On a warm Thursday evening at 23rd, South, and Grays Ferry, the café tables fill up before the band finishes setting up. Someone grabs a soft serve from the walk-up window at Igloo. A couple carries drinks over from Grace Tavern and claims two of the Adirondack chairs circled around the stone fountain at the center of the plaza, the one with the worn relief carving that most people walk past without reading closely. Kids pull Indego bikes out of the rack at the edge of the space. None of it looks temporary.
But it is, on paper. The block of Grays Ferry Avenue underneath all of it has been operating on a renewable street-closure permit since 2013, and the paperwork has never caught up to how permanent the place has become.
A Fountain for Horses, a Street That Never Quite Closed for Good
The stone basin at the plaza's center wasn't built as a gathering spot. The Women's Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals installed it in 1901 as a drinking trough, memorializing a woman named Catherine Thorn, with water for horses on the upper tier and a lower basin for dogs. For most of the twentieth century it sat at a leftover, mostly ignored triangle of pavement where Grays Ferry Avenue's diagonal cut across the neighborhood's street grid.
The South of South Neighborhood Association, known locally as SOSNA, spent close to a decade lobbying to do something with that leftover space before then-Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson signed off on closing the northern slip lane to traffic in 2013. Volunteers fixed the fountain, added planters and café furniture, and turned an underused stretch of asphalt into what SOSNA still calls Triangle Plaza. It became, by most local accounts, the busiest informal gathering space in the neighborhood.
What it didn't become was permanent. The city classifies it as an impermanent pedestrian plaza, and SOSNA has renewed the closure on a recurring three-year pilot permit ever since. Reporting from Billy Penn in April 2024 noted the plaza was in its third such permit cycle, which means the volunteers who maintain it have had to keep re-justifying the space to the city roughly every three years since Obama's second term.
The Grant That's Supposed to End the Renewals
That renewal cycle is what the Grays Ferry Triangles Gateway project is meant to close out. In March 2024, Pennsylvania's Department of Community and Economic Development awarded the city a $1.6 million grant toward the plan, part of an estimated $3 million total cost that SOSNA expects will come mostly from state and city sources rather than neighborhood fundraising.
The redesign itself has been sitting on file since 2015, when SOSNA's Triangles Committee worked with the firm Bergmann Associates on a permanent layout. The stipulations from that process still define the current plan:
- Concrete replacing the painted asphalt, closing the gap between the plaza and the existing sidewalk
- Stone benches cut from Wissahickon schist, arranged around the fountain in a loose, campfire-style circle
- Cobblestone paving in concentric rings, designed to slow foot traffic and manage stormwater runoff
- A matching upgrade to the pair of smaller, less-developed triangles two blocks south at Bainbridge Street
Grant money solves the funding problem. It hasn't solved the permit problem, because the same application also folds in a second, more contested piece of infrastructure a few blocks away.
The Street Reversal That Isn't Really About the Plaza
The Bainbridge Street intersection, where Grays Ferry Avenue crosses 23rd and 24th, backs up badly during rush hour, in part because both streets run the same direction and funnel everything through one bottleneck. SOSNA's proposed fix is to reverse South 24th Street between Bainbridge and Lombard, switching it from one-way southbound to one-way northbound so drivers coming up Grays Ferry have somewhere else to go besides Bainbridge.
A city traffic study found the reversal would have minimal impact and called it viable. Residents on the other side of South Street weren't as convinced. Fitler Square Neighborhood Association members raised concerns that redirected traffic would land on Naudain Street, near the Philadelphia School, and pushed back on the idea that SOSNA should be shaping traffic patterns in a neighborhood it doesn't formally represent.
SOSNA board member Stephen Rodriguez has said the plaza renovation and the street reversal aren't strictly linked, and that the reversal could happen on its own timeline. But both pieces sit inside the same Gateway grant application, which means the fight over one has become, functionally, a delay on the other.
What's Actually Changed So Far
The most recent published account of the plaza, from February 2026 in Urban Land magazine, describes it in almost the same terms as the reporting from a decade earlier: closed to cars, filled with planters and café tables, still asphalt rather than the concrete the 2015 design called for. SOSNA president Lauren Vidas told the magazine the transformation has held regardless of the permit status:
"A block that saw little to no street activity is now one of the most popular places for neighbors to meet, listen to live music, and enjoy dinner or dessert."
One small change has already happened quietly. When the plaza first closed in 2013, SOSNA appended three back-in parking spaces along its southern edge as a concession to residents worried about lost street parking. Those spaces have since been phased out with, according to Vidas, little pushback, which suggests the parking argument that once slowed the project down has largely resolved itself in practice, even without a permanent plaza to show for it.
The Calendar Runs on Volunteers, Not Permits
None of the administrative uncertainty has interrupted the plaza's actual use. SOSNA runs a Thursday Night Music series through the warmer months, with local bands playing while Grace Tavern and Igloo handle the food and drink. Every spring, the plaza hosts Plazapalooza, SOSNA's street festival with food trucks, face painting, and a rotating lineup of local performers, a tradition that's outlasted more than one presidential administration at this point.
A few blocks north at 22nd and Carpenter, the Friends of Julian Abele Park runs its own parallel calendar of concerts and community events, a reminder that the neighborhood's public space south of South Street has always depended more on volunteer committees than on city capital budgets. If you've spent a summer evening at either spot, you've already lived the Graduate Hospital version of civic infrastructure: built by neighbors first, formalized by the city later, if at all.
The fountain has been there since 1901. The plaza around it has been there since 2013. The permit that makes the plaza legal has never lasted longer than three years at a time, and the grant meant to fix that is currently waiting on a street-direction argument between two neighborhood associations. For everyone who's already claimed a table there on a Thursday night, that's the part of the story the space itself doesn't tell you.
If you're weighing a move to a block near South Street or trying to figure out how a corner like this one shapes day-to-day life in the neighborhood, The Stawasz Group knows Graduate Hospital block by block, including the parts of it that are still, technically, a work in progress. Reach out through tsg.homes/contact if you want a local read on what's actually settled and what isn't.
