Paul R. Levy, president and CEO of Philadelphia's Center City District, speaks with disarming candor about his "insanely ambitious" 1999 attempt to reimagine the city's grand diagonal boulevard, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, as a higher-density urban space.

D. Moran/Parkway Museums District.View of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway from Philadelphia's City Hall.

"This was an idea that flopped," says Mr. Levy, whose special-services district is credited with helping revitalize the city's residential and commercial core. "This plan had many components that were overwhelmingly rejected by lots of people," including major traffic re-engineering and building housing on a popular ball field. On the other hand, Mr. Levy says, "I think the notion of re-pedestrianizing the parkway caught on."

"The best idea," says Harris Steinberg, founding executive director of PennPraxis and author of the current blueprint for the parkway, "was really the overarching idea: How do you connect this into the life of the city?"

Mr. Steinberg's city-commissioned plan, "More Park, Less Way," focuses on turning four parcels of underutilized open space into lively neighborhood parks with amenities such as yoga, volleyball, chess boards, food kiosks and cultural programming. The aim is to make the parkway as enticing a destination for city residents—especially the 70,000 who live within a 10-minute walk—as it is for tourists. As a model, Mr. Steinberg points to New York's recent success in transforming an elevated railroad spur into the High Line and Times Square into a pedestrian plaza.

Influenced by the turn-of-the-20th-century City Beautiful movement, Beaux-Arts architecture and the boulevards of Paris, the Fairmount Parkway (its original name) was designed to link the industrial city to Fairmount Park. Completed in 1918 after the demolition of about 1,600 structures, it is bordered by the city's most august cultural institutions, including the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Franklin Institute.

But the Depression slowed building along the parkway, and the mid-20th-century dominance of the automobile created a highway pocked with barren blocks. The result was a far cry from either the urban boulevard envisioned by the architect Paul Cret and others, or the garden-laced promenade designed by landscape architect Jacques Gréber.

"We got left with this dramatic break in the fabric of the city," Mr. Levy says, with anomalies such as "the daily run for art," between Eakins Oval and the art museum, and "the sidewalk to nowhere," leading into oncoming traffic.

While Mr. Levy's first plan for the parkway also went nowhere, a second, more modest one, in 2003-04, laid the groundwork for what he calls "small-scale incremental improvements," costing about $20 million in public and private money.

The formerly inhospitable roadway now has bike lanes and crosswalks, renovated sidewalks and benches, nighttime illumination, new parks and cafés, better signage, and a restored Rodin Museum. Logan Circle, with its elegant Swann Memorial Fountain, has sprouted gardens, and Sister Cities Park, formerly a homeless encampment, has a splash fountain and wading pool, a garden, a café and regular programming.

One spur to the continuing improvements was the move of the Barnes Foundation's galleries to the parkway in May 2012. As Mr. Levy had hoped, other development also is coming: A Mormon temple is under construction at nearby 17th and Vine streets, while three hotel groups are vying to occupy the Family Court building, with its New Deal murals, on the 1800 block of Vine.

Contemplating the parkway, "I had the question, 'Now that we fixed it up, what do we want it to be?'" says Michael DiBerardinis, the city's deputy mayor for environmental and community resources and commissioner of the Department of Parks and Recreation. Mr. DiBerardinis commissioned the report by PennPraxis, the "clinical" arm of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design.

PennPraxis and Mr. Steinberg are known for their broad consultative process, which they used to develop a vision for the city's Delaware River waterfront in 2006-07. Mr. Steinberg says he is interested in "large-scale civic conversations," which often focus on "fixing up the messes of the past."

Because of its views and proportions, the parkway is "the most elegant urban boulevard in the U.S.," Mr. Steinberg says, in an interview that begins at Café Cret, at 16th and Arch streets, and concludes near the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the parkway's western endpoint. "But once you get up close and granular, that's where it's fallen apart."

Mr. DiBerardinis says that the city administration is committed to spending $5 million, about half in public money, to create Mr. Steinberg's parks and make related fixes, including new crosswalks, during the next two years. "These kinds of investments do have measurable economic impact," he says.

As a demonstration project, Philadelphia last month opened a pop-up park in one of the four designated spaces, Eakins Oval, in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Renamed The Oval, and designed to be a "conceptual beach" through Aug. 18, the area has a stage for musical performances, food trucks, ping pong tables, giant chess and checker boards, sandboxes, misting fans and daily programming.

The PennPraxis approach has drawn a mild rebuke from Inga Saffron, the Philadelphia Inquirer's architecture critic. "For all those good, small ideas," she wrote in February, "the new plan shies away from confronting the fundamental design issues that are the source of the Parkway's failure," including what she called "the killer crossing at Eakins Oval."

"Of course it's not enough—and that's not a criticism," Mr. Levy says of "More Park, Less Way." He still argues that "we need to have more city" along the parkway. "If I were to paraphrase Harris's title," he says, "it would be 'More Density, Less Emptiness.' Big, empty open spaces only work if there are people to use them."

Begun in the 1870s, the conversation about the parkway is sure to continue, says David Brownlee, an architectural historian at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art" (1989). "From a historical perspective, the safest thing to say is that the idea of the parkway has changed from decade to decade, certainly from generation to generation," Mr. Brownlee says. "Every generation of Philadelphians has had the parkway they wanted."

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