Philly plans to cap the Vine Street Expressway to reconnect Chinatown

They’re calling it the Chinatown Stitch, a modest name for a massive construction project that would reconnect the north and south sides of the neighborhood by physically capping the below-ground Vine Street Expressway.

City officials and neighborhood leaders said Wednesday that they’re newly hopeful that, finally, it can be done. If all goes as planned — and that’s a big if — groundbreaking could come in 2028.

“This community never gave up the fight for ways to mitigate the expressway,” John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp., said at a media briefing.

A website has been launched to gather ideas and opinions from area residents, and the first community-engagement meeting is set for April 26.

The study area would be from Broad Street to Eighth Street.

A cap would reduce noise, create green space, and become a platform for construction of homes and businesses. Officials had no estimate of total cost but said that capping a single city block could be $25 million to $30 million.

The planning alone costs $4 million and includes a $1.8 million grant from a federal program called Reconnecting Communities. Matching funds totaling $2.2 million were offered by the city, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and a number of private local donors.

This kind of project has been talked about in Philadelphia for decades but has never moved beyond the idea-and-study stage. Officials said Wednesday that the availability of federal transportation money gives them fresh hope that a dream could become a reality.

In the last decade or so, the desire to connect the two ends of the neighborhood has grown, as more businesses have moved into Chinatown North. But occasional plans and studies have never gone forward, despite the expressway’s impact on the community.

The neighborhood could have disappeared in the 1970s, when construction of the expressway was moving full bore. The city sought to raze Holy Redeemer Chinese Church, a major community center and landmark.

The church survived, but the Gallery mall, Market East Station, and the Convention Center claimed chunks of land that blocked neighborhood expansion. Now Chinatown is fighting a Sixers proposal to build a basketball arena on the neighborhood’s southern end.

» READ MORE: Congressional plan would reconnect neighborhoods like Philly’s Chinatown, fractured by highways

Federal elected officials announced in February that they had secured $1.8 million to study ways to reconnect Chinatown. Sen. Bob Casey and Reps. Dwight Evans and Brendan Boyle, all Democrats, said they had gotten funding from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The money would go to the city and to the PCDC from a federal Transportation Department pilot program called Reconnecting Communities. That project aims to redress harms that were done, particularly to communities of color, by the construction of big highways and development projects.

On Wednesday, Chin and Christopher Puchalsky, director of policy and strategic initiatives in the city Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability, talked about what that money would do and mean for the neighborhood.

“This is a really hopeful day for our community and not just for Chinatown but for Philadelphia.”

Chin described how the expressway was planned in about 1966 and finally completed in 1991 — and how studies to lessen its impact started at least as early as 2004.

“Now there’s a glimmer of hope,” he said, adding that he was elated that the community could possibly, finally be connected across the highway.

The planning also will address ground-level Vine Street itself, where traffic is plentiful and fast, so that a cap does not become merely an oasis in the middle of busy east and west streets.

“Nothing happens overnight,” Chin said, but “this is a really hopeful day for our community and not just for Chinatown but for Philadelphia.”

The city hopes to apply for construction grants in 2025 or 2026 and begin construction two or three years later.

The Reconnecting Communities pilot program aims to do what its name describes — join communities that were cut off or split by the construction of highways and other transportation infrastructure. The goal is to remove, retrofit, or mitigate the modern impact of those developments.

”For more than 50 years, Chinatown residents have suffered the consequences of harmful infrastructure decisions that divided their neighborhood in half,” said Casey, who added that the funding would “bring Philadelphia one step closer to righting historical wrongs and connecting residents to more economic opportunities.”

The immediate goal, Puchalsky said, is to come up with a single, viable plan to cap the highway. Then move toward funding.

“We’re really focused on this not being planning work for [the sake of] planning work,” he said, “but to get to construction.”