Center City District’s weekly Open Streets event series on Walnut Street has been a huge hit with businesses, shoppers, and residents, and the business improvement district is soon bringing the fun to Midtown Village this spring.

Surveys and data from the fall Open Streets series revealed around 47,000 visitors attended the events, which represented an average increase of 36 percent across the four weeks, compared to the usual pedestrian traffic on Sundays. Ninety percent of business owners surveyed by CCD reported an increase in foot traffic to their shops, with an average increase of 86 percent, though some businesses saw much larger increases.

CCD’s Open Streets is different from Philly’s more typical street festivals in a few key respects.

First, the events aren’t excessively programmed. The typical set-up for street festivals is that the street is lined with vendor tables and tents, usually in front of existing storefront businesses — often to the chagrin of those businesses. At Open Streets on Walnut, there are few street vendors, there’s light entertainment from buskers and other performers, and there’s more attention for the existing businesses. Walking in the middle of the street, people can see the stores’ signs better, and some stores bring their wares outside for the afternoon to draw people in.

Second, Open Streets is a repeating event series, not a one-time event. While events like the Walnut Street Festival or the Italian Market Festival happen on a single day or weekend once a year, Center City District has been hosting Open Streets events every week, for a month at a time to start. This regularity helps build attendance and community around the events; if you missed the last one and heard about it from a friend or coworker, you can just go the very next week.

This is an important part of Open Streets programs in other places like New York City, which really leaned into the concept during and after Covid. Open Streets events are usually a weekly occurrence on the participating corridors, they’re hosted in neighborhoods in addition to commercial districts, and they aren’t even exclusively on weekends. When I visited New York for the day one time last summer, there was a Lower East Side Open Streets event happening on a random Tuesday evening.

Popen streets

Back in 2015, I worked with some friends and fellow organizers to leverage all the positive excitement from the open streets experiment during the Pope’s visit to persuade the outgoing Nutter administration, and then the incoming Kenney administration, to create an Open Streets program for Philly.

The idea wasn’t new: New York, L.A., and even Pittsburgh already had regular Open Streets programs they’d been running for years at that point, inspired in part by Bogota, Colombia’s world-famous Ciclovia program that opens up 75 miles of city streets for car-free recreational use every week.

Philly hadn’t jumped on the bandwagon yet at that point, but after the Pope visit, over 5,000 people signed our group’s online petition calling on the city to create an open streets program, and we found a receptive audience with some of our elected officials and city staff. Former Mayor Michael Nutter even suggested hosting open streets events once a month to start:

“In an interview with PlanPhilly, Mayor Michael Nutter said that the temporary automobile ban that accompanied security preparations for the papal visit should become a “regular” event.

“I think we can figure out — with a lot of cooperation, patience and support from stakeholders — something that can make some sense for something people can look forward to,” Nutter said, adding, “even if it was once a month to start.”

“So, nothing definitive, and just as an example, the fourth Sunday in every month from X month to Y month,” said Nutter. “Then people know what the story is and how to make whatever adjustments that have to be made.”

The Kenney administration took over a few months later with more modest ambitions, and they created the Philly Free Streets program — an annual event the city hosted four times, which was more of a parade-sized event than what Center City District has been doing on a few blocks of Walnut Street. The city stopped hosting Free Streets during Covid, at a time when our peer cities were ramping up these kinds of events along with other outdoor recreation options.

The Kenney administration never brought Philly Free Streets back after Covid, with no explanation, but conversations with city staff indicate that high security costs were an important reason behind that program’s quiet demise.

High security costs putting these events at risk

The high and rising security costs of hosting street festivals and other popular car-free corridor events aren’t just a big issue for city government — they’re an even bigger problem for smaller organizations like Business Improvement Districts, community development corporations, and other thinly-resourced neighborhood groups all over the city.

The city requires special event organizers to hire police for security, and the Police Department has final discretionary authority about the exact requirements. For larger events, a Homeland Security presence can be required as well. These are unfunded mandates that fall squarely on fledgling groups to pay for, which hurts the fundraising potential or even the basic viability of their events that are often an important part of the fundraising strategy of a neighborhood non-profit organization.

For some events, the total cost of security can exceed 25 percent of the event’s budget. A few recent examples:

• Flavors of the Avenue on Passyunk Ave (2024): Around $10,000 for police security out of a roughly $40,000 event budget
• Fishtown Feastivale: $4,531 for police security out of a $62,100 event budget, with $4,920 in private security costs
• Kensington Sculpture Derby: $12,132 for police security out of a $59,100 event budget, with $3,360 in private security costs
• Manayunk Arts Festival (2024): $24,386 for police security out of a roughly $100,000 budget, with city costs at around $40,000 overall

“This event used to pay for our marketing for the year,” says Gwen McCauley, executive director of the Manayunk Business Improvement District. “We’d run this event and then we’d be able to do some other smaller things that aren’t necessarily profitable.

“It kind of went the other way. Now we have a 36-year-old event and I’d like to keep the event because I’d like to keep the event. It’s the largest juried arts event in the tri-state area. But it’s gone from trying to bring marketing dollars in, to just trying to keep the event alive.”

We unfortunately live in a country where the risk of an insane person driving their vehicle into a crowded festival on purpose is something leaders have to take very seriously. At the same time, if the security costs of hosting community events continue on their current trajectory, community groups won’t be able to host as many of them, or any at all. And what kind of a city would we have then? Something has to give.

Fortunately, another innovation from Center City District’s Open Streets event series points toward a possible happy resolution that can better meet everyone’s goals in a more cost-effective way.

Meridian barriers for the win

While everybody else was out enjoying themselves a couple weeks ago watching the street musicians and people on stilts and the Butterfly Woman, I was ignoring my children to snap some photos of the real Open Streets celebrities: Meridian’s Archer 1200 Vehicle Barriers.

For the first few Open Streets events on Walnut last year, the city used their regular system for securing the area: police at each intersection, and trash trucks parked in the middle of the street. But this year, those trash trucks were gone, replaced with a few Meridian barriers.

Meridian isn’t the only brand in this market — K12 Defense and Delta Scientific have similar offerings — but they have developed barriers specifically designed to thwart vehicular terrorist attacks with a 100 percent lifetime guarantee on the technology, and these are in use all over the country at this point. Last year I saw them in South Beach in Miami, where they — and they alone — were used as the security system for the beachfront Open Streets series.

The barriers aren’t cheap — the Meridian-brand ones are about $6,500 apiece — but neither are the security costs of street festivals, so there’s a good case for the city to make an up-front investment to save on costs for themselves and others over the medium term.

“Within a few years they pay for themselves with frequent deployment, given the demand for events like Open Streets,” says Prema Katari Gupta, CEO of Center City District. “We made this investment because we’ve been really heartened by the response to Open Streets, and we’re excited about opportunities to expand it in the future.”

Center City District is a large and well-resourced organization compared to most Business Improvement Districts. They have the budget to be able to try things like this while smaller groups can’t. But the city government of Philadelphia is an even larger organization that has even more money and even more scope for strategic risk-taking, with a much more explicit mandate to invest in public goods.

A 250th birthday present for community groups

As Philly gears up to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States next year, the Parker administration has an opportunity to use this occasion to do a favor for communities all across the city.

With dozens of events planned for 2026, security considerations are paramount, and if the costs are anything like the examples above, the overall bill is going to be very high.

Under the circumstances, it would be a smart move for the Parker administration to invest in a larger quantity of vehicle barriers from Meridian or another vendor to save money and make more efficient use of limited police resources during the celebrations.

Then, with a stockpile of vehicle barriers left over after the 250th birthday party, the City could loan out the barriers to different groups for community events, saving everyone money on their security costs.

More financially viable street festivals would probably lead to more total community events happening in general, with all the attendant benefits for neighborhood community and economic development that Mayor Parker often talks about as one of her administration’s goals. And, it would also allow city government to make more efficient use of limited resources, especially in light of the 20 percent staffing shortfall at the Philadelphia Police Department.

From temporary to permanent

Of course I would be remiss not to mention the more permanent and cost-effective solution to this issue that’s already in use all over the world: retractable bollards.

Bollards are simple metal poles that can be installed on the sidewalk, as we already have all over Philadelphia.

A retractable bollard is a more sophisticated device where the bollards can be collapsed into the street when they aren’t needed, and then raised for special events.

Some streets in Philly are used so often for street festivals that it would make sense to install retractable bollards on some of them so that those corridors can host more such events. Pulling up the bollards costs nothing, and there’s none of the hassle involved in delivering the very heavy and unwieldy Meridian barriers, although the maintenance needs can be pricey if they need to be repaired often.

Sometimes the online conversation about Open Streets veers into discussions about completely car-free streets, and on a purely idealistic level this does appeal to me too. From a practical standpoint though, retractable bollards seem like an easier sell because of the flexibility they offer.

Places like Sansom Street west of Broad, or the Italian Market, seem like perfect candidates for this kind of flexible treatment. Businesses could still get deliveries without hassle, but during certain hours — weekend nights on Sansom; weekend mornings in the Italian Market, perhaps — the bollards could be raised for more frequent Open Streets fun.

The Streets Department hasn’t been the biggest fan of retractable bollards as a concept in the past, but their reluctance seems more about wanting to avoid new unknown hassles for themselves — the service provider — rather than what is best for the city’s community and economic development priorities.

Elected officials can and should be assertive about their goals in the face of this kind of bureaucratic foot-dragging and excuse-making, because something has to change. Street festivals, block parties, and the like are staples of Philly’s neighborhood culture and represent authentic and effective community development in its purest form.

To remain viable, they need help from the City, and the most cost-effective solutions will all require city officials to think differently about some of our long-standing practices.

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