The Sixers aren’t the first team to eye Center City. Here’s why it didn’t work for the Phillies.

Feeling a bit of déjà vu?

No wonder. The Sixers on Thursday revealed a proposal for a new arena that would take over part of Center City at 10th and Market Streets. That’s not far from where then-Philadelphia Mayor John Street wanted to build a Phillies stadium more than two decades ago at 12th and Vine Streets.

The idea of building a Center City ballpark seemed fanatical at the time, generating fast and fierce pushback from Chinatown businesses and residents. Even Phillies executives, who were originally in the market for a downtown location, weren’t fans, preferring what’s now the team’s current home in the South Philadelphia sports complex.

“The Chinatown site poses significant challenges, including parking, accessibility, traffic, timing and cost,” a Phillies executive said at the time.

» READ MORE: Everything we know about the Sixers’ plans for a new Center City arena

The Sixers’ proposal calls for demolishing a block of the Fashion District Philadelphia shopping center. But whether the project gets a green light remains to be seen.

“We are going to have our own Madison Square Garden,” but newer, with a “world-class team in a new shiny arena,” said developer David J. Adelman, who is part of the $1.3 billion proposal.

By contract, here is a quick look at the Center City Phillies stadium that never was.

Proposed in the spring of 2000, the location at 12th and Vine was Street’s favorite from a host of options put forward by a panel charged with recommending a home for the Phillies and the Eagles. Other options included Northern Liberties, the Delaware River waterfront, Port Richmond, Broad and Spring Garden Streets, and South Philadelphia.

The 15-acre, 44,000-seat ballpark was targeted to open in 2003.

“This is much more than a stadium decision,” Street said in supporting the Chinatown location. “This is, in fact, the kind of decision that establishes a city for years to come.”

Street’s pick came as a bit of a surprise: The location had been written off in the past because of concerns that included cost and traffic. But the decision was ultimately up to the mayor, who said his “gut always told [him] Center City.”

Street’s choice did not have widespread support.

News of the proposed project “was sounded like a Mayday call,” The Inquirer wrote at the time, leading to rallies and packed City Council hearings.

John Chin, the longtime executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp., said the community wouldn’t “go down without a fight.”

“We’ll sit in front of bulldozers if we have to,” he said.

» READ MORE: What would you name a new Sixers arena?

On June 8, 2000, hundreds marched to protest the proposed stadium. The majority of Chinatown’s more than 100 businesses closed for the afternoon to participate.

“The mayor has reduced our community to a bunch of restaurants,” a 16-year-old said at the rally. “How many people will actually stick around after the baseball game? The only people that will be sticking around will be the drunks.”

“Would you want to live in a neighborhood where 80 nights a year 45,000 people walk through?” another rally participant said.

Chin this week called the new Sixers’ proposal “exciting” but said residents would likely be “cautious” about embracing the concept.

Despite Street’s desire for the Phillies to have a downtown ballpark — like major-league teams in Baltimore, Denver, San Francisco, and more — the public outcry proved too great to overcome. Those pushing for the stadium promised that the revenue generated by the city would cover any cost to the residents.

But after months of criticism, the city ultimately settled on a South Philly location not far from where Veterans Stadium stood — and across the street from where the Eagles would build their new home, Lincoln Financial Field. The Inquirer wrote in November 2000 that the decision served as Street’s acknowledgment that a downtown ballpark was “simply too expensive and too complicated to work.”

“Mayors don’t always get what they want,” Street said at the time.

Meanwhile, in Chinatown, the residents let out a collective sigh of relief.

“Now we can go on with our lives,” said Cecilia Yep, founder of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp.

But there was a caveat in Street’s announcement. After previously calling the Center City site revenue-neutral, he then warned that taxpayers would now need to kick in more money initially than the city would get back for the South Philly location. Street and others said they believed development of businesses, hotels, and other event venues around the new stadiums would eventually bring tax revenue to the city.

“The taxpayer, in the end, is going to pay more money than he or she should for something we could have done without acrimony and without pressure and stress,” said then-City Councilmember (and now Mayor) Jim Kenney.

Mike Rosen, head of the now-defunct Philadelphia Virtual Reality Center, which worked with the Phils’ architecture firm Ewing Cole on location scouting, told The Inquirer in 2016 that the site would have been an “economic driver.”

“You would have reenergized that part of the city, similar to Baltimore,” he said. “It would have activated that whole corner of Spring Garden.”

Streets would have been closed and traffic rerouted to make the plan work, but the benefits outweighed the potential costs, Rosen said.

“It would have created, right there in the heart of the city, its own vitality,” he added. “When people got out of the gate, they would head into the neighborhoods and fill the restaurants as opposed to just hopping in your car and leaving.”

But when it came to the Chinatown location, Rosen wasn’t so thrilled.

“It just didn’t work there,” he said. “You couldn’t get to it.”

The Sixers believe that they’ve solved the transportation problem — or they will have by the time the planned arena would open in 2031 — and that relocating to 10th and Market would have a similar effect to what the Phillies were hoping to achieve when they first dreamed of moving to Center City.

“We have the luxury of a really long time before this is on the ground, and we are having a lot of conversations with workers, contractors and businesses, knowing that we are generating a lot of economic opportunity for diverse Philadelphians,” said David Gould, chief diversity officer for Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, the Sixers’ ownership group.