About the Stoops:

In the 2017 public art project, Monument Lab, Philadelphia artist and professor Kaitlin Pomerantz installed On the Threshold (Salvaged Stoops, Philadelphia): "...a monument to a beloved symbol of Philadelphia neighborhood culture: the stoop, or step(s). Pomerantz noted, the stoop is 'a threshold between private and public space . . . [it] functions as a site of social interaction, of relaxation, and of participation.'...

Responding to extensive renovations and redevelopment currently taking place across the city, Pomerantz intercepted historic building materials from demolition sites that would otherwise end up in the waste stream and installed a dozen stoops in Washington Square Park."(1) Pomerantz remarked, “As relics of bygone buildings, the stoops also invite viewers to contemplate history, lives lost and buried histories. These pieces of material history recall the unmarked lives and stories buried below the soil.”

Unaware of one another, the Garden had begun gathering stoops from demolished buildings in the riverwards to create seating and quietly echo the rowhouses that used to stand where the garden is now. Learning about each other's stoop obsessions, EWG collaborated with Pomerantz and local heroes Thunderbird Salvage to bring two of the stoops from On the Threshold to the Garden when the show was breaking down. One is the stoop from Rocket Cat Cafe, saved from the cafe demolition. In the early 2000's the Cafe was the homebase for artists, musicians, and community changemakers. The other Threshold stoop was from the Sharswood Neighborhood, where in 2017, some of the most intense demolition in the City's history took place (three other stoops from the project originating in Sharswood returned to that neighborhood, and now sit at the North Philly Peace Park).