June 10, 2026
Kristin Hunt/PhillyVoice
FloatLab, a collaboration between Mural Arts and Bartram's Garden, will offer visitors an eye-level view of the Schuylkill River when it opens this September.
The floating deck that pulled alongside 56th Street Plaza at Bartram's Garden early Wednesday morning didn't exactly blend into the background. Coated in a fluorescent shade of yellow, the spiraling steel structure clashed with the muted blues of the Schuylkill River and the cloudy gray sky above it. But when it opens in September, this unnatural object will help Philadelphia residents connect with the tidal wetlands and creatures that call it home.
The people behind FloatLab doubted this day would ever come. Mural Arts and Bartram's Garden began work on the project a decade ago, when Michael Nutter was still mayor. A few years later, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, shifting public priorities and jacking the price of steel up to prohibitive levels. As the world stabilized, Mural Arts and Bartram's Garden targeted a 2022 launch date.
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But the hits kept coming. The structure, which was assembled in Hertford, North Carolina, had to be moved out of concern for local turtles. Charting the FloatLab's journey north proved to be another monthslong headache as the waves in the Atlantic Ocean rose too high and other conditions proved uncooperative. Finally, on May 21, it departed a North Carolina shipyard and began crawling its way up to Philadelphia. The Island Trader tugboat dragged FloatLab into its new home around 6 a.m. Wednesday, with an assist from another tugboat named, appropriately, Gritty.
A tugboat named Gritty helped pull FloatLab into its installation site at Bartram's Garden early Wednesday morning.
"It's unbelievable," Jane Golden, executive director of Mural Arts, said as workers guided FloatLab along the river. "Because it's something that we've thought about for so long. I'm sort of in a state of shock, actually, that it happened."
FloatLab is billed as the nation's first tide-responsive public space. A ring of ballast chambers will keep the 75-foot-wide structure level with the surface of the water even as the tide rises and falls each day. Visitors will access the deck through a foot bridge, which will be installed over the summer.
That foot bridge, not the FloatLab itself, will move the most with the flowing water, according to Bartram's Garden Executive Director Maitreyi Roy. She likened the experience aboard FloatLab to being on dock rather than a rocking ship, giving "folks who are not very big on being on boats" an opportunity to see the Schuylkill River up close.
Workers help guide FloatLab across the Schuylkill River.
FloatLab will serve as an educational, artistic and recreational space. Golden and Roy envision it as a destination for school field trips where children will learn about the ecosystem and climate change. But they also see it as a performance space, launchpad for artist residencies and free site for fishing and kayaking.
The project serves the wider goals of Mural Arts and Bartram's Garden. For Roy, it's another piece in her yearslong mission to make the Southwest Philly green space more welcoming and accessible to the neighborhood. Golden, meanwhile, has been seeking ways to expand the practical aspects and wider scope of muralism as she prepares to retire next month.
More than anything, the people who spent 10 years working on FloatLab want to foster personal connections to nature.
"I firmly believe that people love and care for things that they have a relationship with," Roy said. "And our goal is to have these relationships, that people form a bond with the water that then will sustain its stewardship into the future."
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