The Chinese Lantern Fiasco

Between Stephan Salisbury's Philly.com article, Victor Fiorillo's piece in PhillyMag.com, and Inga Saffron's comments on Facebook, it seems the media has spoken: Franklin Square's Chinese Lantern Festival was a failure before it even opened. 

If you're not clear on what the festival is, you're not alone. It's essentially a light show that consists of about two dozen Asian themed lanterns. However, despite being hailed as "the first ever in the Northeast," its cultural or historic relevance is scattered. Historically, Chinese Lantern Festivals are held on the fifteenth day of the first month in the Chinese calendar, or in 2016, February 22nd. Franklin Square's festival opened last night and will run through June 12th. 

With the exception of a "sponsored by" logo for the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation on the festival's site, it has very little to do with neighboring Chinatown, if much else. In fact, the PCDC's website doesn't even mention the festival despite it occurring during the organization's 50th anniversary. Chinatown's tourism website doesn't say anything about it either. That's because the company running the show, Sichuan Tianyu of Zigong, didn't consult with the Chinatown community on the project. 

But what really fired up the media wasn't the festival's murky relevance or shoehorned history; but the park's closure, cover charge, and the foreboding black curtain that now lines almost the entire perimeter of Franklin Square. This isn't just a privately operated festival occupying a park for a week to generate some spending money for the non-profit Historic Philadelphia, it's being walled off from view for two full months, not including the absurd amount of time it's taken to set up.

Entrance to the park after 6pm will cost a whopping $17, blocking evening access to the historic merry-go-round and putt putt golf course. Historic Philadelphia was quick to point out that the park closes at 7pm this time of year. But the festival run until June, and the park has never closed earlier than 9pm during the summer. And although all of Philadelphia's public parks technically have a "closing time," they're open to pedestrians passing through twenty-four hours a day. 

The worst abuse of this space, though, is the black tarp running around the park. What would Rittenhouse residents say if the city's most popular square were not only closed, but blocked from view? The city would lose its mind. But this isn't just a Pope Fence or one of Independence Hall's security walls. In fact, Franklin Square already has a fence in place. This wall serves one purpose and one purpose only: to block the festival from unpaying eyes walking the sidewalks around the park, and ultimately Sichuan Tianyu's wallet. It's offensive and an insult to neighbors, particularly the hardworking Chinatown community that might not want to shell out $17 to see a festival that I have to assume was situated nearby specifically for them. 

If you really want to see this festival, I suggest you head here and buy yourself a $40 drone. It's still legal in Philadelphia and - unless Historic Philadelphia and Sichuan Tianyu decide to built a tarp over the park - there's nothing they can do about it.

Anthony Bourdain's Bladerunner Themed Market

If you've ever been to the Italian Market right before Christmas, you've probably felt like you were in another world. Or if you're a sci-fi geek like me, it undoubtedly conjured up images from Bladerunner.

If you've never seen the movie, it's not for everyone. It's an intellectual mystery set in a dystopic future Los Angeles that questions the ethics of artificial intelligence...or something. Thirty years later I still haven't quite figured it out. 

Several of the scenes take place in a sprawling quasi-outdoor market tucked in the crevasses deep inside the canyons of Los Angeles' towering skyscrapers. Vendors haggle, the homeless steal, and dark corridors lead to insidious dens of drug use and prostitution. Try to imagine Chinatown in three hundred years.

For us, we have our own bustling marketplaces on 9th Street and below Reading Terminal. But New York is prepping to offer something a little more...dicey, although a complete illusion.

Anthony Bourdain, one of television's endless supply of foul mouthed chefs, wants to provide a new market on Manhattan's Pier 57, and he's drawing on inspiration from Bladerunner. Quoted as saying his market "is meant to be chaotic because that's what hawker centers should be," in a sense he'll be resurrecting some of Manhattan's lost grit.

But will it work? Philadephia's public markets were born from a need and survive on posterity. Consumers endure the chaos because the markets are steeped in nostalgia, history, and tradition. Even in the fictional market in Bladerunner, we're led to believe that it organically evolved into what it had become. To outsource a public market to theme restaurant logic seems counterintuitive. But the fact that Manhattan has become the world's biggest Extreme Makeover: City Edition, is exactly why it will "work" there.

However its authenticity will hinge on its operation and execution. Reading Terminal Market came to be because goods could be shipped to the terminal above, similar to Pike Place's proximity to Seattle's waterfront ports. The 9th Street Market originally served as the hub of commerce for the city's Italian immigrant population. 

If Bourdain's market intends to interact with the river and host local vendors, it could succeed at being a true market. But if it is just another collection of boutiques and pricey wine and cheese pairings, it will merely be a food court with a twist. 

For us, we're lucky. I know it's bold to say we're more fortunate than New York, but in some ways we truly are. We have two thriving markets that continue to evolve, a legitimate Chinatown that continues to grow, and successful Night Markets returning for the summer. None are a scene from Bladerunner, nor should they be. Creating chaos for the sake of a chaotic experience makes no sense. 

A New Vine Street

With the new Mormon Temple taking shape on Vine Street and the LDS Church's apartment building proposed for the lot next door, Vine Street may soon look a little more like a street and less like a parking lot periodically interspersed with drab walkups and suburban infill. 

Mayor Nutter actually said that the Temple's addition will make the Benjamin Franklin Parkway “one of the most incredible boulevards anywhere in the world.” I appreciate his enthusiasm, but the claim is a stretch. Still, the potential is fabulous and the Mormon's are ferrying the grandeur of the Parkway onto Vine Street.

The LDS Church's 1601 Vine Street

For all that's been said of the mistake that is the Vine Street Expressway, it's more of a mental barrier than a physical one. Portland, OR is home to its own highway canyon, one barely noticeable because of the successful development flanking the east and west sides. 

Chinatown is inching closer to bookending Franklin Town's "Little Salt Lake City" with its own Eastern Tower which would contain a community center and apartments, and solidify Chinatown's presence in the emerging Callowhill neighborhood. 

The original design was fantastically wild and echoed modern architecture scraping the skies of Shanghai, albeit quite bit shorter. Nonetheless, the urban addition would be a breakaway from the sprawling parking lots, vacant lots, and dull infill that Vine Street is known for. While the urban concept remains, Eastern Tower's latest redesign has erased its edge. 

Take a look. What do you think? 

Is the new design good? Ugly? Or simply too boring to be bad?

Original design

Redesign

If Eastern Tower needed to be downsized, a few floors could have been removed without stripping it of its uniqueness. 

Stream_Line

Back in October, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture announced the winners of the Steel Design Student Competition and not surprisingly, in the Building to Bridge category, local Philadelphia University students took to the Reading Viaduct with Stream_Line.

Stream_Line gracefully extends the Vine Street stump of the Reading Viaduct across the Vine Street Expressway to the sidewalk on the southern side of the street.

Not content with simply curving its way across the canyon with a pedestrian bridge, students Garrow, Martin, and Shenk housed exhibition space and other resources inside the structure itself.

With the neighborhood's investment in local artists, it's easy to imagine gallery space illuminated high above the expressway. Perhaps more importantly, Stream_Line shows us how to architecturally interact with our highways without hiding them under concrete and parks.

Is Philadelphia's Chinatown Struggling?

The Atlantic Cities article by Bonnie Tsui brings to light the alarming rate at which America's Chinatowns are changing. Although she only really looks at three cities, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, she makes some good points. But those points were better made fifty years ago.

Immigrants arriving today arrive with more mobility and many may not even prefer the gritty streets of Philadelphia's Chinatown. As we saw with our own Greektown, when gentrification hits an ethnic enclave full of gainfully employed residents, many embrace the change. Though we still refer to the 9th Street Market as the Italian Market, it's no longer exclusively Italian and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The immigrants who arrived from Greece and Italy a century ago are now successful Americans, not struggling immigrants. That's a good thing. That's why every American came here.

Tsui's article doesn't just miss the mark when it comes to the need for affordable housing, or lack of need, she doesn't even seem to understand the history of Philadelphia's Chinatown. I can't speak for her reference to New York or Boston, but Philadelphia's Chinatown is historically bound by Race and Vine, and 9th and 11th.

Beyond that zone was Market East, Franklin Square, the Furnished Room District, and Callowhill. For half of the last century, Chinatown was boxed in by Market East Station, the Vine Street Expressway, and the Convention Center, an era when Chinatown truly faced its most ruthless and callous transformation, not at the behest of pricy loft dwellers, but the city itself was attempting to eradicate a neighborhood it felt didn't deserve to exist.

Through much effort and the formation of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, Chinatown residents managed to save its historic core, but that core is still bound by history.

The Atlantic City's misunderstanding of Philadelphia's Chinatown

The only luxury apartment buildings in Chinatown are 1010 Race, 1010 Arch, and the Pearl, and the Pearl is very diverse in both its residents and retail. For the past few years the PCDC, and apparently whoever drew the map for Tsui's article, has been trying to rebrand Callowhill as Chinatown North.

That's fine, in fact it's great.

But if you want to claim that gentrification is pushing out Chinese immigrants, you can only consider the part of Chinatown that historically housed immigrants. Callowhill, or Chinatown North, never did. Considering Callowhill is not historically part of Chinatown, you could even make the opposite argument, that Philadelphia's historic Chinatown is not only winning the war against gentrification, but actually growing.

Interestingly, Tsui even mentions our Chinatown's deplorable lack of greenspace and the dire need for parks on behalf of its residents. While the Callowhill Neighborhood Association has been advocating for the conversion of the Reading Viaduct into a park, who's been the park's most vocal adversary? The PCDC.

Eastern Tower wouldn't be on the table in a gentrifying Chinatown.

The hard truth is that property values rise and Center City is getting pricier. While the city provides its share of affordable housing, even in Chinatown, it can't subsidize zones based on ethnicity. That's dangerously close to segregation. In fact it's almost the definition of segregation. 

If the PCDC wants to extend the traditional boundaries of Chinatown all the way to Spring Garden, that's fantastic. The real estate is there and available, but it's available for anyone willing to buy. Philadelphia's historic Chinatown is far from a poster child for gentrification, in fact, our Chinatown is one of the strongest in the country.

Chinatown, City Hall, and Neglect

In discussions surrounding Philadelphia's growth and development, Chinatown is largely ignored. It's considered dirty, poor, and crowded. However much of the statistical research that paints Chinatown as an impoverished ghetto ignores the fact that much of its largely immigrant population are elderly or self employed.

Philadelphia claims to embrace immigrants, but when they don't fit into what we think Center City should be, many would rather relocate them if they don't come to the city with loads of investments.

Americans approach culture enclaves in a uniquely specific way. Outside looking in, we often find them interesting, but when they deviate from our isolated comfort zones some begin to view them as too Chinese, too Italian, or too gay. Of course xenophobia only exposes itself behind the anonymity of message boards, so people vocally express their discomfort with neighborhoods like Chinatown by calling it out as dirty or citing bias statistics to justify their anxiety.

The truth is Chinatown is bighted. But the city views Chinatown as an onlooker. Household trash is dumped around public trashcans, unpermitted street vendors go unchecked, and illegal parking is ignored throughout Chinatown North. This would run rampant and does in any neighborhood ignored by the city.

Despite being boxed in by the Convention Center, The Gallery, Market East Station, and the Vine Street Expressway, Chinatown's population continues to be one of fastest growing in Center City. As more residents move into Chinatown it's reputation won't get any better until the city begins to work with the neighborhood, truly accepting it as a part of Philadelphia.

The city that once attempted to drive an expressway off-ramp through the heart of the neighborhood and drop a baseball stadium just north of Vine Street seems to hold onto the notion that Chinatown has no place in Center City. The city eviscerated the Furnished Room District, Franklin Square, and the Tenderloin in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Chinatown is the sole survivor of a Philadelphia that City Hall once wanted to forget.

Fortunately the Chinatown Development Corporation has a hold on what's left between 9th Street and 11th Street, much to the chagrin of city planners who don't understand how an ethnic enclave should be addressed by a modern city.

While the city continues to push growth and private development, wildly advertising subsidies for sites like Cira Centre South and potential investments in the Delaware Waterfront, the city has mentioned nothing of the PCDC's Eastern Tower and Community Center at 10th and Vine.

The tower stands to alter the skyline of the city and bring more residents and businesses to the struggling Callowhill neighborhood. Although the city has supported residential developments on the Parkway, Franklintown, and the Schuylkill River, neighborhoods that succeed on their own, they've expressed no interest in the ETCC which is poised to bridge multiple neighborhoods, dilute the visual impact of the Vine Street Canyon, and improve a Chinatown long neglected by City Hall.

The New Italian Market

Helen Urbinas's puff piece on Philly.com has managed to shove the proverbial stick further up the traditional Philadelphian's ass.

This benign article wasn't mean to spark debate, just fill space, but we all know that down the rabbit hole known as the internet, it takes about three posts on message boards or comments sections before the discussion turns racist.

The proposal and conversation is an irrelevant nonstarter. As far as I know, the only official designation of any neighborhood is its District or Ward.

"The Italian Market" is a website, not a legal demarcation.

People will call it what they call it. Developers attempted to rebrand the Gayborhood as Midtown Village, but people still call it the Gayborhood and will as long as Woody's continues to expand. Chinatown is full of Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, and Thai restaurants but will always be called Chinatown.  

It's real estate mumbo jumbo. Call it whatever you want: Little Mexico, Vietnamesetown, International Village, or The Italian Market. Who cares? As long as they keep selling live chicken and kangaroo meat, I'm happy it's there.

Chinatown Community Center

This is hot. No, it's downright sexy.

Whether or not the neighborhood north of Vine is historically part of Chinatown, its influence is evident.

With Callowhill pushing for the conversion of the Reading Viaduct into a park, Chinatown is the only neighborhood in this enclave attempting to bridge the expressway's divide.

Uninspired caps bridge most of the divides at each intersection, but a beautifully landscaped park has already been installed on 10th Street two blocks north of Chinatown's newly restored gate.

The Philadelphia Chinatown Development Community now plans to build a 23 storey tower including residences, offices, and a community center just above the expressway.

The center will include a parking garage, and although zoning requires 100 spaces, the developer will apply for a reduction. Given the number of parking spaces available in the vicinity, the developer should try to get an exemption.

The Perfect Storm

A turf war is brewing in the neighborhood north of the Vine Street Expressway between Philadelphia's Chinatown community and Callowhill's loft-living yuppies. The s***showdown has spawned so many rumors and so much hostility from both sides, it's impossible to determine what exactly was proposed and where we landed. The only thing that seems to be clear is that it has nothing to do with money and everything to do with marking territory.

The Philadelphia Inquirer lauded Maria and John Yuen for going up against the Callowhill neighborhood and successfully blocking a proposed Neighborhood Improvement District. The NID would have added a 7% tax to the residents in the Callowhill neighborhood in exchange for maintenance services.

Or was it for the maintenance of the proposed but uncertain Reading Viaduct Park? Or did it exempt the park? Both sides are spewing so much propaganda, it wouldn't be clear to anyone signing a petition.

The problem at the center of the entire debate seems to be the park which was used to sell the NID to Callowhill residents, and used to oppose it to Chinatown residents. It's likely the NID would have passed if the park had never been proposed in the first place. Whether for or against to the park, neither side seems willing to admit that it's highly unlikely we'll see the viaduct redeveloped in any way anytime soon.

What is clear is that the Inquirer's headline is misleading if not downright wrong. Callowhill NID Foes Went Up Against Powerful Forces and Won. Obviously the powerful forces at play were those opposed to the NID if they managed to gather enough signatures to kill it.

In NIMBYism on top of NIMBYism, Maria Yuen even created NOVA, the North of Vine Association, to represent the same neighborhood that the Callowhill Neighborhood Association already represents instead of joining the CNA to work with them.

Some opposed to the NID have even claimed the area north of Vine to be historically part of Chinatown that was cut off when the Vine Street Expressway was built. In fact, Vine Street had divided the two neighborhoods prior to the expressway's construction. Historically the neighborhood north of Vine was known as the Tenderloin. Before the expressway divided the two neighborhoods, Chinatown was exponentially smaller. Opposition seems to be attempting to rewrite history to make its case. Chinatown's growth is great, but the direction in which it would have grown is irrelevant to history.

Unfortunately, the reluctance of both sides to compromise will ultimately harm this area. I don't think the NID is the way to clean up Callowhill. We already pay enough taxes, and there's no reason to add another layer on top of federal, state, and city taxes. The money is there to clean up all of our neighborhoods, we just mismanage it. Many in favor of the NID seem to be confusing their property value with how much it costs for it to exist. A NID may raise the resale price of their home, but unless the NID makes some dramatic improvements, the increase will be to cover the new tax, not because their property is more valuable.

Even if we want to create an Improvement District, other neighborhoods have Business Improvement Districts which tax businesses, not residents. Callowhill lacks the business for this to make any realistic impact.

I don't agree with the way this NID was defeated. Was it Democratic? Yes. Did both side abuse the hype over a pipe dream to make their case? Absolutely.

Philadelphia doesn't have to be expensive to be clean. We all want our property value to go up, but we want it to go up because it's more valuable, not more expensive. Unfortunately the voice in Callowhill seems to confuse the two. At the same time, the voice on behalf of Chinatown is willing to engage in the Democratic process, but unwilling to engage in our Capitalistic process, and the conflict at Vine Street seems to be brewing the Perfect Storm of American Ideology.

Revisting Market East

I was home for Christmas discussing Philadelphia with an uncle from Long Island, who travels to Philadelphia yearly for a convention, staying near Market East. I quickly found myself defending Philadelphia's uniquely local entertainment environment when I realized he was making the point I've been arguing since I first set foot on Market East.

I told him he couldn't judge Philadelphia by the area surrounding the major hotels, that you have to be willing to explore. My knee jerk defense mechanism kicked in when he said he liked Baltimore so much better. After all, talk about a city you have to explore before finding its gems.

Only you can't explore Baltimore on foot. If you're based at Inner Harbor, you have to get into a car and drive across the Badlands to find a truly Baltimorean experience. But that's when I realized, and my uncle validly pointed out, it isn't this native experience that conventioneers and most tourists are looking for. They're looking for what Inner Harbor offers and that is where Baltimore far exceeds Philadelphia.

They don't want the Trading Post or Passyunk Square. Most tourists want to see Independence Hall, a couple museums, and buy a snow globe at a gift shop while dining at a familiar restaurant on their way to an attraction they found in a brochure they picked up in the lobby of their hotel.

Our locally grown restaurants, quirky museums, and obscure historic landmarks do well enough on their own, catering to Philadelphians, suburbanites, and the seasoned tourists accustomed to wandering off the grid. But that leaves a large fraction of our tourism market with nothing to do but hurry past vacant retail spaces, take a few pictures in front of the Liberty Bell, and then retire to their hotel room at 12th and Market wondering why anyone likes Philadelphia.

I'm not sure where this home-grown resistance to commercial progress comes from. Philadelphia is a very proud city, but that same pride keeps visitors from understanding where that pride comes from. When you walk from the Marriott to Independence Hall you're greeted with a vacant mall and a poorly adorned street scape.

It's understandable that our average visitors from Oklahoma might go home questioning our city's historic heritage. While it's true that an illuminated orgy of commerce on Market East wouldn't pay tribute to our city's history, at least not in a conventional sense, it would stimulate the senses and encourage pedestrians to explore. Most tourists will continue to head straight to 5th Street, but they're willing to spend money along the way. And most importantly, a handful will drift north to Chinatown or south to the Gayborhood. This is the experience we want to convey. Unfortunately, because this main thoroughfare offers nothing, no one is going to assume that the side streets do.

While my uncle may be seeking a different source of pride, I want all visitors to be proud of this town. We have enough room to accommodate those looking for the familiar and those looking for something more unique. Market East is a blank canvas dying to offer that.

I want visitors to draw comparisons to Baltimore's Inner Harbor while saying, it's so much bigger, better, and more convenient. I want them to find themselves wandering into our real, local neighborhoods and that starts with a more appealing and convenient Market East fostering foot traffic.

Add to this lively environment the economic benefits of offering the creature comforts to those dying to pay for them and we might find ourselves with the cash to carry this experience to our forlorn Penn's Landing. This diamond in the rough to the locals who use it could be reborn as a destination for tourists and summertime sunbathers who accidentally find themselves there because Market East was so exciting they just didn't want to stop walking.

Look Up: Chinatown

Our skyline might get a new addition, and not where most would expect. Pedestrians and commuters might be looking up in Chinatown, both vertically and northward. As Chinatown continues to expand despite the Vine Street Expressway, those managing stock footage might have to update the pictures of Philadelphia's Chinatown gate.

Chinatown CDC was granted approval by the RDA to develop a lot at 10th on the north side of Vine Street. A 23 story building with groundfloor retail has been proposed for the site complete with a community center, offices, and apartments. AK Architecture is designing the site.

Small Development Near the Convention Center

Something's going up on an unassuming corner near the Convention Center. Near Race and Camac, on the corner of Spring and Camac, a warehouse which has been completely gutted for a couple years, has sprouted some hair. I have no idea what it is, who's building it, or what it's going to look like, but it's cool to see something moving, especially in this forgotten little corner of Center City.

10th Street Plaza

At the north end of Chinatown, perhaps the more visible end as it's seen from those exiting 95 onto Vine Street, a poorly utilized concrete park has been transformed into a proper entrance, and destination attraction, for Philadelphia's rapidly growing Chinatown.

As businesses and residents move north of the Vine Street Expressway, two foo dogs will welcome pedestrians and drivers to Chinatown at 10th and Vine.

Six years in the making, the 10th Street Plaza was started by the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation and cost $300,000.

Although mostly complete, the plaza will soon be home to a statue of Lin Zexu. From Fujian, in return for erecting the monument to Zexu, a Fujianese association will provide the plaza's required maintenance.

Good Intentions Running Amok

S.C.R.U.B., the forced acronym for the Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight, found its beginnings doing just that, advocating for the removal of graffiti and illegal signage on abandoned buildings. But like PETA, SCRUB found that you get more attention protesting the President for swatting a fly than you do with sane debates and rational or fact based arguments.

SCRUB first grabbed mainstream attention several years ago for discouraging the city from accepting hundreds of free benches and trashcans from Clear Channel. These free benches and trashcans would have been maintained by Clear Channel who would have used them for advertising. I honestly can't think of another city where the benches and trashcans aren't used for advertising, and I honestly can't think of a city with less benches and trashcans than Philly. Coincidence? Good job SCRUB. Now the hipsters camp out on the ground and everybody throws their trash in the gutter. Thanks for Reducing that "Urban Blight".

These senseless objectors have chosen the attempted revitalization of Market East as its most recent and vocal protest. Councilman DiCicco introduced a bill before the Rules Committee to allow animated signage, digital billboards, and ads on blank, windowless walls left by Market East's mid-century demolition.

The successful revitalization of Toronto's Eaton Centre is often cited as a potential solution to Market East's continuing decline.

What's unnerving about these career picketers is the way that they blatantly mislead their audience with false claims and poorly Photoshopped renderings of what they claim City Council has proposed. The city has hired several design firms to prepare renderings of The Gallery at Market East after the application of these proposals, but SCRUB has released their own misleading renderings showing the corridor's few remaining historic structures shrouded in advertisements for booze and violent video games.

A misleading rendering by S.C.R.U.B. shows an historic Market East facade shrouded in billboards. Bill 100720 does not call for the application of signage to any historic facades.

The proposal to add signage to SEPTA's headquarters would have limited advertisement space to the interior of windows below the third floor. But in another misleading rendering, SCRUB has falsely implied that advertisements would cover half the building.

The subtle ad space on an unused portion of the building's facade would have provided millions of dollars in funding for our ailing public transportation system.

The three story metal walls of The Gallery at Market East could be used to display dazzling advertisements for events and businesses in and around the city.

A professional rendering shows the same intersection with signage covering The Gallery's blank walls with advertising for our nearby Chinatown and Jefferson Hospital.

As SCRUB calls this signage "Digital Blight" and argues that it demeans the street's history, they not only ignore the fact that much of that history has already been demolished, but also the fact that this street's history relied on its brightly lit consumerism. It was our nation's first "Market" street, launching a Main Street in each town across America as the commercial resource for its citizens.

SCRUB routinely ignores The Gallery at Market East in its arguments against signage on Market East, instead directing its attention at neighboring historic structures and neighborhoods, falsely implying that advocates for a better Market East wish to litter the quaint streets of Society Hill with neon and plasma billboards.

This "Digital Blight" honors the street's history. No one but SCRUB has suggested wrapping Lit Brothers or Strawbridges in Dewar's ads. SCRUB fails to mention the blighted blocks between 8th and 12th, littered with surface parking lots, cold windowless concrete, and vacant or misused retail space. SCRUB deliberately avoids mentioning The Gallery, The Girard Trust Block, or the Disney Hole. Instead they divert their audience's attention to Old City and historic buildings hugging Independence Mall. Buildings that have nothing to do with Market East or any revitalization efforts. Buildings and spaces that succeed on their own merit. Buildings that no one but SCRUB has proposed touching.

SCRUB strategically neglects the blight they charged themselves with attacking, stagnating progress and ignoring fundamental economics, all in an irresponsible effort to maintain their relevance.

Chinese Night Market

Move over Italian Market and Reading Terminal, Chinatown's bringing some competition that tests the limits of Philadelphia's conservative business hours that sometimes conjure up the term "Blue Law".

John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation (PCDC) has proposed bringing a nighttime taste of Asia to the streets of Philadelphia.

Late night outdoor markets are popular all over Asia where vendors peddle cheap eats and outdoor entertainment in bazaars into the wee hours of the night.

Other U.S. cities have attempted to bring the East to the West in places like San Francisco with limited success. However, Philadelphia's Chinatown lacks the touristy gentrification that plagues the Chinatowns in New York, DC, and Los Angeles. This authenticity might be beneficial in creating the genuine grit needed to make these Chinese Night Markets work elsewhere.

Think Big Trouble in Little China.

In a city where most grocery stores are closed by 7 or 8 o'clock, Chinatown's independently owned and operated shops are routinely open much later, and many restaurants serve patrons well into the morning.

Keelung Night Market in Taipei, Taiwan

Before long, club-going Philadelphians might not be headed to Pat's at 2am for a cheese steak, but headed north on 10th to David's Mai Lai Wah for steamed dumplings or late night street vendors on Race for fried grasshoppers or cuddle fish.

Will a night market - a Chinese staple - open in Philadelphia's Chinatown?

The Trocadero

The Arch Street Oprah House, better known as The Trocadero Theatre, or simply "The Troc", opened in 1870 and was designed by Edwin Forrest Durang.

1960

It's various incarnations include The Arch Street Opera House, Park Theatre, New Arch Street Oprah House, Continental Theatre, Gaiety Theatre, Casino/Palace Theatre, Troc Theatre, Slocum's and Sweatman's Theatre, Sweatman's Arch Street Opera House, Simmon's & Slocum's Theatre, and Simmon's Theatre.

1973

Over the years the Trocadero has hosted plays, vaudeville shows, and burlesque. It played a prominent roll entertaining traveling businessmen and military personnel during Chinatown's colorful history as the city's vice district, complimenting nearby opium dens and the adjacent Furnished Room District and Tenderloin.

The Trocadero today

Its most recent use was established in 1986 as a concert and dance venue.

The Furnished Room District and Tenderloin

For decades Philadelphia hosted two of the nation’s most notorious red light districts. Bound by North Broad Street, Market East, Chinatown, and including a wide and industrial stretch of Vine Street prior to the construction of the chasm that now segregates Center City from Callowhill, the Furnished Room District surrounding Reading Terminal and the Tenderloin to the north made up a den of iniquity so lewd that sailors docked in Philadelphia were forbidden from walking its streets.

This post-industrial fallout of large warehouses and rundown hotels used as flophouses housed the city’s homeless, drug addicts, and prostitutes. Chinatown hosted the city’s opium dens and burlesque houses, including The Trocadero, and its eccentric inhabitants called the Furnished Room District and Tenderloin their home.

View of the Furnished Room District and Reading Terminal from atop City Hall

The Furnished Room District's sex themed history spanned a century, with two adult bookstores still occupying the corner of 13^th and Arch until the last decade. While the last sordid businesses lingered into the 21^st Century, city planners began chipping away at this neighborhood’s infrastructure in the 80’s and 90’s.

12th and Arch in 1917

Following The Gallery, the relocation of Reading Terminal’s trains to a new Market East Station required the demolition of several blocks of Chinatown to accommodate underground rail tunnels. While moving the trains underground eliminated the need for the noisy elevated Reading Viaduct, it left Chinatown scarred with a number of large surface parking lots.

1311 Filbert - 1911

During this transition phase, the Furnished Room District became a refuge for Bohemia. Artists and punks occupied the apartments above the remaining storefronts. Nightlife in the district was limited to several small bars including Pentony Tavern which was a gay bar on Filbert Street, several adult themed bookstores, and rampant prostitution. David Lynch lived in the Tenderloin at 13th and Wood in the early 1970's and wrote of it, "Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me. It's the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time."

Breintnall Building's Adult Entertainment Center in the 1990s

The Vine Street Expressway drove a wedge between the district’s hotels and residences and The Tenderloin to the north. It called for the demolition of almost every building on the south side of Vine Street, leaving a street scape lined with narrow parking lots.

While transportation improvements left the Furnished Room District and Chinatown to suffer, the blocks behind Reading Terminal were chosen for the Pennsylvania Convention Center, requiring an expansive clearing of the district’s original architecture. At the same time, politicians were eying Chinatown’s northern annex as the location for a new baseball stadium and had planned to run an expressway exit right through its heart.

Chinatown's Trocadero in 1978

These two proposals were successfully blocked by neighborhood opposition but by then Chinatown had been boxed in by several large civic developments: the Convention Center, The Gallery and bus terminal, The Vine Street Expressway, and a sea of surface parking lots west of Franklin Square.

Near 12th and Race - Demolition for the first phase of the Pennsylvania Convention Center

The final phase of the Convention Center, currently under construction, cleared most of the remaining architecturally significant and historic representations of the Furnished Room District’s eclectic buildings including the Race Street Firehouse, The Lithograph Building, the Metzger Building, and a number of others.

Today, very little remains of this once infamous neighborhood. By targeting blight and ignoring architectural significance, developers have managed to completely erase an entire neighborhood and thus, its history. A small strip of industrial buildings have been restored along the 1200 block of Arch Street and a handful of industrial and small row houses are still maintained on and above Race between 11^th and Broad.

12th and Arch in the 1970s

A portion of the original Tenderloin lives on as Callowhill and Chinatown’s northern annex, sometimes called the Loft District, or Eraserhead by cinema buffs who pay homage to the inspiration of David Lynch's movie of the same name, inspiration that is now a U-Haul parking lot. Meanwhile in the former Furnished Room District, very little movement has been made to develop what remains. Aside from the Convention Center, the district now mostly consists of poorly maintained surface parking lots.

Such projects often attract chain restaurants and retail establishments that cater to tourists and conventioneers and one can hope that it will attract these businesses to the area’s arterial streets such as North Broad and Market East. Unfortunately the Convention Center’s north side pays no respect to what remains of its original architecture. With a wide overhang supporting a garage used to park utility vehicles, its narrow sidewalk devoid of trees; it doesn’t encourage the kind of growth that surrounds most American convention spaces. It remains to be seen if the Convention Center will attract the kind of business the state once promised.

The Vine Street Expressway Problem

One of our largest lesions of surface parking lots sits in a forgotten corner of Center City. Parking Lot Town is boxed in by the Convention Center, the Vine Street Expressway, and a vibrant Chinatown brimming with authenticity rare to most American Chinatowns - a Chinatown consistently targeted by city officials and predatory developers, loved by locals and long time residents, and abhorred by urban newbies and Yellow Tags. Asian owned businesses continue to thrive not just along Arch and Race, but also north of Vine along Callowhill. Philadelphia's Chinatown may be one of the few which continues to grow as a traditional immigrant neighborhood while relatively untouched by development geared toward gentrification or an attempt to attract a homogenized upper-middle class market, all in spite of the casm the Vine Street Expressway cuts through this neighborhood, and the parking holes that litter it's perimeter.

Much has been said regarding the Vine Street Expressway. As one of the nation's shortest interstate highways, many simply question the need for it at all. Prior to its construction which took the better half of a century, Vine Street was a significantly large avenue. Though it carried drivers across the city much slower than the VSE, considering the width of Center City, is it absolutely necessary to carry them across it at 55 miles per hour, particularly since most will be traveling it during rush hour traffic?

But whether you like it or not, it's here to stay. The question is how does it remain, and what responsibility do we have to the surrounding communities it divided? Boston's "Big Dig" often comes up as a solution. Boston's I-95 cut through the literal core of the city and spanned a much larger distance and was ripe with problems. Philadelphia's VSE is much shorter, straighter, and not surrounded by the kind of large scale, modern development that lines Boston's I-95 so capping it between 10th and Broad would be relatively simple. Relatively.

Unfortunately capping it might only produce more parking. Look at the area that caps the regional rail lines leading from Market East Station. One thing Philadelphia doesn't seem to undertsand is that it's pointless (unless you want more parking) to cap something if you never plan on building anything above it. If we capped the VSE it could be nothing but parking lots. Philadelphia seems obsessed with parking. Too much is never, ever enough. We're one of the densest city's in the US, and in most neighborhoods where the average home is about as wide as a midsized sedan, residents feel entitled to at least two cars. While people in Los Angeles work towards creating public trasit options and reducing the need for cars, Philadelphia wants more parking. I'll save that for another time.

As for the VSE, why not look at it this way? Why was it built as a recessed freeway in the first place? There's really no reason. Recessed it is less obtrusive and less visible. Why not cover the VSE with Vine Street, probably what should have been done in the first place. Move the south side of the actual street on top of the VSE, reunite it with it's northern brother, open up the sea of parking lots that the south side demolition created, and give developers a wider plain to work with between Vine and Summer. This increases the room for parking garages to service Conventioneers and hotel guests, making the remaining surface lots unfriendly, ugly, and unecessary. With the VSE underground you unite the Loft District with Chinatown, remove the eyesore of a freeway in your backyard and give investors incentive to create a whole new neighborhood.

More Lessons

Philadelphia lost three city blocks for the creation of the Independence Mall, and subsequently several adjacent neighborhoods filled with architectural gems and colonial history in the neighborhoods of Franklin Square, Society Hill, and Penn's Landing. Most of the initial construction was with good intention considering the leveled neighborhoods were blighted and crime ridden, unfortunately much of the neighborhoods today (with the exception of Society Hill) are filled with surface parking lots, unfriendly windowless government buildings, and unappealing indoor retail.

Just a little of what's been lost:

The three blocks of buildings behind Independence Hall (the horizon of the photo) now make up Independence Mall National Park.Completely unrecognizable today, every building here on Dock Street is gone.

Here you can see four blocks neighboring Dock Street after they were leveled for the construction of I-95 which still serves as a barrier between Society Hill and the river. Note the hill at Front Street which used to lead down to the Penn's Landing neighborhood, now completely nonexistent. The hill is responsible for the difference in height between the west and east side of I-95, accommodated by the large staircases at South Street and Market Street.

Just north of Independence Mall the Vine Street Expressway wiped out a large portion of Franklin Square and Chinatown in the 1980s, and even more recently in the 1990s the Pennsylvania Convention Center consumed three city blocks of dense urban real estate, and in the past two years has expanded east to Broad Street taking with it two more blocks and an historic firehouse, a townhouse built in the early 1800s, the massive stone Odd Fellows Building, and illegally destroyed two designated historic landmarks on Broad Street it had agreed to preserve.

Obviously Philadelphia hasn't learned too many lessons it should have learned from the 50s. Particularly since we have a tendency to bulldoze in anticipation of projects that never come and wind up with surface lots that never seem to go away.