Now that budget cuts have beaten Philadelphia back into post Phillies/Obama reality, it’s time to go negative and make some enemies.
As I understand it, long ago when the city was deciding which neighborhood to eviscerate with an inadequate highway, South Street was on the shortlist. Believe it or not Society Hill used to be a poor ghetto, so the planned construction would have only affected the powerless. At the time, this made the location viable. I’m not a local historian and haven’t done any of research so I can’t say why, but for one reason or another I-676 was built on Vine street instead. Chinatown was pissed. And rightly so.
Take a look at the neighborhood now. South of Vine, we have a vibrant mix of bustling urban neighborhoods. North of the expressway… not so much. Over the decades, Chinatown has trickled north of Vine, opening schools, churches, warehouses and massage parlors. Homes have been built and buildings renovated. All in all though, the vast expanse between Vine and Spring Garden is an identity starved, post-industrial wasteland. Along with the sporadically distributed Chinatown presence, the neighborhood is full of luxury lofts, office space, businesses, warehouses, schools, artist studios, bars, restaurants and general abandonment. If someone knocked you out and you woke up in the parking lot at Broad and Spring Garden, Chinatown is the last place that you’d say that you were.
Which is why back in the 90′s, the Chinatown CDC’s vocal opposition to the construction of a stadium at Broad and Spring Garden kind of irked me. Broad and Spring Garden is nowhere near Chinatown. If he were standing in front of any one of the murals at the proposed site, not even Ryan Howard could hit a ball hard enough to reach Chinatown. School District Headquarters? Yes. The Inquirer building? Maybe. Community College? He’s got an outside shot. But Chinatown? Hell no.
But so many years ago, I gave the CDC the benefit of the doubt. I-676 did legitimately steamroll through the neighborhood and the community does have somewhat of a case with the whole Convention Center thing. If that never happened, who knows how far and how quickly Chinatown would have grown?
With that said, I was still kind of pissed. North Broad is absolutely starved for development. While the major, totally-not-Chinatown North Broad corridor has seen nominal change in the years since the stadium proposal was scrapped, there’s no telling what could have been. As I saw it, North Philly got screwed because the Chinatown CDC planted a flag way past the legitimate boundaries of influence.
Can anyone else imagine a seamless transition from Center City, to a bustling new stadium at Spring Garden, to a rehabbed North Broad straight into Temple’s Campus in the former “heart” of North Philadelphia? Can anyone else see Girard ave pushing east towards Fishtown at the same time those neighborhoods were pushing west towards Broad and beyond? I understand that I’m shamelessly advocating aggressive gentrification here, but fuck it. North Broad needs it. The city needs it. This isn’t a discussion about the costs and benefits of gentrification, this is a rant.
On top of all of this, can anyone else imagine attending a Phillies game at a newly revitalized Broad and Spring Garden? Center City would have shifted inexorably north. Neighborhoods that have been neglected for decades would have seen real investment and change. But no. Instead we have Osteria and a couple of doomed restaurants, a smattering of overpriced condos, a few very large vacant buildings that were bought and never rehabbed, some giant surface parking lots/vacant lots and a whole lot of neglect. Victory for Chinatown?
Which brings us to today.
First off, the casinos are a horrible idea and both Foxwoods and Sugarhouse executives should be chased out of town by a mob of crazed Philadelphian’s carrying pitchforks and torches. No matter where they’re built, any benefit in tax dollars will come at a huge social cost. Has any proponent of these casinos ever taken a look around Atlantic City? It’s a shithole. All the locals are either unemployed, alcoholic skinheads or desperate, tweaked out meth whores. Fuck the casinos.
With that said, the claim that 8th and Market is even ostensibly a part of Chinatown just pisses me off. I mean, what the fuck? This city doesn’t orbit around Chinatown. If anything it orbits around the goddamn Liberty Bell, which by the way is a block closer to 8th and Market than the Chinatown Gate is. But I don’t hear the National Park Service claiming the Gallery is part of their domain. I don’t hear anyone at nearby City Hall, or Washington Square, Jewlers Row, East Chestnut, Market, Sansom, Walnut business and residential associations saying much either. When is the last time you heard about members of the Gayborhood rising up to protest the development of a shopping center on Washington Ave? When is the last time you heard the old bats in Rittenhouse oppose the construction of an apartment building in University City?
While I’m mostly just being an asshole for the sake of it, I wouldn’t have been inclined to take this dickhead position had that stadium thing never happened. In a stadium-opposition-less world, I’d be fully supportive of the Chinatown CDC’s protest against the Gallery slots. I hate the idea of casinos and this one will be geographically close to the neighborhood.
But unfortunately, the CDC blew its sympathy load with the stadium opposition. At this point, there’s no leverage. If you complain about every goddamn thing that happens, you lose legitimacy. Maybe I’m just a callous asshole, but these projects aren’t targeting Chinatown. They’re targeting one of the densest districts in the middle of the east coast’s second largest city. There’s not a lot of room to work with around here. Space is tight and neighborhoods are small. So if Donald Trump wants to tear down the 1200 block of Race and build a gold-leaf encased condo tower, by all means mount a vocal opposition and stop it. But don’t cry wolf. If the CDC wants no neighbors and unlimited room to expand, I’ve heard that land in Pike County is cheap. As it is, 8th and Market is in the middle of a commercial district. It’s near a lot of things. And you know what’s going to happen if Foxwoods pulls out of center city? They’ll build the fucking thing in Nicetown.
That’s all for now.
