Streets near Rittenhouse Row will go car-free on September Sundays

The extraordinary security arrangements for Pope Francis’ visit to Philadelphia in September 2015 closed off Center City and surrounding blocks to cars, creating a sprawling, urban park-like zone where residents mingled with National Guard troops and delighted in roaming the streets at will. 

“It was just amazingly, blissfully quiet and peaceful. We were just riding our bikes all over the place,” recalled Nate Hommel, director of planning and design at the University City District. “I bumped into Jon Geeting, and I said, ‘My wife was saying this reminded her of what I keep calling Open Streets, and what could we do about this?’”

Hommel teamed up with Geeting and other fellow urbanists to create a group called Open Streets PHL. They researched similar programs in other cities and lobbied Philly officials to shut down some streets again, this time for the pure fun of it.

Mayor Michael Nutter and his successor Jim Kenney embraced the idea, giving rise to the Philly Free Streets initiative. In 2016, South Street was closed to cars for one day, drawing thousands of walkers and cyclists. In 2017, the city closed 7 miles of road from Old City to North Philly, and in 2018 and 2019 the event took place along a long stretch of North Broad Street.

During the pandemic, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive was closed to cars and there were some closures for on-street dining, but COVID and high security costs seem to have spelled the end of Philly Free Streets for the time being.

So when the Center City District, Philadelphia’s downtown business organization, recently announced a new series of mini-open streets events in September, the Open Streets PHL crew and many others were thrilled to see the movement, possibly, coming back.

“I’m hoping that the Center City District Open Streets will kind of reinvigorate the idea,” said Geeting, who is director of engagement at Philadelphia 3.0, a political advocacy group. “I think they’re right on the money when it comes to the kind of strategy that’s going to work, which is, make it fun. Let’s make it fun, and people will want to be there.”

A retail-focused outdoor experiment

CCD’s program, called Open Streets: West Walnut, will block cars from entering 18th Street from Chestnut to Locust, and Walnut Street from 15th to 19th, on four Sundays: September 8, 15, 22 and 29. 

Activities on those seven blocks will run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the actual street closures will last from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. It won’t be a complete pedestrian zone; cross streets will remain open to cars at certain intersections, including 16th, 17th, and 19th streets, and the 1700 and 1800 blocks of Sansom Street.

“I have looked at a lot of examples of pedestrian streets in a variety of different places, and that’s how they typically exist,” said CCD president and CEO Prema Katari Gupta. “It’s too much for [traffic] circulation if you don’t do that, and we want people to be able to move north and south on buses.”

The event will include musicians, strolling performers, dance groups, and other “ambient entertainment,” along with a family-friendly zone offering sidewalk chalk, games, and activities for kids. Some restaurants will offer expanded outdoor seating, and stores will have discounts, open houses, and events like a group run organized by Philadelphia Runner. 

The Open Streets days were inspired in part by Philadelphia’s repeated designation as the country’s most walkable city for tourists by USA Today experts and readers, Gupta said. “I love that identity, particularly for our Center City,” she said.

The street closures are also intended to “reinforce the desirability” of the Walnut Street shopping corridor, especially the section along Rittenhouse Square, which Gupta said retail brokers and some national real estate experts have described as a “must-have” location for newer, expanding retail brands. The Rittenhouse Row business organization is a partner in the event.

“The bet here is that people walking down the street spend more money in support of retailers and restaurants than cars driving down the street,” Gupta said. “So we thought we’d create a little bit of a recurring event around this, just to get more people out and sort of get people to think differently about the role of the road.”

CCD closely studied Boston’s Newbury Street, a mile-long shopping district that becomes a pedestrian-only route for 10 Sundays over the summer, she said. 

Gupta acknowledged “a little bit of dissatisfaction” from open streets advocates about the “limited ambition” of CCD’s program, which will cover only about seven blocks and only on four days. The decision to limit its size was driven in part by a requirement that CCD hire off-duty police officers to man the street closures and pay them overtime rates. 

“The costs are non-trivial,” she said. “But, frankly, we want everyone to be safe and comfortable while we’re there, so it’s money we’re happy to spend.”

An interrupted history of outdoor festivals

Philly has a long history of temporarily pedestrianizing streets. In 1971, for example, a local advertising exec inspired by Copenhagen’s walking streets and car-free plazas came up with Walk on Walnut Street, a car-free promenade from Broad Street to 20th on Wednesday evenings.

Writing for WHYY’s PlanPhilly nine years ago, Geeting tracked down photographs and an account of the event. Bands performed, restaurants put out sidewalk seating, and tens of thousands of people poured into the street. 

There were three Walnut Street events in 1971, followed by an annual Super Sunday that pedestrianized part of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway near the Art Museum annually through 1986.

Philly Free Streets represented something of a return to that tradition. Geeting said he thought it was strange that, rather than expanding the program during COVID — much as cities like New York, Boston, and Minneapolis were doing, to give residents more places to get out of their houses — the city essentially shut it down. 

Advocacy groups and several councilmembers had urged the Kenney administration to close 18 miles of streets to cars during the pandemic, including Kelly Drive, 9th Street in the Italian Market, and roads that go through FDR Park, Hunting Park, and West Fairmount Park. But officials demurred, citing constraints on an overtaxed police department and the challenge of expanding outdoor access equitably across the city.

While Philadelphia often closes streets to cars by using trash or fire trucks to block them off, Hommel said it may be possible to do it more cheaply by installing retractable bollards, as in some European countries, or putting up simple traffic barriers.

“New Orleans does this all the time, where they just put out little bicycle barriers through the core of the city. Cars go a different direction, and people can just walk around,” he said. 

Philadelphia’s Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems (OTIS) has “really talented transportation folks and urban planners,” Hommel said. With regards to relaunching Philly Free Streets, “I believe that there would be desire again, if we could figure out a way to either lower the costs of doing a big event like this, or maybe there’s a way to share the cost burden across multiple entities.”

An OTIS spokesperson said the program was transferred in 2019 to the Office of Special Events, which oversees happenings like parades and musical festivals. A spokesperson said Philly Free Streets was “paused” in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and could come back again.

“The Office of Special Events has been thinking about ways to reintroduce this program to the city, with support from other city agencies and stakeholders,” she said, “and exploring new possibilities for how it can evolve in today’s world.”