Is Jefferson’s dazzling new outpatient building enough to heal East Chestnut Street?

I really wanted to write a rave of Jefferson Health’s new Honickman Center, the glittering, 19-story ice palace at the corner of 11th and Chestnut.

It’s a design that is full of grand gestures and small satisfying details. At a time when so many glass buildings are afflicted by a deadening flatness, the architects at Ennead have energized Honickman’s facade by wrapping it in a rippled glass screen that causes sunlight to rake the surface like a breeze across a pond. The same commitment to quiet luxury continues inside, where Stantec designed Honickman’s outpatient facilities to feel more like an upscale spa than a standard medical building.

Surely a design this good should be a shot in the arm for struggling Chestnut Street.

But as I left the official tour, my eye strayed to the next block of Chestnut Street, and my enthusiasm for Jefferson’s latest bauble began to wane. Even though the hospital campus is in the heart of Center City, close to multiple transit lines, Jefferson has managed to turn its portion of Chestnut Street into a two-block dead zone. The disconnect between Honickman’s dazzle and Jefferson’s self-inflicted blight couldn’t be more extreme.

Just a few steps from Honickman, on the 1000 block, the shop windows in Jefferson’s Gibbon Building are sealed tight. They were papered over two decades ago so hospital staff could occupy the spaces. The bleakness continues on the 900 block, where Jefferson leveled a row of handsome 19th-century buildings in 2004. At the time, Jefferson promised to build a new medical building on the empty site. Twenty years on, the block is home to a large surface parking lot, a garage and a few fast-food chains. Most of the remaining stores across from Gibbon have closed, unable to survive this arid environment.

Hospitals, which have long practiced a me-first approach to planning, are notorious for walling off their campuses with sky bridges, garages and long driveways. The proliferation of such auto-centric features is bad enough in a self-contained medical district, such as the area next to Penn. But they can be devastating in Center City’s core, which depends on variety to attract pedestrians.

While Jefferson certainly isn’t the only entity responsible for Chestnut Street’s recent troubles, its treatment of these two blocks creates a yawning gap in retail activity midway between Broad Street and Independence Mall, and makes it harder for nearby shops and restaurants to thrive. The pandemic and its aftereffects have only worsened the situation.

In the last year, the east side of Chestnut Street lost its two biggest retailers: Target, which was located across from the Honickman site, and West Elm, which occupied a space near Broad Street. Wawa also shut a large store at 13th and Chestnut in late 2021, citing safety concerns.

About the same time, the Wanamaker Building went into receivership after losing its main office tenant. Given Macy’s plan to consolidate its operations and reduce its store count, many fear the company will abandon its space in the historic department store when its lease expires in 2027.

Like the rest of Center City, the east side of Chestnut Street has struggled to keep up with changes in shopping habits over the last few decades. Before the pandemic, the corridor seemed to be on the rebound, thanks to the expansion of the National Real Estate Development’s East Market project, which brought new apartments, hotels, and retail to the area.

In 2016, the opening of the Collins, a large residential building on the 1100 block, promised more improvements. A few doors away, the MilkBoy music club and the haute streetwear store Lapstone & Hammer both emerged as popular destinations.

Then the pandemic hit. During a recent walk, I counted 30 vacant storefronts on Chestnut between Ninth and Broad Street. There is a tendency to blame the street’s retail woes, as Wawa did, on such things as shoplifting and the perceived lack of safety. It’s certainly hard to miss the panhandlers and people stretched out on the sidewalks.

But the sealed-up storefronts and neglect have also been an enabler.

What struck me during my walk is that the problems on Chestnut Street are not spread uniformly along the corridor. Some blocks have no retail vacancies, while others have clusters of empty storefronts. Jefferson’s dead zone contains one cluster. The other was centered in the 1300 block, where the magnificent Cunningham Piano building sits vacant and dilapidated. Its owner, the Church of Scientology, has been promising to develop the building since acquiring it in 2007, yet its condition continues to decline, bringing down the whole block. That stretch, incidentally, is right across from Macy’s entrance.

We can see a similar dynamic at work on East Market Street. While National Real Estate Development has regenerated the area between 11th and 12th, its neighbors have allowed their properties to languish. Both the Goldenberg Group and the Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corp. have been sitting on two large sites at either end of the retail corridor — at Eighth and 13th Streets, respectively — since the 1990s. Even though East Market is the most transit-accessible area of Philadelphia, Goldenberg and Pulver continue to use that land for parking cars. The subpar renovation of the former Gallery, now the Fashion District, didn’t help matters.

Right now, some people are championing the Sixers’ arena proposal as the best hope for reviving the East Market neighborhood. But if National’s $1 billion mix of apartments, hotels, and offices couldn’t get Goldenberg and Pulver to budge, what is the likelihood that a project open only 150 days a year will change their behavior?

There are two things that might break the logjam: incentives and enforcement. The city could introduce tax incentives to encourage more mixed-use development and discourage surface parking lots in the quadrant east of Broad Street. At the same time, it could get tough with speculators who mothball their buildings for decades and allow them to crumble in plain view. But for these measures to work, they would have be part of a larger, coordinated planning effort.

Since taking office, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker has been talking up the need to get people back into their offices for the sake of Center City’s economy, which is a large part of Philadelphia’s economy. But it’s not enough for workers to return to their old desks from 9 to 5. They also need places where they can shop and eat.

In theory, Jefferson’s expanding presence could be a boon for the area. Despite their tendency to wall off their territory and force out other uses, hospitals are a destination. They attract people round-the-clock, seven days a week. When Honickman formally opens April 15, Jefferson expects to see a thousand patients a day — including weekends — for medical treatment.

Unfortunately, those visitors won’t find any shops along the building’s main frontage, Chestnut Street. Because the tower sits on a relatively small footprint, the architects say, they were forced to push the elevators up against the building’s southern facade to ensure that there would be a contiguous area on each floor for medical uses. But that arrangement means there is no room left at street level for retail. Although the architects did try to liven up the ground floor with transparent glass walls and art installations, that combination isn’t enough to provide the retail continuity that Chestnut Street needs.

Still, it’s unlikely that Honickman would have turned out as well as it did without the help of National Real Estate. Because the tower is on National’s property, the developer oversaw the project, selecting Ennead as the building’s architect and helping Jefferson to shape the design.

Being part of East Market also allowed Jefferson to take advantage of the existing infrastructure, making Honickman a better building. Since the East Market project was designed to accommodate a 300-car underground garage, Jefferson didn’t need to impose another parking structure on the street. The garage was laid out so vehicles enter from a small alley behind the tower. That means visitors can drop off their cars without terrorizing pedestrians on Chestnut.

While that infrastructure made it possible for Ennead to design a tower that feels like an urban office building, Honickman wasn’t cheap or easy to build. The project set Jefferson Health back $762 million. For context, that’s roughly half of what the Sixers say they plan to spend for a Market Street arena.

The big price tag is partly a reflection on the state of health care right now. As more hospitals consolidate into sprawling health systems, the competition for paying patients, especially those seeking high-priced specialty treatments for cancer, gastrointestinal conditions and infectious diseases, has become intense. One way to attract such patients is by offering personalized medical care in a luxe environment. Before designing the interior spaces, Jefferson conducted extensive consumer research that informed everything from the layout of exam rooms to the height of the check-in desks.

As a result, Honickman’s interior often resembles an upscale hotel. When patients step off the elevators on the treatment floors, they will be greeted by trained concierges and then escorted to sun-dappled lounges with spectacular skyline views to wait for their appointments. The furniture and decorative elements — including $3.8 million for art — give the spaces an unusual serenity. Because patients may have to spend all day at Honickman visiting different specialists, Jefferson also carved out secluded work spaces where they can set up their laptops between appointments. There are even designated spaces for pets.

Jefferson deserves credit for working so hard to create a facility that makes patients feel comfortable and welcome as they undergo difficult medical procedures. Now we need them to apply the same treatment to Chestnut Street.