Every so often, a city is offered an occasion big enough to justify trying things it’s already been curious about. This summer, Philadelphia got such an opportunity, between the FIFA World Cup, MLB All-Star Week, and the semiquincentennial. At Center City District (CCD), our team took this opportunity and ran with it.
Between a weekday version of Open Streets in Midtown Village, a pilot of the downtown wayfinding system we are building, and a pop-up retail and public art initiative activating vacant Market East storefronts, our team conducted many live experiments. I’m proud of all of it, and proud of how thoughtful and iterative our organization’s approach to improving downtown has become.
There’s one thing that I want to be honest about. Visitors were the rationale, not the reason. CCD’s mandate is supporting Center City’s ecosystem: office workers and commuters, residents, retail and restaurant businesses, hotels, and cultural institutions. But this summer’s civic pride brought resources, attention, and partnerships that don’t come around often. That combination gave us room to pursue ideas we’d already been curious about; each one was built to outlast the season it was born in.
So here’s how I’d like you to read this summer: not as a season of one-off events, but as a season of prototypes. Wayfinding, pop-up retail, and storefront art were tested on our streets, and each pointed to a version of Center City worth building further.
Take wayfinding. CCD maintains a system of more than 1,000 signs in and around Center City; most are part of Walk!Philadelphia, a system largely unaltered since 1997. A year ago, we commissioned a comprehensive wayfinding review and master plan from City ID to plan what should come next. We’ve worked closely with over 40 partner organizations, from SEPTA and PATCO to Visit Philadelphia, to advance this plan, which includes a smaller, more strategically placed network of signs, stronger accessibility, deeper integration with transit, and a new visual language, from color and typography to icons and illustrations, grounded in behavior studies of how people actually navigate downtown.
This summer offered ideal timing to evaluate prototypes of the new wayfinding system. We installed 15 temporary map-based signs along the Market Street corridor and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, tracing a route that linked event venues to the destinations around them, paired with a new printed map distributed through our Community Service Representatives, hotels, and hospitality partners. By June, we had distributed nearly 30,000 copies, and our CSRs reported roughly 20 percent more street-level engagement than a typical summer. It was the first time we could see, on real streets with real crowds, whether a year of planning held up. It did, and what we learned is already shaping the permanent system we’re now working — and fundraising — to build.
Market East told a similar story. Storefront vacancy along that corridor has been a persistent problem, and this summer became a proving ground for what could fill it. A $1.85 million City grant from Mayor Parker and Councilmember Mark Squilla funded improvements along Market Street East, from planting street trees to renovating transit headhouses to repairing bus shelters. Two pieces of that work stood out to us as genuine experiments.
The first was retail. Inspired by San Francisco’s Vacant to Vibrant program, CCD hired Meantime, a nonprofit that specializes in activating vacant storefronts, to recruit local entrepreneurs into empty spaces on the 900 block of Market Street: booksellers, a record shop, an art gallery, a coffee shop, water ice, apparel. Comcast, HBSE, the Fashion District, and the City all came to the table to make it happen. In the first three weeks, those storefronts drew nearly 3,300 visitors and generated almost $50,000 in sales, and foot traffic on the corridor rose about 10 percent from May to June. The results were convincing enough that we extended the program past the summer. Several of those businesses are still there, and Meantime is developing a retail incubator model to bring in the next round of entrepreneurs.
The second was art. We were inspired in part by London’s high streets, where vacancies don’t default to broker signs shouting leasing information in oversized fonts. Instead, the information is embedded in beautifully designed graphics that improve the sidewalk experience. We wanted to bring that idea here. We worked closely with Mural Arts Philadelphia to cover more than 5,500 square feet of vacant storefronts and building frontages, including a striking mural by Manuela Guillén on the 1100 block of Market. Where retail wasn’t ready to move in, art gave pedestrians a reason to stop and look instead of a reason to turn away.
Both interventions are small pieces of the mayor’s and councilmember’s broader vision for Market East, and our pilots offer early evidence for what that longer-term effort can build toward.
So here’s how I’d like you to read this summer: not as a season of one-off events, but as a season of prototypes. Wayfinding, pop-up retail, and storefront art were tested on our streets, and each pointed to a version of Center City worth building further. The work now is to take what we learned and continue the progress.
Prema Katari Gupta is President and CEO of the Center City District.
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