Check out the Science Center’s futuristic Innovation Plaza

The University City Science Center has a new “pocket park” at 37th Street between Market and Chestnut.
They’re calling it Innovation Plaza, and it features the long-awaited Innovators Walk of Fame monuments, honoring people like futurist Buckminster Fuller (who has a new gastropub named after him in Point Breeze) and the women who worked on the ENIAC, like Jean Jennings Bartik and Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli. Its launch party was last Friday.
Backed by a state grant and a handful of donors, like Comcast, International House of Philadelphia and NewSpring Capital, it’s part of the Science Center’s ongoing investment in the Market Street corridor.
The park is inspired by the “Golden Section,” “the underlying proportion found in the design of all nature and life that has inspired architects and designers for millennia,” according to the release. “Scientists, mathematicians, engineers and artists all use the Golden Section as a foundational design structure. This proportion is infinitely scalable and is reflected in the two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements of the Plaza.”
But at last week’s Rise conference, CEO Steve Tang said it looked like the time tunnel from the ’60s TV show of the same name. There are even new bike racks.

Attendees of the Innovation Plaza pop-up party. (Photo by CJ Dawson Photography)

(Photo by CJ Dawson Photography)