More Misleading Renderings

The Preservation Alliance has joined SCRUB in misleading the public with renderings falsely displaying an historic building shrouded in advertising. I have to give them props for using a Krispy Kreme ad in their doctored rendering right in the midst of the sugar tax fiasco.

As I understood the bill, the Lit Brothers building was exempt. However, look closely at the facade next time you walk by it and you'll see the moulding is covered in period signage.

The Preservation Alliance prepared a rendering showing a sixty year old black and white photo of Lit Brothers shrouded in color billboards, including office windows. This is a worst case scenario that will never happen. Not only is Lit Brothers a landmark loved by the city, there are many other locations on Market East more condicive to these advertising schemes, including The Gallery, The Girard Trust Block, and the Disney Hole.

Even if it's not exempt, the public outcry from someone attempting to cover this landmark in billboards would be louder than any irrational rant carried out by SCRUB.

On the roof, however, who cares? If you ask me, that block could use some height. But the Preservation Alliance would like you to believe that the facade, including the office windows, are going to be covered in Revlon ads. Really? That's just ridiculous.

This is our historic corridor of consumerism but it is not Philadelphia's historic core. While it leads tourists to our to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, so does I-95 and Delaware Avenue. There is no endangered history on Market East. With historic churches and theaters decaying all over the city, like SCRUB, the Preservation Alliance's resources are better employed elsewhere.

They're ba-ack...

Carol Ann turned an ominously said, "they're ba-ack." I wondered why a cold chill ran down my spine as I opened up planphilly.com, whose contributors I like to think are at least moderately objective and in favor of the successful redevelopment of Center City's largest commercial corridor.

That is until I read their latest contribution from SCRUB's most vocal witch hunter, Mary Tracy.

I really don't want to give this group any more attention than they deserve, but this time the captains of unreason and an uncompromising passion to preserve the blight they claim to fight don't even seem to know what they're fighting. Or perhaps they just assume that those they pander to won't bother reading through the legal jargon of Bill 100720. The latter is probably a more accurate assumption.

Well, I read it. And Mary Tracy's latest assertion is brazenly false, and the wording in Bill 100720 couldn't be clearer.

Mary Tracy's irrational argument over "unsightly" billboards she hasn't even seen yet states that Bill 100720 would "permit large scale animated billboards on the historic buildings of Market East."

Check your facts, Mary. Bill 100720 states clearly:

(4) The following buildings shall not be considered host buildings:

(a) An historic building, unless such building during its history supported an exterior sign that would have met the definition of a large format sign;

Your move, SCRUB.

A hearing to discuss Bill 100720 will be held on Tuesday, June 7th, and 10am in Room 400 at City Hall.

Turn on Those Lights

The nice weather is bringing out the tourists and just as I passed 12th and Market, what were they taking pictures of? Not Market East's "quaint Colonialism", but the Hard Rock guitar and the news feed outside Loews. 

History is our brand? Not everywhere, SCRUB. Tourists like shiny things. As soon as we stop struggling to convince Nebraskans that they have to appreciate our cobblestone streets and Steven Starr restaurants, the sooner we can just give them what they want: "authentic" Italian from Sbarro and $20 plastic busts of Benjamin Franklin.

We burden ourselves with the labor of insisting - even dictating - the tourist experience. The sad reality is most tourists don't care. And they're not going to care. You can't educate a revolving population of individuals that spend three days here once in their life. Try to do that and you'll make yourself crazy. Try to do that and you'll find yourself fighting to preserve the "historic brand" of Market East.

Most tourists want to see what they see in pictures and have dinner at a familiar restaurant. You're average tourist doesn't want an adventure, they want convenience. It's true we have a great restaurant scene, and the Foodies that come here know that. But they know exactly where to go and they have fun finding it.

Instead of shoving gourmet food down the throats of families from Phoenix who wouldn't know the difference between Olive Garden and Vitri, reserve it for those who appreciate it along the quaint cobblestone streets of Society Hill.

There is no shortage of opportunity for authenticity in Center City. Look around. Chestnut Street, Washington Square, and even Old City are home to plenty of vacant storefronts and undeveloped properties bound to become the next hot restaurant run by an Iron Chef.

Let Market East be what it is dying to be. Practical for us, bright and shiny for tourists, and a gold mine for the city. Given the excitement generated by that neon guitar, and then the dread as tourists turn to the east, I don't think SCRUB is going to win this one. It's just a matter of one of the Market East stakeholders making the first move and turning on the lights.

Illuminating Broad Street

Arguments against digital signage may have lost a little traction as the Kimmel Center unveiled it's animated video cube at the corner of Broad and Spruce.

Broad Street's historic core has been illuminated in everything from lanterns to neon to LEDs for the past 200 years, and now plasma.

The new signage shows how illuminated advertising can revitalize an architecturally barren corner.

While the target demographics for the Kimmel Center and The Gallery at Market East may be substantially different, the PIFA cube has transformed a stale, unfriendly design into something dynamic through the process of digital advertising.

Far less architecturally significant, Market East's target retail market is primed for an exponentially larger implementation of this successful medium. While South Broad is home to more than a dozen historic skyscrapers and theaters, Market East's major retail artery is left with four historically significant properties at best.

8th Street to 12th Street is an architectural fallout zone of poorly designed retail space, unattractive signage, and The Gallery, saddled with more than two blocks of sporadically adorned metal and concrete walls.

If the argument against the proposed digital signage at Market East is based on its content, then the conversation hasn't begun. Advertisers would be sought after the space is approved. As SCRUB proved with an Absolut ad near 8th and Market, it only takes a few helicopter parents to harass advertisers away.

No one has proposed illuminating The Gallery, or any other building in the vicinity, with advertisements for Delilah's. The potential revenue generated by this space and the business it will attract are staggering. Campaigning against digital signage on Market East purely based on its speculative content is irresponsible to the community.

However if the argument is based on the wattage, medium, or the technique in which the content is applied, a format justified even minimally on South Broad Street cannot rationally be banned from what should be Center City's core of consumerism.

Nagging Your Way to Relevance

College is expensive, especially design school. And architecture school? Forget it. But my favorite little clique of chronic complainers have found a loop hole in all of that. Apparently in Philadelphia, if you want to be a professional in anything - let's say urban planning - all you need is a website, 30 fans on Facebook, and the incessant ability to nag.

Well, Mary Tracy and her cohorts at SCRUB have outnagged themselves this time. In addition to being the thorn in Market East's multiple attempts to reinvent itself, SCRUB has self-assigned itself an expert in urban planning and outdoor marketing, publishing the "Accessory Signage Handbook".

These anti-blight activists, who have done little if anything to address this city's definable examples of "urban blight", organized a workshop in Lower Moyamensing on responsible and legal signage. That's funny, because the only signage SCRUB has been attacking is the legal signage along Interstate 95, small posters on news stands, and the attempted use of The Gallery's blank walls.

Meanwhile vacant buildings in our poorest neighborhoods continue to be shrouded in illegally applied signage that isn't just ugly, but also dangerous, and Market East remains a desolate strip of mid-century architecture, concrete, and trash filled surface lots.

I can't wait to hear what these self-professed professional urban planners have to say about City Target's possible arrival at The Disney Hole.

Lighting Up Market East

Has Mary Tracy, Executive Director of SCRUB (The Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight), ever been to Market East? I often wonder. This is the woman who said of the first serious discussions to improve the decaying corridor in over two decades, "they're talking about taking what could be a really majestic area and totally stigmatizing it with honky-tonk junk."

You would think the last time she walked Market Street from 8th to 12th was 1776 because even since the early 19th Century, Market East has been stigmatized with "honky-tonk junk." It is what it is, and it's how it's succeeded in the past. It's also the street that inspired a nation of Market Streets and Main Streets as the main commercial corridor. What she calls "honky-tonk junk" is what pays a city's bills.

But where is this majestic potential that Mary Tracy envisions? She and SCRUB have only ever played a contrarian thorn, but never offered an alternative solution. Like a lot of Philadelphia's dreamers, I can see a lot in a little. If we couldn't, we'd live in San Francisco or Boston or some boutique city that has already figured out what SCRUB refuses to accept: progress costs money.

But where is the potential in Market East? Is it in the two story Girard Block with its giant McDonald's inspired roof? Is it in the dead Colorforms adorning the vacant Value Plus? No, the potential, while obvious to many may be ironic to SCRUB, is in the blank canvas that is The Gallery.


View Larger Map

Market East's "majestic" 10th and Market, one of a few corners SCRUB routinely ignores in their plight to preserve this stagnant corridor. Why? Because any attention paid to this intersection would prompt the rational opinion: Sure, light it up!
Take a tour.

Illuminated by Hard Rock Cafe's neon guitar and Sole Food's scrolling news feed, Market East succeeds at 12th. While those who think Philadelphia can't sell anything that doesn't have a Liberty Bell on it refuse to accept that Market East's brightly lit corridor of consumerism will carry our tourists from their hotel to Independence Mall, those with a basic understanding of Economics 101 see the ugly mid-century architectural abortions along Market Street being used to capture billions of tourist dollars along their trek to our historic hot spots.

SCRUB claims to fight for a cleaner Philadelphia, billing themselves as an anti-blight organization, but I can't think of a single instance in which it has done anything to fight urban blight, only stifle capitalism. Have they ever cleared a block of vacant row homes or launched a campaign to clear trash from vacant lots?

Advertisements aren't blight. They pay for things like sidewalks and trees. Ultimately they can even pay to develop light rails and renovate historic city-owned buildings. But the primary focus of this group is to attack corporate investment in our city. Then they assume that taxes will pay for our dreamers' visions, while our taxes barely keep our libraries and pools open.

Unless SCRUB has found the secret wardrobe to a world of unlimited public funds, I think we're better off following the model that saved so many other cities' decaying retail corridor. If Mary Tracy knows something that other cities don't, show me the flute playing goat-man from Narnia and I'll shut up.

She doesn't. And if SCRUB's interest lied in removing blight, they would be compromising with City Council on a way to attract business - revenue - to Market East.

Instead, they bullheadedly refuse to accept the basic rules of capitalism under the misguided delusion that this city has one and only one thing to offer: "People are coming to our city to visit the historic areas; that's our brand." -Mary Tracy, Executive Director of S.C.R.U.B.

I'm sorry, SCRUB, but I think we're a little better than that. Maybe you can't envision a better Market East, but I sure can. And it's time to turn the lights back on.

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.

Scrubbing Market East

S.C.R.U.B. managed to weasel their way into a Daily News article on the recent conversation in City Council to finally do something with our city's ailing Main Street, Market East. And big surprise, they don't like it.

What could have come across as a healthy, compromising debate to sturdy the organization's relevance, only solidifies their reputation as a handful of contrarian hipsters with no understanding of economics, urban planning, and what most of our residents and businesses actually want or need.

Market East has always served as Center City's bustling commercial corridor, it's history illuminated in consumerism. With the exception of Reading Terminal, the PSFS Building, and the United States Post Office, Market East's historic infrastructure was entirely eradicated by mid-century development between 8th and 13th Streets.

If the "Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight" were truly dedicated to reducing urban blight, one of the first projects they should be cheerleading would be improvements to the street scape in Center City's commercial core.

Instead, Mary Tracy, President of S.C.R.U.B., called improvements to Market East "honky-tonk junk" and pegged Philadelphia a one trick pony by calling history our brand. I'm sorry, but like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, I would hope that one of our nation's biggest cities is more dynamic than that.

Rendering showing improvements to the Girard Trust Block between 11th and 12th. Originally the site of Snellenburg's Department store, the current building was created by chopping off all but two floors of the defunct department store and was intended to serve as a placeholder for future development.

While Tracy is correct in asserting that "People are coming to our city to visit the historic areas," she is ignoring the fact that they are also coming to shop, work, go to conventions, and to enjoy our restaurants and nightlife.

Besides, if history really were our "brand," what history is being preserved by stagnating Market East development between 8th and 13th?