designers also included not merely one of Philadelphia's signature wall murals but four, each busier than the next. One wonders what DAS could have done on a smaller budget.
Real acquired the rights to the World Cafe name from WXPN, the home of David Dye's groundbreaking World Cafe radio program. The radio station is merely a tenant in the building, which was developed by Carl Dranoff under a complex agreement with the University of Pennsylvania. Each part of the project had its own architect.
Real and DAS organized focus groups to elicit the main qualities associated with the radio station, and the most common responses - eclectic, handcrafted, colorful, multicultural - were translated into the design. One key quality, however, seems absent from the list: alternative. The concert-hall mezzanine, for instance, is a little too much like a stadium skybox. Perhaps after a few of the rowdier bands play the hall, some of the corporate sheen will wear off.
The funkiness of public radio comes through more on the other side of the soundproof partition, where WXPN has its studios, and Meyer Associates of Ardmore strived for a less-canned look. The nature of the office space allowed the original steel trusses to be left exposed. Station employees named the broadcast booths for the four Beatles, Elvis and Bob Dylan. Already, visiting musicians have helped the design by defacing an entire wall with scribbled messages.
But the decorating choices are really a minor part of the story. Like the Kimmel, World Cafe Live succeeds in establishing itself as an activity hub in a transitional neighborhood. The music hall, restaurant and radio station will help repair the big urban gap that exists between Center City and West Philadelphia, making the Schuylkill corridor a meaningful part of city life.
Since the completion (more or less) of the Schuylkill recreation trail this year, the corridor has been abuzz with construction. The steel outlines of two high-rise projects bracket the river: the 28-story Cira Centre on the west bank and the 12-story Edgewater apartments on the east.
The gap between the two sides of the waterway has been shrinking for nearly a decade, ever since Penn declared its intention to nudge its campus eastward. With Penn's help, Dranoff converted a block-size warehouse at 31st and Walnut Streets into the Left Bank apartments in 2001 by coring out the useless central portion of the building.
Dranoff's architect, Mark J. Brodsky of Bower Lewis Thrower, has now performed a similar construction feat on the former Hajoca Corp. building, built between 1921 and 1930 as a factory for large porcelain bathroom fixtures.
The firm removed three structural columns to create a concert hall with no obstructed sight lines on either the main level or the mezzanine. As a result, the large, open room can be converted from a 350-seat bistro-style club to a 500-seat theater. The 45-foot-wide stage offers a generous platform for rock bands. The biggest challenge, however, was to soundproof each of the building's three parts. That effective acoustical insulation means performances can take place simultaneously in the main concert hall, the restaurant and the WXPN studios.
Unfortunately, these requirements made the project so pricey that Dranoff could not afford the extra million dollars or so needed to extend the Walnut Street sidewalks to the building line, as he did at the Left Bank. There, the extension of the sidewalks magically transformed a stranded island into a full-fledged member of the city grid. World Cafe Live still feels stuck behind a moat.
That's a shame, because the music club can be a powerful pedestrian magnet that speeds the area's transformation. World Cafe Live was always expected to draw patrons from Center City across the hostile Walnut Street Bridge, but it became clear on opening night that many suburban music fans are willing to take the train to 30th Street Station and walk to the hall. They should not have to cross a drawbridge to reach such an important and invigorating cultural attraction. |
