Open Streets Sundays in Philly are great. Now do it for real.

It’s not every day you see a baby chilling on its back in the middle of Walnut Street, and for very good reason — babies are squishy and generally well-liked. But during Open Streets: West Walnut on Sunday, I saw just that, a baby on an area rug in the center of the road, without a care in his car-free little world.

The tiny guy wasn’t the only one enjoying being all up in the street — there was also a stilt walker strutting her stuff, an Equinox exercise class of overachievers doing forearm planks, and a street performer who was blowing bubbles and blowing little kids’ minds.

During the second Sunday of this four-week Open Streets experiment, in which seven blocks of Walnut and 18th Streets in Rittenhouse are closed to vehicles for the day, Philadelphians came out in their best dresses and Phillies jerseys, with their dogs and babies, not to attend some big crowded festival, but just to enjoy life in the streets of the city they love.

Outdoor dining at restaurants like Pietro’s and Parc was packed, even with expanded seating into the street. Artists painted away and peddled their wares in busy Rittenhouse Square, and street performers — from saxophone and violin players to Philly street-poet-for-hire, Marshall James Kavanaugh, practiced their crafts and enriched the experience of being in this corner of the world on that day.

I saw the city alive, I felt its character, much like I hoped when, earlier this year, I joined the chorus of people calling for a car-free zone in Philly, after visiting Boston and experiencing the lively busking scene in the pedestrian-only zone around Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market.

As someone who loves to drive, I never thought I’d wish for car-free streets, but the more I travel, the more I realize how important pedestrian-only zones are to a city’s soul. Nobody remembers a street filled with cars, but they do remember a street filled with people and performers (and cute dogs, so many cute dogs).

The first time I stood in the middle of a road in Philadelphia without fear of death or dismemberment was when the city was closed to vehicles for three square miles during Pope Francis’ visit here in 2015. I’ll never forget the incredibly euphoric (and only slightly postapocalyptic) feeling of standing in the middle of North Broad Street, staring up at City Hall in awe.

It felt like magical realism. It felt like a different city. It still looked like Philly but everything seemed lighter and brighter — especially the other people who were around me in the street.

Inspired by that experience, a group of residents successfully advocated for the city to make closing streets to cars an annual thing under a program called Philly Free Streets. From 2016 to 2019, Philadelphia made several miles of a road (or several connecting roads) pedestrian-only for a few hours, one day a year. The first year it was South Street, the last two, North Broad.

The program stopped during the pandemic. Sure, Sansom Street was closed to traffic during some of the pandemic to accommodate outdoor dining and Martin Luther King Drive was shut down to cars for recreation (and remains so on weekends from March to October), but Philly Free Streets never returned.

So I was pretty excited when I got a release from the Center City District announcing they were starting their own pedestrian-only street program every Sunday this month.

Prema Katari Gupta, president and CEO of the Center City District, said that unlike the Philly Free Streets program, which promoted bicycling, running, and exercise (then-Mayor Jim Kenney even led a “power walk” the first year, if you can believe it), Open Streets: West Walnut was created to promote shopping and dining.

“First and foremost, the Center City District is a business improvement district and so this is very much an event that is supposed to support the restaurants and retailers,” Gupta said. “We’ll be collecting a lot of data on restaurant volume, pedestrian volume, and demographics to see how does this street do compared to when there are cars on it.”

Naysayers have long claimed preventing cars on city streets will prevent people from shopping or dining there, but some studies have shown otherwise and many of the shops and restaurants I saw Sunday were teeming with people.

Gupta said her team did outreach to area businesses prior to the event and the response was largely favorable. She said the first day of Open Streets there was a feeling of “collective effervescence” and even her teen daughter thought the event was cool, “which made it all that more magical.”

“I think people wanted something special and something different,” she said. “The hope is that there are lessons for other neighborhoods here too. I think a lot about how much time we all spend on screens, and doing real things with real people in real places is the only real anecdote.”

Gupta said the data her team is collecting will “fact check the vibes” of Open Streets, to see if it truly was a success and should be brought back or replicated elsewhere.

But Gupta isn’t sure a permanent pedestrian-only street makes sense, noting that restaurants and retailers need deliveries (in some totally car-free places I’ve been to, like Cinque Terre, Italy, deliveries are often made in the very early morning).

“I don’t know there’s a car-free agenda on any of this but we do need to think critically about our default usage of these places and maybe there could be more time and space to pedestrians,” she said.

State Sen. Nikil Saval, whose district covers Rittenhouse, enjoyed attending the first Open Streets this month with his son. He said that despite Philadelphia being an extremely walkable city (we’ve been named the most walkable city in the country in USA Today’s Readers Choice Awards for two years in a row), Philly still has a long way to go.

Bike safety activists and street calming advocates point to the death of Barbara Friedes, a medical resident at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who was killed by a driver in July while biking on Spruce Street near 18th — just blocks away from the event this weekend — as urgent evidence that more needs to be done.

“There’s much more to do on traffic-calming measures, closing streets more often, or pedestrianizing permanently some street. We unlearned some of the lessons of the pandemic when it comes to outdoor dining and closed streets,” Saval said. “We need to embrace that we have an overall pedestrian-friendly city that can grow dramatically if we start to do more Open Streets initiatives.”

And what would it take to get a permanent pedestrian-only street, something which people have been calling for now for more than a decade?

“Overwhelmingly, it’s an issue of political will,” Saval said. “The initiative of the Center City District should be applauded because it creates a mass experience that in part creates a political will. Any political leader who attends will have a positive experience.”

So I’d like to ask all of our politicians — city, state, and federal — to try to make it to an Open Streets day (there are two left) and see for yourself (and, ultimately, for the rest of us) just how good the streets of Philadelphia look and feel when populated with people instead of automobiles.

Open Streets: West Walnut will run again from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sept. 22 and Sept. 29. During that time, 18th Street from Locust to Chestnut and Walnut Street from 15th to 19th will be closed to vehicular traffic.