Market East doesn’t need the Sixers arena to make a comeback

I never understood why anyone thought that a Sixers arena would be the answer to Market East’s problems. It’s not just that the enormous box would have been dormant throughout the workday and more than 200 nights a year. Or that the project would have destroyed the most successful portion of the Fashion District mall, compromised Jefferson Station, and wreaked havoc on nearby Chinatown, one of Philadelphia’s liveliest neighborhoods.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s embrace of the Sixers project was part of the same magical thinking that gave us the original Gallery shopping mall, the belief that One Big Thing will save Market Street. But the mall didn’t do the trick. Neither did the Convention Center. Nor the remake of Independence Mall.

What will save Market Street is many small, incremental things. It takes a lot more work and coordination to implement discrete measures. And for that, you need a master plan, overseen by the city’s planning staff, not outsourced to a trio of high-flying billionaires focused on their own interests.

The last time Philadelphia planners took a serious look at Market Street was in 2009, right after City Council approved a casino for what was still called the Gallery. While that proposal died the death it deserved, the plan laid the groundwork for the East Market development, which used existing buildings and streets as a basis for reinventing the block between 11th and 12th Streets. That project remains a model for how to do large-scale, mixed-use redevelopment in a city with a colonial-era street grid and a wealth of historic buildings.

If Philadelphia was less in thrall to big-money players, the Parker administration would have undertaken a similar planning exercise before it handed Market East over to the Sixers. Yes, the city did issue several impact studies. But those assemblages of data were not plans, and the findings were promptly ignored anyway. The Center City District and Comcast came up with ideas that looked a little more like plans. But not one of those studies grappled with the kind of concrete legislative, budgetary, or zoning actions necessary to get from A to B and initiate a true transformation.

The Parker administration has been telling us for months that it will eventually get around to doing a master plan for Market Street. With the impending loss of Macy’s as a major presence on the corridor, there’s no time to waste.

And even though the Sixers have washed their hands of Market Street, the owners should still foot the bill, just as they promised. After all, city workers spent two years and thousands of hours smoothing the way for the arena, only to have the Sixers say, “Never mind.” They owe us.

But let’s not limit the exercise to Market Street. We’ve been too fixated on the problems of this one retail street and the fate of its two behemoths, the Fashion District and the former Wanamaker Building. The entire east side of Center City urgently needs an intervention.

The east side is a distinct neighborhood with a common history. The area — Chestnut to Market, from Sixth to Broad — emerged as the city’s main office and retail destination after the Civil War. With the completion of City Hall in 1901, those streets went into a slow decline as shops and wealth shifted to the west side. The 2020 pandemic, and the retail apocalypse that followed, further diminished commerce that remained on the east side of Broad.

Today, at least half a dozen enormous legacy buildings on the east side are struggling with vacancy. That includes the ground floors of Lit Bros., Strawbridge’s, the Public Ledger building, the Blum store, and the grand Ninth Street post office, plus the perennially blighted Cunningham Piano building. I recently counted 30 vacant storefronts on Chestnut Street alone. Wanamakers has almost as much office space as Liberty Place, most of it empty.

But to paraphrase the great Philadelphia adman Elliott Curson, Market East isn’t as bad as Philadelphians say it is.

The district has what urban planners call “assets.” The area offers the best transit connections in the region and should get better with the reopening of PATCO’s Franklin Square station later this year. With its movie theater, bowling alley, and two-story Primark, the westernmost block of the Fashion District is still a big draw. Chinatown, which is right next door, often feels as busy as Walnut Street.

The area has also seen an influx of experiential attractions expected to open soon. In the last few months, paintball courses, Formula 1 simulators, arcade games, and indoor bounce houses for kids have burrowed into the spaces once occupied by clothing and furniture retailers. There are nights when Chestnut Street is awash in twentysomethings. Thanks to all those enormous store lots, the east side has a future as an entertainment district.

Because the area was Philadelphia’s original office district, it also retains an astonishing number of ornate, early skyscrapers, the kind that give Chicago and New York their reputation for architectural innovation. Although some of these towers have already been turned into apartments, plenty of others, like the 1894 Watkins building (a.k.a. Society Hill Furniture), appear to be languishing.

Unlike the big department stores, which have immense floor plates, these slim, historic towers are easier to convert to residential use. Adding more apartments and increasing the neighborhood’s population density would provide more customers for local shops and make the area feel safer. Janice Woodcock, who ran the planning department for the Street administration, says city leaders should revive the strategies developed in the 1990s and outlined in an influential report titled “Turning on the Lights Upstairs.”

These improvements won’t just happen on their own, of course. Both the old towers and big department stores have structural challenges that increase construction costs. Very likely, the Wanamaker Building’s owners will have to core out portions of the building’s floors to create light wells for apartments. Meanwhile, small buildings, like Society Hill Furniture, don’t yield enough units to make conversions worth the effort. Chestnut Street is lined with such modest, mid-rise buildings.

Because it will take extra creativity to reuse the east side’s legacy buildings, the city needs to create an organizing entity to lobby for the neighborhood. Not exactly a special services district, since the Center City District already covers the area and provides cleaning and security. But the east side requires a dedicated curator of some kind to make sure the city doesn’t lose interest. The district should include the Roundhouse block, between Race and Arch, much of which was leveled as part of urban renewal in 1963.

An east side curator would start by identifying tax incentives to offset high construction costs. Mark Merlini, who was part of the team at Brickstone Realty that saved the Lits Building from demolition in the late 1980s, would like to see a residential version of the state’s Keystone Opportunity Zone.

The creation of a KOZ is what enabled the massive development now taking place at Schuylkill Yards, but it is intended only for new construction. Gov. Josh Shapiro, however, just created a special fund to revive historic commercial areas in downtown Pittsburgh. Why not a similar fund for Philadelphia’s east side? The city could also do its part by offering a special 10-year tax abatement for new residential construction in the district (instead of the five-year version available citywide).

The Philadelphia Parking Authority, in partnership with Gilbane, is about to reconstruct the crumbling parking garage at 10th and Ludlow. The main facade — long blighted — actually faces Chestnut Street. It has been redesigned to look like a real building and accommodate retail. The new garage will be able to support a tower (or two). Those projects are more likely to happen once incentives are in place.

The city should also explore several zoning changes to encourage new development. It wouldn’t take much to eliminate off-street parking requirements for new buildings in the east side special district. Not only does it cost a lot to equip a high-rise building with a parking garage, the negotiations with neighborhood groups over the exact number of spaces wastes a lot of time. As it is, the east side already has too many garages and surface lots.

Speaking of which, it’s time the city stopped enabling the owners of the two oldest surface lots on Market Street: the so-called Disney hole and the lot at 13th Street. Under the city’s zoning laws, surface parking lots must renew their license every five years. By rubber-stamping these requests for almost half a century, the city has given the owners a steady revenue stream that has allowed them to hold out for a big redevelopment payday. It’s time to stop the speculation, Merlini and several planners told me.

An east side curator wouldn’t just act as a lobbyist for developers. That person could work with Jefferson Health to repopulate the empty retail in its Chestnut Street buildings and could help the owners of the big department stores create a Center City version of the Bok building’s creative incubator. A curator might even be able to persuade film companies to build studios in the large spaces.

It was odd to hear the mayor speak recently about restoring Market Street as a place for high-end retail. Neither Market nor Chestnut Street is likely to be a retail destination again. For better or worse, online shopping is here to stay, and downtown shopping districts will continue to shrink. The best Market Street can expect is mixed-use towers that include some retail space on the ground floor.

For many residential developers, Market Street is a hard sell. It’s not just the existence of so many blighted properties between Ninth and 10th (which have the same owner as the Fashion District). The street still feels like a commercial place. But a curator could use temporary strategies, like pop-ups and outdoor concerts, to help domesticate the street.

Imagine a lush, outdoor beer garden like the one the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society runs on South Street. For years, the Free Library has been trying to find bigger quarters for its Independence branch at Seventh and Market, which serves Chinatown and Washington Square West. Putting the library in a street-facing space at the Fashion District would give residents from the surrounding area another reason to come to Market Street.

That may sound like a small thing compared with a $1.3 billion sports arena. But such step-by-step changes on Market and Chestnut Streets are far more likely to produce a real neighborhood over the long haul, one that feels like an organic part of Philadelphia.