Sixers arena project gets harsh critique from city-appointed panel

Members of a city-appointed advisory panel panned the Sixers plan for a downtown arena on Tuesday, calling it “undercooked” and questioning whether construction would repeat harmful mistakes of the past.

“I don’t think as a city we just need to accept this as our fate,” said committee member Ashley DiCaro, a senior associate at Interface Studio urban planning. “We need to think about the real giveback here and whether we should build this thing.”

She and some other members of the city’s Civic Design Review committee — which includes design and land-use experts — reached back a half-century to the building of the Gallery mall, which turned three central blocks of East Market Street into a mostly closed, inward-facing series of walls. Five years ago the site became the Fashion District, another struggling mall, where the basketball team intends to build.

Today, DiCaro said, it’s clear the Gallery was a mistake, one that wiped away the natural urbanism of the city in exchange for a promise of development.

“We now know better,” she said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for us as a city to say, ‘The mall is dying, so we have to accept this.’ ”

Committee chairperson Michael Johns, speaking at the end of a tiring, daylong review of the basketball team’s updated site plans, concluded, “We’re just not there yet.”

“And the question is: How do we get there?” said Johns, an architect who is principal of Mdesigns + MWJ Consulting LLC. “We can’t say, ‘Start all over,’ because frankly, we don’t have that authority. What are the things we can say to entice them to take the time that’s left to make some improvement?”

The Sixers intend to depart the Wells Fargo Center in South Philadelphia in 2031, moving into a $1.55 billion, 18,500-seat venue atop Jefferson Station at 10th and Market Streets. They say that they chose the site on the western third of the Fashion District to help move the city into a greener, transit-oriented future, and that a new arena will bring activity, jobs, and spending to a struggling Market East corridor.

Developers are not required to make any changes based on the feedback they receive from the committee, which took no vote. The process is intended to allow builders to hear perspectives from experts and the public, so they can make changes to their plans if they wish to do so.

Additional city reviews will come later. The approval process for the arena remains in its early stages. No enabling legislation will go before City Council until the city completes its own studies of the arena’s potential impacts. Those studies already are months late, and when questioned at Tuesday’s meeting, city planning officials could provide no timeline for their completion.

This was the Sixers second and final appearance before the CDR committee, which heard the team’s presentation of its revised site plan and listened to comments from more than 40 members of the public, who mostly spoke against the proposal.

“I don’t look at this [plan] and say, ‘Wow, that’s super cool, that’s a great public space,’ ” said committee member Tavis Dockwiller, the founder and principal of Viridian Landscape Studio. “I’m not seeing it yet. If this is going to come to this area, I want to see it. I want to see it vibrant and connected to the neighborhoods.”

She said she worried about lack of detail on elements including an adjoining housing tower and about “false equivalencies,” such as comparing the Philadelphia site to that of Boston’s TD Garden, which is farther from the heart of that city.

She also worried, she said, “that this puts a dent in the Stadium District that’s just getting off the ground.”

The Phillies and Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Flyers and the Wells Fargo Center, recently announced a partnership to turn some of the district’s vast parking lots into a $2.5 billion sports-and-entertainment district.

When CDR committee members finished their remarks, they offered Sixers representatives at the hearing a chance to respond.

Alex Kafenbaum, senior vice president and head of development at Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which owns the Sixers, said he agreed with the committee’s critiques but cautioned that the team’s plans represented a “first pass,” with more study, inquiry, and refinement ahead.

The design process has not fully begun, he said, and the team envisions incorporating the suggestions made by committee members.

All day, Sixers’ experts explained the details of their plans to the committee and to the public, and responded to questions big and small, covering everything from the duration of street lane closures after games to whether visitors could make use of the arena roof.

Committee member Daniel Garofalo, a senior adviser at eConsult Solutions Inc., said it’s important to examine the project that’s presented — not an idealized version of an imagined development that some might prefer if circumstances were different. And in this case, he said, the project is presented by an experienced development team that’s prepared to spend serious money.

Still, he said at the end, “this is a little undercooked.”

The team’s traffic diagrams left him befuddled, he said. And the design for the public, ground-floor arena area, with a diagonal walkway that ends at an assembly area, “is a giveaway that it’s a little underthought.”

The ground floor is crucial because it must be the draw to bring people to the site when no event is taking place — roughly 200 nights a year. The Sixers envision a mix of retail and dining options, with room for public events and easy access to SEPTA transit.

“We have to get that first floor to be an absolutely first-class destination,” Garofalo said. “Right now it looks substandard, or second rate.”

DiCaro said the drawing of the promenade looked “like what you’d encounter at the airport or the mall.”

The key question, she said, was in 20 or even 50 years, would the city regret the decision to build as it regrets the Gallery? As it regrets putting a highway through Chinatown, a decision that will now cost taxpayers $158 million for a partial fix, to build a cap over the belowground Vine Street Expressway?

The Sixers have proposed a $50 million community benefits agreement, a type of contract commonly offered by developers in which they agree to make certain enhancements in exchange for the community’s support of their project.

But $50 million, DiCaro said, is less than a year’s salary of the Sixers’ star player. Surely Chinatown is worth more.

When people envision the future, she said, “will we say as a city that this was worth it?”