The Venice Island Water Project, talked about for at least a decade and started at the end of the summer, seems close to completing its first phase. Between the Manayunk Canal and the Schuylkill River, between the Lock and Cotton Street bridges sits a strip of land that was, until very recently, home to basketball/hockey courts, a playground, a rec center, an abandoned pool, and a parking lot.

A year ago

The Venice Island Underground Water Storage Basin project will replace those old sites with state-of-the-art recreational facilities, a new performing arts center, 400-foot long underground water storage basin, a pumping house, and a new parking lot with entrances at both bridges. During the past few years there have been dozens of community meetings during which feedback from locals was collected, to make sure everyone was “on board.”

Rendering of the

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The Philadelphia Water Department says the $45M Venice Island Recreation Center remake project is now accepting bids. The plans we found (involving engineer Jerry Snyder, the City of Philadelphia and its Capital Program Office) are for the construction of a new recreation center,  performing arts center and the installation of an underground water-storage tank; and the replacement of the playground, park, basketball court, hockey rink and 175 parking spots (the pool will stay the same). The project (a collaboration between the PWD, Parks & Recreation and the Manayunk Development Corporation) will include more than 25,000 square feet of landscaped green space, according to Newsworks.org. Construction will begin later this year and will most likely take a few years. It’s well-known that during rainstorms the Schuylkill becomes a bacteria cocktail of sewage and…

The Manayunk Island (know to adults as 1 Leverington Avenue and to Realtors as Venice Island) that once held Carmella’s (which, for the record, we thought was great) and Arroyo Grille has been as sad as the ratings for the Lost/Greys Anatomy poser, Off The Map. The two acres are for sale or lease and according to zoning (RC1) can be used for a restaurant or a hotel (really?). Although the owner is desperate enough to consider a hotel, he is very specific as to what kind of restaurant he wants: “Asian or seafood-themed.” The 175,163-square-foot lot was bought in 1999 for $376,100 by Daniel Neducsin (d/b/a Ned Green Partnership and Venice Island Realty), one of the lucky Fitler Square residents who lives on Delancey Street. The lot, recorded as “grossly irregular” in shape, was almost a condo complex with roof deck and private…