IT'S ALMOST TIME for One Liberty Place to yield its status as Center City Philadelphia's tallest building. That's the Liberty Place spire peaking out from that traffic sign on the westbound Schuylkill Expressway (a Yield sign: a coincidence? I think not.) As you can see, the construction of the Comcast Tower concrete center -- think of it as the chewy nugat center of a chocolate office building -- has almost reached to the top of the spire that changed the face of Center City. By the end of 2007, the cable giant's corporate headquarters will be the tallest building in Philadelphia at 975 feet, surpassing Liberty Place by 30 feet.

When ground was broken for Liberty Place on May 13, 1985 (talk about a day in Philadelphia that will live in infamy) it followed a century of City Hall Tower being that tallest structure in the city, after debuting as the tallest public building in North America (548 feet including the 37-foot-tall bronze statue of William Penn) after ground was broken for City Hall in 1870. It required months of debate by politicians and civic and architechtural spokesmen and just plain folks for Philadelphia to agree with the "idea" of changing its skyline after being dominated so benignly for so many years under the brim of that Quaker hat.

I'll admit it. . .I was a total Billy Penn Hat Rule guy. I thought the restriction on the size of Center City structures was a way of preventing Philadelphia from looking "just like" any other American city that wasn't New York or Chicago. I thought our city's low and impressive skyline served our nature. You could not enter Center City from any sort of a distance without understanding that you had arrived at an important place. Philadelphia may have been low and gray, but it was solid as stone. It had a concrete core, much like the Comcast Tower's 54 inch-thick reinforced concrete walls of the come-and-get-me-terrorists center core, which is Center City's first highrise since 2001. But City Hall Tower's walls are 22 feet thick. What did they know?

But you can't stand anywhere near City Hall and the Masonic Temple, near Wanamakers and the Reading Terminal, without falling in love all over again with concrete and brick Philadelphia. Solid my friends. And we are part of it. From Arch Street you can see the red glowing brick of the Verizon Center, or the Bell Telephone Tower, or whatever they're calling it these days.. But doesn't it look like a phone jack from the side? And hasn't it always? Such a wonderful building.

I think it's fair to say that startiing with Liberty Place, the first building among so many that broke the Billy Penn Hat Rule (find City Hall Tower in that photo above), what we have gotten are handsome buildings that not only enhance, but enchant. I love the Cira Centre. It should be called the Horizon Building. It tells you what kind of day you're in. All angles and refections and total deceit. We have been blessed with wonderful buildings, or at least buildings that do not send the villagers running out into the night with torches seeking the architect of Frankenstein's monster. We love our buildings. We notice them and require them. After all, they're ours.