In the ongoing debate over how to revitalize the economically stagnant and partially vacant Market East corridor, the city’s planning director Jessie Lawrence has some clear ideas about the direction redevelopment should take: it should be massive, and it should include plenty of housing.
“It’s prime time for density along Market Street,” Lawrence said Wednesday, at a Q&A session put on by the Design Advocacy Group. “Everything along Market Street could be big, and it could be high.”
He noted that when Mayor Cherelle Parker held town halls last year to rally support for a proposed basketball arena on Market East, she would sometimes talk about the glory days of the corridor’s bygone department stores, like Gimbel’s and Lit Brothers.
“It’s great to talk about, but those days are done,” Lawrence said. “One of the things that did come clear in the last two years, arena or not — I think we’re done with big-box retail along Market Street.”
Instead, as the much-praised East Market development around 11th Street shows, housing combined with other uses is the way to go, he said, echoing many other observers.
That dovetails with Parker’s plan to create or preserve 30,000 units of housing citywide in her first term, and with recent real estate data showing a surge of people moving into tall, multi-family buildings in and around Center City, he said.
“We need to diversify our (housing) stock, and if we’re talking about a bigger, badder, more dense Market Street, this is the time to do it. We have the proof of concept… in East Market (and) we have a report that also says that we grew in our center core more than anywhere else,” he said.
“One out of eight Philadelphians live in Center City, and that’s not in a row house,” he said.
Lawrence started in the job five months ago, following a short stint as an associate deputy mayor, and during Wednesday’s discussion he made his first significant public remarks as director of the Department of Planning and Development.
Here are some of the highlights.
Ensuring buildings actually get built
After the 76ers unexpectedly abandoned the downtown arena plan in January, in favor of building a new venue with Comcast in the stadium district instead, Parker promised to speed up development of a new master plan for Market East. It’s been unclear when or how that will happen.
“We are planning as we speak,” Lawrence said Wednesday. “We’re going to make some sort of announcement very, very soon. It’ll be along the lines of what that team will be, putting that all together or carrying that out, and it’ll be along the lines of what the priorities for the future are.”
The group will include members of one of the mayor’s business roundtable groups, which is focused on Center Center rejuvenation, along with property owners like Macerich (owner of the Fashion District mall), the 76ers, Comcast and other stakeholders, he said — “anybody that has any dog in the fight when it comes to what we’re doing along Market Street.”
The city previously commissioned a master plan for the area in 2009. It may have helped spur National Real Estate’s development of its $1 billion East Market project, and was followed by the renovation of the Gallery mall into the Fashion District.
But it also envisioned a casino on Market and substantial new housing and other construction on the corridor and in Chinatown, most of which never materialized.
Lawrence argued that the recent arena planning process did a good job of including property owners and other key stakeholders, and by doing that again with the master plan, the city will help ensure it produces a realistic vision that those participants will go on to build.
“This administration is very clear about the fact that they really want to see it actually happen,” he said. “I’m certain that the administration will do its damnedest to make sure that what we come out of the process with is something that can be implemented.”
There will be a short-term plan to prepare Market East for the surge in visitors expected for next year’s celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, along with medium- and long-term plans, he said.
Time to “right-size” the Fashion District
Lawrence briefly touched on a couple specific big questions about Market East: what will happen with the soon-to-be-shuttered flagship Macy’s at 13th Street and with the Fashion District, which was slated to shrink for the arena project?
New York real estate company TF Cornerstone owns the Macy’s space in the Wanamaker building and is in the process of purchasing the upper floor offices, which it reportedly plans to convert into loft apartments and other uses. Such conversions can be very complicated and expensive, and Lawrence said the plan left city planners with questions.
“Our first question was, OK, how are you going to do that?” he said. “We’re certainly at a time where we’re thinking about office-to-residential conversions … but thinking about this big, giant footprint that is kind of atypical of anything that’s been built recently, how are you going to navigate that? If it is going to be residential, what are you going to need in order to really achieve the permitting?”
One of his department’s divisions, called Development Services, will help TF Cornerstone through the process, he said.
As for the Fashion District, it’s widely seen as struggling and Macerich is thought to be looking to unload the property to a new owner. While it was extensively renovated just six years ago, some have suggested that the inward-looking, suburban-style mall should simply be torn down and replaced, perhaps with a mixed-use development.
“With the arena coming, there was clearly an opportunity to look at that, to right-size it. Now that it’s not coming, what exactly does that space become? Does it become all retail?” Lawrence asked. “If the pandemic didn’t happen, what would the Fashion District be?”
He didn’t answer the question, but went on to say that “we have proof of concept in East Market on the 1100 block, that was … intended to pave the way.” That large development includes a few stores and restaurants along with apartment towers, a hotel, an office building and a medical tower.
“It does show what the rest of these very large blocks can be, thinking about how some of those assets are really kind of vacant and emptying out,” he said. Those may end up including some of the large federal buildings around 6th and 7th streets, given the Trump administration’s shared intentions to shrink the federal workforce and sell off government-owned properties, he said.
Making Market Street into Main Street
Asked about why Market East was so plagued with vacancies and undeveloped parking lots, Lawrence said he thought people don’t feel comfortable visiting the area.
“It’s crime, and it’s safety. It’s why we have a giant Marriott facing Filbert Street, as opposed to Market Street,” he said.
He said those fears have contributed to a rash of store closings, including Macy’s, a Target, and various Wawa stores. Another recent closure was a Giant Heirloom grocery store that had opened just three years earlier.
“We’ve attracted new opportunities, and we’ve also ran those new opportunities away in a [short] time, like, it’s been quick. We’ve proven to ourselves that it’s hard to sustain things with existing conditions,” he said.
“It’s not just about development. It’s about creating a space that’s also safe and attractive to people,” and includes its many transit connections, he said. “It’s SEPTA’s job to make their system much more attractive. It’s the police department’s to make it safer. It’s Clean and Green to make that safer. It’s the ability for us to harness momentum as to what’s going on in Old City, and bring some of that streetscape activity and visioning down to the corridor.”
Market Street needs to be seen as more of a Main Street for multiple neighborhoods — Chinatown, Washington Square West and Midtown Village — so it draws people from all those areas. The retailers and other business there should not just be meant “for people that work on Market Street to go downstairs and buy a mattress really quick,” as he once did after he moved to Philadelphia, he said.
“It’s also to come off the south side of that block or the north side,” he said. “It shouldn’t be the divider. It should really be the connecting opportunity.”
