As part of the Michael Baker Jr., Inc. Team, NTM’s Jeff MacKay, Paul DeBarry, John Yamashita, and Ryan Burrows entered the Infill Philadelphia: Soak It Up! Competition – a national design competition to promote the creative, innovative use of green stormwater infrastructure in Philadelphia and other cities. The competition was sponsored by the Philadelphia Water Department, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Community Design Collaborative.
Each team had to focus its design on one of three sites in Philadelphia:
1. Warehouse Watershed – A warehouse and a city-owned vacant lot that offered possibilities for public-private partnerships and the revitalization of a high-vacancy, mixed-use residential/industrial district.
2. Retail Retrofit – A retail strip center that had the potential to play a more central role in the surrounding neighborhood through improved walkability, pop-up space for community events, and access to river recreation.
3. Greening the Grid – An historic neighborhood with an engaged community and a dense network of streets, alleys, roofs, and open space that offered possibilities for an array of small-scale interventions.
NTM was the only firm teamed with Michael Baker Jr. in this competition. Jeff, Paul, John, and Ryan helped the Michael Baker Jr. Team with design option number two, Retail Retrofit. They helped redesign the Gray’s Ferry Shopping Center to include more environmentally-friendly aspects, such as bioretention islands, porous pavement, roof rain water harvesting, planter boxes capturing roof runoff, and complete elimination of polluted runoff from entering the combined sewer system. The Michael Baker Jr. Team design placed in the top three finalists out of 13 designs in the competition, and the team was invited to present its project at the competition awards ceremony. The final selection was made on March 7, 2013, at the reception held in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.