A car-free pedestrian corridor proposed by Master of City Planning students Maggie White, Chelsea Cao and Hansen Xie for Owen Miles "reactivates street life and local businesses."
For more than two centuries, Philadelphia shoppers and merchants alike have flocked to the Center City corridor known as Market East. While the area has seen more vibrant days, and witnessed decades of various revitalization schemes, its future remains unclear. Last year, community members successfully fended off what some considered an extractive plan for a mixed-use development anchored to a sports arena, and while the city hasn’t put forward an alternative plan, Mayor Cherelle Parker recently announced a new planning initiative for the area.
This semester, Weitzman students and faculty have been thinking through the future of the neighborhood and also how to think it through. Open to students across the school, Studio Plus was devoted to Market East and explored issues of historic preservation, urban planning, and housing. Students went into the field to research the area and meet in each other’s classrooms to analyze what they’ve found.
“Every city has got its own Market East, a historic core that is its commercial core,” says Randy Mason, professor and chair of historic preservation with appointments in city and regional planning and landscape architecture, whose second-year historic preservation studio forms one pillar of Studio Plus. “It’s a wonderful collection of buildings from different periods that represent the continuities of the grid of streets and its traffic and density of people. It’s transformed continually, but the city has been derelict in performing its duties of shaping change and balancing the private and public benefits.” Today, that balance feels particularly off-kilter. “The solution is a strategy of creating coalitions for change,” he says. “And preservation is always part of that mix.”
Historic preservation students conducted a SWOT analysis of Market East (Photo: Zhijie Wang)
First, Mason’s students researched what has and hasn’t been preserved on site. “We created a memory map to see which buildings remain and which have been lost through time,” says Fatima Nayibi Cacerers Arar. Then, explains Shen-Tzu Chen, “we interview interested parties, including community organizations and developers.” They examine these histories in various ways, identifying the site’s significance, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. “We take the analyses and all the research we do on the ground,” Chen says, “and start to think about a preservation philosophy to apply to our individual projects.”
Arar is developing a plan for the Atwater Kent Museum, which closed in 2018. “It was a well-known museum of Philadelphia history. We don’t have access to the building, but its pathologies are obvious,” she says. “We’re looking at how the marble is aging, and how the gutters of the building are in bad condition too. Basic maintenance now can prevent the building from further deterioration in the future.” And Chen is looking at the commercial history of Market East. “Retail space is being abandoned, so I’m thinking of both short- and long-term commercial interventions,” she says. “How does a historic building with historic fabric come back to market?”
Laura Wainer, assistant professor at City College of New York, with graduate architecture students at the mid-review for the studio led by Brian Phillips
Perhaps, wonders architect Brian Phillips, it might come back as something other than retail. “I’ve used Market East as a site for studio classes throughout my teaching,” says Phillips, a lecturer in the Department of Architecture. “Specifically, I’ve been interested in The Gallery mall, which was reimagined as the Fashion District in 2019 and then was slated to be partially demolished for the arena. It’s a contested space, which people deem as a kind of failure. But it wasn’t. It just wasn’t meeting the criteria of highest and best use of what a successful place is, which crosses social, economic, and political boundaries.” The founding principal and creative director of the Philadelphia architecture firm ISA, Phillips is leading the housing component of Studio Plus, in which students develop projects comprising both socio-economic research and physical renderings and models for speculative adaptive reuse. “It’s a great palette for urbanism,” he says. “Students are looking at solutions that treat housing almost like a tenant fit-out, cutting holes into the mall for artist housing, or focusing on food to expand Chinatown. Maybe, if we imagine it in the right way, things could happen. It’s a kind of pragmatic whimsy.”
Bringing those ideas into fruition is often the result of thoughtful urban planning—the kind cultivated by planner and Weitzman Lecturer Miles Owen (MCP’18) in the third section of Studio Plus. His students recently completed a week-long site visit to New York City, touring high-density commercial corridors. “From their existing conditions research and talking to people who are engaged on the ground,” Owen says, “they are working on a set of alternatives for Market East.” After decades, if not centuries, of revitalization plans not panning out, Owen encourages his students to dream big. “I want to cut through all the history and say: All right, there are some basic parameters. But what is the pie in the sky solution? Pedestrianize the whole area? Create an urban college campus?” Over the semester, students pushed the boundaries of what’s possibly in a series of propositions. “Once they’ve explored those,” he says, “now their job is to work backward and forward to find out where the implementable median is for these ideas.” This ranges from researching funding mechanisms to developing narratives. “These are all, fundamentally, parts of the planning process, regardless of the site’s complexity,” Owen says.
Among the site visits conducted by historic preservation students was one to the Atwater Kent museum, where they proposed connecting the courtyard to the larger neighbhorhood fabric. (Photo: Fatima Nayibi Cacerers Arar)
One animating principal of Studio Plus might be to acknowledge that only interdisciplinary approaches offer a chance of success. One of the students in Mason’s class, Zhijie Wang, is a dual-degree student in landscape architecture and historic preservation. Like Awar, she’s looking at Atwater Kent, but focusing on ways to connect its backyard park to the larger neighborhood fabric. The studio, she says, is challenging her ideas of how to determine the identity of a place. “We are not just looking at economic value, but heritage and social value as well.” As redevelopment takes shape, whether according to the plans of the mayor or those of her Penn cohort and mentors, Wang wants to help ensure those values remain. “We want to repurpose Market East in a welcoming way, where people will want to hang out and live there,” she says. “We’re living in the past and the moment right now, and thinking about the future.”
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