This Pizza Is A Park

2021

Commissioned by the Riverfront North Partnership, Philadelphia, PA

Collaboration with Mary Welcome

This Pizza Is A Park is a cardboard monument to the forgotten river history of a Philadelphia neighborhood. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we distributed 5,600 custom-printed pizza boxes to a riverside community cutoff from their riverfront for two generations. Participants received a copy of the project when they ordered a large at Old English Pizza and Steaks on Orthodox Street during January - March of 2021.

The pizza box was printed with historic photographs, games, and riverfront history. The artists developed the visual design from archival research, vernacular streetside identity, and oral history interviews with community elders conducted over the phone during the pandemic lockdown.

More About the Project

Bridesburg is a small, working-class neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia. Since the neighborhood was established, its waterfront has attracted industry, including chemical companies and a petcoke refinery. Despite this, Bridesburg residents continued to use the river for fishing, play, and boating. However, all public waterfront access was blocked by industrial development by the 1960s. In 2021, the nonprofit Riverfront North Partnership and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation will break ground on a new park in the neighborhood and convert a former concrete factory into a public greenspace. For the first time in two generations, Bridesburg historic connection to the riverfront will be restored.

Though elders remember childhoods by the river, most Bridesburg residents don’t have a relationship with the river. This Pizza Is A Park was intended to reintroduce the riverbank.

The pizza box is based on the idea that a park is a space of community possibility, where people can play, share, and steward a space together. Before a park is built, it only exists in imagination, so that space of possibility is essentially limitless. The pizza box is a slice of the riverbank for people to play with. While the social-distancing conditions of the pandemic prevented gatherings and in-person exhibitions, the pizza box circulated via the network of a local pizzeria, entered private homes, and started conversations between whoever shares a pie.