If you’ve ever taken a trolley to or from West Philadelphia, you’ve likely passed through the 40th Street Trolley Portal, the location where the 11, the 13, the 34, and the 36 lines emerge from underground (or start their trip underground, depending on which way you’re traveling). Roughly 5,000 people board or get off a trolley here, at the spot where Woodland Avenue splits off from Baltimore Avenue, with tens of thousands of additional people riding past the stop on a daily basis. Historically, the aesthetics of this portal were, to be kind, from hunger. There was concrete everywhere, interspersed with some small, sad trees. Many wires hung from above, as you might expect. And some little shelters for people waiting for the trolley had ice block windows as a defining feature. This was a public space begging for a major makeover.

So it came as no surprise, back in 2012, when we learned that University City District had a plan to renovate the portal into a greened and pedestrian friendly plaza. Speaking of things that aren’t surprising, here we are, roughly six years later, and the project is now finally finished. By that we mean that just as real estate development projects tend to drag along and face all sorts of delays, public space projects tend to suffer from similar issues, but even more severely. The fact that both Septa and the City were involved helps explain why everything took so long, along with the fact that some of the costs of the project required serious fundraising by UCD.

Those challenges are now in the past though, and if you walk, bike, or trolley over to this location today, you will see that the portal is dramatically improved from its previous condition. The circle on its western end is now full of grass, shrubs, and small trees in planters. The transformation is truly epic on the eastern side of the portal, where the two-story Trolley Car Station restaurant has opened, bringing a new dining and drinking option to this location. The building looks sharp inside and out, and we suspect that the upscale diner-type options will play well at this address. We’re especially fond of all the seating surrounding the restaurant, and also appreciate the Indego station out front.

Perhaps our most significant complaint about the transformation of this space into the “Trolley Portal Gardens” is that the project managed to spend $4.5M but didn’t do anything to the trolley shelters themselves. It’s well and good that the people passing through the portal will have dramatically improved scenery and the new restaurant is a great addition, but it seems a little odd that the shelters still look like they’re stuck in the 1980s. Given UCD’s track record on public space projects (the ever-evolving Porch at 30th Street Station comes to mind), we have to think that they’ll keep tweaking things here, so perhaps the shelters will be in play in the near future. Even if that doesn’t happen for quite some time, the portal has improved by leaps and bounds over what it looked like before, and we believe its makeover might even inspire some more people to take advantage of public transportation.