Chase Bank is coming to another former Wawa location in Center City

The former location of Wawa’s flagship Philadelphia location at 201-11 S. Broad St. is becoming a Chase Bank.

This is the second time this year that JPMorgan Chase’s retail banking wing has announced it’s taking over a location that housed a Wawa.

“Oftentimes convenience food stores or gas stations are often going after the same types of locations that we do,” said Ashlee Kelly, managing director of real estate at JPMorgan Chase. “At Broad and Walnut, it was really one of [Wawa’s] forays into an urban environment, which obviously works great for us and maybe in this situation wasn’t the best location for them.”

In recent years, Chase has been bucking national trends by adding retail banking locations while others in the industry pivoted to fewer physical locations to emphasize their digital offerings and save labor costs.

JPMorgan now runs the largest bank network in the nation, eclipsing competitors like Bank of America and Wells Fargo. In February, the company announced that it would add another 40 locations in the Philadelphia region, expanding on the 50 locations it has placed in the metropolitan area since 2018.

In March, the decades-old Wawa at 21st and Hamilton Streets in the Art Museum District learned it would not have its lease renewed in favor of a Chase Bank.

Kelly said that Center City Philadelphia and its immediate neighborhoods are a compelling location for the company because they have a mix of office, shopping, nightlife, and residential traffic.

“It makes it a great combination for us … when you think about Philadelphia with the amount of residential that they also have intertwined with their central business district,” Kelly said.

She said the company plans three or four more locations in Philadelphia by the end of 2026, in addition to the existing 16 branches. The Philadelphia metropolitan area contains the large majority of Chase Bank locations in Pennsylvania.

As for their propensity for targeting Wawa locations, retail banks and convenience stores both want to grant easy access.

No word yet on whether a brass band from the Philadelphia Orchestra will play the Rocky theme music as it did at the grand opening of the Wawa flagship at 201-11 S. Broad in 2015. The high-profile location on the Avenue of the Arts is owned by the University of the Arts.

“Wawa typically leased high-profile corners, exactly where a growing bank would also want to be,” said Jacob Cooper, partner at MSC Retail, who has worked with Chase Bank as a landlord-side broker, although not on the South Broad Street deal.