The Avenue of the Arts was once ‘the epicenter of Philadelphia.’ Recent development hopes to bring that back.

On a recent Friday night, Peter Caceci watched a band of jazz buskers approvingly as they attracted a small crowd in front of the Kimmel Center on South Broad Street.

“You can’t do this in the suburbs,” said Caceci, who plays live music all over Center City, but especially likes a spot in front of the storied Bellevue hotel just up the street. “People complain about the city, but this is where the arts are.”

For the last 30 years, this thoroughfare between City Hall and Washington Avenue has been known as the Avenue of the Arts — a sobriquet that dates to Ed Rendell’s first term as mayor 30 years ago. The investment of $330 million in state, city, and private dollars has proved a lasting legacy.

But after more than two years of a pandemic that brought the performing arts and dining out to a standstill, the Avenue of the Arts is figuring out how to meet its future.

“The pandemic was terrible,” Caceci said. “I was surprised by how desolate it got.

“It seems like commerce, in terms of trucking and cars, is back. White-collar work people are working again, but we are still missing a lot of people.”

Data from Placer.ai suggests a halting recovery, showing that monthly pedestrian activity on Broad Street between City Hall and Washington Avenue is still far below pre-pandemic volumes. But other metrics, such as occupancy rate of ground floor premises closer to City Hall and ticket sales at major institutions, are back or close to pre-pandemic levels.

Residential activity on the Avenue of the Arts is soaring, too. Developer Carl Dranoff’s interest in this stretch of Broad Street continues with the recent opening of the Arthaus condominium skyscraper at 301 S. Broad and two new projects in the planning. Other developers with proposals along the corridor include the Post Brothers and the Goldenberg Group.

“There’s just so much infill and new construction on the avenue. We’re restoring Broad Street to its position of preeminence in the city,” said Dranoff, a longtime Philadelphia developer who lives in Symphony House, his first condo project on the Avenue of the Arts. “That’s the way it was at the turn of the 20th century. We were the epicenter of Philadelphia and we’re getting that back.”

In many ways, this stretch of urban roadway highlights both the promise and the uncertainty of this moment.

While residential and restaurant interest is booming, there is unease about public safety, given the rise in gun violence in the city. People are generally driving crazier than before 2020. Illegal ATVs zip around with abandon. Residents and visitors to the area say there are more unhoused and mentally unwell people living on the street in the shadow of Arthaus than there used to be.

“The vibe is good, but I think the safety has gone down generally in the city,” said Gregory Costello, a waiter at Volvér, a restaurant in the Kimmel Center. “People are more aware of their surroundings when they go out. I’ll take an Uber when I go home. I’m not going to walk.”

These are the challenges facing much of Philadelphia and other American cities at this point in the pandemic. How can uneasiness about the perception of safety be squared with a welcoming environment that is attractive to visitors, workers, and residents alike? How can public space be remade anew?

It’s not that different of a question from the one city leaders faced in the early 1990s, when the Avenue of the Arts was launched to begin with.

When Rendell took office in 1992, Philadelphia was in dire economic straits. Fiscal crisis gripped the city, the mayor clashed with municipal unions, and crime was at its 20th-century height. Given his limited resources, Rendell was looking for winning ideas that already had buy-in.

A proposal for rebranding South Broad Street as the Avenue of the Arts had been in circulation for a decade or more. As modern skyscrapers went up along west Market Street in the 1980s, the elaborate Art Deco office buildings south of City Hall emptied out, leaving the identity and usage of the corridor in question.

“Ed has said many times when he became mayor, he didn’t have a lot of money to spend, and he didn’t have a lot of time,” Dranoff said. “So he looked at the shelf and picked out things that were already designed or thought about. One of them was this notion of the Avenue of the Arts.”

The city floated bonds, Harrisburg kicked in funds, and private donations were solicited to back the new mayor’s initiative.

These funds contributed to the construction of the Kimmel Center, which opened in 2001 as the new home to the world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra. But they also went to more quotidian placemaking with investment in sidewalks with fancy brick work, antiquated-looking light poles, and street improvements that briefly exiled the Mummers to do their strutting on east Market Street.

Opinion polls at the time showed that the Avenue of the Arts concept, which then extended to North Broad, as well, was among Rendell’s most popular policies. But this vision for South Broad Street clashed with the other realities of Center City life in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Back then, the nearby intersection of 13th and Locust was a byword for street sex work and open-air drug use. An effort to open a large strip club in the area was eventually fought off, although the owner told a reporter in 2002 that his business would fit right in, given the neighborhood’s tawdry reputation.

“This area is very eclectic, and I think it’s a little extreme to think we’re all going to start walking around in white tuxedos,” he said when asked about his proposed club’s proximity to the Avenue of the Arts.

Other challenges have more obvious parallels today. Late at night, South Broad Street can feel eerily empty, except for those who have nowhere else to go. Contemporary patrons of the Avenue of the Arts tell of having to step over the occasional pile of human waste.

That may sound familiar to the man who is now mayor of Philadelphia.

“It’s really getting ugly out there,” then Councilmember Jim Kenney said in 2002, before he introduced legislation that attempted to regulate aggressive panhandling. “People are seeing a side to Philadelphia they don’t have to see.”

The idealized vision of the Avenue of the Arts has long lived a bit uncomfortably alongside the realities of life in a large city with a high poverty rate.

“Many of our board members live in the city, walk the street, and we’ve all observed the ATVs, safety concerns, homelessness,” said Dianne Semingson, chair of Avenue of the Arts Inc., a nonprofit that promotes the area.

But avenue boosters emphasize that it is important to separate the wave of gun violence that has engulfed some Philadelphia neighborhoods and the more generalized sense of disorder in such areas as the Avenue of the Arts.

“I don’t think there’s been a whole lot of crime because we haven’t heard that,” Semingson said. “Certainly, there has to be some. But I’m not aware of carjackings or shootings or anything like that.”

About the same time that the possibility of a large strip club on a neighboring block was being fought back, Dranoff began developing Symphony House at 440 S. Broad. The 31-story condo building with the Suzanne Roberts Theatre in the basement was the first residential construction on the block in decades.

Since then, Dranoff has developed three more buildings, with two more planned, while the surrounding neighborhood filled in with renovations and new construction. He is a driving force behind the Avenue of the Arts rejuvenation effort. To that end, the Avenue of the Arts Inc. has hired the architectural consulting firm Gensler to draft a plan for the future of the area.

The goal is to modernize some of the placemaking touches of the Rendell administration, such as the lamps with their decorative illuminated A’s, add trees, and eliminate street parking on parts of South Broad Street.

But they also want to bring in new features, especially on the southern end of the Avenue of the Arts, where car-centric gas stations and drive-through fast-food restaurants are still prominent.

“Public realm improvements related to physical planning are on top of our list,” said Oliver Schaper, design director and a principal at Gensler. “Greenery through the avenue will be incorporated into a plan. As far as traffic calming, there’s an overall perception that there are spaces within the avenue that are perhaps too valuable to be used for cars.”

No decisions have been made. Gensler will present its findings to the public in November, when it releases a plan for the avenue’s future. City Council buy-in would be needed to make any dramatic streetscape changes, and Broad Street boosters hope a new mayor could be a champion for the area, too.

But there are also harder-to-answer questions of how to change public perceptions of safety and make people comfortable with going out again at this point in the pandemic.

On the avenue, as Caceci watches his fellow buskers at work, their playful tunes are periodically drowned out by the roar of passing dirt bikes. But he doesn’t think that downtown is more dangerous than it used to be.

“I had a business here in the city, and I am well aware of how much tourism we had between 2000 and 2020,” said Caceci, who ran a pizza place in Old City and lives in Frankford. “They aren’t fully back. I think some people are afraid to come into the city. Everything is politicized. It gets played up how dangerous it is. I’m 61 years old. To me, it’s like the city always was.”